The Lives of Objects

2018 ◽  
pp. 30-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie Hohmann
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ontological Categories

This chapter brings into dialogue a number of materially astute theories and methodologies in the humanities and social sciences to consider how we might conceive of the lives of objects in international law. It begins with everyday lives—the way law and objects are woven into daily existences, drawing on ethnographies of the lived experience of law. Second, it considers the social lives of objects and biographical approaches to the lives of things, making reference to anthropological ideas, museum studies, and history, as well as ‘life writing’ and biography. Third, it considers objects as vibrant, agentive actants, drawing on ideas from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS), thing theory, and also recognizing the long legal history of objects as agents. The chapter deliberately seeks to unsettle the legal and ontological categories of subject and object, to provoke reflection on how they are constructed and contested in international law.

scholarly journals Compressed Air Technology in Swedish Archaeology: An Example of the Social Construction of Technology in Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Åsa Gillberg ◽  
Ola W. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Compressed Air ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Historical Case Study ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In this paper the authors problematize the relation between technological and social aspects of archaeological fieldwork through a historical case study of the introduction and use of compressed air technology in archaeology. They do this by incorporating aspects of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) into the history of archaeology. Apart from archive material, fieldwork reports and interviews with colleagues have been the primary sources. The study shows how technology is negotiated and renegotiated, and how the technical and the social form each other. Finally, the authors draw attention to issues of technological development in the present.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

Part III Regimes and Doctrines, Ch.35 Theorizing Free Trade

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orford Anne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Market Distortion ◽  
Historical Trajectory

This chapter re-examines the history of free trade and its relationship to international law. It locates contemporary trade agreements within a larger story about the relation between the state, the market, and the social; explores why it is useful to place current trade agreements within a longer historical trajectory; offers a brief narrative of how the concept of free trade has moved across a two-hundred-year period since the late eighteenth century; and concludes that concepts such as free trade (and related concepts such as discrimination, market distortion, protection, and subsidies) are the product of political struggles over particular ways of understanding the world, justifying entitlements to resources, explaining why some people should profit from the labour of others, and legitimizing the exercise of power.

scholarly journals Informaatiokäytäntöjen tutkimuksen teoreettisia ja metodologisia mahdollisuuksia

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaakko Louhivuori
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Practice Research ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Information Practices ◽  
History Of

In this article I ponder how the actor-network theory and the practice-based studies can be applied in information practices research. The history of the actor-network theory goes back to the 1970s and 1980s and is linked to sociology as well as science and technology studies. Actually it was not intended to be so much a theory, but more like a method of combining actors into a wider story without preconceived ideas or laws of thought. In recent years, information practice research has paid more attention to the practice-based studies than to the actor-network theory. The quest for the full recognition of nonhuman factors as a part of information generation and its utilisation can be observed as a common ground with these two approaches. I believe, that if we apply the components of the actor-network theory and practice-based studies, we will get a more holistic view of information practices. These views and results may be used to review information practices and to develop the information processes further.

The City in Chorus: For a Choral History of Athenian Society

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Vincent Azoulay ◽  
Paulin Ismard
Keyword(s):  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Civic Society ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Athenian History ◽  
The City ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Formation Of Groups

This chapter specifically aims to find a path that traverses — or a midway point between — both approaches to the study of the Greek world influenced by Actor-Network Theory and more traditional Durkheimian approaches centered on the city. It considers the model of the choros (as it was conceptualized by classical authors) as capable of offering a productive paradigm for understanding the mechanisms of belonging at work within Athenian civic society during the classical period. The choral reference also refers to a certain way of writing history—one inspired by the models of the novel and the choral film— that seems particularly fitting for describing the complex way in which the Athenian social sphere functioned. The article formulates the following hypothesis: a choral approach, at the crossroads between the specifically Greek conception of the chorus and the contemporary conceptualization of the chorus in the field of fiction, makes it possible to stay as close as possible to the ways in which the social sphere was composed, the formation of groups, and the identities at the various levels of community life. This hypothesis to put to the test by examining a unique moment in Athenian history: the years between 404 and 400.

‘Two men, so dissimilar’: Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-63
Author(s):  
Rachel Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Fantasy ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter examines a critically overlooked literary fiction by an Irish writer whose legacy has tended to be overshadowed by the modernist generation which succeeded him. George Moore’s Albert Nobbs depicts the lives of not one but two female-bodied men working in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s. It provides an alternative origin for a literary history of transgender representation, with an emphasis on lived experience and social reality rather than the historical fantasy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published ten years later. This chapter aims to articulate the ‘transgender capacity’ (David Getsy, 2014) of Moore’s novella, exploring the insights it offers into the social and economic functions of gender. Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, has been canonised as a classic of feminist theatre; reflection on its critical reception reveals the ways in which transgender motifs have been interpreted in Second Wave feminist contexts.

Love’s Evolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Severe Disabilities ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Term Care ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reasonable Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

The relationship between empathy, love, and compassion has long been contested in the history of moral theory. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s definition of compassion as a form of judgement, and its relationship to empathy as both emotive and cognitive, this chapter seeks to uncover some of the reasons why empathy and compassion are still contested by scientists working in moral psychology as being relevant for the truly moral life. It also draws on fascinating work by archaeologists that shows reasonable evidence for the existence of deep compassion far back in the evolutionary record of early hominins, even prior to the appearance of Homo sapiens. The long-term care of those with severe disabilities is remarkable and indicates the importance of empathy and compassion deep in history. This is not so much a romanticized view of the past, since violence as well as cooperation existed side by side, but an attempt to show that the rising wave of anti-empathy advocates have missed the mark. Compassion is the fruit of cooperative tendencies. Primatologist Frans de Waal has also undertaken important work on empathy operative in the social lives of alloprimates. The Thomistic concept of compassion in the framework of his approach to the virtues in the moral life is also discussed.

The Nomadic Sense of Law in an International Constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-283
Author(s):  
William E. Conklin
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nomadic Communities ◽  
Legal Space ◽  
International Constitutionalism

This article examines the place of Nomadic peoples in an international constitutionalism. The article claims that an important element of a Nomadic culture is its sense of law. Such a sense of law differs from a constitutionalism which has privileged fundamental principles aimed to constrain acts of the executive arm of the State. Such a constitutionalism is shared by many contemporary domestic legal orders. Public international law also takes such a constitutionalism for granted. In the focus upon rules to constrain the executive arm of the State, the sense of law in Nomadic communities has slipped through arguments which the jurist might consider inclusive of the protection of such communities. This problem is nested in a legacy which has weighted down the history of European legal thought. The article initially identifies three forms of nomadism. The social phenomenon of nomadism has been the object of juristic commentary since the Greeks and Romans. The image of Nomadic peoples in such a legacy has imagined Nomadic peoples as lawless although the article argues that a sense of law has existed in such communities. Such a sense of law contradicts a State-centric international legal order. Public international law has reserved a special legal space relating to Nomadic peoples. The article identifies four arguments which might be rendered to protect Nomadic peoples in such a State-centric international community. Problems are raised with each such argument

Persistent stigma despite social change: experiences of stigma among single women who were pregnant or mothers in the Republic of Ireland 1996–2010

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciara Bradley ◽  
Michelle Millar
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Interpretive Method

‘Single’ women continue to experience stigma during pregnancy and mothering in the Republic of Ireland. This article explores the experiences of stigma of single women who were pregnant and mothering in Ireland between 1996 and 2010. The biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) was used to elicit biographical narratives. Analysis on both the lived experience of the women and the social context of the time created a ‘situated subjectivity’ in a sociocultural context. This article argues that despite large-scale positive social change before and during this period, single women’s pregnancy and motherhood continued to be to be stigmatised in Ireland. Women experienced this stigma in their everyday interactions. They negotiated stigma in their personal and social lives, employing strategies that drew on material and symbolic resources available to them. Social class, ethnicity and time were among factors that mediate the experience, but can also intersected in particular social locations to create a more stigmatised identity.

Beyond Texts? Towards a Material Turn in the Theory and History of International Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Social Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Cambridge School

Abstract While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.

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