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

May 22, 2012
by Michael Guggenheim
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Eat a Tactic

A picnic concept by Michael Guggenheim and Christian von Wissel for the “engaging tactics” conference at Goldsmiths, Department of Sociology in collaboration with the British Sociological Association and Goldsmiths’ Methods Lab in April 30th – May 1st, 2012, with contributions by the conference participants.

The aim of the conference was “to explore social sciences’ ways of engaging with the social world. The event seeked to explore how to (re)imagine ‘tactics’ for producing and sharing social knowledge, focusing on the construction and upholding of meaningful and confiding relationships with both research participants and ‘emerging publics’.”

Our (self-assigned) task: Create a lunch for the conference.… Continue reading

May 22, 2012
by Anders Koed Madsen
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Cooley’s Web vision

Pondering the relevance of Cooley´s theory of communication to theorizing web-based visualizations

Anders Koed Madsen
Copenhagen Business School/CSISP Visiting Fellow

On May 3^rd CSISP hosted a reading group to discuss the relevance of the early 20^th century American pragmatist Charles Horton Cooley for theorizing online forms of social inquiry. Like that of other early 20^th century thinkers, Cooley’s work offers some promising concepts for exploring the current digital networked context, such as the notion of the economy of attention. Some contemporary devices of inquiry served as the empirical references in the discussion, namely tools that harness and visualize digital traces left on the web.… Continue reading

March 28, 2012
by sop03aw
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The New in Social Research: Javier Lezaun recording

We are pleased to put online the next in our ‘The New in Social Research’ series, a recording of Javier Lezaun’s (March 20th) talk titled Cinematography and the Discovery of Social Kinetics (for download, not to stream).

Lezaun’s talk looks at the use of film by two early 20th century social scientists: (1) Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, and his colleague (2) Kurt Lewin, the pioneer of Social Psychology. In the work of these two figures we find the idea of the social as a form of movement, as a kinetic event, most visibly manifested in the face-to-face interactions of small groups. Lezaun’s talk shows the important role that film played in the creation of this idea of the social in the works of Köhler and Lewin.… Continue reading

March 19, 2012
by fpalmay
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Artefacts of Mapmaking

“The bird, far from his name, flies from the name that I give it, but continues to fly in the treats of zoology and the poems of St. Jhon Pierce. The gull is in its sky, irreducible to ours, but the language of the taxonomist is in the books, itself irreducible to any gull ever dreamed of, living or dead”. (Latour, Pasteurisation of France, 1988).

This video is part of a presentation done during the visit by the Science Po Master’s Programme for Art and Experimentation in Politics and Bruno Latour to CSISP at Goldsmith, this March 7th. It was used as visual data to reflect on different traditions of mapmaking´s artefacts.… Continue reading

March 13, 2012
by jcastillos
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SPEAP visits CSISP

On March 7, The Programme in Experimentation in Art and Politics (SPEAP) , an MA programme recently established at Science Po (Paris), visited The Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) at Goldsmiths. The day was part of a longer Concentration Week that SPEAP students and staff spent at Goldsmiths, visting different departments. The week was dedicated to a specific research theme: If nature is no longer a mere background for human acitvities, what change does this entail for art and the social sciences? The theme was communicated to participants in advance, and during the workshop they engaged with it through presentation, film and discussion.… Continue reading

March 12, 2012
by David Moats
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From Digital Methods to Digital Ontologies: Bruno Latour and Richard Rogers at CSISP

It was a completely full house last week (7 March) in the Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre for Richard Rogers’ and Bruno Latour’s joint presentation as part of The New in Social Research – with students and lecturers lining the steps and craning their necks from the upper deck.

Both speakers were gracious co-hosts: Rogers referring to himself as “the appetiser for the main course”, while Latour framed his talk as “a footnote” to Rogers’. But the two lectures, which addressed “digital methods” and “digital ontology” respectively, were more closely entwined: Rogers’ cutting edge mapping and internet research techniques provided “an occasion” for Latour to vindicate the theories of Gabriel Tarde, while Latour’s Tardian ontology provided validation and grounding for Roger’s methodologies.… Continue reading

March 5, 2012
by Noorje Marres
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HeHe’s Environmental Method

Last summer I went to Norwich to watch the artist collective HeHe launch their project Plane Jam from the roof of the Theatre Royal, as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Below is my report of the day, which I only recently finished and which touches on some themes relevant to this blog, including that of how material settings can be deliberately deployed to produce moral and political effects, which I think of as ‘environmental method.’

On the Art of Minor Modification in HeHe’s Plane Jam

Noortje Marres

One sunny morning in May I took the train up to Norwich to attend the launch of Plane Jam, a site-specific art project by the Paris-based collective HeHe.… Continue reading

March 1, 2012
by joedeville
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The New in Social Research: Ruppert recording

We are pleased to put online the next in our ‘The New in Social Research’ series, a recording of Evelyn Ruppert’s lecture titled ‘Doing the Transparent State: Methods and their Subjectifying Effects/Affects’ (Feb 28th).

Building on themes explored in the previous talk by Fuller and Harwood, Ruppert looked at the effects (and affects) of the UK government’s data ‘Transparency Agenda’, insisting on the generative capacities of this device. This includes the release of detailed data, via publically accessible, comparatively easy-to-use online platforms (e.g. government produced data apps), ranging from details of MPs expenses to itemised lists of departmental spending. This data, in turn, can be – and increasingly is – downloaded, manipulated and mediated by organisations and institutions, whether by journalists looking to produce eye catching visualisations , or companies hoping to unearth market value hidden in the relations between and amongst different data sets.… Continue reading

February 24, 2012
by joedeville
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The New in Social Research: Fuller & Harwood recording

As part of our ongoing series exploring claims to newness in social research, we are pleased to put online a recording of this week’s event (Feb 21st), ‘Database as funfair’.

Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, drawing on work done by YoHa as part of the Invisible Airs project, explored what can be learnt from, and done with, relational databases released to researchers as part of a government drive towards data transparency (themes to be explored further by next week by Evelyn Ruppert – more details about upcoming events are on the CSISP homepage).

Having been given access to the expenditure database of Bristol City Council, they soon worked out that the data – in itself – wasn’t particularly interesting (in fact, as they write, part of the power of this data operates specifically because of its inability to command interest, through the “multiple layers of boredom” which it generates in its readers), to a degree because of what was absent, excluded, or rendered unintelligible.… Continue reading

December 21, 2011
by joedeville
2 Comments

My Best Fiend lectures: Fuller & Oswell recordings

In the supposed season of goodwill, we at CSISP are pleased to be able to release two recordings from the recent series of lectures exploring issues of intellectual emnity. These feature talks from David Oswell from Goldsmiths and Steve Fuller from the University of Warwick.

In these lectures, organised by Michael Guggenheim, CSISP and the Department of Sociology, four scholars were invited to reflect on their academic enemies, with the goal of investigating the productivity of intellectual enmities. Each speaker was invited to choose an enemy of their choice (from people, to movements, to disciplines), and analyse his, her or its productivity for their own thinking, their research and their career.… Continue reading