Nov 7th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Rudy, Alan. “Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology*.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 6 (2005): 85-90. Print.
- The relationship between Marxism and ANT is logical because of Marxisms longtime engagement with the historical concern with relations between natures, sciences, technologies, and societies.
- ANT is characterized as a “non-modern relational mode of analysis” that isn’t comfortable with the dualisms of modernity: science-politics, subject-object, macro-micro, etc. In Marxist terms, it utilizes a materialist conception of history.
- Power in ANT is a network effect – not something wielded by social individuals over objectified others or natures (87).
- Latour and ANT background many of the “sociopolitical worlds” infusing technoscience.
- ANTs goal – as articulated by Callon – is to permit “an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized” (90). In this sense, ANT is an exploration of political representation and the genesis of sovereignty.
Nov 7th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Hunter, Shona. “Oscillating Politics and Shifting Agencies: Equalities and Diversity Work and Actor Network Theory.” Equal Opportunities International 26 5 (2007): 402-19. Print.
- This essay uses ANT to develop an analysis of Iopia, a Black woman equalities educator working in a prison in the UK in an education context. The article hopes to demonstrate how the actor-network interacts with both human and non human objects to “challenge racism” in this particular context (402).
- The study found that Iopia moved from an initial position of being marginalized to one central to the “new” network for quality and diversity. This network challenges and sustains narrow exclusionary definitions of diversity.
- The authors consider this a “feminist ANT analysis” and see their work interacting with more fully developed and integrated versions of critical race and critical culture theories to analyze equalities work.
- The article places an emphasis on the act of translation to see how folks can use “material objects to draw in multiple ‘others’ into their own networks.
- A fundamental tension for this article is the one that develops between the “real” work of equality and the work that many folks do – sometimes begrudgingly – toward diversity.
- ANT is used in this article to “illuminate the formalized and less formalized processes through which equality and diversity gets taken up and not taken up in organizations” (404).
- ANT is taken up by some feminist science studies. A list includes: Singleton 1996, 1998; Star 1991; Haraway 1991, 1997). Perhaps you should look to these to see how feminism and ANT work together.
- This article points out some fundamental problems/debates in ANT : 1) the colonizing policy of ANT in relation to the “other,” 2) the politics of ANT, 3) the importance of ambivalence (amorality), and as a result, extensive embellishments on the original work. (405)
- Much like Latour, the authors of the piece rely on Callon (1986) to demonstrate that the objects of the world are constituted by their relations with objects, not vice versa. Callon’s work also demonstrates that there is no analytic distinction between human and non human actors. Notions such as “institutions, state, class, ‘race’ or gender’ are constituted as ‘coherent, consistent, uniform across time and space’ through networks of people, ideas and objects” (406).
- Great lay definitions of the processes of gaining allies:
- Interessement: This is what you really want to be
- Translation: We are the ones who can help you become that.
- Enrollment: Grant your obedience by your own consent.
- Displacement: Ignore or pay less attention to other scenarios, make this network more durable
- Feminists such as Susa Leigh Star “suggests that one powerful way in which feminist analysis and ANT can be joined is in linking the outsider or marginalized actors characteristic of feminist work with the translation model of ANT to explore ‘the point of view that which cannot be translated: the monstrous, the Other, the wild’” (408). In this way, ANT can help analysts understand what “marginal actors achieve through day-to-day work and the novel ways in which organizational future may get play out as a result” (ibid).
- This article really uses ANT to demonstrate how to “coerce” or “persuade” actors through translation toward enrollment.
- This ANT work underscores the multiplicity of identities involved in ANT work by highlighting how the networks we engage in are multilayered and intersectional. While being an enroller of different actors, one is also always enrolled in other networks. These multiplicities point to how a single conception of the object is always woefully inadequate. The study also highlights how non-human actors (policies in this case) have the ability to enroll actors and make things happen (they have agency).
Nov 4th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Potts, Liza. “Using Actor Network Theory to Trace and Improve Multimodal Communication Design.” Technical Communication Quarterly 18 3 (2009): 281-301. Print.
- Potts begins the article by demonstrating how CNNs list of Hurricane Katrina missing/survivors was an exercise in a non-function network – or a non-network. Because of the sites inability for users to interact with the system to “add important details, edit names, locate duplicates, or point out incorrect entries” the system ended up being a place where “no trace left, thus no information, thus no description, thus no talk” (283). In other words, because the site’s Katrina list didn’t allow people to turn the data into information, it was basically useless.
- This article takes up the notion of “user-centered design” and tries to consider how disaster response systems can and should be designed with the end-user in mind. Here Potts references Spinuzzi’s article (and later chapter in Network) where workers invent “genres” in order to accomplish their goals and get their work done.
- According to Potts, because we, as researchers, cannot accurately predict what sorts of information might be important “to specific groups in specific situations, we need methods by which we can understand dynamic relationships between users and technologies” (285). To achieve this, she hopes to employ ANT.
- Potts defines work: “Any online activity in which active participants – actors in ANT – are engaged in distributing data about an event” (286). It’s important to remember that she’s working on “disaster” scenarios in online contexts.
- Potts recaps ANT pre RTS on 286-7.
- Potts proposes to use ANT to “identify actors in order to trace how they create information from raw data around them to meet their localized literacy needs” (286). This means that her project is not to describe what is already in play – what is static; rather, she wants to “build flexible tools” to accommodate the ways that actors create information. These tools are based in writing technologies and depend on the input of the participants using them.
- Potts uses actants, translation, inscription, prescription, and punctualization to demonstrate ANT in action with respect to the London bombings.
- Potts leads her reader through the creation of translation by demonstrating how problmatization, interessement, enrollment & mobilization led to translation.
- At one point, Potts claims that “by researching the geographic area on Wikipedia, looking at maps provided by Google Earth, and examining numerous photos in this photo pool, I was able to triangulate this information to discern how participants were exchanging information and validating images based on their own literacies across multiple systems” (292). Great, but HOW?!? J
- Potts, in her prescriptions/inscriptions section hopes researchers can begin designing software that operates on open systems that do a better job of cataloguing metadata so that
- After using ANT to describe how Flickr didn’t get the job done as efficiently as it might have during the London bombings of 2005, Potts states, “we also need further openness between communication systems and the producers across disparate systems, volunteerism for those aggregating information and validating data, and willingness of eyewitnesses to share and distribute their life stories. We need to build systems that can help [people], allow volunteers to validate and update information, instead of systems that lock down our data and prevent knowledge sharing” (298).
- In essence, Potts is arguing for more holistic experiences of digital environments instead of merely “tool” oriented uses. She is also arguing for a integration of designer and user (participant-designer in her words) to see how users actually use the information (another call for ANT based research).
