Ethnography of Science, Technology and Practices

This article concerns the forms of involvement of « not scientific » actors in research, and the emergence of new expertises, through the case of linguistic researches on sign languages. We show that the main registers of participation of deaf locutors can be described as activities of cultural and lin- guistic mediations. We then analyze what are the tasks and the responsibilities endorsed by these people within a laboratory of linguistics specialized in the analysis of the Quebecois Sign Language. This article, which relies on an ethnographic analy- sis of these scientific activities, shows how the locutors invol- ved in these researches are becoming experts. It suggests articulating the studies on science, on forms of collective actions and on emergence of new expertises, and evokes the central character of an analysis of practices – even routine – of scientific inscription and communication.

Yuri Takhteyev's Coding Places is an ethnographic study of software development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As such, it offers a welcome and necessary counterpoint to Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom, which examines the culture of free software and open source hackers, primarily in the United States. Coleman's work is an excellent look into the moral world of free software, and the pleasures of coding that motivate it. While free software is a critique of the dominant intellectual property regime of the West, it itself stems from and reinterprets a liberal ethics, one which focuses on free speech and individual creative expression.

Automatic Milking Systems (AMS) milk cows any time without the need for a human worker to be present. Cows choose when to be milked and detailed data is recorded by the robot which can be accessed remotely by computer or mobile device meaning farmers can check the health and performance of their herd from a distance. It is claimed that robotic milking improves the working conditions and lifestyle of the dairy farmer, as well as having economic advantages and benefits for cow health and welfare. This paper focuses on the relationship between AMS and the role of the stockperson. Although AMS reduces the need for labour in the milking parlour and in theory creates freedom and flexibility for the farmer, in practice farmers found their work routines changed rather than lessened. Ultimately, the role of the stockperson is still vital in maintaining and improving cow health and welfare when compared to conventional milking routines.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a “techno-cultural frame.” This frame includes the construction of a developer’s identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or “indies,” rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple’s WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple’s relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple’s coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple’s policies.

Laboratory studies—ethnographic research conducted in and about medical and scientific labs—are connected to movements within cultural anthropology, sociology, and women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s that called for critical social scientific accounts of powerful Western institutions. Laboratories were identified as key sites for the transformation of both science and society as observers of laboratory work challenged representations of scientific institutions as isolated from the cultural, political, and economic concerns that animate everyday life outside of the laboratory. Ethnographers began to conduct fieldwork in laboratories, applying the insights of ethnomethodology, practice theory, discourse analysis, and other social science methods in order to analyze what scientists actually did and said, which revealed messier, more interesting versions of laboratory life than what could be found in official accounts or polished scientific publications. Ethnographies of labs, however, were never intended as mere descriptions. This work had important political implications—if science was more than a neutral recording of facts and a linear progression of individual accomplishments getting closer and closer to the truth about nature, then perhaps science could be done differently. If all scientists necessarily brought their cultural beliefs and values to bear on their work, then the exclusion of a wider range of perspectives—from women, minorities, and other groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences—could no longer be justified using the language of objectivity, rationality, or neutrality. As laboratories became better established as sites of social scientific research in the 1990s and 2000s, scholars began to expand their inquiries and pursue more specialized concerns. The focus on scientific discourse and practice that had been present since the beginning of laboratory studies deepened, and studies of scientific language, communication, gesture, practice, and pedagogy grew into subfields in their own right. Scholars continued to examine gender and science, developing strong research programs focused on the natural sciences, where questions of objectivity and perspective came to the fore, and biomedicine and the life sciences, where questions about bodies, representation in research, and interventions in reproduction were given particular attention. Another strand of research began to revisit the question of the laboratory itself—what kind of place is the laboratory, and is it always bounded by four walls? Scholarship on laboratory technology has been another productive area where interest in practice has met attention to values and valuing, as research on weapons science and biotechnology has opened up profound questions about nature, culture, and the limits of the human.

In this case study I argue that experts, to gain relevance in a jury trial, need to fit into a manifold division of knowing. They do so by borrowing and sharing diverse knowledges. These exchanges place the modest expert testimony right into an authoritative and powerful decision-making apparatus. This argument derives from an ethnographic study of a ''sleepwalking defense.'' The division of knowing embraces the certified facts, the instructed case, the competing expertise, and the common sense. As a conclusion, I identify the experts' twofold relevance. Experts perform the case as undecided and decidable. They provide exclusive knowledge and affirm a set of other knowledges. By ''knowing'' and ''not knowing,'' the experts perform individual modesty and systemic immodesty by the same token.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple
software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and
how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a “techno-cultural frame.” This frame includes the construction of a developer’s identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or “indies,” rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which
means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple’s WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple’s relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple’s coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple’s policies.

Robotic milking machines are novel technologies that take over the labour of dairy farming and reduce the need for human–animal interactions. Replacing ‘conventional’ twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, it is claimed that robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. Such claims are certainly contested, but the installation of robotic milkers clearly establishes new forms of relationships between cows, technologies and dairy farmers.

This paper draws on in-depth interviews with farmers and observational research on farms to examine relationships between representations of robotic milkers as a technology which gives cows freedom and autonomy, and practices and mechanisms which suggest that bovine life is re-captured and disciplined in important ways through the introduction of this technology. We focus on two issues. First, we explore changes in what it is to ‘be bovine’ in relation to milking robots, drawing on a combination of a discursive framing of cows' behaviour and ‘nature’ by dairy farmers and on-farm observation of cow-technology interaction. Second, we examine how such changes in bovinity might be articulated through conceptions of biopower which focus on knowledge of and intervention in the life of both the individual cow body and the herd. Such knowledge and intervention in the newly created sites of the robotic milking dairy are integral to these remodelled, disciplinary farm systems. Here, cows' bodies, movements and subjectivities are trained and manipulated in accordance with a persistent discourse of agricultural productivism. In discussing these issues, the paper seeks to show how particular representations of cows, the production of embodied bovine behaviours, technological interventions and micro-geographies contribute to a re-capturing and re-enclosure of bovine life which counters the liberatory discourses which are used to promote robotic milking.

This is the only full length report of an ethnography of an archaeological dig to have been published. It describes the everyday events that take place on the excavation of a Bronze Age ring-ditch cemetery, situated in the east of England, from the viewpoint of an ethnographer. The author asks the question: what are the conditions - social, material, cognitive, practical - which make archaeological interpretation possible? His ethnography focuses on the acts of discovery through which archaeologists encounter and interpret material evidence of the past. An ‘act of discovery’ is defined as 'the (temporal) relation between (embodied) subjects and (emerging) objects, mediated through the use of tools'. This is where the cultural agency of archaeologists, in giving form to material patterns, comes into contact with the sheer ‘resistance’ of unfolding material evidence. It is in these practical encounters, the author argues, that knowledge of the past is ultimately produced and reproduced.

Si les nanotechnologies sont souvent présentées comme la promesse, encore incertaine, d´une révolution scientifique et industrielle à venir, elles sont d´ores et déjà l´objet d´une profonde transformation des modes d´organisation du travail scientifique. C´est de cette mutation dont cet ouvrage rend compte, en allant observer au plus près le foisonnement des activités et des projets engagés par les protagonistes de ce nouveau monde des technologies de l´infiniment petit. Le terrain de cette enquête sociologique est le pôle Minatec, situé à Grenoble, qui propose un modèle original d´organisation des activités scientifiques et innovantes. Le travail d´investigation permet de saisir ce modèle à ses niveaux de fonctionnement les plus opérationnels, grâce à une immersion approfondie au sein des laboratoires et des plateformes qui composent le pôle. Il souligne un aspect de la recherche scientifique qui est rarement mis en avant : l´importance du travail collectif lié à l´organisation des activités expérimentales. En analysant la nature et les effets de ces pratiques d´organisation, l´ouvrage conduit le lecteur loin des clichés réduisant l´innovation à une affaire d´initiatives entrepreneuriales isolées, et le travail scientifique à une activité intellectuelle et solitaire. Il lui offre ainsi l´occasion d´examiner concrètement la façon dont se fabriquent les technologies innovantes dans un domaine de recherche émergent. Il lui permet aussi de mieux comprendre les profondes transformations qui bousculent actuellement le monde scientifique.

(Original and unabridged) 1991 thesis on ethnography of archaeological practice.

Themes covered include:

material resistance
fluidity of emerging materials
rhythms of work and tool-use
archaeological inference-in-action
acquisition and transmission of craft skills
embodied perception of artefacts
phenomenology of archaeological practices

The thesis gives detailed accounts of processes taking place "under the moving blade of the trowel", long before the well-known phrase ‘at the trowel’s edge’ was coined.

Introductory chapters are somewhat out of date, but the main ethnographic section is arguably as relevant as ever. This early work is rarely cited in the post-processual literature. In a recently published book, however, Gavin Lucas describes the thesis as:

“almost unrivalled, even today...a superb analysis of the archaeological operation from a material perspective ...quite ahead of its time... still offers one of the best and sustained analyses of how archaeological facts are produced in the field, from a participant-observer on an excavation of a Bronze Age site in Britain” (Lucas 2012, 'Understanding the archaeological record', p203).

of those exercises that generates in the student the meaning of those theories and concepts themselves. In this way, science is learned more as an embodied craft skill, rather than abstract propositions, and what constitutes what Kuhn calls a "paradigm" is rather not a theoretical worldview but shared experience in seeing new problems as variants of existing canonical ones with known solutions (Warwick and Kaiser 2005, 394-398).

This  thesis is centred around the analysis of how the different groups of specialist experts that make up theoretical physics at large communicate and transmit knowledge between themselves. The analysis is carried out using two sociological frameworks: the Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE) approach by Collins & Evans (2007), and mechanisms of sociological and institutional trust in the general sociology of science literature. I argue that the communication process is carried out in two ways: through interactional expertise that is based on deep comprehension when the interaction is between micro-cultures that are sociologically closely connected, and through lower forms of knowledge relying on trust for the micro-cultures that are sociologically far apart. Because Collins & Evans’ framework is strongly based on processes of transmission of tacit knowledge, an analysis of the importance of tacit knowledge in physics is carried out to support the thesis. Speciđc types of tacit knowledge are closely examined to understand how they shape theoretical physics practice. I argue that ‘physical intuition’, one of the guiding principles of all theoretical activity, is infact a type of tacit knowledge — somatic tacit knowledge — that is familiar to both philosophers and sociologists within the academic literature. ăe end result is a description of physics that highlights the importance of sociological mechanisms to hold the discipline together, and that permit knowledge to flow from the empirical to the theoretical poles of physics practice, and vice versa. The thesis is supported by unstructured interview material and by the author’s prolonged interaction within theoretical physics professional circles.

This conversation between Michael Lynch and Mauro Turrini gives a historical reconstruction of Lynch's career, from his ethnography of a cutting-edge science laboratory to his recent socio-historical analysis of the technological transfer of molecular genetic techniques to the realm of forensic sciences in the 1990s. The dialogue initially deals with Lynch's ethnomethodological education as one of Garfinkel's graduate students. This background sees him as an original voice of the STS community, especially for his criticism of constructionism, the most common approach of this research area. This critical attitude is the common thread of the interview, which deals with ethnographic method, with the ways in which empirical concepts are constructed, and with the interpretation of some of the major concepts of ethnography of science, such as scientific practice, tacit knowledge and closures. Lastly, the conversation focuses on the prominent role of history in Lynch's latest research on DNA fingerprinting and on the counter-political attitude of ethnomethodology. The ethnomethodological approach emerge as an important resource for rethinking and updating the STS research agenda now that the constructionist stress on the contingency and uncertainty inherent in technoscientific facts and artifacts has been widely acknowledged in law, culture, society and politics.

A partir de l'ample thématique de la complexité, ce livre invite à un voyage à travers les sciences contemporaines. Ces dix-huit histoires de sciences, déclinées sous la forme d'entretiens menés avec des chercheurs scientifiques de divers horizons et disciplines, s'adressent à « l'honnête homme » soucieux d'acquérir quelques clés de compréhension des sciences et de leur place dans la cité. Elles permettent de saisir comment certaines idées, notamment à l'origine de la révolution informatique, influent sur nos modes de vie et de pensée, notre perception et notre interaction avec le monde.

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre la complexité d'un réseau informatique et celle des insectes sociaux ? Quelles sont les possibilités et les limites de l'intelligence artificielle ? L'humanité est-elle en train de donner naissance à de nouvelles formes de vie artificielle ? Peut-on réinventer la vie, maîtriser les croisements génétiques ? Quelles promesses et dangers faut-il voir dans l'essor de la biologie en ce début de siècle ? L'incertitude, l'imprévisible, le hasard sont-ils des manifestations de notre ignorance ou bien plutôt une donnée fondamentale ? Dieu joue-t-il aux dés ? Serait-Il un horloger ou un ordinateur cosmique ? L'Univers est-il fini ou infini, mortel ou éternel ? Y aurait-il une "théorie du tout" ?

Voici quelques-unes des questions fascinantes que soulèvent ces histoires de sciences, dont l'ambition est de montrer les richesses que la notion de complexité a pu suggérer aux chercheurs depuis une vingtaine d'années. Un parcours vertigineux de ce que certains des esprits scientifiques les plus fins de notre temps peuvent découvrir et inventer.

Entretiens avec Edgar Morin, Ilya Prigogine, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Mange, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Luc Steels, Christopher Langton, Francisco Varela, Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman, Bernard Derrida, Yves Pomeau, Ivar Ekeland, Gregory Chaitin, John Barrow, Laurent Nottale, Andrei Linde, Michel Serres.

Etnografía de laboratorio es una perspectiva analítica de los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología que observa a los científicos y sus prácticas en el laboratorio y se aproxima a los procesos cotidianos e íntimos del trabajo científico al mismo tiempo que mantiene un tipo de observación «antropológica» para estudiar la construcción social de la ciencia. El presente trabajo delinea los elementos etnográficos y etnometodológicos que orientan éste esfuerzo, criterios distintivos que diferencian esta perspectiva analítica de otras al mismo tiempo que la hace más diversa de lo que había sido planteada. Finalmente, concluye aspectos clave para estudiar ésta aproximación.

Palabras clave: Etnografía de laboratorio, Estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, Etnografía, Etnometodología.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of ICT within the formalisation programme put forward by Recife’s City Council to regulate the informal trade that pervades the city’s popular squares and streets. This formalisation takes shape by issuing formal licenses to give informal workers ‘permission’ to sell pre-determined items at specific sites. Drawing on Foucault we will argue that ICT is a formalising technology, which serves this formalising regime to control, discipline and survey informal traders. We will argue that the technology’s disciplinary intent was shaped by: a) the ways by which the socio-political context, rather than a technical rationality, affected how both control and surveillance were performed and disciplinary decisions were enacted; b) how its appropriation by licensed workers facilitated the reach of the regime’s surveillance but in some cases also sabotaged the programme’s disciplinary intents, c) how the information system reinforced the marginalization of informal workers and strengthened the position of the municipality.

This article, drawing on ethnographic study in a chemical physics research facility, explores how notebooks are used and produced in the conduct of laboratory science. Data include written field notes of laboratory activity; visual documentation of in situ writing processes; analysis of inscriptions, texts, and material artifacts produced in the laboratory and assembled in notebooks; and an in-depth interview with an expert chemist whose research and writing formed the basis of this investigation. Findings from this study suggest that the notebook occupies a negotiated space between the scientist's contingent response to exigency in the laboratory and the genre-specific strategies that he or she deploys to communicate his or her work outside the laboratory. This text, the author argues, might therefore be understood as a locus in the sense that it facilitates a reflexive process whereby inscriptions are used both to interpret a-perceptual chemical phenomena in time, and, through their inclusion and integration in the notebook, to discipline that interpretation Written Communication XX(X) over time. Tracing the way inscriptions move between material synthesis, on the one hand, and text production, on the other, this article ultimately offers a methodical approach for investigating how the material, technical, and symbolic dimensions of writing and text converge in a modern scientific workplace.

This paper considers how feminist STS scholarship has contributed to the expansiveness　of ethnographies of science and technology today. Since starting out as “laboratory studies”
in the 1970s, the topics and theories explored in these ethnographies have become more
diverse; instead of focusing primarily on scientific knowledge production, STS scholarship
has expanded to explore areas in medicine, the environment, natural disasters, and so on. This
paper shows that this diversity in ethnographic topics and theories emerged not only from
extrinsic reasons – that is, that relations between society and science have changed – but also
from intrinsic transformations within STS itself, namely the emergence of Actor Network
Theory (ANT) and feminist STS. In particular, this paper delves into Donna Haraway’s
concepts of “situated knowledge” and the “material-semiotic,” showing how these two
concepts have enabled ethnographers to discuss various relationships between humans and
non-humans, beyond the domain of science and technology.
ANT enabled scholars to discuss the entanglements between humans and non-humans
within and outside of laboratories. However, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour primarily
focused on the ability of scientists to control and manipulate human and non-human actors in
their networks, in order to achieve their goals. By contrast, I argue that the relations between
humans and non-humans that Haraway describes are not limited to these manipulative aspects.
Tracing the entanglements between dogs, bees, microbes, and flowers, she sheds light on
various relations, and in particular on bodily and ethical responses. She also draws attention to
“knots” that show how various domains, such as science, the arts, politics, and the economy,
are complicatedly intertwined.
In the final section of the paper, I discuss three recent trends within ethnographies of science
and technology today. Drawing on other influential feminist STS scholars, I illustrate the
expansiveness of these recent approaches by exploring some representative ethnographies.

This article is the result of an ethnography based on my
experience as an environmental consultant during the
construction of Belo Monte dam. In particular, about my
participation as a researcher in the Complementary Studies
of the Bacajá River, which, following the determination
of the Brazilian Indigenous Foundation, focused on the
ecological aspects of the Bacajá river, especially the ways
of life of the Xikrin population located on the banks of the
river. The analysis of this field raises a timely reflection on
“corporate indigenism” practice, a process that, accordingly
to Stephen Baines, submits the legal and administrative
order of the state’s indigenist policies to the private
interests of companies and corporations engaged in the
installation of enterprises in, across or on the frontiers of
indigenous territories. I intend to problematize the practical
structure of corporate indigenism in order to explore how
its rules and principles (bureaucratic and techno-scientific)
disguise the destructive temporality of capitalism.

LUCY AND MATTERS OF MOVEMENT, SIZE, AND PLACEMENT IN PATARA DMANISI

I am interested in studying how the hominids/hominins of Dmanisi are represented, an interest related to the ethnography of paleoanthropological knowledge production and communication, particularly the kind of knowledge that is represented to the general public in English. In order to provide a background for discussing the Dmanisi case, I first discuss Lucy. The next post will be about Dmanisi.

A major focus of my study is how the scientific telling of human evolution is imbued with spatial/ideological concepts of national territory (Ethiopia and Georgia, here) and continental terrain (Africa, Europe, Eurasia, and Asia). As a concluding question, I ask the possibility of telling about human evolution without using terms referring to national territories and continental terrains.

Key Words: Human Evolution, Space/Place, Time, Movement, Ritual, Narrative, Identity, Museum, National Territory, Continental Terrain
http://taamaat.com

Web 2.0 social networking sites (SNSs) are characterized as interactive sites of collaborative content production and content viewing. Facebook’s release of its content marking ‘Like’ button affords its members with even finer-grained reading and writing capabilities. Despite its apparent simplicity, the meanings re/produced and the social needs satisfied by the ‘Like’
tool may be far more complex than we currently understand. Many qualitative studies have aimed their efforts at overt displays of active audience, or ‘prosumer,’ behaviour i.e. tweets, wikis, blogs etc., yet little on micro-tool use. Conversely, pinpoint data traces inscribed by micro-tools have ushered in large-scale quantitative social network analyses. This macro view comes at the expense of obscuring the atomized person and their social needs. These two
strands of research require bridging. Using a symbolic exchange framework, this study empirically explores salient patterns of communicative rituals within a fourteen participant sample. It responds to issues raised by audience research through the lenses of microsociology and anthropology. The research methodology employs semi-structured interview, thinking-aloud and non-probability variable analysis. The purpose is to explore two interrelated
research questions: (1) what inter-subjective meanings does this sample of Facebook
users convey and interpret using the ‘Like’ button tool? and (2) how, if at all, are the
identified meanings socially constructed and ascribed with perceived value? The findings
suggest that the meanings that the sample ascribes to ‘Likes’ are polysemic. Using different
strategies ‘Likes’ are used to signal language, paralanguage, emotion, shared memories and
gifts largely for social support. The primary strategies of influencing the perceived value of
‘Likes’ are (1) keeping them scarce, and (2) varying combinations of the following elements:
social tie, ritual type, reciprocity, human attention, and interaction mode (semi-/public
performance awareness). The central limitation of this study is its presumption that ‘Like’
exchanges are intended to always communicate meaning. As evidenced, ‘Likes’ are also
clicked for unknown personal reasons.

The challenge to study the embodied, practical experience of consumption is attracting increasing interest in agro-food studies (Lockie 2002). This paper argues for attention to be turned towards the bodies of animals, plants and humans, materially connected through the agro-food network, to enable a study of the embodied, practical experience of consumption. This paper apprehends the relationship between humans and nonhumans in two empirical examples from the agro-food network through applying a ‘relational materialist’ (Thrift 1999) approach. This approach is worked through by drawing upon the concepts of ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979; 1982) and ‘intercorporeality’ (Weiss 1999) and through introducing the concept of ‘things becoming food’. A live art performance of sushi being made is discussed to show how embodied practices materially transform the fish into sushi, from production to consumption. Excerpts from the video diary of an organic food consumer and his talk are compared to explore the practice of eating or not eating between potato and human. The findings contribute to debates on nonhuman methodologies, embodied consumption practices, food quality and the intimate material connections between bodies that eat and bodies that are eaten.

In this article I want to answer three questions: why psychoanalysis is extremely popular in Argentina, why it is the main psychological therapy, and why psychoanalytical ideas are taken for granted. As with most expert knowledge, psychoanalysis is thought of by followers as a theoryand clinical practice with universal reach, immune to the effects that the specific characteristics of national, regional or urban environments can cause. Against these wishes, the types of knowledge defined as “expert” like psychoanalysis are, above all, social practices rooted in cultural traditions and networks of meanings, placed, interpreted and appropriated in singular contexts. For that reason, psychoanalysis is a plural, historical and contextual phenomenon; it does not exist
only as institutions, theories, therapeutic practices or learning systems, but as a way of acting and thinking, which affect to social identities and lifestyles. In other words: institutions, theories, therapies or professional training are related to everyday life. I suggest researching how psychoanalysis in
Argentina has become a practical knowledge, that is to say, common sense. If psychoanalysis works as a secular theodicy, we need to show how that theodicy has become acceptable and reasonable for a lot of Argentinean people.

OSEA ongoing research projects (4 or 7 week programs)

Sustainable Community Tourism Development

Emergent Cultures Research:  Research on Sexualities, Sociality, Subjectivities in context of Globalization and Change

Health, Healing, Belief --- Ethnography of Food and Medical Pluralism

Resumen: El 'giro ontológico' ha sido una reciente corriente intelectual que ha recibido atención y críticas tanto de la filosofía como de la antropología. Realmente, este movimiento no hace parte de ninguna de esas disciplinas, sino que se constituyó como la matriz teórica de una nueva disci-plina: los Science and Technology Studies. A medida que estos ganaban legitimidad académica y definían su identidad profesional, cierta inconmensurabilidad emergió entre esta comunidad científica y las otras disciplinas que se veían amenazadas por esta nueva corriente. Este artículo hace un recuento histórico de la construcción paralela de los Science and Technology Studies y el 'giro ontológico', haciendo hincapié en la propuesta de Bruno Latour, el primero en articular teorías ontológicas con metodologías etnográficas, gesto fundacional de los Science and Technology Studies. También se muestran algunas críticas recientes realizadas al 'giro ontológico', que buscan deshacer esta hibridación entre filosofía y antropología. Se concluye que, pese a lo certero de algunas de estas críticas, los Science and Technology Studies logran mantener cierto dominio disciplinar, mientras que el ‘giro ontológico’, en tanto matriz teórica de esta nueva disciplina, sí debe hacer frente a los desafíos contemporáneos.

Abstract: The ‘ontological turn’ has been a recent intellectual trend that has received attention and criticism from both philosophy and anthropology. Actually, this movement is not part of any of those disciplines, but rather was constituted as the theoretical matrix of a new discipline: Science and Technology Studies. As these gained academic legitimacy and defined their professional identity, certain incommensurability emerged between this scientific community and the other disciplines that were threatened by this new trend. This article makes a historical account of the parallel construction of Science and Technology Studies and the ‘ontological turn’, emphasizing the proposal of Bruno Latour, the first to articulate ontological theories with ethnographic methodologies, a founding gesture of Science and Technology Studies . Some recent criticisms made of the ‘ontological turn’ are also shown, which seek to undo this hybridization between philosophy and anthropology. It is concluded that, despite the accuracy of some of these criticisms, Science and Technology Studies manage to maintain a certain disciplinary dominance, while the ‘ontological turn’, as a theoretical matrix of this new discipline, must face those contemporary challenges.

The study presented here is from a remanufacturing shop located in a large metropolitan area in the US. In this particular shop, buses were overhauled completely. During this process, while mechanics were dismantling the buses, quality assurance employees could assess what parts they could discard and which ones they could recycle. It was never clear, however, which parts could be reused and which parts were unusable. It is under these conditions that remanufacturing business is still learning from itself since there are no clear rules as to how to approach the "optimal" remanufacturing sequence.

These days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of science fiction and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another, constantly connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through technology. One wonders where the individual, the person, the human, and the body are—or, alternatively, where they stop. These are the kinds of questions Hélène Mialet explores in this fascinating volume, as she focuses on a man who is permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices, and collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.

Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of interviews with Hawking, his assistants and colleagues, physicists, engineers, writers, journalists, archivists, and artists, Mialet reconstructs the human, material, and machine-based networks that enable Hawking to live and work. She reveals how Hawking—who is often portrayed as the most singular, individual, rational, and bodiless of all—is in fact not only incorporated, materialized, and distributed in a complex nexus of machines and human beings  like everyone else, but even more so. Each chapter focuses on a description of the functioning and coordination of different elements or media that create his presence, agency, identity, and competencies. Attentive to Hawking’s daily activities, including his lecturing and scientific writing, Mialet’s ethnographic analysis powerfully reassesses the notion of scientific genius and its associations with human singularity.

In some circumstances, scientists of the same discipline visualize and view differently the same scientific object. The question of representational difference, which has usually been connected to scientific revolutions or controversies, is framed here using the concept of “style,” addressing the plurality of scientific traditions within a well-established scientific field. Using ethnomethodology we will examine the divergences of representational practices that, beyond the apparent consensus of a scientific community, are present throughout the procedure of chromosomes preparation. The ethnographic data was gathered through participant observation and in-depth interviews in several Italian clinical cytogenetic laboratories. The concept of style emerges through the examination of the two alternate, and sometimes conflicting, ways of configuring the complex texture of practice, instrumental mediation, epistemic virtues, and expertise involved in scientific representation of chromosomes. Resonating with the recent debate on objectivity, it tries to articulate the concept of “epistemic virtue” outside an internalised scientific self through an aesthetic, analytical, instrumental, and ontological preferences in the current manners to produce and see the same research object.