There is growing interest in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as a possible tech... more There is growing interest in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as a possible technology for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. In the first study of its kind, we investigate whether and how different forms of incentivisation impact on public perceptions of this technology. We develop a new experimental method to triangulate perceptions of BECCS in different policy scenarios through quantitative measurement and qualitative elicitation. Here we show that the type of policy instrument used to incentivise BECCS significantly affects perceptions of the technology itself. While we find approval of coercive and persuasion-based policy scenarios for incentivisation, supportive instruments proved polarising. Payments based on the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere were approved, but guarantees of higher prices for producers selling energy derived from BECCS were strongly opposed. We conclude that public support for BECCS is inextricably linked to attitudes towards the policies through which it is incentivised.
This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the caree... more This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the career over the last four decades of a single molecule, tafenoquine. First identified as a promising antimalarial by the US Army in the 1970s, tafenoquine has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the radical cure of vivax malaria – the first product to receive marketing authorization for this indication in more than 65 years. The new drug is the result of a collaboration between the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline and the not-for-profit organisation Medicines for Malaria Venture, with the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The successful development of tafenoquine, the paper argues, signals an important transition within the global health era: from the chemotherapeutic humanitarianism that characterized pharmaceutical efforts against malaria in the early 2000s, towards a period of drug discovery driven by the promise of global disease eradication. The paper uses the example of tafenoquine to advance a more general argument about the multiple and evolving pharmaceutical conjugations of malaria – the articulation of competing visions of the disease around the capabilities (and limitations) of particular molecules.
This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation ... more This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation of mosquitoes: the insectary, the semifield station, and the outdoors. We approach each of these settings as creating a distinct mode of interiority, a particular room-space. This concept resets the investigative encounter in terms of an aesthetic of attention, and offers a counterpoint to the ideals of control and containment that dominate biosecurity understandings of infectious disease research. An ethnographic foray into the compositional logics of entomological experiments serves to illuminate the dialectics of caring and killing that characterize scientific inquiry into animals that pose a public health risk.
In a lecture delivered in 1997 Bruno Latour identified the "things that do not work with actor-ne... more In a lecture delivered in 1997 Bruno Latour identified the "things that do not work with actor-network theory." These were four: the word actor, the word network, the word theory, and, last but not least, the deceptively unobtrusive hyphen. These four inadequacies represented, Latour argued, "four nails in the coffin" of actor-network theory (ANT) and revealed the design flaws that had been built into this "careless experiment" in empirical metaphysics (Latour 1999).
Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate 'geoengineering' have demonstrated the deeply c... more Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate 'geoengineering' have demonstrated the deeply controversial nature of this field of scientific research. Social scientists have begun to explore public perceptions of geoengineering, and have documented a significant degree of concern over the effective governance of research and experimentation in this area. Yet, public perception on what constitutes a legitimate geoengineering experiment and how it should be governed remains under-researched. In this article we report on a series of experimental deliberative workshops with members of the public designed to elicit and explicate diverse understandings of geoengineering experiments and their governance. In contrast to previous methods of invited public deliberation , which privilege egalitarian-consensual models of discourse and decision-making, we test a novel approach that places majoritarian, individualistic, and consensual forms of public deliberation on an equal footing. Our study suggests that the perceived controllability of experimental interventions is central to public views on their acceptability, but that controllability is itself a complex, multifaceted quality, drawing together a set of heterogeneous concerns about the purpose and repercussions of scientific work. The citizens who participated in our workshops employed four criteria to adjudicate the acceptability of geoengineering experiments: (1) the degree of containment; (2) the uncertainty surrounding experimental outcomes; (3) the reversibility of impacts; and (4) the scientific purity of the enterprise. We theorize that the public legitimacy of geoengineering experiments depends on variable, context-specific combinations of these criteria, and that technical determinations of the proper 'scale' or 'location' for geoengineering research will be poor predictors of the sorts of public concerns that will be triggered by further experimentation in this area.
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specificall... more This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newsletters published over a period of one year (2013). We define foodwatch’s approach as ‘governance by campaign’ – an approach marked by simultaneously constituting: (a) key food governance issues, (b) affective publics that address these topics of governance through ICT-enabled media and (c) independent food and food-related expertise. We conclude our paper with a discussion of foodwatch’s mode of ‘governance by campaign’ and the democratic limits and potentials of a governance mode that is based on invited participation.
In this paper, we analyse the introduction of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in Brazil and ... more In this paper, we analyse the introduction of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in Brazil and use this case to probe the notion of Responsible Innovation and its applicability to the development of new public health biotechnologies in the global South. OX513A, a strain of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes developed by the British firm Oxitec, has been used experimentally in Brazil since 2009, when it was imported into the country as a promising new tool in the fight against dengue. We discuss the regulatory history of OX513A in Brazil, as well as the forms of ‘community engagement’ that have accompanied the release of transgenic mosquitoes. We argue that the conduct of a scientific research project is only part of a broader effort to localise insect biotechnology in Brazil, an effort that has enjoyed very visible support from political authorities across the country. We conclude by arguing that if the framework of Responsible Innovation is to have purchase on this sort of transnational and multifaceted innovation trajectory, it has to include at its centre a strong notion of political accountability.
What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogi... more What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test his quality as a leader. These training formulas, we argue, rely on the therapeutic hope of dramaturgical self-realization, but often degenerate into a form of regressive fetishism in which the fantasy of existential resolve and serious decision-making can be playfully and safely enacted. Surrealism and its demise provide an angle from which the peculiar fragility of these operations can be understood: what the experiential business curriculum provides, in this interpretation, amounts to a sort of subrealist shield, a protective dilution of the challenges that await in the world at large. When the element of the ethical pledge is added to this compendium of techniques, the result is a self-referential (and essentially indulgent) form of spiritual exercise solely oriented to the auto-elevation of the business self.
In a short period of time climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific... more In a short period of time climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific issues subject to deliberative public engagement. Here, we analyse this rapid trajectory of publicization and explore the particular manner in which the possibility of intentionally altering the Earth’s climate system to curb global warming has been incorporated into the field of ‘public engagement with science’. We describe the initial framing of geoengineering as a singular object of debate and subsequent attempts to ‘unframe’ the issue by placing it within broader discursive fields. The tension implicit in these processes of structured debate – how to turn geoengineering into a workable object of deliberation without implying a commitment to its reality as a policy option – raises significant questions about the role of ‘public engagement with science’ scholars and methods in facilitating public debate on speculative technological futures.
Our introductory essay in this journal’s 2013 Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ examined th... more Our introductory essay in this journal’s 2013 Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ examined the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies and explored the implications of the notion of enactment. Three responses to that Special Issue argue that (1) there is no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and social constructivism, (2) we need to be wary of overly generic use of the term ‘ontology’ and (3) the language of ‘turns’ imposes constraints on the richness and diversity of science and technology studies. In this brief reply, we show how each of those critiques varies in its commitment to circumspection about making objective determinations of reality and to resisting reification. We illustrate our point by considering overlapping discussions in anthropology. This brings out the crucial difference between the science and technology studies slogan ‘it could be otherwise’ and the multinaturalist motto ‘it actually is otherwise’.
In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases ha... more In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived “market failure,” the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. This article explores the paradoxical role of private property in this new configuration of global health research and development. Rather than a tool to block potential competitors, proprietary assets function as a lever to attract others into risky collaborative ventures; instead of demarcating public and private domains, the sharing of property rights is used to increase the porosity of that boundary. This reimagination of the value of property is connected to the peculiar timescape of global health drug development, a promissory orientation to the future that takes its clearest form in the centrality of “virtual” business models and the proliferation of strategies of deferral. Drawing on the anthropological literature on inalienable possessions, we reconsider property’s traditional exclusionary role and discuss the possibility that the new pharmaceutical “commons” proclaimed by contemporary global health partnerships might be the precursor of future enclosures.
Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround is the book Alexis de Tocqueville would have written if, in... more Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround is the book Alexis de Tocqueville would have written if, instead of spending his time with the respectable menfolk of New England in the 1830s, he had been lucky enough to hang out with the psychedelic pioneers of the California of the 1960s. Once he got over the initial shock (and it should not have taken him long: Tocqueville had seen his share of radical enthusiasts), he would have realized that in a prosperous and populous America at the peak of its Cold War glory, the experience of participation in a democratic polity was increasingly dependent on the immersion of its citizens in all-enveloping media environments, tightly composed communicative architectures where they could receive a vivid impression of life in a diverse and egalitarian society. Within these surrounds -multi--image and multi--sound--source settingsone could attain that "strange combination of extreme individuality and selflessness" that Allan Kaprow identified in Jackson Pollock's paintings and sought to reproduce in the initial instantiations of the Happening. Producing a heightened sensory awareness of the reality of liberal democracy had become a necessity -a symptom, but also an antidote -in a society dominated by the homogenising power of mass media and mass consumption. The achievement of Turner's book is to reveal the technical and aesthetic mediations -a heady combination of social--scientific ideas, multi--media formats, and new styles of artistic installation and performance -that enabled this phenomenological recalibration of the American democratic experience.
The development of the One World, One Health agenda coincides in time with the appearance of a di... more The development of the One World, One Health agenda coincides in time with the appearance of a different model for the management of human-animal relations: the genetic manipulation of animal species in order to curtail their ability as carriers of human pathogens. In this paper we examine two examples of this emergent transgenic approach to disease control: the development of transgenic chickens incapable of shedding avian flu viruses, and the creation of transgenic mosquitoes refractory to dengue or malaria infection. Our analysis elaborates three distinctions between the One World, One Health agenda and its transgenic counterpoint. The first concerns the conceptualization of outbreaks and the forms of surveillance that support disease control efforts. The second addresses the nature of the interspecies interface, and the relative role of humans and animals in preventing pathogen transmission. The third axis of comparison considers the proprietary dimensions of transgenic animals and their implications for the assumed public health ethos of One Health programs. We argue that the fundamental difference between these two approaches to infectious disease control can be summarized as one between strategies of containment and strategies of competition. While One World, One Health programs seek to establish an equilibrium in the human-animal interface in order to contain the circulation of pathogens across species, transgenic strategies deliberately trigger a new ecological dynamic by introducing novel animal varieties designed to out-compete pathogen-carrying hosts and vectors. In other words, while One World, One Health policies focus on introducing measures of inter-species containment, transgenic approaches derive their prophylactic benefit from provoking new cycles of intra-species competition between GM animals and their wild-type counterparts. The coexistence of these divergent health protection strategies, we suggest, helps to elucidate enduring tensions and concerns about how humans should relate to, appraise, and intervene on animals and their habitats.
Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the ground... more Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious tasks of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. The mosquito surveillance and larval elimination practices of an urban malaria control program offer an opportunity to observe how efforts to create distance between species relate to the physical and civic textures of the city. Seen in the particular context of the contemporary African metropolis, the work of public health appears less a matter of control than a commitment to constant urban maintenance and political mobilization.
Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumu... more Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumulation of stagnant water where disease-carrying insects lay their eggs. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus were identified as the vector of malaria transmission, these aquatic habitats have been a key object of epidemiological research and public health intervention against the disease. Yet the breeding ground can be incorporated into a number of different topologies, each implying a different spatialization of malaria and a distinct imagination of what kind of mosquito control is ‘doable’. A contemporary example of malaria control in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, illuminates an essential tension between what we characterize as territorial and bionomic approaches to the breeding ground—that is, between control strategies premised on treating all mosquito habitats within a given region, and those that prioritize certain sites on the basis of their position within ecological networks. Each topology localizes the breeding ground by reference to a distinct set of relations, and thus advances an idiosyncratic understanding of what sort of research is worthwhile conducting and what kinds of intervention are sustainable. The multiple ways in which the breeding ground can become an object of research and action clarifies the role of topology as an infra-logic of public health, and makes explicit the politics implicit in efforts to bring different orders of the local to scale.
There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. U... more There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. Until recently, the term ‘ontology’ had been sparingly used in the field. Now it appears to have acquired a new theoretical significance and lies at the centre of many programmes of empirical investigation. The special issue to which this essay is a contribution gathers a series of enquiries into the ontological and reflects, collectively, on the value of the analytical and methodological sensibilities that underpin this new approach to the make-up of the world. To what extent and in what sense can we speak of a ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies? What should we make of, and with, this renewed interest in matters of ontology? This essay offers some preliminary responses to these questions. First, we examine claims of a shift from epistemology to ontology and explore in particular the implications of the notion of ‘enactment’. This leads to a consideration of the normative implications of approaches that bring ‘ontological politics’ to centre stage. We then illustrate and pursue these questions by using an example – the case of the ‘wrong bin bag’. We conclude with a tentative assessment of the prospects for ontologically sensitive science and technology studies.
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Resea... more In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political ‘climates’. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic ‘atmospheres’ were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of ‘leadership’ under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of ‘leadership’ that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation.
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Resea... more In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political 'climates'. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic 'atmospheres' were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of 'leadership' under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of 'leadership' that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation.
The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for inve... more The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive micro-realities in which participants were exposed to, or experimented with, selected ‘social problems’. We investigate the nature of these techniques – being simultaneously highly artificial and disturbingly realistic – and propose the notion of ‘provocative containment’ to understand their operation and effects. We point to five ingredients of their characteristic mode of operation – expressionism, incitement, trauma, distillation and technology – and argue that they do not serve to represent a simplified version of social reality, but rather to ‘realize’ particular forms of social life intrinsic to the medium of provocative containmen
How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the production of reference mat... more How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the production of reference materials, artefacts that incarnate legally relevant measurements and serve as a transitional object for the law in its approximation to the stuff of the world. The argument, an opening for an ethnographic investigation into the life of legal materials, is based on a study of the work conducted at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM), an agency that, for over fifty years, has fabricated official versions of the objects and substances mentioned in European law.
There is growing interest in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as a possible tech... more There is growing interest in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as a possible technology for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. In the first study of its kind, we investigate whether and how different forms of incentivisation impact on public perceptions of this technology. We develop a new experimental method to triangulate perceptions of BECCS in different policy scenarios through quantitative measurement and qualitative elicitation. Here we show that the type of policy instrument used to incentivise BECCS significantly affects perceptions of the technology itself. While we find approval of coercive and persuasion-based policy scenarios for incentivisation, supportive instruments proved polarising. Payments based on the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere were approved, but guarantees of higher prices for producers selling energy derived from BECCS were strongly opposed. We conclude that public support for BECCS is inextricably linked to attitudes towards the policies through which it is incentivised.
This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the caree... more This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the career over the last four decades of a single molecule, tafenoquine. First identified as a promising antimalarial by the US Army in the 1970s, tafenoquine has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the radical cure of vivax malaria – the first product to receive marketing authorization for this indication in more than 65 years. The new drug is the result of a collaboration between the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline and the not-for-profit organisation Medicines for Malaria Venture, with the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The successful development of tafenoquine, the paper argues, signals an important transition within the global health era: from the chemotherapeutic humanitarianism that characterized pharmaceutical efforts against malaria in the early 2000s, towards a period of drug discovery driven by the promise of global disease eradication. The paper uses the example of tafenoquine to advance a more general argument about the multiple and evolving pharmaceutical conjugations of malaria – the articulation of competing visions of the disease around the capabilities (and limitations) of particular molecules.
This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation ... more This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation of mosquitoes: the insectary, the semifield station, and the outdoors. We approach each of these settings as creating a distinct mode of interiority, a particular room-space. This concept resets the investigative encounter in terms of an aesthetic of attention, and offers a counterpoint to the ideals of control and containment that dominate biosecurity understandings of infectious disease research. An ethnographic foray into the compositional logics of entomological experiments serves to illuminate the dialectics of caring and killing that characterize scientific inquiry into animals that pose a public health risk.
In a lecture delivered in 1997 Bruno Latour identified the "things that do not work with actor-ne... more In a lecture delivered in 1997 Bruno Latour identified the "things that do not work with actor-network theory." These were four: the word actor, the word network, the word theory, and, last but not least, the deceptively unobtrusive hyphen. These four inadequacies represented, Latour argued, "four nails in the coffin" of actor-network theory (ANT) and revealed the design flaws that had been built into this "careless experiment" in empirical metaphysics (Latour 1999).
Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate 'geoengineering' have demonstrated the deeply c... more Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate 'geoengineering' have demonstrated the deeply controversial nature of this field of scientific research. Social scientists have begun to explore public perceptions of geoengineering, and have documented a significant degree of concern over the effective governance of research and experimentation in this area. Yet, public perception on what constitutes a legitimate geoengineering experiment and how it should be governed remains under-researched. In this article we report on a series of experimental deliberative workshops with members of the public designed to elicit and explicate diverse understandings of geoengineering experiments and their governance. In contrast to previous methods of invited public deliberation , which privilege egalitarian-consensual models of discourse and decision-making, we test a novel approach that places majoritarian, individualistic, and consensual forms of public deliberation on an equal footing. Our study suggests that the perceived controllability of experimental interventions is central to public views on their acceptability, but that controllability is itself a complex, multifaceted quality, drawing together a set of heterogeneous concerns about the purpose and repercussions of scientific work. The citizens who participated in our workshops employed four criteria to adjudicate the acceptability of geoengineering experiments: (1) the degree of containment; (2) the uncertainty surrounding experimental outcomes; (3) the reversibility of impacts; and (4) the scientific purity of the enterprise. We theorize that the public legitimacy of geoengineering experiments depends on variable, context-specific combinations of these criteria, and that technical determinations of the proper 'scale' or 'location' for geoengineering research will be poor predictors of the sorts of public concerns that will be triggered by further experimentation in this area.
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specificall... more This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newsletters published over a period of one year (2013). We define foodwatch’s approach as ‘governance by campaign’ – an approach marked by simultaneously constituting: (a) key food governance issues, (b) affective publics that address these topics of governance through ICT-enabled media and (c) independent food and food-related expertise. We conclude our paper with a discussion of foodwatch’s mode of ‘governance by campaign’ and the democratic limits and potentials of a governance mode that is based on invited participation.
In this paper, we analyse the introduction of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in Brazil and ... more In this paper, we analyse the introduction of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in Brazil and use this case to probe the notion of Responsible Innovation and its applicability to the development of new public health biotechnologies in the global South. OX513A, a strain of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes developed by the British firm Oxitec, has been used experimentally in Brazil since 2009, when it was imported into the country as a promising new tool in the fight against dengue. We discuss the regulatory history of OX513A in Brazil, as well as the forms of ‘community engagement’ that have accompanied the release of transgenic mosquitoes. We argue that the conduct of a scientific research project is only part of a broader effort to localise insect biotechnology in Brazil, an effort that has enjoyed very visible support from political authorities across the country. We conclude by arguing that if the framework of Responsible Innovation is to have purchase on this sort of transnational and multifaceted innovation trajectory, it has to include at its centre a strong notion of political accountability.
What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogi... more What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test his quality as a leader. These training formulas, we argue, rely on the therapeutic hope of dramaturgical self-realization, but often degenerate into a form of regressive fetishism in which the fantasy of existential resolve and serious decision-making can be playfully and safely enacted. Surrealism and its demise provide an angle from which the peculiar fragility of these operations can be understood: what the experiential business curriculum provides, in this interpretation, amounts to a sort of subrealist shield, a protective dilution of the challenges that await in the world at large. When the element of the ethical pledge is added to this compendium of techniques, the result is a self-referential (and essentially indulgent) form of spiritual exercise solely oriented to the auto-elevation of the business self.
In a short period of time climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific... more In a short period of time climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific issues subject to deliberative public engagement. Here, we analyse this rapid trajectory of publicization and explore the particular manner in which the possibility of intentionally altering the Earth’s climate system to curb global warming has been incorporated into the field of ‘public engagement with science’. We describe the initial framing of geoengineering as a singular object of debate and subsequent attempts to ‘unframe’ the issue by placing it within broader discursive fields. The tension implicit in these processes of structured debate – how to turn geoengineering into a workable object of deliberation without implying a commitment to its reality as a policy option – raises significant questions about the role of ‘public engagement with science’ scholars and methods in facilitating public debate on speculative technological futures.
Our introductory essay in this journal’s 2013 Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ examined th... more Our introductory essay in this journal’s 2013 Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ examined the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies and explored the implications of the notion of enactment. Three responses to that Special Issue argue that (1) there is no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and social constructivism, (2) we need to be wary of overly generic use of the term ‘ontology’ and (3) the language of ‘turns’ imposes constraints on the richness and diversity of science and technology studies. In this brief reply, we show how each of those critiques varies in its commitment to circumspection about making objective determinations of reality and to resisting reification. We illustrate our point by considering overlapping discussions in anthropology. This brings out the crucial difference between the science and technology studies slogan ‘it could be otherwise’ and the multinaturalist motto ‘it actually is otherwise’.
In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases ha... more In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived “market failure,” the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. This article explores the paradoxical role of private property in this new configuration of global health research and development. Rather than a tool to block potential competitors, proprietary assets function as a lever to attract others into risky collaborative ventures; instead of demarcating public and private domains, the sharing of property rights is used to increase the porosity of that boundary. This reimagination of the value of property is connected to the peculiar timescape of global health drug development, a promissory orientation to the future that takes its clearest form in the centrality of “virtual” business models and the proliferation of strategies of deferral. Drawing on the anthropological literature on inalienable possessions, we reconsider property’s traditional exclusionary role and discuss the possibility that the new pharmaceutical “commons” proclaimed by contemporary global health partnerships might be the precursor of future enclosures.
Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround is the book Alexis de Tocqueville would have written if, in... more Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround is the book Alexis de Tocqueville would have written if, instead of spending his time with the respectable menfolk of New England in the 1830s, he had been lucky enough to hang out with the psychedelic pioneers of the California of the 1960s. Once he got over the initial shock (and it should not have taken him long: Tocqueville had seen his share of radical enthusiasts), he would have realized that in a prosperous and populous America at the peak of its Cold War glory, the experience of participation in a democratic polity was increasingly dependent on the immersion of its citizens in all-enveloping media environments, tightly composed communicative architectures where they could receive a vivid impression of life in a diverse and egalitarian society. Within these surrounds -multi--image and multi--sound--source settingsone could attain that "strange combination of extreme individuality and selflessness" that Allan Kaprow identified in Jackson Pollock's paintings and sought to reproduce in the initial instantiations of the Happening. Producing a heightened sensory awareness of the reality of liberal democracy had become a necessity -a symptom, but also an antidote -in a society dominated by the homogenising power of mass media and mass consumption. The achievement of Turner's book is to reveal the technical and aesthetic mediations -a heady combination of social--scientific ideas, multi--media formats, and new styles of artistic installation and performance -that enabled this phenomenological recalibration of the American democratic experience.
The development of the One World, One Health agenda coincides in time with the appearance of a di... more The development of the One World, One Health agenda coincides in time with the appearance of a different model for the management of human-animal relations: the genetic manipulation of animal species in order to curtail their ability as carriers of human pathogens. In this paper we examine two examples of this emergent transgenic approach to disease control: the development of transgenic chickens incapable of shedding avian flu viruses, and the creation of transgenic mosquitoes refractory to dengue or malaria infection. Our analysis elaborates three distinctions between the One World, One Health agenda and its transgenic counterpoint. The first concerns the conceptualization of outbreaks and the forms of surveillance that support disease control efforts. The second addresses the nature of the interspecies interface, and the relative role of humans and animals in preventing pathogen transmission. The third axis of comparison considers the proprietary dimensions of transgenic animals and their implications for the assumed public health ethos of One Health programs. We argue that the fundamental difference between these two approaches to infectious disease control can be summarized as one between strategies of containment and strategies of competition. While One World, One Health programs seek to establish an equilibrium in the human-animal interface in order to contain the circulation of pathogens across species, transgenic strategies deliberately trigger a new ecological dynamic by introducing novel animal varieties designed to out-compete pathogen-carrying hosts and vectors. In other words, while One World, One Health policies focus on introducing measures of inter-species containment, transgenic approaches derive their prophylactic benefit from provoking new cycles of intra-species competition between GM animals and their wild-type counterparts. The coexistence of these divergent health protection strategies, we suggest, helps to elucidate enduring tensions and concerns about how humans should relate to, appraise, and intervene on animals and their habitats.
Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the ground... more Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious tasks of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. The mosquito surveillance and larval elimination practices of an urban malaria control program offer an opportunity to observe how efforts to create distance between species relate to the physical and civic textures of the city. Seen in the particular context of the contemporary African metropolis, the work of public health appears less a matter of control than a commitment to constant urban maintenance and political mobilization.
Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumu... more Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumulation of stagnant water where disease-carrying insects lay their eggs. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus were identified as the vector of malaria transmission, these aquatic habitats have been a key object of epidemiological research and public health intervention against the disease. Yet the breeding ground can be incorporated into a number of different topologies, each implying a different spatialization of malaria and a distinct imagination of what kind of mosquito control is ‘doable’. A contemporary example of malaria control in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, illuminates an essential tension between what we characterize as territorial and bionomic approaches to the breeding ground—that is, between control strategies premised on treating all mosquito habitats within a given region, and those that prioritize certain sites on the basis of their position within ecological networks. Each topology localizes the breeding ground by reference to a distinct set of relations, and thus advances an idiosyncratic understanding of what sort of research is worthwhile conducting and what kinds of intervention are sustainable. The multiple ways in which the breeding ground can become an object of research and action clarifies the role of topology as an infra-logic of public health, and makes explicit the politics implicit in efforts to bring different orders of the local to scale.
There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. U... more There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. Until recently, the term ‘ontology’ had been sparingly used in the field. Now it appears to have acquired a new theoretical significance and lies at the centre of many programmes of empirical investigation. The special issue to which this essay is a contribution gathers a series of enquiries into the ontological and reflects, collectively, on the value of the analytical and methodological sensibilities that underpin this new approach to the make-up of the world. To what extent and in what sense can we speak of a ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies? What should we make of, and with, this renewed interest in matters of ontology? This essay offers some preliminary responses to these questions. First, we examine claims of a shift from epistemology to ontology and explore in particular the implications of the notion of ‘enactment’. This leads to a consideration of the normative implications of approaches that bring ‘ontological politics’ to centre stage. We then illustrate and pursue these questions by using an example – the case of the ‘wrong bin bag’. We conclude with a tentative assessment of the prospects for ontologically sensitive science and technology studies.
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Resea... more In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political ‘climates’. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic ‘atmospheres’ were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of ‘leadership’ under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of ‘leadership’ that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation.
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Resea... more In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political 'climates'. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic 'atmospheres' were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of 'leadership' under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of 'leadership' that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation.
The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for inve... more The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive micro-realities in which participants were exposed to, or experimented with, selected ‘social problems’. We investigate the nature of these techniques – being simultaneously highly artificial and disturbingly realistic – and propose the notion of ‘provocative containment’ to understand their operation and effects. We point to five ingredients of their characteristic mode of operation – expressionism, incitement, trauma, distillation and technology – and argue that they do not serve to represent a simplified version of social reality, but rather to ‘realize’ particular forms of social life intrinsic to the medium of provocative containmen
How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the production of reference mat... more How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the production of reference materials, artefacts that incarnate legally relevant measurements and serve as a transitional object for the law in its approximation to the stuff of the world. The argument, an opening for an ethnographic investigation into the life of legal materials, is based on a study of the work conducted at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM), an agency that, for over fifty years, has fabricated official versions of the objects and substances mentioned in European law.
This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension ... more This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension of public participation in contemporary societies. This work moves beyond the original focus of STS on the role of experimentation in the sciences to consider the proliferation of experimental formats in the arts, social movements, economic organization, and public life. The chapter outlines several strands of scholarship that, through the study of experiments, have developed a materialist, situational and performative understanding of the making of publics in technological societies. At the heart of this scholarship lies a formative ambiguity: the fact that experiments in participation operate as both an object of inquiry and a device that actors including researchers themselves can deploy for the creation of new collectives. After reviewing how a focus on experimental situations was instrumental to the emergence of STS as a distinctive mode of inquiry, the chapter elaborates three recent themes from the literature: object-centered engagement, inventive methods, and prototyping. The chapter concludes by arguing that experiments in participation represent a crucial nexus of theory and practice in contemporary science, technology and society, one that allows the field to expand its repertoire of political tools and participate in wider experimental cultures.
The Basque town of Mondragón is home to one of the largest and most significant experiences of co... more The Basque town of Mondragón is home to one of the largest and most significant experiences of co-operative organization and workers’ self-management anywhere in the world. The Mondragón co-operative movement, born in the 1950s around the local technical training college and a handful of small industrial firms, encompasses today more than one hundred co-operative firms operating in ninety-seven countries and generating an aggregate revenue of €12bn. In this chapter we review the historical origins of the Mondragón experience and the goals that guided the first co-operative projects. After describing the organizational principles and governance mechanisms of individual co-operatives and of the Mondragón group as a whole, we examine the rapid expansion and internationalization of some of the most emblematic Mondragón firms – a process that has led to a difficult balance between the maintenance of the original co-operative principles at home and an increasing reliance on capitalist forms of ownership and production abroad. We conclude by discussing the impact of the recent economic crisis on the Mondragón group and its system of inter-co-operative solidarity, and reflect on the future prospects for this far-reaching experiment in collective ownership and democratic governance.
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Papers by Javier Lezaun