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What I really enjoyed in reading this book is that it offers a way for those of us in design to think with the kind of hopeful scholarship coming out of feminist theory. For so many, scholars like Haraway are a challenge to read, but not only does Rosner make this scholarship accessible, she spins something new into the ideas. She takes Haraway’s ‘speculative fabulations’ and provides very tangible ways to think ‘with’ stories, and think ‘other’ and ‘more than’ with stories. Her design interventions (constituting a patchwork across the book) provide exemplary ways of both undertaking design and also thinking with it. The centrepiece, the work Rosner has done with others on weaving the Apollo mission’s ‘core memory’, speaks then to both a designerly practice for doing technological innovation and a way to do design in responsible, sensitive and open-ended ways.

Beyond recounting her exemplary design practice, Rosner does a lovely job setting the stage in the early parts to the book. We learn how an instrumentalist design prevails in today’s science and technology, and yet Rosner shows it didn’t always and doesn’t have to be this way. I liked, in particular, her interweaving story of Haraway’s biography and Lucy Suchman’s profound influence on science and technology, which serves to draw out sometimes common and sometimes contrasting viewpoints. This stitching together of some arguably very different threads produces a lively tapestry of ideas for Rosner to work with, showing immediately her commitment to a generative working with the relations between design and technoscientific innovation.

I can’t wait to see how this book impacts practice and the future wave of designers aiming to make a difference. I for one will be adding it to my class readings.

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A conversation with Alex and Daniela for the “What are you reading?” column in interactions magazine, Nov. 2017.
A.S.T.: Daniela and I wanted to try something a little different for this issue’s “What are you reading?”. We wanted to read something together that had a resonance between us, and that might give rise to a generative discussion. After a bit of deliberation, we settled on two books. The first is Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World,” an extraordinary examination of one of the world’s most rarified mushrooms across capitalist supply chains and histories of multispecies cohabitation that explores the tensions between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival. The second book is Sarah Ahmed’s “Living a Feminist Life,” a feminist treatise that weaves together ideas from feminist of color scholarship with personal meditations on everyday feminist encounters.
Although quite different in scope, and although investigating topics conventionally outside HCI, both volumes explore feminist figurings of materialism that Daniela and I have been mulling on for quite some time. […]
Before getting into the readings, I feel it’s important to share that over the last eight years Daniela and I have grown together as scholars. Early on, we shared a keen interest in materialities as articulated by people like Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour. Over the years, this mutual interest has developed to centre far more on a feminist figuring of materialism and a particular concern for the entangled enactments of being and doing in the world, probably best exemplified in Donna Haraway’s figures of the cyborg, companion species and, most recently, the chthulucene. At the same time, Daniela has gone on to develop a mature reading of craft, hand-work and repair, and demonstrated the importance of these to HCI. And my own interests have threaded a variety of topics together, but been unified by a deep interest in the structural effects and affects of computation. Together, then, we hoped our convergences and divergences might make for something engaging, if unconventional for an interactions’ reader.
* * *
Having read these books what makes them valuable to be read together, and critically how do they come to be valuable together as feminist figurings of materiality?
D.K.R.: I’m in awe of these authors — the scope of their work, their ability to entwine a strong activist agenda with a crisp theoretical focus, and their skillful nurturing of a poetics of practice with powerful analytic potential. How to search for understanding while asserting difference? Thinking through mushrooms, I’ve learned, can help.
Before reading Tsing’s book, I never thought much about mushrooms as more than something delicious (or deadly!) to consume, and certainly not as an object for feminist world-making. But as with Ahmed’s focus on feminism, reading Tsing’s account of the matsutake mushroom is a deeply personal account of noticing —showing how the impulse to notice can take multiple forms. For Ahmed noticing is a political act, drawing forth and realizing exclusions and omissions. What is it that people learn not to notice? In learning and unlearning across difference Ahmed promises opportunities for listening, for noticing. Tsing works with a noticing of unpredictability, the dance of following tracks in the dark, of follow the mushrooms, of noticing what matters. Bodies, both living and dead, become tools for “show[ing] us how to look around rather than ahead.” (2015, 22) They enroll additional instruments for knowing; forms of political listening that, in Tsing’s words, “look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest” (ibid, 5).
Have these forms of noticing infected your work? What did you find?
A.S.T.: You capture a strong commonality between what have been for me two exhilarating and deeply moving texts. I felt the same way: noticing is thoroughly enlivened by both authors. I found their ideas turned and folded in together—involuted! (Hustak and Myers)—to offer up something more and at the same time pointing to a deeper, more critical attention to things.
I was delighted with Tsing’s insistence on following the stories, of choosing to turn away from the usual modes of scholarly accounting and, instead, stay with the noticed details of lines spun by mushrooms and people across time, and along global supply chains. Also, I was touched by Ahmed’s attention to revisiting her own profound encounters with violence, (un)happiness and self-discovery, and responding by daring to ‘get in the way’—like Wolf’s Mrs Dalloway, finding ways to stop and orient the body differently. Between them, such shifts in scale! But together they invite, as you say, a care for paying attention and asking, to use Ahmed’s words, “questions about how to live better” (2017, 12).
It’s with an emphasis on the latter that I want to respond to you, and that I mean to ask a follow on question. Certainly paying attention to the details has been central to my research in studying how lives entangle with technologies. This has always been the starting point for the ethnographic enterprise that channels my work. And yet, I’ve managed to bracket this kind of eye for detail from what I bring with it, what worlds I bring with such noticings. I agree with you, Ahmed and Tsing (along with other feminist writings) show how noticing has its politics, that by ‘merely’ noticing we are always already entangled in a cosmopolitics (Stengers) in which the personal and structural are strung together, and where injustices, inequities and violence are immanent. What Ahmed’s and Tsing’s noticings show for me, then, is a commitment to much more than the detailed accounts of the world. By paying attention to the troubled conditions we are implicated in, they are making the space to seek reparative methods and the possibilities for other more bearable worlds.
What I’m curious to hear is whether these ideas of what I am beginning to think of as ‘resistances and reparations’ resonate with you in reading the texts and, perhaps more importantly, if/how you see them coming through in the design research you do.
D.K.R.: I like thinking of these as reparative methods — and, in this sense, I see their methods as reflections of genealogy. The lineage of design we receive as HCI practitioners looks very different from the one I inherited as an undergraduate design student, which looks different from the one I now seek to recuperate in my recent work (exploring the practices of women who wove early forms of computing memory by hand). In this multiply produced trajectory, in seeking out varied pathways toward defining design, I see possibilities for reconfiguring what comprises design today. Design might not work toward progress or toward ruin but instead, after Tsing, it may help us think with “salvage rhythms.” It might help us notice the uneven, contingent, and collective work required for change. Ahmed writes of women’s studies departments:

“We have to shake the foundations”

“But when we shake the foundations, it is harder to stay up” (2017, 232). Does design call for the same willful commitment to keep going, “to keep coming up?” (ibid, 12).
Ahmed and Tsing don’t speak directly to design as a field or as a practice. But I wonder if you see in their critiques and potentials — from “decentering human hubris” to “diversity work” — an opening for elaborating a different kind of technology design? Tsing writes, “To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas” (2015, 254). As you do this listening, this reparation and resistance, what not-yet-articulated common agendas might you find?
A.S.T.: There’s so much to say in response to this, but in the interests of space (which we are running out of), let me limit my answer to one thing in particular, namely what I see to be our contemporaneous obsession with numbers, counting and simulacrums of the market place. To me, this unerring drift (that sometimes feels like a surge) towards measurement and the market rationalising of everything, has become such a big part of how we approach technology design. It operates as a rationalising force in so much work, to the point that we mask how—in the way Tsing shows so compellingly— labour and capital is strewn together through such a heterogeneity of flows, eddies, disturbances and even ruin. Indeed, the labours and products that many of us are involved in appear to be so bound up with this powerful logic, but there are still so few possibilities to question or resist it, to “shake the foundations” and “keep coming up”.
For me, Tsing and Ahmed show that we need, urgently, to find ways to act together, to make more possible with the possibilities you write of. Inspired by Ahmed’s language, in particular, I come away wanting to build an army in which each of us is not afraid of putting our bodies into it. All around us, there are ideologies, structures, methods, norms, practices, etc. that seek to smooth so much over and remove each of us from being counted, really counted, from being “alive with a world”. What we need are ways to keep pushing, resisting, and being sensational. We need to ensure our noticings are noticed.
D.K.R.: So maybe then, for HCI, this call to arms makes possible a renewed concern for the problem-solving heritage of the field. Across its methodological rubrics and case studies, HCI scholarship tends to frame design as a means of accomplishing ends, of seeking out too-easy resolutions rather than encouraging creative listening, in Tsing’s terms. These texts, by contrast, caution against such prefabrications and fatalisms. They show that what is at stake in making and inhabiting unpredictable encounters is our ability to recognize and become more accountable to those who lose out — to the things that lie outside our immediate view, to the bacteria that make the soil in which many designers mine, to the “users” haunted by our patriarchal legacies of innovation work. Tsing and Ahmed ask readers to struggle against — to take in and wrestle with our surrounding ecosystems. “We become a problem when we describe a problem,” writes Ahmed (2017, 87). For HCI, Tsing and Ahmed show that designers are not self-contained entities but designers-in-motion, continually working together across difference.

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The seminar is summarised as follows:

Considering Peter Sloterdijk’s rendering of a Heideggerian ‘being-in’ this informal seminar will be a situated reading. The discussion will be located at the Royal Society of the Arts to spatially think through an approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘spherology’ across disciplines. How, where and with what matterings do we embark our daily readings is no trivial matter? Sloterdijk’s writing can both inform and trouble readers and so the adjacent readings from and will open up further questions and provocations. Sloterdijk’s recent publications have been aimed at a design audience (namely architects) and with his media theory the following digital media question will be proposed.  With a broadly experiential and performative approach in mind the discussion will loosely consider spherology in this respect:

• This formulation opens to the somewhat irreverent question (following Sloterdijk’s own irreverence) of how his thinking can be turned into an app or an application (app displacing application displacing theorisation displacing philosophisation, the last term barely being a word)?
• How might Sloterdijk’s work be reparatively questioned through a feminist enquiry? How might Sloterdijk’s metaphors engage us intra-actively?

I’ve sketched out my response to the latter:

First, I have to say I am not really familiar with Sloterdijk’s work, and I come to the suggested text informed by two equally lively but quite different threads of thinking. One is ‘relational materialism’ as articulated by Annemarie Mol and a host of others in STS (sometimes in differing flavours). The other is a feminist technoscience that draws heavily on Barad and Stengers, as well as Donna Haraway, Lucy Suchman, etc.
Turning, then, to Sloterdijk (and his short Spheres Theory piece), I like the question of islands, and the mixtures of thinking introduced by comparing and contrasting islands to spaces as varied as apartments and worlds. This mixing of the mundane with the, well, global seems to me to raise lots of interesting questions about our modes of being, about ontology. I also quite like the idea of foam as a analytical device as it conjures up much of the multiplicity, and contingent and provisional qualities of being that I take from scholars, again, like Haraway, Suchman, etc. So these concepts of islands and foam, etc. are as Sengers would call them helpful ‘tools for thinking’ (p. 186).
Yet, at the same time, I must admit that I feel uneasy about what I see to be the strong humanist position that runs through Sloterdik’s theorising. For example, I’m uneasy with the Freudian and evolutionary (p. 3, middle col) types, symbols, stages, etc. that are so full of categorical fixity and “grounding definitions” (Stengers p. 187). This, for me, is summed up in Sloterdik’s evocative question about the “the difference between the paw and the hand” p3. Why should we be looking to difference here, at least in any essential way? My worry is that Sloterdik’s position occupies, too much, the ‘major key’ or ‘centre stage’ (p. 186) to borrow from Stengers or what Barad calls ‘atomistic metaphysics’ (p. 813). That is, in instructing us to see humans, islands, houses and indeed architecture in quite definite ways, Sloterdik provides us with a ‘stake defined by an either/or disjunction’ (Stengers p. 186), you are either in or out.
So, like I said, I see the ideas of foam and the like as useful ‘tools for thinking’, but I am not so sure about the outside-inside binary Sloterdijk mobilises here. For me, coming out of (post)structuralist sociology, I immediately think of Durkheim, Mary Douglas and also the anthropology of ritual (Van Gennep 1960) when I think of inside/outside and the production of the home as scared vs profane. And then there is of course Foucault (with his understanding of the ‘order of things’ (2005)), who Barad reminds us leaves us with much trouble to ‘hold on to’ (p. 813) or ‘stay with’ (Haraway) when it comes to our personal bodies and the wider politics that surround and invade us, inside (Foucault 2010). From these loosely connected threads of thought, I like to think of the inside being made or ‘performed’ (Barad) through the ordinariness of (domestic) material labour. Isn’t it the routine but at the same time ritualising practices that make homes to be the special/sacred inside places that they are? Home as, forever, an ongoing endeavour, never to be defined by “inherently determinate boundaries or properties” (Barad p. 813)?
This is no doubt an ungenerous characterisation, but I take Sloterdijk to be working with an almost essentialist idea of inside, something tied to our evolutionary biology, and to some extent our (metaphysical) mastery over nature: “Biology deals with the environment, philosophy with the world” (p. 3). Although he is ready to present his theory as a “spatial interpretation” and not one able to “explain everything” (p. 3) he seems prepared to proclaim what things like philosophy, biology and homes are, not how they are, and how they are always already ‘becomings’: so, for instance, “homes are initially machines to kill time.” (p. 5). While I like the provocativeness of statements like this, I find them too general and too couched in a restricted, elementalism  — as if we might just break things down in these neat ways.

“Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is, feeling its borders, experimenting with the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing insulting questions that would lead them to mobilise and transform the border into a defence against their outside.” (Stengers p. 184)

I would like to ask what it might be like to be on the inside, living right there and making do with the things and practices (a lá Stengers) that are available to us (and that we make available). To me this ‘thinking par le milieu’ (Stengers p. 187,from Deleuze) is a more responsible and responsive understanding of our presence and role in place. Yes, I see that Sloterdijk, with his foam and islands is doing some generative work to blur the boundaries and reveal the fluid relationality inherent between things, practices and space. Nevertheless, he looses or seems to overlook the performative qualities of ‘being there’ (that is much more than Heideger’s rather too general Dasein), and entangled in the “(re)configurings of the world” (Barad p. 816),  of being there ‘accountable’, ‘responsible/responsive’ and ‘belonging’ (Barad/Stengers).

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
Foucault, M., Ewald, F., & Fontana, A. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. M. Senellart (Ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publication.
Stengers, I. (2013). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Spheres theory: Talking to myself about the poetics of space. Harvard Design Magazine, 30, 126–137.
van Gennep, A. (1960)  The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Nelson, D. (2013). “Yes to Life = No to Mining:” Counting as Biotechnology in Life (Ltd) Guatemala. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 11(3).

Nelson weaves together a compelling if somewhat bleak story of mining in Guatemala and the impact it is having on small villages and local people. What she does especially well is show the complexities of the mining industry’s presence in the mountains of Guatemala and the many different issues at stake for the multiple actors (human and nonhuman). Without a doubt, she paints a vivid picture in support of the people labouring in the mines and affected my the huge physical presence of the mining industry, but at the same time she captures the uncertainties and occasional doubts the locals themselves have in mobilising a clear cut case against mining.

“I explore struggles over differences in live-ability and response-ability.”

Relevant for me are Nelson’s thoughts on counting and accounting. She sheds light on the modes of counting—the repertoires and regimes—and what kinds of authority they afford. At the same time, she reveals the real tensions that arise in trying to use number to capture and (re)produce the worlds we make.

“How do you balance — without particularly accurate information — quetzales to cuerdas of land, wages to labor, hopes for progress, development, and the “will to improve,” to war’s devastation and the impossible existing relations of production?”

I’m reminded, in Nelson’s piece, of Helen Verran’s amazing book , and it relates closely with a few other works I’ve been reading on counting and number:

Beer, D. (2015). Productive measures: Culture and measurement in the context of everyday neoliberalism. Big Data & Society, 2(1), 1–12.
Felski, R. (2002). Telling Time in Feminist Theory. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 21(1), 21.
Skeggs, B. (2014). Values beyond value? Is anything beyond the logic of capital? The British Journal of Sociology, 65(1), 1–20.
Verran, H. (2013). Numbers performing nature in quantitative valuing. NatureCulture, 2, 23–37.

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The article is a hard hitting critique of Apple’s current design philosophy. More than this, though, the two long time interaction design gurus set out a clear project for design, one that they see Apple having been instrumental in but now deviating from. Their general argument is, on the face of it, pretty convincing. Yet digging a little deeper it’s one that I have problems with. This post is really an effort to sort things out in my own mind.
I think, outwardly, at least, Norman and Tog have a point about Apple doing a disservice to design. Certainly, in their marketing and stores, they are putting a lot of emphasis on visual aesthetic and physical form. As Norman and Tog say, this conveys a message that the business of design (and how it is being widely promoted by Apple) is all about making things pretty. I am fairly confident though that Apple’s designers would make a strong case for putting meticulous effort into interaction cues, and visual (and tactile) feedback—that is, in thinking carefully about the ensemble of product/interaction design. I’ve read interviews with Apple’s designers saying just this and heard Ive talking about the painstaking efforts to convey interactional qualities through animation, touch, tactility, etc. Whether they’ve made good choices or not is, I’d say, another matter.
Again, I also recognise that Norman and Tog have some very clear and convincing arguments for the kind of interaction design they proselytise. I worry though that they are part of the old guard that sees some of the original ‘solutions’ to the problems they themselves created/defined as the best ones (for example, what they see to be ).

If we were to take this reference—indeed reverence—to Apple’s past design at face value, we would be led to imagine that none of us had problems with using earlier versions of Mac OS. Well, of course we did. I never really got on with Apple’s original bitmap Chicago font, the open/save dialogues were notoriously confusing, and we’re still left with the legacy of a very awkward solution for ejecting media.


More importantly, there is a sense of the authors misjudging the changing ways we have come to think about computing and use computers. In fact, I think many people don’t think they’re using computers anymore—at least in how we understood them in the 80s/90s as productivity machines. Our phones and tablets are much more entertainment devices (devices of consumption), not so far from a gaming experience in which many will know things like discoverability, feedback, mapping, and the ability to undo are just not cast in the same mould. Of course, the kinds of design criteria Norman and Tog talk about are important and I, for one, sorely miss them when I try to use Word, Excel, etc. on a iPad. But in the world of iOS, where the forms of use are so very different, I think the issues manifest themselves differently and demand a different kind of attention (one that Norman and Tog choose not to see or perhaps not to understand).
What particularly interests me about this is that I think we need to recognise that what good usability is and, to some extent, what good design is are things we in a sense ‘manufacture’ through the technologies we produce and design. Tog and Norman understand good design guidelines as static, something somehow unchanging, irrespective of everything else that is changing. By talking about “basic psychological principles” they indicate an obduracy to what good design might be, but fail to recognise that this is deeply bound to the continuously changing material practices we are enabling through ‘computing’. They write: “principles reflect the needs, desires, and abilities of human beings, not the machines they use.”
The trouble is our needs, desires and abilities are inexorably entangled with matter, matter like machines. The qualities of being human can’t in some way exist outside of these entanglements. Of course, there is much to be gained by looking back to designers like Dieter Rams, but I think what we’re doing when we do this historicising is reworking old concepts into contemporary moments, undertaking a translation work to make these meaningful for the assemblies of things and people we are dealing with today. So, to me, the guidelines Norman and Tog speak of make most sense for the machines that they played a role in engineering and building. A principle of consistency has a very particular meaning for the early Mac OS that, I feel, doesn’t translate in any straightforward way to contemporary operating systems and ecologies of apps, etc. What Tog and Norman miss, I think, is that we are always giving shape to new and different possibilities of good design through the things we create. As computing has diverged from the Macintosh (and PC), we have created logics and rationales that present fundamentally different kinds of interaction where it doesn’t always make sense to rigidly apply past principles.
Even though Tog and Norman plead for us not to, yes, let’s take the popularity of the iPad amongst—for lack of a better category description—retirees (or ‘grandparents’ if you like). I know I’m not alone in being struck by how people from my parents’ generation can get so intimately attached to their iPads. I think we have to ask what’s going on here and not brush aside what is visibly a genuine intimacy by simply criticising some specific user interface features based on the design of “traditional computers”. And this is meant as more than the hackneyed “could my mother use it” kind of point. Really, what’s going on here? Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons for the iPad’s appeal (and I don’t mean to overlook a lot of the really difficult and frustrating aspects of using them), but I think we’re witnessing a different set of expectations around computing and the relationships we form with machines. This seems to be something Norman and Tog don’t want to acknowledge (despite Norman’s efforts to understand ). 
As I see it, the iOS aims to reveal (and make discoverable) a different set of qualities that appeal in different sorts of ways and that fit within a logic of portable and touch enabled devices in the way the Mac OS doesn’t (and shouldn’t). In the original design of the Mac, choices also needed to made about what was immediately discoverable and what would be buried under the menu architecture and in obscure dialogues (remember the Chooser?), and this presented a particular kind of logic-of-use. With the iOS, I think (intentionally or not) a different kind of experience is surfaced by the decisions to reveal and hide interactional capabilities, and the logic-of-use here is fundamentally different; I feel like the iPad, etc. is much more about the feel for content (and to some extent, creation). So perhaps it’s this that makes the devices so appealing and that many of us, including my parents, get so attached to.


Finally, I should say that I am a long time Mac user but I feel wedded to Macs (and the Apple ‘ecosystem’), for now at least, because that’s what I’ve bought into and am used to using. I’m really not sure whether Apple’s interaction design is especially better than anyone else’s and I think there are lots of things that confuse and frustrate me about their various operating systems. This post isn’t one defending Apple’s design, but more a response to what I see as Don Norman’s and Bruce Tognazzini’s views on design.

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Kenney, M. (2015). Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran’s relational empiricism. Social Studies of Science, 1–23.

Kenney’s article is very much a homage to Helen Verran and her wonderful book Science and an African Logic. She pays special attention to Verran’s efforts at decomposition and frames these through a lens of accountability. Care is given by Kenny to differentiate this kind of accounting from that of “contemporary neo-liberal bureaucracies” that run the risk of strengthening “the academic culture that privileges critique and revelation over other, more subtle and creative, approaches.” (p. 8)
What I particularly like about Kenney’s reading of Science and an African Logic is the emphasis she places on Verran’s ‘generative critique’ and, in these same terms, the way we might come to understand the empirical/ethnographic account.

“Verran […] helps us see ethnographic writing conventions as generative, not of true representations (tracings of real relations) but of promising fictions, echoing Strathern’s definition of ethnography as an ‘effort to create a world parallel to the perceived world’” (p. 10).

For me, this is such a helpful way to think about the accounts we produce as field researchers. It gets us past questions about factual or realist representation. It reminds me of something I heard the singer PJ Harvey say on Radio 4 a while back. Talking about Harold Pinter’s poetry and ‘the poetry’ of Kubrick’s films, she evocatively describes what she sees in them:

As with Pinter and Kubrick, then, I appreciate Kenney reminding us that ethnographic accounts such as Verran’s must be written/read as “an alternative way of figuring and paying attention to differences that may enable different forms of response and participation.” (p. 11)

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Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). “Nothing comes without its world”: thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216.

Puig de la Bellacasa writes evocatively on Donna Haraway’s work and draws it into an idea of care. I especially like how she figures care as a way of bringing things into productive relations with one another, not narrowing in on oppositional differences, but seeking a generative relationality.

One thing that’s noteworthy is the absence of Annemarie Mol in this text, with her in science and technology scholarship. I wonder if this has to do with her only just veiled criticisms of some in feminist technoscience through her remarks on ‘new materialism’:

Whatever the case, Puig de la Bellacasa “speculative reading” of Haraway and her thickening of care provides a helpful basis for thinking about what we know and how we know it.

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Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2014). ANT, multiplicity and policy. Critical Policy Studies, 1–18.

 

I’m in two minds about this article by Law and Singleton (2014) that targets policy making through the example of the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK, circa 2001. It’s a useful and simply put precis of and its developments since the 1980s. It helpfully threads together the concepts of heterogeneity, relationality, multiplicity and — and attributes the concepts to the leading lights in . Aiming to speak to a (presumably uninitiated) policy audience, the authors are clearly trying to make three decades of STS scholarship approachable. I’m also sympathetic with the points made about the relevance of ANT to policy making and policy studies, neatly aligning as they do with leftist, liberal academic sensibilities (I’ll come back to this).
Yet the article has two weaknesses that raise some anguish for me. One is quite simple; the article doesn’t quite do what’s written on the ‘tin’. In the abstract and throughout the text, there is a repeated reference to feminist material semiotics and the paper is presented as an effort to draw ideas from a metaphysics that stitches together this semiotic framing with ANT. The trouble is, there is really only a cursory reference to what I prefer to call a . Donna Haraway is used as a singular stand in for an immense and lively literature that makes up the feminist technoscience corpus. Of course, both of the article’s authors know this very well, so it disappoints me (a little) to see it not dealt with a bit more sensitively.
More troubling for me is the way ontology is worked through in the article. I worry that the work from scholars like Mol, Stengers, etc. has been boiled down to something akin to standpointism. What I think Law and Singleton succeed in demonstrating is that ways of knowing are enacted by ever-changing configurations or assemblages of actors/things (i.e., material practices). Yet, despite their undeniable efforts, they fail to produce a convincing argument (for me, at least) of the value of ontological multiplicity. I hear a fictional reader (to match their fictional ANT Prime Minister) asking: “Why does ontology matter here? Surely this is just still about different perspectives, and the stuff about ontology just complicates things?” As a matter of fact, the imagined back and forth between civil servant and Prime Minster leaves me siding with the anxious official: “So what’s your point Prime Minister?”
As I see it, what needs more care in the article is what multiplicity might allow for. I don’t think it’s enough to say Prime Ministers or policy makers should allow for multiple ‘realities’ to co-exist — a policy making that is “more tolerant”. This feels too much like a liberal politics conveniently wrapped up in metaphysical theorising. My sympathies lie with such a politics to be sure, but I have to ask whether the tolerance proposal is simply likely to reinforce the same old distinctions between the right and left. What I think multiplicity does, and that the authors try to convey, is allow a reimagining of the very basis for how things are. So it’s not just that there are different realities or worlds at play, but it’s that you can change the basis on which these worlds are produced and, crucially, then set the ground work for something radically different. It’s here where I think a more careful detailing of feminist technoscience might ) and is also encapsulated nicely in her retort to Trevor Pinch ().
Let me offer, then, another very roughly sketched out example case to think through. Around about the same time as the , with the growth of online media sharing and, in particular, the use of peer-to-peer channels to distribute content like music, TV shows and films, broadcasting organisations faced serious threats to their integrity and control. In this light, the BBC saw the policies it had written into their Charter to be ones designed to protect content, copyright, etc. and thus limit access.
However, over time something quite remarkable happened. I’ve yet to find anything that documents it, but somewhere within the organisation it was realised that its Charter (its written policies) could be ‘performed’ differently. That rather then protecting content, the public organisation’s primary role could be one of freely (within certain contested limits) distributing it. I believe it’s this change that we now see having such a wide impact on content provision from the BBC. With innovations in online broadcasting and content distribution, the BBC appears to be pushing hard at what distribution (and production) is, it appears to be really transforming how content is both shared and consumed. Yes, many of these changes have been driven by broader market shifts, but as I understand it, the BBC would never have been able to pursue some of its initiatives if it hadn’t seen its Charter to be something fundamentally different. Through an assemblage of organisational actors, agents and processes, the Charter and indeed the BBC as a broadcasting service was imagined to be something different. In turn, this led to wide sweeping changes, organisational and industry wide.
This then, is a multiplicity in policy-making, and one with productive transformations. Although I’m not privy to the details, its clear that an organisation (made up of agents and practices) found a way of treating its charter as fundamentally multiple, and in doing so, it chose a version of it (a mode of being) that opened up some immensely productive possibilities. The point here is the same as Law and Singleton’s, but my hope is it demonstrates that multiplicity isn’t limited to professing a liberal tolerance for multiples; more than this it sets out an ontological where worlds are open to trouble and, as a consequence, difference can be reimagined. Where Law and Singleton are incontrovertibly right is that: “realities are practised into being… but this takes a lot of effort, many resources and a great deal of hard work.”

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