CCR601 – Final Project – Richardson
Richardson, Pamela. “Agricultural Ethics, Neurotic Natures and Emotional Encounters: An Application of Actor-Network Theory.” Ethics, Place & Environment 7 3 (2004): 195-201. Print.
- This paper arises out of a particular tension between the author and the multiple “actants” that constituted the research subjects she interviewed in a trip to Barbados to conduct fieldwork on the relationship between agriculture and tourism.
- The author uses ANT because it “creates the space to conceive of alternative geographies, imagined as points of connection and lines of flow in the context of a multidimensional spatial imaginary” (196). In other words, the points of connection in the network are constantly in flux (see other article that discusses the flow of the network as transient).
- The author uses four key tenants of ANT in her investigation into the ethical dilemma she faced while conducting interviews: relationality, hybridity, corporeality, and embeddedness.
- ANT, when used in this context, is used to “facilitate an understanding of how ethics are (re)configured in the spaces of encounter.” In other words, ANT is used in this study as a conceptual/interpretive device for the researcher’s experience.
- The author’s quandary comes from her experience interviewing a farmer who claimed that organic farming was impossible in Barbados. Because of her own “ethical baggage” it was impossible for her to imagine any farming that was not organic as ethical.
- This realization led the researcher to the conclusion that ethics are not normative, not ageographical. But conceiving of the situation as an “isolated localism” was just as difficult because . . . well, I’m not sure why. The author never gives a satisfactory description of why here.
- Turning to ANT, Richardson realized that Latour’s theory – with its nature-society, good-bad dualism imploded and reconceptualized as consequences of interaction – might provide a way to discover how entities and their interactions with other entities are “performative, mutually constitutive, and constantly emerging” (197).
- Because of ANTs emphasis that entities are always relational, always unstable and always in the process of becoming, ethics must also flow through networks – ethics must be in motion and consequential rather than static and determined.
- Deontological = considering acts and not consequences when determining the ethics of an event.
- Tying Burke and Latour (or Latour with Latour – depending on where you draw your definition of identification), the author notes that all encounters are negotiated. She says, “Corporeality and hybridity of identity were constantly negotiated in the process of establishing identification” with her research subjects (199). This process of deciding who to be was “always unstable” and in a sense, becoming – kairotic.
- All of the dilemmas faced by the author could be said to be a result of Callon’s term “entanglement.” As a result, “decontextualized rationality” in fieldwork is an impossibility.
- ANT allowed this author to quit asking questions about what is ethically “good” or “bad”; rather, ANT helped her understand HOW ethical identities are always emergent. Thus, ANT allows actors to renegotiate their ethical identities in relational – instead of normative/universal – contexts.
