Dis/Abling Spaces of Calculation: Blindness and Money in Everyday Life

10.1068/d4173 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 594-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schillmeier
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Social Understanding ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Visually Disabled ◽  
Empirical Material

In this paper I attempt to explore how ‘ordinary acts’ of dealing with money and with money technologies fabricate enabling and disabling—dis/abling—spaces of calculation. Rather than referring to money merely as a general symbolic medium of exchange, I highlight the materiality and the sensory practices involved in handling money and shaping the practice of sociality. Drawing on empirical material, I explicate some of the ways in which everyday practices with money are distinctively important for visually disabled people. Combining sociological and social philosophical thoughts with insights from science and technology studies, I rethink the social understanding of money and disability. I explore how (visual) dis/ability is situated in everyday practices and suggest that it can be understood neither as an individual bodily impairment nor as a socially attributed disability. Both money and blindness become visible as complex sets of calculate practices, linking bodies, material objects, and technologies with sensory practices. These practices, I conclude, draw attention to the heterogeneous fabrication of sociality and to the emerging dis/abling spaces of calculation that unfold in the course of everyday life.

scholarly journals Dis/Abling Practices: Rethinking Disability

Human Affairs ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schillmeier
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Multiple Processes

Dis/Abling Practices: Rethinking DisabilityThe paper discusses how ordinary acts of everyday life make up the complex and contingent scenarios of disabilities that create enabling and disabling (dis/abling) practices. Drawing on qualitative empirical data the societal visibility and relevance of dis/abling practices are analyzed by connecting disability studies and sociological ideas with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). The essay explores how (visual) dis/ability is the outcome of human and non-human configurations and suggests that dis/ability can be understood neither as an individual bodily impairment nor as a socially attributed disability. Rather, dis/ability refers to complex sets of heterogeneous practices that (re-)associate bodies, material objects, and technologies with sensory practices. These practices, the paper concludes, draw attention to the multiple processes that (re-) concatenate the conduct of human affairs.

scholarly journals Social Role of the Librarians of the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline da Rosa Ferreira Becker
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Federal Institute ◽  
Educational Institute ◽  
The Social ◽  
Education Science

The study was carried out through the theoretical foundation about the conceptions and objectives of the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology, and also on the social role of the librarians of this educational institute. These Federal Institutes were created in Brazil in 2009 and they offer basic and higher education. This study aims at investigating, analyzing, and understanding if the librarians of the Federal Institutes of Education, Science, and Technology recognize their social roles as professionals that can contribute to the development of cognitive skills with regards to the information in the library’s users. A case study was carried out with all the librarians of the Federal Institutes and questionnaires were the method used for collecting data. It should be noted in the librarians’ answers that they recognize their social roles, and they act according to what they recognize. In their everyday practices, these librarians try to minimize the difficulties that the library’s users face in relation to the search, location, use, assessment, dissemination, and understanding of information.

scholarly journals Thinking with attachments: Appreciating a generative analytic

2021 ◽  
pp. 030631272110488
Author(s):  
Marianne de Laet ◽  
Annelieke Driessen ◽  
Else Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Obesity Surgery ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Dementia Care ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
The Social

Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through ‘attachments’. We appreciate – both in the sense of valuing or respecting and in the sense of evaluating or assessing – how the notion of ‘attachment’ invites re-imagining relations between the social and the technical, between knowers and objects known, and between sociotechnical work and the affective sensibilities that enable, and are brought to life by, such work. Our respective ethnographic engagements with dog-human relations, obesity surgery and dementia care demonstrate that it is agents’ diverse and shifting attachments to technologies and techniques that shape the ways in which bodies, knowledge and practices form. The affects that arise in this process, or so we claim in neo-pragmatist fashion, are not preconditions to, but rather the result of such practices of attachment; rather than a prerequisite, they are an effect of the work of attaching itself. Thinking with attachments recognizes how techno-scientific work builds and shapes passions, aesthetics and sensory experience, allowing us to trace how varied sensibilities to what constitutes ‘the good’ come to be and come to matter in practices of relating between humans, animals and things.

scholarly journals Doing things with description: practices, politics, and the art of attentiveness

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412097597
Author(s):  
Nicole Vitellone ◽  
Michael Mair ◽  
Ciara Kierans
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
The Social

In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and researchers in allied social science fields thus find ourselves reflected back in Love’s work, encountering our own research practices in an unfamiliar light through it. In a period where our established methods and analytical priorities are subject to challenges on many fronts from within our own disciplines, it is hard not be struck by Love’s provocative invocation of the social sciences as interlocutors and see in it an invitation to contribute to the debate she has sought to initiate by revisiting our own approaches to the problem of description. Inspired by Love’s intervention, the eight papers that form this Special Issue demonstrate that by re-engaging with description we stand to learn a great deal. While the articles themselves are topically distinct and geographically varied, they are all based on empirical research and written to facilitate a reorientation to the role of description in our research practices. What exactly is going on when we describe an ancient papyrus as present or missing, a machine as intelligent, noise as music, a disease as undiagnosable, a death as good or bad, deserved or undeserved, care as appropriate or inappropriate, policies as failing or effective? As the papers show, these are important questions to ask. By asking them, we find ourselves in positions to better understand what goes into ‘indexing and making visible forms of material and social reality’ (Love, 2013: 412) as well as what is involved, more troublingly, in erasing, making invisible and dematerialising those realities or even, indeed, in uncovering those erasures and the means by which they were effected. As this special issue underlines, thinking with Love by thinking with descriptions is a rewarding exercise precisely because it opens these matters up to view. We hope others take up Love’s invitation to re-engage with description for that very reason.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Mei Zhan
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
Institutional Interplay ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Analytical Point ◽  
State And Market

This chapter reviews the collective exploration into the entanglements of science and technology, the state, the market, and everyday life in contemporary China. The chapter presents a compelling argument for why it is critical, at this particular moment, for anthropologists to step in and make their accounts and analyses of science in/of/and China relevant to academic and public discussions and debates. It emphasizes that China is not a place outside of the West where “usual science” proliferates and changes its forms in a non-Western national or cultural context. Rather, the translocal sociohistorical formation and the complex conceptual and institutional interplay of state, market, and technoscience shaping and shaped by post-Mao, post-socialist, and now Xi's authoritarian China demand thoughtful and experimental ethnographic engagement on the ground. The chapter also invokes governmentality as an analytical point of entry into the enmeshments of science, state, and market and as a way to forge a conversation with topics central to science and technology studies (STS) literatures.

Following the Fukushima Disaster on (and against) Wikipedia: A Methodological Note about STS Research and Online Platforms

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 938-964 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Moats
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
English Language ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Lay Knowledge ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fukushima Disaster ◽  
Digital Research ◽  
Research Tools

Science and technology studies is famous for questioning conceptual and material boundaries by following controversies that cut across them. However, it has recently been argued that in research involving online platforms (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), there are also more practical boundaries to negotiate that are created by the variable availability, visibility, and structuring of data. In this paper, I highlight a potential tension between our inclination toward following controversies and “following the medium” and suggest that sometimes following controversies might involve going “against platforms” as well as with them. I will illustrate this dilemma through an analysis of the controversy over the coverage of the Fukushima disaster on English language Wikipedia, which concerns boundaries between expert and lay knowledge but also the social and technical functioning of Wikipedia itself. For this reason, I show that following the controversy might mean making use of less formatted and less obvious data than Wikipedia normally provides. While this is not an argument against the use of automated digital research tools such as scrapers, I suggest that both quantitative and qualitative researchers need to be more willing to tweak their approaches based on the specificities of the case.

scholarly journals Dancing with Data: Introducing a Creative Interactional Metaphor

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-548
Author(s):  
Darren J Reed
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Ballroom Dance ◽  
Interactional Analysis ◽  
Device Use ◽  
Interactional Features

In this article, a dance metaphor is developed to deepen our understanding of the material, sensual, processual, and experiential potential of digital data relations. Premised upon Blumer’s notion of a sensitising concept, ballroom dance theory is applied to everyday use of the Apple Watch so as to prompt investigation of subtle interactional features of device use. The aim is to engender an inclusive umbrella concept while simultaneously stimulating questions of analysis of and access to small-scale and intimate moments of embodied behaviours in future interactional analysis. In so doing, the article contributes to the sociology of data relationality in everyday life, as well as constituent approaches such as science and technology studies and the interactional study of bodies and machines.

Invisibilizing politics: Accepting and legitimating ignorance in environmental sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 839-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Jeon
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Although sociologists have explored how political and economic factors influence the formation of ignorance in science and technology, we know little about how scientists comply with external controls by abandoning their prior research and leaving scientific innovations incomplete. Most research in science and technology studies (STS) on ignorance has relied on structural and historical analyses, lacking in situ studies in scientific laboratories. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the habitus of ignorance as a mechanism of the social production of ignorance. Scientists have a set of dispositions that establish practical contexts enabling them to ignore particular scientific content. Leaders of the organization repeatedly legitimate the abandonment of unfinished projects, while ordinary laboratory scientists internalize the normalized view that the scientific field is inherently opportunistic and that unfunded research should be left undone. A cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance by actors at distinctive positions within the organization provides a mechanism of social control of scientific knowledge. As the mechanism is habitually self-governed by the rules of the game of current scientific institutions, the result is an indirect, although deeply subjugating, invisible and consolidating form of political and economic domination of the scientific field.

Situating Technology: Confrontations over the Use of Sonar among Turkish Fishermen and Marine Scientists

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ståle Knudsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Fishing Practices

AbstractSince its introduction in the Turkish fisheries in 1980, use of the fish finder device sonar has been a controversial issue among fishermen and between fishermen and scientists. Most fishermen claim that sonars scare away or kill fish while local marine scientists contend that sonars have no such effect. What can study of this conflict tell us about the use of advanced technology in regions of the world far away from the metropolitan production of such technologies? In this ethnographic approach to a study in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) the fishermen's use of and the scientists' research on the sonar are surveyed. The article discusses the degree to which the adoption of sonar in the Turkish fisheries has resulted in a standardization of fishing practices—not only technologically, but possibly also in the way the fishermen perceive the hunt. Some theoretical arguments on how people relate to technology are reviewed and a phenomenologically inspired perspective advanced. It is argued that too much attention on finding the "Truth"—in this case whether the sonar is harmful to fish or not—diverts attention from more fundamental issues, such as what kinds of change sonar has brought to the social relations of production.

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