ANT Flashcards
The modern constitution (?,?)
Latour 1993
1st dichotomy = translation - networks and hybrids are how the world really is
2nd dichotomy = purification - nature/society
Laboratory life (?;?)
Latour and Woolgar 1979
Ethnography
Scientific facts are socially and materially constructed
Material e.g. tech, organisms, experimental subjects
Scientific views = achievements produced by assemblage of human and nonhuman actors
ANT’s empiricism
Not a theory but a method/approach to understanding how the world comes to be
Seeks explanations which work / are useful
Experiments in risk (?;?)
Haraway 1997
Immersion in world - putting yourself at risk
Being open to different ways of seeing
Learning to be affected by water voles (?;?)
Hinchliffe et al 2005
Had to develop new skills to understand how water voles inhabited a brownfield urban site
Trained their senses
ANT - things are precarious
Aren’t pregiven - always in process of being performed
Multiple
Indeterminate
Reflexive - researcher shapes them
= fieldwork and conceptual must be thought together - pre-given theories are useless
ANT’s critique of ANT (?;?)
Law et al 1999
Widespread and uncritical adoption
Need to ask how things are continually becoming; the labour it takes to hold them stable
Marxist critique of ANT
Little ground for political critique/resistance
Some networks are more powerful than others
Influence of structural forces e.g. capitalism
Nihilistic relativism = no normative judgements about good/bad relationships
False antithesis of Marxism and ANT (?;?)
Castree 2002
Capitalism = an enduring actor-network
Capitalist imperatives play a role in how actor-networks are assembled/sustained
BSE crisis (?;?)
Hinchliffe 2001
Indeterminacy, relationality, materiality – would’ve given insight
Didn’t translate ‘knowing of indeterminacy’ into action
1988 feed ban - but disease sociable in ways it didn’t anticipate and exacerbated
Participatory democracy:
- exclusions and power relations
- not properly antagonistic = can’t have rational solution; consensus = expression of hegemony
- stable understanding of disease = closure
Critique of BSE article
how to include knowledge of indeterminacy in policy?
Without consensus how will there be decisions?
Urgency of acting?
Unfair e.g. of participatory democracy?
- not a real plurality of voices
- precautionary principle = expanded and prolonged participation; calls for change of course listened to
Metallurgy (?;?)
Barry 2010
Aren’t hard/inert - part of dynamic assemblages
= act in unanticipated ways - different sites e.g. field v. lab
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline
- crack in material coating - BP didn’t think about behaviour in field
Became political issue in UK - timing; NGOs use it as symbol of close gov-business relations
= materials aren’t inevitably political, but in certain sites and circumstances can be
Political matter (?;?)
Braun and Whatmore 2010
Nonhumans are at the heart of human becoming
Originary technicity = no human without technical objects and practices
Political matter - matter that does work and intervenes in the world
Thing-power (?;?)
Bennet 2010
= agency/power/vitality of nonhuman objects
e.g. rubbish on a drain affected her
Strive towards naivety - acknowledge vital materiality; don’t put it all down to cultural/historical constructivism = makes you treat nonhumans more carefully and ecologically
