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	<title>feminist technoscience Archives | Alex Taylor</title>
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	<description>by Alex Taylor</description>
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		<title>What are you reading?</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:28:03 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Reading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[feminist technoscience]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HCI]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Happy to have the short conversation I had with @danielarosner published in Interactions Magazine’s regular “What are you reading?” column. We experiment with a brief interchange about two wonderful books: Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. Below is the long-winded version before tidying and [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Happy to have the short conversation I had with @danielarosner published in Interactions Magazine’s regular “<a href="http://interactions.acm.org/enter/view/alex-s.-taylor-and-daniela-k.-rosner" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">What are you reading?</a>” column. We experiment with a brief interchange about two wonderful books: Anna Tsing’s <em>The Mushroom at the End of the World</em><a id="tippy_tip0_601_anchor"></a> and Sarah Ahmed’s <em>Living a Feminist Life</em><a id="tippy_tip1_6055_anchor"></a>.<br>
Below is the long-winded version before tidying and editing.<br>
<span id="more-3667"></span></p>
<blockquote style="font-size:.8rem"><p>
A conversation with Alex and Daniela for the “<a href="http://interactions.acm.org/enter/view/alex-s.-taylor-and-daniela-k.-rosner" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">What are you reading?</a>” column in interactions magazine, Nov. 2017.<br>
<strong>A.S.T.</strong>: 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.<br>
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. […]<br>
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.<br>
* 	*	*<br>
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?<br>
<strong>D.K.R.</strong>: 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.<br>
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).<br>
Have these forms of noticing infected your work? What did you find?<br>
<strong>A.S.T.</strong>: 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.<br>
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).<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<strong>D.K.R.</strong>: I like thinking of these as reparative methods —&nbsp;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:</p>
<div class="highlight" style="font-size:3rem">“We have to shake the foundations”</div>
<p>“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).<br>
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?<br>
<strong>A.S.T.</strong>: 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”.<br>
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.<br>
<strong>D.K.R.</strong>: 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.
</p></blockquote>
<div class="tippy" data-title="1" data-href="/what-are-you-reading/#foot_text_3667_1" data-class="annie_footnoteRef annie_custom" data-name="foot_loc_3667_1" data-showheader data-anchor="#tippy_tip0_601_anchor">Tsing, A. L. (2015). <em>The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins</em>. Princeton University Press.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="2" data-href="/what-are-you-reading/#foot_text_3667_2" data-class="annie_footnoteRef annie_custom" data-name="foot_loc_3667_2" data-showheader data-anchor="#tippy_tip1_6055_anchor">Ahmed, S. (2017). <em>Living a Feminist Life.</em> Duke University Press.</div>
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		<title>Platypus blog post</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2017 18:57:57 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Writing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[capability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dis/ability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[feminist technoscience]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>The Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology &#38; Computing (CASTAC) and Rebekah Culpit kindly gave me the opportunity to write a piece for Platypus (the CASTAC blog). Titled “Becoming More Capable”, the blog post sketches out some of the early ideas I’ve been thinking with in connection to dis/ability. Specifically, it takes up a [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The <a href="http://castac.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology &amp; Computing (CASTAC)</a> and Rebekah Culpit kindly gave me the opportunity to write a piece for <a href="http://blog.castac.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Platypus</a> (the CASTAC blog).<br>
Titled “<a href="http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/becoming-more-capable/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Becoming More Capable</a>”, the blog post sketches out some of the early ideas I’ve been thinking with in connection to dis/ability. Specifically, it takes up a generative (feminist inspired) position, that understands capability as collectively achieved, as a ‘becoming-with’. The Platypus post is <a href="http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/becoming-more-capable/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>, or see a longer un-edited version below.</p>
<div class="highlight" style="font-size: 325%;">“<i>We need to exercise the imagination in order to elbow away at the conditions of im/possibility.</i>”</div>
<p style="text-align: right; font-size: .9rem;">Ingunn Moser &amp; John Law (1999: 174)</p>
<blockquote><p>What is it to be capable? How might we elbow away the conditions that limit ability, to become more capable?<span id="more-3316"></span><br>
In this short piece, I take seriously <a href="http://blog.castac.org/2017/03/implication-design/">Rebekah’s invitation</a> to account for “different ways of doing, acting, and living in the world”. The anthropological imperative to “take into account difference” and consider how objects “intersect with social worlds, imaginaries and emergent social practices” speaks to my ongoing efforts to engage, productively, with the long and troubled relationship between technology and dis/ability. Specifically, it resonates with work I’ve been undertaking that asks what, if anything, artificial intelligence (AI) might offer the blind and vision impaired.<br>
What I want to do in the following is give some space to an idea of capability that I’ve found especially generative in rethinking this pairing of ability and technology, and in asking what AI could be good for. I find works like that of Shreeharsh Kelkar’s (published on the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/how-not-to-talk-about-ai/">CASTAC blog</a>) to be valuable here in critically examining what AI introduces to the technsocial assemblages of work, entertainment and leisure, and the boundaries enacted in/through such figurings. Like Shreeharsh, I hesitate to define, again, what counts as AI. Turning things around, my concern is for a capability that is achieved with others, and what the possibility of <i>becoming capable</i> <i>together</i> might mean for designing AI-with-dis/ability differently.<br>
Thinking with dis/ability, I’ve found myself returning to a mixture of writings in disability studies, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist technoscience. I’ve drawn particular inspiration from Charles Goodwin and Ingunn Moser who have, in different ways, provided examples of the careful study of practice; both show a commitment to disrupting those sedimented “distributions of power and agency” which seem to come too easily when working with dis/ability (Moser 2005: 667). Also, offering a somewhat tangential perspective have been Donna Haraway’s writings and Vinciane Despret’s manifold accounts of animals. I’m conscious Haraway and Despret may seem peculiar reference points with their shared concerns for speculative/science fictions and stories with companion species, and I’m sensitive to what may appear to be the problematic connections I am drawing between such ‘fabulations’ and human dis/ability. However, my intention here is not to insist on direct parallels but to use the productive and uplifting works of Haraway and Despret to introduce a different point of view and, I hope, new questions around capability.<br>
With this backdrop, the first thing to say is that the commonly referred to <i>deficit model</i> in disability studies presents an especially worrying version of capability. This version places the individual along a spectrum of ability, where what he or she can or cannot do defines them as more or less capable. Thus, blindness and vision impairment are indicative of an absence of ability. Worse still, if being human is defined somehow by a set of pre-defined abilities that constitute a ‘prototypical body’, then an absence of some sort or another conjures up the image of an actor who is less-than-human.<br>
It’s this version of capability that Charles Goodwin troubles so convincingly in his careful analysis of the conversations between an aphasic man, Chil, and his family. Chil has only three words in his vocabulary, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘and’. In a ‘formal linguistics’, Goodwin argues, Chil, with such a limited repertoire of words, “might seem an atypical, marginal figure for the study of human language, a defective actor who can be easily ignored without theoretical loss” (2004: 152). The “psychological and neurological structures necessary for linguistic competence are to be found” in the “mental life” of the speaker, and thus Chil is defined by a bodily absence, an individual deficit (2004: 153).<br>
However, in actual talk, Chil shows himself to be a competent and adept conversationalist. Goodwin details how communicative features such as ‘nonsense’ syllable use, prosody, intonation and turn taking, and interactional, embodied resources like gaze and posture, are used by Chil to not just participate in ongoing conversational talk, but initiate and direct such talk himself.<br>
The trouble with the deficit model of dis/ability then is it presents a version of capability that presumes a ‘normal’ human, and a deviation or absence of some ability, such as a limited lexicon, to be an indication of a “defective actor”. Yet this captures nothing of the mutual accomplishment of capability where such things as talk must be understood as an emerging phenomena, achieved in concert, with the involvement from others and a range of situational resources in-action. You might say, with the deficit model, capability is judged comparatively, always against some notional normative figure, always with an absence or lack of something that detracts from a ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’ presence in the world. No room is given for capability as it is achieved: how we—all of us—might just come to be capable in and through worlds strewn with ‘continuities and discontinuities’, and through ‘good and bad passages’ (Moser and Law 1999).<br>
This takes me back to something a fieldwork informant, Jerry, told me. Comparing how people ‘take in information’ who have been blind from birth (as he has) with those who have recently lost their vision, Jerry thoughtfully comments:</p>
<blockquote><p>We have a shared method I suppose of taking in information… It’s not… I don’t have to spend that time imagining the visual switch… They refer to the world that they live in as being like living in a fog, you know, nothing’s very clear. But I never had that feeling that my world is a fog. It’s the world.</p></blockquote>
<p>I’m struck here by Jerry’s allusion to a world that is <i>not</i> forever placed in contrast to another. The ‘shared method’ is about coming to be capable, collectively, about living a life not dominated by a loss, a fog, but by being/becoming capable in/with the world. Another informant, Sarah, described something similar but in more concrete terms:</p>
<blockquote><p>I was quite young when I learnt to take other cues. You know, people’s voice, what they sound like, how much they’re talking, are they suddenly really quiet [when] they’re normally really chatty, that they’re just not quite themselves. And quite often that’s an easy way. But! For example, the idea of catching someone’s eye across the room, that’s a foreign language to me. I just don’t even know what… I can in theory know what that means but in practice even if your head is facing towards me I don’t know who you’re talking to necessarily.</p></blockquote>
<p>For Sarah, a visual cue—catching someone’s eye—is foreign, is other worldly; this could be used to highlight an absence in Sarah, the fog she lives in, a deficit in ability. But to me it feels more genuine to say she has become capable in/with a world that is other-than-visual. Dis/ability and what renders one more or less capable is afforded through a continual attunement in a world with others.<br>
<span style="font-size: 1rem;">Jerry’s and Sarah’s reflections—that say so much to me about worlds that are other-than-sighted—bring to mind two related threads of work. One is a moving series of works from the artist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Calle" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20170427104357/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Calle" data-versiondate="2017-04-27T10:43:57+00:00" data-amber-behavior>Sophie Calle</a>. In photos, videos and stories, Calle has people ponder on colour (“<a href="https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/color-blind/13515" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20170426082015/https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/color-blind/13515" data-versiondate="2017-04-26T08:20:17+00:00" data-amber-behavior>La Couleur Aveugle</a>”) and beauty (“<a href="https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/the-blind-at-home/12717" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20170426080354/https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/the-blind-at-home/12717" data-versiondate="2017-04-26T08:03:55+00:00" data-amber-behavior>Les Aveugles</a>”), and first and last sights (“<a href="https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/view-of-the-exhibition-pour-la-derniere-et-pour-la-premiere-fois-at-nagasaki-prefectural-art-museum-nagasaki-japan-2016/10000010590" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20170426081511/https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/view-of-the-exhibition-pour-la-derniere-et-pour-la-premiere-fois-at-nagasaki-prefectural-art-museum-nagasaki-japan-2016/10000010590" data-versiondate="2017-04-26T08:15:12+00:00" data-amber-behavior>Pour La Dernière et Pour La Première Fois</a>”). Not all of those people Calle collaborates with are blind—some are seeing things for the first time (“<a href="https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/voir-la-mer/21871" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-versionurl="http://web.archive.org/web/20170426080910/https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/voir-la-mer/21871" data-versiondate="2017-04-26T08:09:11+00:00" data-amber-behavior>Voir la mer</a>”)—but in each case the audience is invited to rethink the relations between person, experience and sight, and imagine worlds that are more-than-sighted and actively brought into being.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 1rem;">A second related thread that reminds us of our active presence in the world is one which resonates with “the arts of feminist speculative fabulation” (Haraway 2016) and provides significantly different versions of capability to work with. In particular, it brings to mind Donna Haraway’s refigurings of human-machine entanglements and multi-species companionship, and also Vinciane Despret’s lively stories with animals. Haraway equips us with generative ways of imagining worlds actively brought into being, of composites of actors (of all kinds) defined not by “bounded utilitarian individualism” (Haraway 2016), but by </span><i style="font-size: 1rem;">becoming-with</i><span style="font-size: 1rem;"> each other.</span></p>
<blockquote><p>“Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name of the game; becoming-with is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s terms, rendered capable. Ontologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Like Haraway, I find this ‘becoming-with’ takes on tremendous value through Despret’s work. Despret’s sensitivity to ‘asking the right questions’ of conditions and actors of all kinds, and of their assemblages, open up the possibilities to so much more, to render us capable in so many more ways (Despret 2016). Just as Chil emerges as a competent speaker and his family “treats him as someone who has something to say,” (Goodwin et al. 2002) Despret is interested in the possibilities of “interagency” (Despret 2013), of what actors-together might be rendered capable of. Despret’s project—if it can be referred to like this—is thus an expansive one. It is to perpetually invite the prospect of new ‘devices’, new ‘practices’, new ‘conditions’, new ‘fabulations’, and to invite the chance, the risk, even, of becoming <i>more</i> capable together.<br>
It’s just such a version of capability that I believe gives us so much more to work with. Dis/ability is not constrained by the imagined limits of what it is to be human, but rather made possible by the conditions actors (of all sorts) are active in.<br>
So, what if we—those of us who think and live with dis/ability—found ourselves able to work with capability along these lines? How might we approach dis/ability, and imagine new figurings of technology and dis/ability? This is not the place to speculate on these imaginaries, but it does I hope show that a different onus is put on emerging technologies like AI. The versions of technosocial fabulations we might begin to tell here are not of the repair or replacement of vision (or other deficits in ability) but of enlarging what and how we become-capable-with, <i>become more capable</i>.</p>
<div style="font-size:.9rem;margin-top:1rem">Despret, Vinciane. 2016. <i>What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions</i>? London: University of Minnesota Press.<br>
Despret, Vinciane. 2013. <a href="http://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686">From secret agents to interagency</a>. <i>History and Theory</i>, <i>52</i>(4), 29–44.<br>
Goodwin, Charles. 2004. A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia. <i>Journal of Linguistic Anthropology</i> 14(2): 151–170.<br>
Goodwin, Charles, Goodwin, Marjorie H., &amp; Olsher, David. (2002). Producing Sense with Nonsense Syllables: Turn and Sequence in Conversations with a Man with Severe Aphasia. In Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, &amp; Sandra A. Thompson (Eds.), <i>The Language of Turn and Sequence</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br>
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. <i>Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene</i>. London: Duke University Press.<br>
Moser, Ingunn. 2005. On becoming disabled and articulating alternatives. <i>Cultural Studies</i> 19(6): 667–700.<br>
Moser, Ingunn and Law, John. 1999. <a href="http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03489.x">Good passages, bad passages</a>. <i>The Sociological Review</i>, <i>47</i>(S1), 196–219.</div>
</blockquote>
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		<title>“Being Capable” at UCL Knowledge Lab</title>
		<link>/ucl-knowledge-lab-talk/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 26 Feb 2017 20:57:53 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Talks]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[capability]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Last Wednesday, tried again to capture my thoughts on capability and capacity, this time at the UCL Knowledge Lab (Institute of Education). The recording of the talk is available here. &#160; [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignright size-full wp-image-3169" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/KL_talk_small.gif" alt="Being Capable - Knowledge Lab talk" width="220" height="220"><br>
<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news-events/events-pub/feb-2017/being-capable" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Last Wednesday</a>, tried again to capture my thoughts on capability and capacity, this time at the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-centres/centres/ucl-knowledge-lab" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">UCL Knowledge Lab</a> (<a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Institute of Education</a>). The recording of the talk is available <a href="https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/5484" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.<br>
&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Talk at RCA, Design Products</title>
		<link>/what-are-we-capable-of/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:10:07 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Talks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[capability]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>I had a very generous slot for presenting to some in Design Products at the RCA this week. &#160; In this talk, I want to suggest we have spent too much time working with the limits of capability—the limits of the perceptual apparatus, the limits of cognitive capacities, and the limits of how critters (whether [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I had a very generous slot for presenting to some in <a href="https://www.rca.ac.uk/schools/school-of-design/design-products/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Design Products</a> at the RCA this week.</p>
<blockquote>
<div width="400" height="300"><img loading="lazy" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/rca_dp_talk.gif" alt="Slides from RCA Design Products talk Feb 2017" width="400" height="300" class="size-full wp-image-3103"></div>
<p>&nbsp;<br>
In this talk, I want to suggest we have spent too much time working with the limits of capability—the limits of the perceptual apparatus, the limits of cognitive capacities, and the limits of how critters (whether human or nonhuman) interact and relate to one another. Drawing on a feminist technoscience and using examples from recent fieldwork, I’ll aim to show that, together, we make ourselves capable. That capability isn’t limited to some pre-given, individual state, but comes into being through (inter)action, through entangled relations between actors of all kinds. This, I’ll claim, gives us a very different way of thinking about our relations with technology and especially the promise of AI and machine learning. Rather than machines aiming to replicate human capability, I want to propose an expansive project that allows us the chance to imagine something ‘other-than’ finite capabilities, that sees capability as a ‘becoming-with’, and lays open the possibilities for much much more.</p></blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div style="font-size:0.9rem;">I’m hoping to fine-tune and do a little tidying of these ideas for <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news-events/events-pub/feb-2017/being-capable" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this talk</a> at the <a href="http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/lkl/cms/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Knowledge Lab</a> (Institute of Education) later this month.</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Paper presented at 4S/EASST meeting</title>
		<link>/finite-flourishings/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Dec 2016 18:38:07 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Conferences]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Writing]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>At the combined 4S/EASST meeting this year, Sarah Kember and I presented a paper titled: Writerly (ac)counts of finite flourishings and possibly better ways of being together As Sarah’s introduction to the paper outlined, our co-writings were an attempt to think with the emerging strategies of feminist counting, accounting and re-counting. Below, I present my [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>At the combined <a href="http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/16" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">4S/EASST meeting</a> this year, <a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/staff/kember/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sarah Kember</a> and I presented a paper titled:</p>
<div class="highlight">Writerly (ac)counts of finite flourishings and possibly better ways of being together</div>
<p>As Sarah’s introduction to the paper outlined, our co-writings were an attempt to think with the emerging strategies of feminist counting, accounting and re-counting.<br>
Below, I present my part to the co-authered piece. It’s long, so I put it here more for the record than any expectation it will be read. I must add that the ideas I present draw on work done by <a id="tippy_tip2_4427_anchor"></a>. Without her energy and always thoughtful investment in the field site, this reflection would not have been possible:<span id="more-2209"></span></p>
<div style="margin:3rem 0 0 -1rem;">Let me approach what we are calling these not so responsible strategies of feminist counting, accounting and re-counting — where <a id="tippy_tip3_1135_anchor"></a> — from a different perspective. I’ll begin by talking about a community building project I’ve been involved in and then, only very briefly, sketch out how, despite the differences, the two accounts Sarah and I have presented stitch together a common thread. This is a thread that I will just hint at for now — it has to do with collective refigurings, a multiplicity in participation, and, naturally, a counting by other means. Our hope is to introduce a sense of perspective, or a re-scaling, where the scale is not merely more human or humanist but something that stems from a kind of writerly, feminist retelling that challenges the masculinist disembodied knowledge practices of those who are able to see multiscalar worlds or invisible information infrastructures from everywhere and nowhere.<br>
The project I want to recount is set within a six-year regeneration programme on the outskirts of London, where a deteriorating 1960s housing estate — once made up largely of high-rise tower blocks — is in the midst of being demolished and replaced by a contemporary mix of family houses and low-rise apartment buildings. It is a project also set against a longer arch: of a political move from ‘social housing’ to ‘affordable housing’ and a political appetite for ‘social mixing’.<br>
It will surprise no one here, that such ideas of regeneration, affordability and social mixing have already been characterised as paradigmatic of, if not instrumental to, the neoliberal project. Here, dwellings, and where and how we dwell, are judged against a market value and opportunities for wealth creation. Even community is commodified under a logic of economic factors and enterprise. Connecting these strands, Luna Glucksberg <a id="tippy_tip4_1838_anchor"></a> of a “symbolic devaluation of people, their homes and communities on inner-city estates” where values such as wealth creation seem to be more about an “exclusion from specific value producing processes” than building better spaces and communities.<br>
My story, amidst all this, begins three years ago with an invitation from Carol, the progressive and remarkably calm project manager leading the regeneration of shall we call it the ‘Eastgate Estate’. Working for a Housing Association that has taken over the once publically owned estate, Carol articulates a compelling case for the massive changes to the built environment. She talks of a failed project now synonymous with social depravation and crime rather than brutalist utopias. “You’ll end up on the Eastgate Estate” has been the threat to troublesome youth in the area.<br>
In Carol’s eyes, the fresh building plans and concurrent changes to things like tenancy agreements are a concerted push towards building a community —one community — where there was none. This is palpable on the site and feels to genuinely motivate Carol’s team. Indeed, Carol’s original invitation to me was to help in this ‘community building’ by working with the regeneration team’s public engagement officer, Charlie, and a group of core residents from the old estate.<br>
For myself, and Clara Crivellaro, it was impossible to resist Carol’s invitation. Although under considerable pressure as project manager, Carol welcomed virtually all the ideas we put forward. Thus, over the course of 18 months, led by Clara, we embarked on a series of interviews, meetings, workshops and interventions, culminating in the design of a system for collecting audio recordings of residents’ local stories — a system seeking to project personal and collective narratives back onto a place literally stripped of its physical and social geography.<br>
Many of you here would expect nothing less than participant informed and carefully crafted systems like this from a participatory design. What I want to focus on though are not these interventions per se. Rather, what has struck me has been how a predominantly women’s labour—or, better yet, the labours of women—have come to surface the different ways in which a community counts. And, for me, this isn’t simply about getting behind grassroots resistances where what counts is a two fingers up to the establishment. I find myself sceptical of any such tidy binary, and one-way solutionism.<br>
In writing with Sarah, we’ve come to understand our co-figurings as a <em>recounting-as-rescaling</em>, where a feminized labour (as opposed to purely feminine labour) highlights the continued value of stories in an era dominated by financial accounting and the singular computational count. This is a rescaling that doesn’t reject metrics, but is productive in computational and material architectures that might re-evaluate who and what counts.<br>
So, in the case of the Housing Association’s management team, what stood out were not the social mixing numbers being targeted or even Carol’s overwhelming spreadsheets calculating startlingly large costs against forecasted revenues from the different tenancies. For me, what mattered were the shifting perspectives and scales afforded in Carol’s daily encounters: that she put her office in one of the soon to be demolished buildings; that she walked the Estate’s streets and corridors, talking and genuinely listening to residents; and that they visited her with tea and cake, and for counsel.<br>
Carol seemed in this not just for the senior position she’d been given at her Housing Association’s flagship site or because she stood out as an exceptional woman among the usual male-management in planning and development… she was in this because she believed life on-the-Estate could be different. Sensitive to the frictions and contradictions of working to a spreadsheet of value-over-values, she and her team created the conditions of openness to other stories and the inevitable rescaling of counts, up and down.<br>
For residents, this openness has indeed complicated things. Long-time resident of the Eastgate Estate, Theresa, found the operationalised value of a community counted against her. Without an assured income, she failed to meet the cut for the estate’s new tenancy agreements and so found herself having to move to a nearby estate.<br>
Yet, while we worked on the project, Theresa continued to be one of the most active participants and, with the recording technology in particular, helped to collect many of the recordings.</div>
<div style="font-size:1.4rem;margin:1rem 0 1rem 3rem;">“We are doing this because we want people to know that everywhere you go there is going to be problems and sometimes you can make a negative into a positive thing. I mean it’s like the stabbing – sometimes when you have a tragedy that brings the community together […] can help improve something […] people know that everything is not perfect.”</div>
<div style="margin-left:-1rem;">For Tracey, the stories counted because they represented people on the Estate coming together for genuine reasons, they were stories that resisted homogeneous notions of a ‘perfect harmonious community’ and that showed instead why communities find a resilience.<br>
Thus Thereas is, classed at once, as not right for the new estate, financially, but also deeply invested in its past, present and future. Her troubling position unravels any singular logic of value and shows there to be hard to reconcile differences to a count.<br>
Troubles were also there in the recorded stories themselves. Wondering about what to record, Denise told a group of us about her scavenging on the demolition site looking for memorabilia to preserve something from the old estate.</div>
<div style="font-size:1.4rem;margin:1rem 0 1rem 3rem;">“Just before the block itself was actually locked off to the public, I went back with a carrier bag full of glass bottles and did it one more time, just to hear it, and I videoed it, so here it is [replays sound]”</div>
<div style="margin-left:-1rem;">Managing to get to the top of one of the derelict tower blocks, she’d thrown bottles down the rubbish shoot — as she did when she was a child — and recorded the evocative sound on her phone.<br>
In a later encounter, again sat around the recording equipment, Rose, a 30-year resident on the estate, spoke of it being “the best thing that ever happened”, giving her the chance to “do things she never dreamt of”. Her recollections are again of a community pitching in and making do: of morning coffees, ploughman’s lunches and afternoon teas, of fun days in the local fields, money raised to see the Christmas lights and bus rides to villages in Kent. “You looked for good things” and discovered “there was always good things.”</div>
<div style="font-size:1.4rem;margin:1rem 0 1rem 3rem;">“Obviously it has changed over the years and there are so many diverse stories […] that it all adds to everybody’s knowledge of everybody else…we are all sharing and learn more about the past and as I said we meet people and they talk about what they would like for the future…its all connected really…”</div>
<div style="margin-left:-1rem;">Yet Denise’s mementos and Rose’s good things don’t seem like things that can be uniformly calculated; they might more easily be classed as “popular,” or “lay,” “creek-side,” even “housewife” metrics that are, as the anthropologist Dianne Nelson <a id="tippy_tip5_4104_anchor"></a>, the muddy pollutants in a ‘regime of logic’ that balance costs against benefits. But still, these “off-book” accounts (again Nelson’s phrase) materialise the many things that can come to count, counts as always something laboured on in the variably scaled “value producing processes”.<br>
And of course there has been the time and labour Clara has put into this project. Maybe these labours and their impact could all be tallied up as a successful return on investment, and used as a ‘responsible metric’ in her department’s national research excellence framework assessment. For me, though, it’s been Clara’s continuing care for what counts and how it might be counted. Putting her heart into the work, her achievement has not been to narrow in on one side over the other, of assuming what counts or who counts in singular ways. Rather, she’s surfaced the struggle and, borrowing from Haraway, stayed with it to make room. For me, Clara’s care epitomises what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls an “affective engagement”. She has succeeded in ‘re-affecting’ an objectified world by creating the conditions for rescaling in what-counts-as-valuable on an Estate.<br>
In a mixture of ways, then, women like Carol, Theresa, Rose, Denise, and Clara have given me the impetus and language to ask different questions about community and about counting. I’d be wrong to claim that these women speak for a feminist ontics, yet, one by one, I see what they’ve done and what they do as a feminised labour, a recounting-as-rescaling, that is situated somewhere and that, in its ongoingness, holds the possibilities open.<br>
As a man working for what I can only describe as a masculinised organisation (one heavily invested in the computational count and the logic that knots together this with markets), these alternative figurations and rescalings invite me to reflect on my complicity. They invite me, to paraphrase Isabelle Stengers, “to recognise [myself] as a product of the history whose construction [I am] trying to [un]follow”. It ushers me into I hope irresponsible yet at the same time productive patternings and knottings where there might just be the possibility of refiguring computational and material architectures for values in the making.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="Clara Crivellaro" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip2_4427_anchor">… working from Newcastle’s <a href="https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Open Lab</a></div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="values might find a way to supersede value" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip3_1135_anchor">See “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1111403" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Capital experimentation with person/a formation: how Facebook’s monetization refigures the relationship between property, personhood and protest</a>” (Skeggs and Yuill 2015)</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="writes" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip4_1838_anchor">See Glucksberg, L. (2014). <a href="http://doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.142297" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“We Was Regenerated Out”</a>: Regeneration, Recycling and Devaluing Communities. <em>Valuation Studies</em>, 2(2), 97–118.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="puts it" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip5_4104_anchor">See <a href="http://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/yes-to-life-no-to-mining-counting-as-biotechnology-in-life-ltd-guatemala/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Yes to Life = No to Mining:” Counting as Biotechnology in Life (Ltd) Guatemala</a></div>
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		<title>Back to interaction (a reply to Barry)</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2015 12:32:47 +0000</pubDate>
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		<category><![CDATA[HCI]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Interaction]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>I’m grateful to Barry Brown for his comments on my short Interactions piece, “After Interaction”. Barry, as always, you’ve forced me to think more carefully about my meanderings. Indeed, my intention was to append a short reply to your comment, but your questions have demanded more and, predictably, words have got the better of me. [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’m grateful to <a href="http://barbro.tumblr.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Barry Brown</a> for his <a href="/published-after-interaction/#comment-125">comments</a> on my short <a href="http://interactions.acm.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Interactions</a> piece, “<a href="http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2015/after-interaction" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">After Interaction</a>”.<br>
Barry, as always, you’ve forced me to think more carefully about my meanderings. Indeed, my intention was to append a short reply to your <a href="/published-after-interaction/#comment-125">comment</a>, but your questions have demanded more and, predictably, words have got the better of me. This post, then, is my long-winded response. Thank you for giving me the chance to expand on my thoughts.</p>
<blockquote><p>First, let me respond to your criticisms regarding the interminglings of humans and nonhumans.<span id="more-755"></span> As I understand it, you are opposed to the idea of a kind of symmetry between the two. I concede, symmetry here raises problems, as does the implication that people and things populate the same single category.&nbsp;With these problems, I realise I need to make my position clearer.<br>
Finding my inspiration in (post) ANT, feminist technoscience and, as Mol now likes to call it, a <a id="tippy_tip6_707_anchor"></a>, you are right to point out that I see the human-nonhuman binary as a &nbsp;peculiar one. However, I see the symmetry trick to be far from, well, a trick. On the contrary, to me it feels a much more genuine and responsive starting&nbsp;point. Let’s consider the category problem.&nbsp;For starters, when would you and I imagine ourselves to share a category? Well, one rather macabre place might be on the pathologist’s bench. Another might be as one of the many millions of commuters passing through London. In both, we are — in different senses — human bodies. We can, though, imagine just as many situations in which we would be lumped into different categories&nbsp;– ethnicity, geography, intellectual auspices, and so on. Likewise, we could repeat this exercise with things: tables and chairs are items of furniture, but at the same time they of course can be categorised, differently, in that they reference particular styles/periods, or are made of distinct materials. Indeed, this category&nbsp;making could, dare we&nbsp;imagine it, lump things and people&nbsp;together: door-men and self-closing door hinges keep cold weather out, police and&nbsp;road humps slow traffic, etc.&nbsp;So the&nbsp;symmetry here is not one that presupposes categorical sameness, or indeed any essential categories — be they the body or mind, or people vs. things.<br>
My obvious point here (and&nbsp;I&nbsp;apologise for belabouring it) is that categories, <a id="tippy_tip7_1329_anchor"></a>, are enacted. Chuck Goodwin provides us with such delightful examples of this.&nbsp;I particularly like his description of <a id="tippy_tip8_7834_anchor"></a>. So why then would we presuppose that one very particular category distinction&nbsp;–&nbsp;that between humans and nonhumans — should prevail above all others? Surely, we would want to be open minded about the ways categories are done and not to approach any phenomena insisting that one binary must be enforced?<br>
Let me, then, take up another of your&nbsp;related objections and through this return to my <a href="http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2015/after-interaction" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">piece in interactions</a> and my modestly pieced together point on&nbsp;relationality. You ask whether it is helpful to attribute agency and normative qualities to things&nbsp;–&nbsp;productive in the short term, you suggest, yet&nbsp;eventually leading us into a quagmire of nonsense and confusion. Can&nbsp;I ask you this: in what way is human agency independent of *things*? I find it hard to think of a context in&nbsp;which agency resides entirely in/with humans. A more honest&nbsp;perspective, as I see it, is to see this more like a spectrum in&nbsp;which agency surfaces somewhere amongst a relational configuration of actors/agents.&nbsp;I slow the car down because&nbsp;I am moving in a car, and together we (me and the car) are obliged to respond to the material arrangement of the road, the road furniture (as it is called), and the road hump. True, remove the human and the intention to slow down is&nbsp;gone, but so too when the car or hump are gone.&nbsp;The intention is in the&nbsp;mixture of humans and&nbsp;non-humans. And your power station gives us another helpful example. Why would we want to imagine that a morality and set of accompanying&nbsp;activities (like investing in nuclear&nbsp;energy) are in someway separate to the things themselves? Without nuclear power stations, and all that&nbsp;’stuff’ that goes into them, where would we find the morality. Of course, we would not.&nbsp;Agencies and normativities arise out of relational entanglements.&nbsp;<br>
Alas,&nbsp;I must agree with you though. These are longstanding arguments, and&nbsp;I’m confident&nbsp;I won’t be the one who&nbsp;satisfactorily answers your objections.&nbsp;Yet I hope to have shown that the proposal is not to simply shift agential capacities from one side of the human-nonhuman binary to the other. Nor is it to blindly lump humans and&nbsp;nonhumans into the same category.&nbsp;I draw on a project that contests any such binaries or&nbsp;essentialist categories, and instead invites a serious examination of how worlds of humans and things are enacted.<br>
It’s this point on&nbsp;relationality that brings us back to the heart of the matter, a rethinking of interactions. As a matter of fact, I’m not all that concerned with the word, as it is generally used, and&nbsp;I, like you, greatly admire&nbsp;sociologists such as Goodwin who show the interactional accomplishments that constitute ordinary scientific business. My concern is with an interaction that narrows its sights on the neatly demarcated interactions humans&nbsp;have with machines, and presupposes that we might easily separate and forget about the relational entanglements that run alongside and interweave with these. What Goodwin so expertly illustrates is how the assembled arrangements of human bodies (plus their talk) and things, occasion&nbsp;‘worlds’ of materially configured knowing and logic. The rationale and product in science is enacted through the&nbsp;incessant categorising and ordering (i.e. bringing into relation) of people and things. In effect, Goodwin shows us worlds in the making — ‘world making’. As he writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>Rather than sustaining an opposition between the “mental” and the “material” such activity systems seamlessly link phenomena such as the embodied actions of participants, physical tools, language use, work relevant writing practices, etc. into the patterns of coordinated action that make up the lifeworld of a workgroup.(<a id="tippy_tip9_8026_anchor"></a>)</p></blockquote>
<p>So through their linking activities his archaeologists are bringing a very particular kind of ‘lifeworld’ or world into play, one enacted and sustained through materially bound activities that keep certain relations stable and others mutable. If you are advocating this kind of attention to interaction then&nbsp;I am&nbsp;all for it.&nbsp;<br>
My basic premise in the Interactions article builds on precisely this shift from a empirical project that relies on ready-made categories and relations, to one that is genuinely about how the relations are enacted and what the enactments mean for the worlds we live in. I argue this matters for technology because in designing and building technical systems we are affording (and indeed <a id="tippy_tip10_4146_anchor"></a>) certain ways of knowing and doing. We are implicated in that world making that Goodwin observes, but in our case we are giving real shape to the instruments and processes that might  bring things, practices, knowings, normativities, etc. into being. We are designing vast arrays of Munsell chart-like systems and the processes that give them authority to claim things about and enforce certain orders in the world.<br>
Finally, it’s this recognition of our inevitable participation in performing worlds, even when we valiantly try to resist a priori categories, that I claim we must show a <a id="tippy_tip11_4824_anchor"></a>. The narrow concern for how technical things support or mediate an exceptional human endeavour elides the shear diversity of and possibility for different and new figurings — it is to start too late, it <a id="tippy_tip12_7474_anchor"></a>. An openness to the unfolding relations — not just a fixation on a few but in all their varieties — invites us to be far more careful about the worlds we live in; we see that we have some part to play (even though it will always be <a id="tippy_tip13_2417_anchor"></a>) and have a great deal at stake in how we want to live, and how we might make things better.</p></blockquote>
<div class="tippy" data-title="'relational materialism’" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip6_707_anchor">Mol, A. (2013). <a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712456948" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting</a>. Social Studies of Science, 43(3), 379–396.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="as we well know" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip7_1329_anchor">My favourite in this thread of thinking is: Bowker, G. C., and Star, S. L. (2000). <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=xHlP8WqzizYC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR9&amp;dq=sorting+things+out&amp;ots=Mz4ArAp1nD&amp;sig=a8KPmLE7LoG4P7c8b0yysgtFpoE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences</a>. MIT press.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="archaeologists using the Munsell chart" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip8_7834_anchor">Goodwin, C. (2000). Practices of color classification. Mind, culture, and activity, 7(1–2), 19–36.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="Goodwin, 2000, p. 21" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip9_8026_anchor">Goodwin, C. (2000). Practices of color classification. Mind, culture, and activity, 7(1–2), p. 21.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="authorising" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip10_4146_anchor">I like the way Despret writes about this: Despret, V. (2004). <a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X04042938" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis</a>. Body &amp; Society, 10(2–3), 111–134.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="care for" data-anchor="#tippy_tip11_4824_anchor">On care, this article has been important for me: Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011).<a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things</a>. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="'assumes too much and leaves out too much'" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip12_7474_anchor">Barad, K. M. (2011). Erasers and erasures: Pinch’s unfortunate ‘uncertainty principle’. Social Studies of Science, 41(3), p. 449</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="situated and partial" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip13_2417_anchor">Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3): 575–599.</div>
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		<title>Reading ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2015 17:34:29 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Reading]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Reading María Puig de la Bellacasa’s article on feminist&#160;notions of care. 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&#160;and draws it&#160;into an idea of care. I especially like how she figures care as a [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Reading María Puig de la Bellacasa’s article on feminist&nbsp;notions of care.<span id="more-675"></span><br>
<img loading="lazy" class=" size-medium wp-image-685 aligncenter" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/without-its-world-300x300.png" alt="without-its-world" width="300" height="300"></p>
<blockquote><p>Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). “Nothing comes without its world”: thinking with care. <em>The Sociological Review</em>, 60(2), 197–216.</p></blockquote>
<p>Puig de la Bellacasa writes evocatively on Donna Haraway’s work&nbsp;and draws it&nbsp;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.</p>
<blockquote><a id="tippy_tip14_2683_anchor"></a></blockquote>
<p>One thing that’s noteworthy is the absence of Annemarie Mol in this text, with her <a id="tippy_tip15_1042_anchor"></a> in science and technology scholarship. I wonder if this has to do with her only just&nbsp;veiled criticisms of some in feminist technoscience through&nbsp;her remarks on ‘new materialism’:</p>
<blockquote><a id="tippy_tip16_842_anchor"></a></blockquote>
<p>Whatever the case, Puig de la Bellacasa “speculative reading” of Haraway and her thickening of <em>care</em> provides a helpful basis for thinking <a id="tippy_tip17_5432_anchor"></a> about what we know and how we know it.</p>
<div class="tippy" data-title="Caring and relating thus share conceptual and ontological resonance. In worlds made of heterogeneous interdependent forms and processes of life and matter, to care about something, or for somebody, is inevitably to create relation. In this way care holds the peculiar significance of being a ‘non normative obligation’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2010): it is concomitant to life – not something forced upon living beings by a moral order; yet it obliges in that for life to be liveable it needs being fostered." data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip14_2683_anchor">p. 198, Puig la Bellacasa (2012)</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="central contribution on the topic of care" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip15_1042_anchor">See Mol, A. 2008. <em>The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice</em>. New York: Routledge.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="As the new materialism forgets these relational engagements and affordances it has no ￼way of talking about what matter ‘itself’ does, other than naively echoing natural science textbooks and journal articles – minus the materials and methods sections. Decades of work in STS is being disdainfully discarded. In the process most of the questions that ‘relational materialism’ was trying to raise are being sidelined, too." data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip16_842_anchor">… pp. 380–381, Mol, A. Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting. <em>Social Studies of Science</em> 43, 3 (2013), 379–396.</div>
<div class="tippy" data-title="diffractively" data-showheader="false" data-anchor="#tippy_tip17_5432_anchor">That is, productively or generatively.</div>
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		<title>Reading Data matter(s)</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 13 Apr 2014 21:14:02 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Wilson, M. W. (2011). Data matter(s): legitimacy, coding, and qualifications-of-life. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(5), 857–872. Really helpful paper from Matthew Wilson on the interminglings of data and geography. Although more concentrated on a particular aspect of community life (namely reporting problems or damage to local facilities etc.), the paper has some [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Wilson, M. W. (2011). <a href="http://envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d7910" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Data matter(s): legitimacy, coding, and qualifications-of-life</a>. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(5), 857–872.<br>
<a href="http://envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d7910"><img loading="lazy" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/data-matters-300x300.png" alt="data-matters" width="300" height="300" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-506"></a><br>
Really helpful paper from Matthew Wilson on the interminglings of data and geography. Although more concentrated on a particular aspect of community life (namely reporting problems or damage to local facilities etc.), the paper has some strong relevances for the <a href="http://tenisonroad.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Tenison Road project</a>. Especially useful are Wilson’s thoughts on <i>mattering</i> in relation to feminist technoscience and of course <a id="tippy_tip18_8134_anchor"></a></p>
<div class="tippy" data-title="Donna Haraway" data-anchor="#tippy_tip18_8134_anchor">Wilson cites:<br>Haraway D J, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York)
<p>Haraway D J, 1997 Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2122.png" alt="™" class="/archive/wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, New York)</p>
<p>Haraway D J, 1999, “Knowledges and the question of alliances”, in Knowledges and the Question of Alliances: A Conversation with Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, and David Harvey (Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA)</p></div>
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		<title>Reading Haraway’s ‘Companion Species’</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Aug 2013 10:10:21 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Reading]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Reading, with delight,&#160;Donna Haraway‘s&#160;Companion Species. Small and pocketable, it travels. [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="https://ast.io/archive/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Companions.gif"><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-14" alt="Companions" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Companions-300x300.gif" width="300" height="300"></a><br>
Reading, with delight,&nbsp;<a title="Donna Haraway" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer">Donna Haraway</a>‘s&nbsp;<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo3645022.html">Companion Species</a>. Small and pocketable, it travels.</p>
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		<title>On always already</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Taylor]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>The&#160;phrase&#160;“always already” is, in the main, attributed to the&#160;poststructuralist&#160;philosopher Jaques Derrida. It has, however, come to be a trope for the new&#160;materialists&#160;and it is in this usage that I modestly take it on. Specifically, my guiding sources are from the feminist&#160;technoscience&#160;scholars&#160;Donna Haraway&#160;and&#160;Karen Barad,&#160;both of whom make heavy use of the phrase to trouble the binaries [...]</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="https://ast.io/archive/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alwaysalready.gif"><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3" alt="Alwaysalready" src="/archive/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alwaysalready-300x224.gif" width="300" height="224"></a><br>
The&nbsp;phrase&nbsp;“always already” is, in the main, attributed to the&nbsp;<a title="Post-structuralism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer">poststructuralist</a>&nbsp;philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jaques Derrida</a>. It has, however, come to be a trope for the new&nbsp;materialists&nbsp;and it is in this usage that I modestly take it on. Specifically, my guiding sources are from the feminist&nbsp;<a title="Technoscience" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoscience" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer">technoscience</a>&nbsp;scholars&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Donna Haraway</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karen Barad</a>,&nbsp;both of whom make heavy use of the phrase to trouble the binaries abound in science and technology&nbsp;(subject-object, mind-matter, inside-outside, past-present, etc.).<br>
For some back ground reading see&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08038740.2011.620575#.Umg3TJEYjHM" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The New Materialist “Always Already”: On an A‑Human Humanities</em></a>.</p>
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