The InSIS BioProperty research group invites you to its forthcoming seminar series on property rights in the biosciences. The series explores the changing landscape of intellectual property rights in biomedical research. Should human embryonic stem cells be patentable? Can we use ‘Open Source’ models to advance research in synthetic biology? Do property rights hinder the ability of research groups to collaborate? How can we ensure equitable access to biomedical products and services? The speakers include experts from the field of law, public policy and the social sciences.

‘Legal and ethical perspectives on property rights in human biological material’
Nils Hoppe, CELLS, Leibniz Universität Hannover
24 January
4:00–5:30pm
64 BanburyRoad

‘Building a patent systemin the public interest? Making democracy, the economy, and morality in the United States and Europe’
Shobita Parthasarathy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
31 January
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road

‘Ownership in the contemporary life sciences’
Justine Pila, Faculty of Law, University ofOxford
07 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road

‘Why we do not own our bodies’
Anne Phillips, Gender Institute and Government Department, London School of Economics
14 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road

‘Between use and exchange in bioeconomy’
Nik Brown, Department of Sociology, University of York
21 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road

‘Ownership and sharing in synthetic biology: a ‘diverse ecology’ of the open and the proprietary?’
Jane Calvert, ESRC Innogen Centre,
University of Edinburgh
28 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road

Feel free to download the poster. All welcome!

Noortje Marres and I have edited a special section of the journal Economy and Society dedicated to Materials and Devices of the Public. The papers (by Gay Hawkins, Sarah Whatmore & Catharina Landström, Javier Lezaun, and Noortje Marres) explore the role of things, devices and material settings in facilitating new forms of public engagement. In the introduction, we discuss the value of an approach that treats material engagement as a distinct and explicitly political mode of performing the public.

Claes-Fredrik, you are Professor of Technology and Social Change at the University of Linköping, Sweden, and are currently a Visiting Fellow at InSIS. What brings you to Oxford?

I’m here to do some research, meet people, write stuff, and thinking through stuff. And the secret thing is that I’m also escaping a few meetings.

Last week you gave a work-in-progress presentation about your current research, which focuses on valuation practices in medical research and I was curious to hear what got you interested in the topic initially?

I have for a very long time wanted to develop ways to examine how the economic is intertwined with scientific practice and the shaping of technology. Both because I think it is important, and because I think it is something that has not received sufficient attention within STS. I have grappled with how to do that and previously did work on the every day management and coordination of clinical large trials. When I did that work I also tried to investigate the economic aspects of large trials, for instance, how physicians are remunerated for recruiting patients but this was a bit difficult.

I have been thinking for quite a while that maybe the design of large clinical trials could be an interesting place because there appear to be many calculations involved; calculations that are both scientific calculations but also calculations about the costing of trials such as how much you can spend on it and maybe also about the commercial possibilities. That was more of an unpolished idea for quite some time but then Francis Lee was recruited into a position to work with me on questions about the design of research, and then we developed this research project together into a few different grant applications which we are still waiting to hear if they will be funded or not.* It’s been a long, abstract journey in terms of wanting to investigate the topic of science and economic practice but the development of this particular project is the result of perhaps one and a half years or so and we worked most hard on developing it this spring by writing grant applications.

So what will be your site of study? Where will you explore these issues?

Francis will look at experiments related to biomarkers and I will focus on the design of large randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We are currently investigating different possible sites and have some contacts already with people involved in clinical trials as well as experiments related to biomarkers. We both intend to do some of the fieldwork in the UK.

Can you say a bit more about how you will go about studying how the economic is intertwined with scientific practices.

We are planning to look at a few different experiments – or rather the design phase of these experiments – and we plan to do repeated interviews with those involved in the design efforts. One part of the exercise is thus to investigate who is involved in this work: maybe there is an investigator, a sponsor, representatives of patient organisations that can be involved but that has to be an empirical question. So, the methodology will be repeated interviews following the design process, which can take a few months or half a year, sometimes even longer. Hopefully, we will also be able to sit in on meetings where different kinds of designs are discussed.

It sounds like you are focusing on a laboratory site primarily. In how far do you plan to also consider/research how potentially other sites beyond the laboratory – I’m thinking, for instance, of Research Council’s and their annual research priorities and their grant evaluation practices – are intertwined with valuation practices in the laboratory?

I guess we have to start somewhere, where we think that the centre of this design work is going on but of course there is presumably a lot of stuff that is influencing and involved in that process. In our interviews done for preparing the grant applications, we have also begun asking about what kinds of tools are used, such as tools with the standard costing figures that contains a black-boxed kind of valuation. These come from somewhere and we have to make a reasonable attempt to investigate where this stuff comes from and what influence they have. And, of course, if it is a trial sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, how they evaluate different aspects of a trial. So probably there are several sites involved in a single design. And from what I understand there is a lot of emailing and teleconferencing going on as well. Hence there is no single point in time or space where the design is made. That are simultaneously interesting and challenging aspects of this topic.

While you are visiting InSIS you are also involved with organizing a workshop…

…yes, on the 21st of October a group came from the University of Linköping, Sweden, Tema T, the unit were I work – technology and social change – to visit InSIS. The visiting group of about ten to 15 people is part of a research programme called ValueS, which stands for Science, Technology and Valuation practices, and we are interested in STS and valuation as a practice. The purpose of the InSIS-ValueS meeting is to discuss each other’s research, explore ways to collaborate and establish regular exchange between the two groups. And we actually have a specific site for this meeting!

What else are you currently working on?

I’m finishing up an old paper, which I wrote about the study of the everyday coordination of large trials. What else? I’m working on a book proposal for an edited volume on value practices in life science, which is a volume that brings together different contributions from different aspects of life science, from different researchers. We have 13 contributions. So, I’m working on the book proposal with Francis Lee and Isabelle Dussauge, my co-editors from Sweden, who will also come to Oxford for the InSIS-ValueS meeting.

Did you find some time to explore Oxford so far? How are you finding it?

I’m finding it very nice and I’m enjoying it a lot. The weather has been good and the dining has been excellent. And I have a nice jog along the Thames in the mornings. It’s perfect.

It’s great to hear that you enjoy Oxford. Thank you very much for the interview!

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* In the meantime, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Francis Lee have received research funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for 3,5 MSEK [appr £ 325.000] for their research project “Trials of Value”. Congratulations!

Congratulations on your new job, and welcome to Oxford. What were your first impressions when you arrived three weeks ago?

Thanks. Thinking about the constant stream of new people, places, ideas, discussions, connections and cultures I’ve encountered over the past few weeks makes it quite tricky to construct a coherent narrative about ‘first’ impressions! One impression is that Oxford is very much alive and charged with intellectual provocations. I’ve been struck, in particular, by the location of InSIS within the Said Business School and within Oxford. On the outside, you have a smooth, shiny building – on the inside, corridors bristling with barbed and unblunted ideas. Likewise, superficially, there’s the Oxford one might imagine – ancient, traditional, made of solid walls and foundations…but within it, you find the STS group, where people are chipping away both at the foundations of knowledge and its ceiling, studying everything from neuromarketing to transgenic mice. It feels like an exciting place to be. When I first fell into academia, I rationalized it on the basis that I didn’t want to contribute to profit-making and I didn’t want to work ‘in an office’. So finding myself in a beautiful steel and glass office at a business school makes for an intriguing relocation!

So what exactly are you going to work on?

I will be working with Javier Lezaun and Amy Hinterberger on a project exploring the contested nature and the future of intellectual property rights in biomedical research. The biosciences are increasingly giving rise to entities that resist a straightforward categorisation as property, including high-profile developments such as cloning, biobanks, transpecies transplantation, hybrids, chimeras, and stem cell reprogramming. The study of property in relation to these ‘innovations’ raises all sorts of questions about the social management of the boundaries between the animal and the human, life and death, the public and the private. By bringing these new forms of life into the world, the life sciences are challenging the limits of intellectual property and disrupting traditional jurisprudence on private appropriation. In this project, we’ll be exploring the contemporary dynamics of private and common property through a number of case studies, including stem cell patenting and the use of transgenic research mice. We’ll also be looking at changing organizational forms of scientific research in relation to ‘neglected diseases’, such as patent pools and the introduction of open-source components in public-private partnerships. By studying these developments ethnographically, we should be able to shed light on how they are reconfiguring flows of information, materials and knowledge in the biosciences, and generating new forms of governance and accountability.

Will this be an entirely theoretical study or are you also planning in doing some empirical work?

In order to develop a novel analytical framework for understanding reconfigurations of property, we need to observe actual property practices in biomedical research. Broad generalizations can only take you so far – and, as far as capturing current shifts in biomedical research rights goes – not far enough. So we will anchor our theoretical advances in close ethnographic observation of the fields of innovation just mentioned (transgenic mice, stem cells and R&D for neglected diseases). This will enable us to answer questions we simply could not fathom by sitting at our desks alone; for example, how does the use of a living patent, such as the OncoMouse, affect scientists’ knowledge-making practices? How are legal strategies embedded in the day-to-day practices and infrastructures of stem cell research? Through which material relations is intellectual property shared and accessed in an ‘open lab’ developing drugs for neglected diseases? Our empirical research will take us from patent offices to labs to ‘virtual’ research coordination sites, and provide detailed material for a comparative analysis informed by theoretical insights from STS, economic sociology and legal studies.

OK, so do you already have a specific field site in mind?

The short answer is: not yet. We’re still in the early stages of fieldwork discussions, and there are a number of avenues to explore. I am hoping to study property configurations in a global product development partnership (PDP) spanning Europe and Africa, which would build on my previous research looking at transnational clinical trials. PDPs for ‘neglected diseases’ are curious hybrids, often describing themselves as virtual institutions, and linking highly distributed and culturally diverse material sites, from pharmaceutical company offices to university labs to clinical trial sites and beyond. Studying property ethnographically in such an ‘unbounded field’ will be an interesting methodological challenge.

Looking at your biography, it strikes me that you have been very successful at linking research and “fieldwork” on the one hand with activism and “working in the field” on the other. Is this something you would like to continue here at InSIS?

I don’t know about activism, but I did initially get into the field of HIV research through a desire to shake up the status quo (and thereby, implicitly, improve it) through critical social research. If success is measured in terms simply of fieldwork opportunities, then working in a school of public health was a very successful place to pursue this. However, studying a field you are also working in has its problems – I think Emily Martin once referred to it as like trying to push a bus in which you are also travelling. It goes back to the well-rehearsed debate as to the compatibility of ‘commitment’ with radical epistemological relativism, a tension which seems particularly acute when you bring STS sensibilities to bear on issues like HIV and malaria in low-income countries. After grappling with this in the public health arena, I’m quite glad to step away for a while and pursue some (perhaps) more theoretical and philosophical questions from the other side of the fence. I think InSIS will provide an excellent intellectual location from which to do this.

So welcome again, and thank you for your thoughts.

Thanks!

While at InSIS I worked upon two case studies as part of the Oxford eSocial Science project. The first case study was an ethnography of a very successful computer lab in London. They have been creating middle-ware programmes for hosting visualisations online. These visualisations render academic, publicly available or crowd-sourced information in an interactive format – from the (near) real-time availability of Barclay’s bikes in London to the latest UK census or crime statistics from the Metropolitan Police Service. I explored the tension in the work involving code that must be balanced for the success of such e-research labs. New and innovative types of data are being mashed-up in visualisations, but this creativity is coupled to ad hoc programming on the part of each individual programmer. Rather than focus upon the data, care must be given to ‘code curatorial’ practices to sustain these platforms.

The second case study was a timely study of Twitter. Much discussed and perhaps overly hyped as a means for network mobilisation during recent political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and here in London (and greater UK) during the past riots, Twitter is emerging as a reservoir for data mining by academics, politicos, the private industry and others. (The Guardian, for example, now employs a team to study Twitter). With a colleague at a lab that harvests the ‘back-end’ of social media platforms, I co-authored a paper on the ethical implications of such research. A bit contentiously, we urge a levelling of ourselves with those we study through making ourselves equally vulnerable to potential data-mining. The paper is now available at Taylor and Francis.

Abstract

“In this paper, the authors examine some of the implications of born-digital research environments by discussing the emergence of data mining and the analysis of social media platforms. With the rise of individual online activity in chat rooms, social networking sites and micro-blogging services, new repositories for social science research have become available in large quantities. Given the changes of scale that accompany such research, both in terms of data mining and the communication of results, the authors term this type of research ‘massified research’. This article argues that while the private and commercial processing of these new massive data sets is far from unproblematic, the use by academic practitioners poses particular challenges with respect to established ethical protocols. These involve reconfigurations of the external relations between researchers and participants, as well as the internal relations that compose the identities of the participant, the researcher and that of the data. Consequently, massified research and its outputs operate in a grey area of undefined conduct with respect to these concerns. The authors work through the specific case study of using Twitter’s public Application Programming Interface for research and visualization. To conclude, this article proposes some potential best practices to extend current procedures and guidelines for such massified research. Most importantly, the authors develop these under the banner of ‘agile ethics’. The authors conclude by making the counterintuitive suggestion that researchers make themselves as vulnerable to potential data mining as the subjects who comprise their data sets: a parity of practice.“

Continue reading the full paper at Information, Communication and Society.

The Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, University of Oxford, presents a series of three lectures with distinguished academics whose inspirational work has contributed significantly to our understanding of contemporary cities and societies. The first distinguished lecturer will be Prof Jennifer Robinson from the Department of Geography, University College London:

Cities in a World of Cities: traces of elsewhere in the making of city futures

8 November 2011, 5–6.30pm
Edmond Safra Lecture Theatre
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Prof Jennifer Robinson examines what must be considered in the making of city futures. Under conditions of globalisation, city futures are imagined in the context of a wider world of cities: policy making for cities is profoundly internationalised. And in the wake of vast changes where urbanisation is taking place across the globe, scholars must now theorise the contemporary urban condition with reference to a world of diverse cities. Both require new vocabularies and new ways of working with traces of elsewhere as city futures are re-imagined: for policy makers to operate at the complex interface between circulating policies and local political contestations, and for scholars to revitalise and invent comparative and international ways of doing research.

About the speaker
Jennifer Robinson has published widely in urban geography: on the politics of segregation in South African cities (The Power of Apartheid, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), on urban development in post-apartheid cities, and, more generally, her book, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Routledge: 2006) established a post-colonial critique of urban studies, arguing for urban theory to draw on the diversity of urban experiences across the globe in developing more general accounts of cities.

This even is free but registration is required. We kindly request you register your interest here.

Just in case you are still looking for something to read this weekend, a Special Issue of Encounters has just been published. Edited by Brit Ross Winthereik, Peter A. Lutz, Lucy Suchman and Helen Verran, the Special Issue collects six contributions on the challenge of “Attending to Screens and Screenness”. While the object of interest (“the screen”) might seem straightforward, the authors develop a range of puzzling insights from some very interesting empirical materials. So if you can be tempted by stories about a raid on a Danish pizzeria, Californian wildfires, the Transmilenio of Bogotá, “problematic” Danish children, an energy control room, travelling researchers or online patient feedback, make sure you have a look.

My own contribution tackles the research-practical question of “How to attend to screens?” and turns on some recent themes in STS around ontology, technology and the notion of enactment. Here is the abstract:

In this paper, I explore the question of how to attend to screens. Starting from the puzzling observation that screens seem both ubiquitously present and conspicuously absent in everyday life, I find that existing studies tend to take the analytic status of screens for granted and juxtapose them with a human user to theorize the relationship between the two. In an attempt to avoid such dualisms, I turn to recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and focus on how screens are being enacted in practice. However, exploring a strategy of enactment in the context of a recent ethnography of web-based patient feedback produces mixed results. Perhaps most importantly, the salience of objects is not given in enactment, but itself contingently accomplished—a process in which the role of the researcher is easily overlooked. The paper concludes that a call to attend to screens as ‘objects of interest’ may thus be better understood as an invitation to engage with people and things in situations in which the notion of ‘screens’ may (or may not) provide a useful heuristic for orienting inquiry.

Further papers by Karen Boll, Katrina Petersen, Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda, Helene Ratner, Antti Silvast and Jane Bjørn Vedel.

Over this past Michaelmas and Hilary Terms Tanja Schneider and I convened a series of informal conversations about ‘the doing of fieldwork’. These were meant to be a place to share reflections on, advice about and methodological tips for, undertaking this uniquely intense but little explicitly discussed mode of scholarship. Often, in addition to a sense of intellectual comradery, the sessions felt emotive and therapeutic – sometimes deliberately so. One theme which emerged was the concern with our ethnographic descriptions and how they matter. Visiting fellow Torben Elgaard Jensen suggested the topic of ‘the status of our descriptions’. Following on from these conversations, a group of us have decided to formalise the discussion as a session for the upcoming American Anthropological Association in Montreal, Canada. Former visiting Dphil Helene Ratner and Malte Ziewitz are spearheading the venture. Below are the session and paper abstracts.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology: What is the status of our descriptions?

“The goal of descriptive adequacy is unattainable but continually haunts the endeavor, lying alongside, but in another time, and speaking back, like the immaterial ghosts of prophecy or the value of a currency.” (Maurer 2005, p. 54)

What is it to describe? What ambitions and hopes do we attach to our descriptions? How do we make them “work” for us as policy advisers, spokespeople, critics and ethnographers? While the goal of adequate representation has been disputed for a long time, the status, construction and performativity of our descriptions remain an open question. In Mutual Life, Limited (2005), Bill Maurer notes that despite consensus on the impossibility of accurate and adequate descriptions, it continues to haunt “the [ethnographic] endeavor”. Hereby he points to an aesthetics of ethnography which, despite claims to relativism, in many cases still makes use of the persuasive rhetoric of “being there” (see also Strathern, 2004, p. 10). Roland Barthes (1982) has similarly argued that the prose of a plethora of details and descriptions characterizing ethnography is to create the “effect of the real”, which is part of constructing the ethnographic authority (Barthes in Knuuttila 2002).

With the “crisis of representation” of the 1980s comfortably behind us, we now see different questions about description, reflexivity and modes of writing emerging. The anthropological style and prose of “being there” with its representational effects is still deployed widely, leaving behind reflexivity debates as an issue of past concerns. Others add a few extra voices and confessions as a placeholder for epistemological self-awareness. A third position, lateral ethnography, uses empirical descriptions to question the very practices of anthropological ways of knowing. How can we understand these divisions in styles of ethnographic description? What are their implications? In this session, we explore how Science and Technology Studies (STS) can offer alternative understandings for how descriptions come to matter. Those working in the field of STS have long studied how different representations are achieved, in production, assembly, and circulation. Applying a sensitivity to the various ways in which the distinctions between fact and fiction, culture and nature, are enacted, it offers a vocabulary for exploring different modes of describing and writing. Taking our own descriptions as a starting point, we discuss how various reflexive and post-reflexive moves can inform the manner in which our ethnographic descriptions are deployed.

In the session, the following papers will be presented:

Thick Description On Diet – or What Does It Mean to Represent? Helene Ratner (Copenhagen Business School)

Abstract: Within anthropology and STS alike, the enactment of a “realist genre” or an authoritative voice such as the royal “we” has produced much concern (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Woolgar 1988), with the call for multi-vocality or literary experiments to “disrupt the apprehension of texts as ‘objective’ accounts” as a result (Woolgar 1988). Such reflexive approaches, however, have been dismissed for assuming that: “the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as in some way relating to a referent out there. Reflexivity is supposed to counteract this effect by rendering the text unfit for normal consumption (which often means unreadable)” (Latour 1988, p. 168). According to Latour, the problem is not one of being too persuasive in conventional writing but rather one of engaging with the (more) serious concerns of the people we study (Latour 2005, p. 33). Descriptions perform not through representation but as “action at a distance”. Revisiting the reflexivity debate, this paper addresses questions of how descriptions perform and the implications beliefs about the performativity of research has for writing. Instead of resorting to textual experiments as to break a narrative calling to “represent”, it proposes to understand research as “partial connection” (Strathern 1991). This is a work of mutual engagement and experimentary articulations which is about adding agency to “observer” and “observed” rather than representation (Jensen and Lauritsen 2005). This raises different concerns with writing than those of epistemological angst.

Description As Prescription – or What Does It Mean to Say That Documents Are Performative?: On ‘theory-Hope’ and ‘politics of Description’ In Performative Science and Technology Studies Christopher Gad (IT University of Copenhagen)

Abstract: In STS, the concept of performativity has been used in an ontological argument to counter a representationalist world-view (Pickering 1995). Performativity has later been used to conceptualize how market- worlds are partially constituted by how they are described. Models, theories, etc. take part in the cultural production of what they re-present (MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007). This means that descriptions of all kinds must be investigated in terms of their prescriptive and agential potentials and effects: ‘what they say’ is not as important as what they (might) do (Dogonova & Eyquem-Renault 2009). According to Michel Callon (2010), performative accounts allow us to imagine how things could always be performed differently. Judith Butler (2010) suggests that performative thinking allows engaging in a continuous ‘argument with the real’, as an ongoing contestation of ‘truths’. In that regard, both suggest that politics emerge from performative thinking. Paul Du Gay (2010), however, comments this ‘hope’ is strongly related to ‘a moment of theory.’ While claiming to be political, what ‘practical politics’ flow from performativity in general remains unclear. This paper addresses how ‘politics of description’ emerge through a Danish case. The paper argues that what texts say and what they do have to be read in specific juxtaposition. Complexities of reading and writing both with and against performative texts (Jensen and Lauritsen 2005) is thus a central concern of the paper. The case exemplifies how particular issues concerning the purpose of description emerged in the moment of imagining a specific research topic as performed.

Descriptions As Companions? Notes from an Uneasy Relationship Malte Ziewitz (University of Oxford)

Abstract: Descriptions still tend to be conceptualized in terms of what Harvey Sacks (1963) famously called the ”commentator machine”: a device consisting of two parts, one of which engages in some practical activity and one of which produces a form of language about the first part. But what happens if we abandon this distinction and move beyond the various attempts at generating ‘correspondence’, ‘mirroring’ or ‘meaning’? What if we accept that our descriptions lead a life of their own? What if they do not simply ‘describe’, but ‘do’ things? In this paper, I will mobilize recent ideas from STS about symmetry, agency and performativity to explore an understanding of descriptions as actors or, as Arthur Frank (2010) suggests with reference to Donna Haraway’s (2003, 2008) trope, “material semiotic companions”. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of web-based feedback schemes, I will report on my encounters with both my own and others’ descriptions and the heterogeneous relations they entered, maintained and disrupted. I will sketch my attempts to follow and take care of them as a ‘good’ companion, but also recount moments of loss, betrayal and corruption. Rather than regarding descriptions as privileged windows into some otherworldly reality or narrative devices at the hands of the author, I will illustrate how they are implicated in the making of selves and sociality, defying the unimportant difference between ‘discourse’ and ‘doings’.

The Matter-Ing of Descriptions: Four Propositions Timothy Webmoor (University of Oxford)

Abstract: So what difference to our descriptions, field notes and narratives make? If we agree with Law (e.g. 2010:173) and other material semiotic sympathisers that to be real something must make a difference, how do I begin to think my writings in the field matter, where do I detect that difference? How would I trace their matter-ing, their reality-making? Exhuming my own descriptions from recent fieldwork at a software development lab in London, I suggest that the status of ethnographic descriptions often involve several issues. First, closet representationalism – and a coherentism at that. A working assumption is that I am rendering faithfully what is going on in these interactions. Second, “out of the box.” That is, already ready for assembly. My notes anticipate other obligations and accountabilities, primarily write-up for publication. To matter beyond satisfying my desire to understand this field setting I need to circulate my descriptions. Third, visual outsourcing of rhetoric and creativity. To matter I want some compelling visuals to supplement my textual narrative. This argument of the visual as supplemental evidence is well rehearsed. Nonetheless, I still take them for assembly with my text later on for this reason. Finally, temporal ebbs and flow. There is a temporal path to matter-ing, but it doesn’t seem very linear or sequential. Some of the process is anticipated, but there are many iterations to how the descriptions – textual, visual and I should add auditory too – will be involved in matter-ing along my research path.

Archaeological Description and Doubt Christopher L Witmore (Texas Tech University)

Abstract: What role does skepticism play in archaeological descriptions? What does the question of doubt reveal about the adequacy of a description? What is the relationship of skepticism to the issues of accountability and ultimately trust? This paper addresses these questions by taking a closer look at the modes of articulation deployed in an archaeological excavation at the remains of a Roman fort in Binchester, UK.

For more information about the session please contact the organisers:
Helene Ratner, hr.lpf@cbs.dk
Malte Ziewitz, malte.ziewitz@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Tim Webmoor, timwebmoor@gmail.com.

Over the last few years I have been following the attempt of the European Union to domesticate genetically modified organisms. In the future imagined by the EU, genetically modified must ‘coexist’ with conventional and organic agriculture. This means that fields under transgenic cultivation have to be separated and isolated, in order to minimize the extent of genetic exchange between plant varieties.

This paper follows the fate of bees and beekeepers in this scenario. The former have become a vector of ‘genetic pollution’, since they can carry pollen from transgenic plants far enough to render moot the isolation distances and buffer zones established around GM field. As a result, beekeepers have become an active political actor in the debate over ‘coexistence’.

Abstract. Over the last decade the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees have become a matter of public policy in the European Union. Determined to establish a system where transgenic crops can ‘coexist’ with conventional and organic farming, the EU has begun to erect a system of demarcations and separations designed to minimize the extent of ‘gene flow’ from genetically modified plants. As the European landscape is regimented through the introduction of isolation distances and buffer zones, bees and other pollinating insects have become vectors of ‘genetic pollution’, disrupting the project of cohabitation and purification devised by European authorities. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres on parasitism, this paper traces the emergence of bees as an object of regulatory scrutiny and as an interruptor of the ‘coexistence’ project. Along with bees, however, another uninvited guest arrived unexpectedly on the scene: the beekeeper, who came to see his traditional relationship to bees, crops, and consumers at risk. The figure of the parasite connects the two essential dynamics described in this paper: an escalation of research and the intensification of political attributes.

You can download the full paper here.

French sociologist, philosopher and STS researcher, Bruno Latour, is one of the most significant and creative thinkers of the last decades. Bruno Latour: Hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world is the first comprehensive and accessible English-language introduction to his multi-faceted work.

The book contains chapters on Latour’s Antropology of Science, Philosophy of Modernity, Political Ecology and Sociology of Associations. It also contains an original interview with Latour. The book is written by Anders Blok (Sociology, University of Copenhagen) and myself.

Further details are available here.

Just in case you missed yesterday’s conference, a quick pointer to a summary over at our project blog. You will learn more about the talks and their topics, the list of delegates, some reflections on the by now world-famous worm experiment as well as reactions from elsewhere on the web.

To get you in the right mood, here is a screenshot of Andy Balmer presenting on his autoethnographic inquiry into HotorNot.com while simultaneously being worm-polled:

Read more here.

The eighth installation of the STS Talk-Walks revolved around the theme of visualisations and visualising. What practical work goes into creating visualizations and making them travel? Who, which or what is actually being visualized? What are the risks involved in visualizing? How come that ‘visualization’ has gained such currency? Has it, actually?

Whether it was due to the all-too-familiar visualisation of ‘heavy rain showers’ on the BBC Weather homepage or not (the grey icon almost scared this writer off), the turnout was not overwhelming this time. However, the happy three that ventured out in the rain were rewarded with great conversational depth and a very tolerable amount of rain. Here follows a necessarily incomplete and biased story of how it went, but really this image says it all (or does it?):

Walking downstream on the Thames Path from Said Business School, we started by noting how the term ‘visualisation’ is claimed by a confusing collective of actors. It is taken to mean anything from diagrams that sum up texts or ideas to digital stepping stones that have become integrated into how scientists proceed in laboratories. It was suggested that while this diversity makes it hard to run smooth conferences under the visualisation banner, it could also be cast as a powerful unifying concept. Further to this, one participant pointed out how a visualisation in itself can work as a focal point around which people with different interests are able to gather. Interestingly, our shared everyday language also seems to contain a throng of hints to the visual, as is for example ‘illustrated’ when politicians talk of the need for ‘transparent’ institutions and ‘clear’ policy making.

Later, a halfway pint at the cosy Isis Farm House became instrumental in discussing the concept of affordances and the ontological status of those environments that present themselves visually to us. None of the participants were entirely comfortable employing the notion of affordances (which has also been used by a very diverse set of writers), but it was useful for trying to get at what it is that might make visualisations appear so powerful in comparison to for example texts. Perhaps there is something more immediate about the way that we relate to the visual? This argument was only hesitantly accepted, though, with some unexpecting readers suggesting that they reacted in a highly emotional and instinctive way to the final passages of the novel ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy. In this case the text seemed to have powers equal to the most arresting (in the Barthean sense) pieces of visual art.

During the walking and talking, we several times found ourselves reflecting on the recent InSIS conference Visualisation in the age of computerisation. For example, the keynote by Peter Galison was useful for thinking about how different styles of attaching truthfulness to scientific visualising have emerged over the last three centuries. The idea came up that if digital visualisations are gaining currency in our times, it might have to do with the classic statistical logic of attaching value to representations that sum up large amounts of data.

It turned out that more than one of the talk-walkers were doing current work in which they encountered the practicalities of visualizing, so this occasion to discuss was warmly welcomed. Whether some of the thoughts that were generated at the talk-walk can be transferred from the field of the Thames Path to the field in which visualising work is carried out remains to be seen.

Next STS Talk-Walk: Friday, 22 July 2011.

The first STS Talk-Walk this term took us downstream along the Thames to the Isis Farmhouse. It also challenged us to think hard about ‘spinning’: what is it to spin a topic? How have you spun your research in recent papers, talks and presentations? What were the practicalities involved? What did you find easy/difficult/challenging/etc. about it? Is there an ethics of spinning? How useful is it to talk about ‘spinning’ as opposed to ‘framing’ or ‘turning’?

As usual, the conversations were diverse and touched upon a myriad of aspects, thoughts and stories. In fact, it seemed that the theme of ‘spinning’ could be spun in many different ways. So here is a short and highly selective list of ideas and associations that travelled with us along the Thames.

• What does it practically take to spin an issue? Jasper told a story about the candidacy of Michael Ignatieff in the Canadian federal elections and how it was spun by different political groups. While some argued that a well-educated leader with international reputation would be the right person to advance Canadian politics, others portrayed him as a stranger and outsider, who had long lost ties with his country and ‘common Canadians’. It was interesting to see how the different spins variously mobilized objects like ‘common Canadians’ or ‘international challenges’ to present their version of the world and spin a web of carefully crafted realities.
• Also the ethics of spinning figured prominently. While some thought that ‘spinning’ already comes with strong connotations of dishonesty and betrayal, others suggested that it is the very idea of a fact (and not just a perspective on it) which is achieved in the process of spinning. At any rate, it turned out to be productive to think about what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spinning — and what it takes to make these arguments.
• Some wondered about the different meanings the word ‘spinning’ has adopted in other languages. In German, for example, the verb ‘spinnen‘ can refer to the activity of threading or weaving a web, but is also used to denote the state of ‘being bonkers’ (as in the famous line from the Asterix cartoons, ‘Die spinnen, die Römer.‘ = ‘These Romans are crazy.’).
• The longer we talk-walked, the less certain we were about who, which or what is actually spinning what, which or whom. Tanja told a story about a recent press release that was issued about her research on neuromarketing. While the press release had emphasized the generally critical stance of the project towards the currency of all things ‘neuro’, it turned out to be received quite differently. In fact, the project was presented as ‘cutting-edge’ neuromarketing research itself, and sentences indicating ethnographic distance were simply edited out in re-publications. As a consequence, people started e-mailing with praise for the interesting project and the need to advance the field of neuromarketing. While a lot more complex, the story showed that spinning cannot simply be credited to the magic craft of a few spin doctors or political consultants, but rather appears as a messy and unruly process with unpredictable outcomes. Spinning, in this sense, means becoming part of and engaging with an issue — if we like it or not.
• All this led us to speculate that spinning may not be the exception to a rule, but rather a useful trope to talk about the activity (and politics) of doing research generally. What if everything is somehow spinning — and what kind of spin would that be?

Next STS Talk-Walk: Friday, 17 June 2011. More info here. If you have an idea for a topic, please let us know.

If you follow the news from our How’s my feedback? project, you probably know already about the upcoming conference. On 28 June 2011, a range of researchers, designers, managers, government innovators and users will come to Oxford to discuss the technology and politics of evaluation. Specifically, we will focus on the phenomenon of web-based review and rating schemes, i.e. all those platforms that in one way or another invite, aggregate, calculate and distribute feedback about books, dishwashers, lawyers, teachers, health services, ex-boyfriends, haircuts, prostitutes or websites.

There is bound to be a lot of food for thought. While some have greeted this development as an innovative way of fostering transparency, accountability and public engagement, others have criticized the forced exposure and alleged lack of accuracy and legitimacy, pointing to the potentially devastating consequences of negative evaluations.

The conference will tackle these issues head-on. How are we to judge the effectiveness of these schemes? What modes of governance are implicated in their operation? What does it take to establish and maintain such a scheme? How can we make sense of different methodologies, such as algorithmic rankings (e.g. Google Web Search) vs. individual user reviews (e.g. TripAdvisor)? What counts as ‘good’ feedback and what as ‘bad’? What is it to evaluate the evaluators – and will this business ever end?

A special focus will be on our recent attempts to develop a platform that allows people to share their experience with online reviews and ratings — a feedback websites for feedback websites. An excellent line-up of speakers has volunteered to comment on this process from different perspectives, including Malcolm Ashmore (Colombia/Loughborough), Andrew Balmer (Sheffield), Stefan Schwarzkopf (Copenhagen Business School), Ian Stronach (Liverpool John Moores), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths) and Steve Woolgar (Oxford).

So if you fancy a day in Oxford (and give some feedback), please have a look at the conference page and check out the homonymous project. Most importantly, please register soon to secure a spot.

Graham Harman diagrams the ‘fourfold’ object at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society

Graham Harman recently visited Oxford for a week as part of a Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar. The organisers, archaeologist Chris Gosden and geographer Sarah Whatmore, both of the University of Oxford, put together an innovative format whereby scholars who think and write about the supposed ‘ontological turn’ were gathered together with objects at the fantastically eclectic Pitt Rivers Museum. Immersed in musty stuff, the scholars were to think freshly about the interdiscplinary importance of things by talking through objects in-the-hands. Perhaps at home with the Heideggerian ‘throwness’ of the event, Harman contributed to the discussions through his advocacy of Object-oriented Philosophy. A theme which emerged at the event, particularly at the more conventional series of presentations held mid-week, was whether a turn to ontology could ever possibly ‘take things seriously’ on their own. Or whether a consideration of objects, devices, instruments and other missing masses – the under-labourers of a host of heterogeneous practices in science and society – must necessarily ‘shift out’ to a more holistic consideration of the relations that stuff enter into. A lesson of STS has of course been not to a priori bracket off what ingredients are engaged in what we are describing. This agnosticism leads researchers to acknowledge many untoward connections that might have been passed over in ‘conventional’ studies. So often how we relate to things is through relations.

But do we lose the trees for the forest? In emphasizing relations that things enter into, do objects themselves drop out of view? Sometimes reading magnificently sensitive accounts of how constellations of humans and nonhumans are coordinated to become semi-stable phenomena, whether electronic patient records in hospitals or location-based mobile phone technologies, I come away with little idea of the actual objects. Descriptions seem sometimes too eager to pass quickly to the ‘higher order’ scale of commodity derivative trading or atherosclerosis enactment and management. Is it intellectually blasé or even disreputable to describe objects themselves?

This is where Harman’s work intervenes. Amongst his many works that merge “the centaur of classical metaphysics . . . with the cheetah of actor-network theory,” chapter 6 in his Prince of Networks cautions against the influential trend of relationism in much of STS. Of course, we might subtly question the very categorisation and boundaries taken up in definitions of objects as isolated, discreet and self-contained. But Graham undertakes just this. A very close and phenomenologically sophisticated and sensual study of objects and their ‘essence’ as unified entities that can neither be reduced to their relations with other humans and nonhumans, nor exhausted by their qualities. But then ‘essences’ are out of vogue now too. For STSers, Harman provokes us to pause and consider the ‘thingly’ qualities of what matters. To consider the trade-offs involved in scaling-out our sophisticated accounts of how things enact ontologies. Archaeologists, who have long produced ‘thick descriptions’ of objects and developed nuanced theories for the relations of things and persons, find a much needed humility in Harman, a reminder that storying the past can never be too focused on objects themselves.