CSISP Online | Blog of the Centre for the Study of Invention & Social Process, Goldsmiths

March 20, 2013
by David Moats
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A Writing Exercise for the Public: Warren Sack on Digital Convergence

text by Lonneke van der Velden

Warren Sack‘s lecture at CSISP last week was an invitation to the public to engage with the creative re-appropriation of code. Sack presented a draft chapter of his book on Software Studies as Liberal Arts, in which he aims to present the story of digital convergence in a way that enables the reader to become a new kind of writer and the digital humanities to meet code in new ways.

Sack began with a Venn-diagram used by Nicholas Negroponte to promote the naissent MIT Media Lab (1978), a clean and symmetric depiction of how the older broadcasting and publishing industries would converge with the computer industry.… Continue reading

February 25, 2013
by David Moats
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Memories of Another Future: Andrew Pickering on Cybernetics

Utopian thinking has long been out of fashion in academia but there was a palpable sense of nostalgia in Andrew Pickerings talk last week for a time when scientific practice still seemed to hold the key to another world. Drawing on his book The Cybernetic Brain, Pickering offered cybernetics as an unrealised alternative future: a non-modern ontology of unknowability and becoming. In his account, cyberneticists undertook daring experiments with adaptive systems and ecologies, and in doing so they offered an alternative to the modern understanding of science as mastery over nature and the imposition of categories and hierarchies on the world.… Continue reading

February 12, 2013
by Noorje Marres
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Kristin Asdal on office politics: taking nature into account/ing

(University of Oslo) gave a talk at CSISP entitled An ordinary technology of politics: The office as a device for taking nature into account/ing.

Kristin Asdal is professor of Science, Technology and Culture at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK). Her work is concerned with political ecology and the technologies of politics and foregrounds the role of mundane political institutions.

Recordings available below.

Her lecture explores two relevant governmental settings or ‘offices,’ Norway’s pollution agency and its Ministry of Finance, and asks how these settings make it possible for nature to be taken into account(ing). Asdal’s analysis focuses on the articulation of environmental issues as political objects, arguing that it takes work for the environment to enter into politics.… Continue reading

January 28, 2013
by Laurie Waller
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CSISP Salon with David Oswell: In an age of devices before devices, are we all post-representational?

David Oswell began this CSISP Salon with the assertion that devices like apps are everywhere. STS researchers use devices as most people use apps: as tools for navigating through the complexities of the social world. The novelty of STS approaches in social science are often premised on the claim that it’s possible to open up and look inside devices. Navigating in contemporary STS is thus often characterised as a process of following and tracing the inscriptions constituting a device; through practices of description STS works through the device out to the world. Moreover, as Savage and Burrows recently argued, the development of description as a mode of scholarly engagement is needed for a contemporary sociology to address the challenges posed by a “knowing capitalism” capable of appropriating the devices sociologists once thought to be their own.… Continue reading

January 21, 2013
by Noorje Marres
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What is Digital Sociology?

There have been some posts recently about Digital Sociology (here and here), and I would like to add a few comments, based on my experience developing the MA/MSc Digital Sociology at Goldsmiths together with others.

I might as well begin with my main point: I have one big fear about digital sociology, and that is that it will be seized upon as an opportunity to re-enact the drama of the ‘two cultures’ : I mean the debate in which humanistically inspired approaches are pitched against narrow scientistic ones – with sociologists thinking they must choose to be either ‘with them or against us.’ I don’t think this has happened yet, but it will not necessarily be easy to avoid over the coming years: digitization has been widely and very publically framed as an opportunity for a new push in ‘computational social science’, and this fact alone will make it tempting for some to cast digital sociology in the role of defender of sensitive, civilized, more tolerant forms of study, over against narrowly defined scientific empiricism.… Continue reading

November 6, 2012
by Noorje Marres
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Material Participation book launch

On October 10, CSISP hosted the launch of Noortje Marres’ new book Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London. The launch took the form of a discussion with Javier Lezaun (Oxford), Celia Lury (Warwick), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths) and was moderated by Monika Krause (Goldsmiths).

Here you can download the audio recording.

November 6, 2012
by David Moats
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Tactics of Issue Mapping Part 2

On October 26 and 27 CSISP hosted a second event on Tactics of Issue Mapping, which David Moats discusses in his workshop report below.

The first day featured a series of presentations on the role of creative practice in connecting research and intervention in issue mapping, and audio recordings of these talks can be downloaded here: Part 1 and Part 2.

The second day was dedicated to groupwork on a selected tactic of issue mapping, namely bias detection, about which you can read more here.

“Issue Mapping combines social theory, computing, design and advocacy. If one of those elements isn’t there it doesn’t work” – Noortje Marres, workshop co-organiser

If the first Issue Mapping workshop, earlier this year, explored the arsenal of digital tools and tactics available to researchers, then this second instalment was concerned with how we might put them to good use in addressing specific problems.… Continue reading

October 15, 2012
by David Moats
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Issue-Oriented Activism: Israel Rodriguez Giralt Recording

Earlier this month, we were pleased to have CSISP visiting fellow Israel Rodriguez Giralt open the autumn term’s lecture series. You can find links to a full audio recording of the talk and slides below.

ISSUE-ORIENTATED ACTIVISM: Comparing the emergence of concerned groups around care policies for dependent people in UK and Spain.

This talk analyses and compares two political situations: the launch of the “Act on Dependency”, an important and controversial social policy approved in 2006 by the Spanish Government with the aim of guaranteeing public support for people who cannot lead independent lives for reasons of illness, disability or age; and the austerity programme (also known as “the cuts”), promoted in 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of the United Kingdom as a way to tackle the UK’s budget deficit.… Continue reading

September 24, 2012
by Joe Deville
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Comparison as invention: Reflections on the Apples and Oranges conference

As is nicely captured on this blog, the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process has a strong interest in work emerging and working through concepts and methods allied to science and technology studies (STS). Yet, despite the implicitly comparative undertones in the analysis of ontological multiplicity, for instance, or the overt embrace of comparison by no less than Bruno Latour, STS seems to remain largely ambivalent towards the explicitly comparative act as a methodological tool.

The factors that have played into the turn against comparison—not only in this field, but across a broad selection of qualitative research—are numerous and have been discussed extensively elsewhere.… Continue reading