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Since its adoption by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2003, the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has been steadily growing in popularity across the world, to date having been ratified by 93 per cent of the UNESCO Member States. Both praised and cursed for its impacts, the 2003 Convention has attracted the attention of not only professionals and practitioners but also heritage studies scholarship. Stefano’s book adds to this growing body of knowledge by engaging with the safeguarding scheme promoted under this UNESCO Convention. Framing the discussion around the demand for ‘community participation’, Stefano reveals the obstacles inherent in the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage (ICH) safeguarding scheme while actively seeking means to overcome them. Written in an accessible manner for both researchers and professionals, the book should appeal to all those interested in heritage safeguarding and in what community participation really means in practice
The volume “The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme: Key Aspects and Recent Developments”, co-edited by Ray Edmondson, Lothar Jordan and Anca Claudia Prodan, brings together 21 authors to respond to the growing interest in the scientific study of this UNESCO initiative. The aim is to encourage academic research on MoW in the context of Heritage Studies and beyond. Published in 2020, the volume is so far the only one offering reflections for study on the MoW Programme. It further surveys an important chapter in the history of MoW, during which there have been fundamental changes in its profile and operation.
This chapter explores the potential that critically oriented perspectives hold for broadened insights about the heritage value of digital documents. Digital technology has significantly changed the way documents are conceptualized, created, accessed, transmitted and preserved, and digital documents are characterized by features that challenge established perspectives. Although any of these features may hold heritage significance, digital documentary heritage is poorly represented in the context of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), in particular on the International Memory of the World Register, which contains a selection of some of the most globally representative documents in any form, including the digital. Observing that libraries and archives, and their underlying disciplines, which have informed MoW, have been dominated by positivism, this chapter builds on the assumption that approaching documents too narrowly entails the risk of overlooking the manifold significance they could have. Consequently, I suggest that moving away from positivism and adopting critical perspectives might help us understand more comprehensively the manifold heritage significance of digital documents. For illustration, I am using the example of software, and I discuss how the adoption of critical perspectives enables broadened insights about the significance of software, not just as a component in a digital document but also as a document in its own right.
The Introduction begins by describing the aims and the background of the book The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme: Key Aspects and Recent Developments. The aim is to stimulate the development of systematic education and research on the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), especially in the context of the other United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) heritage programs. It is intended as a basic tool for students and young or established researchers from the field of Heritage Studies or related fields and disciplines, as well as for practitioners with scientific interests. The main inspirations came from the International Graduate School Heritage Studies in Cottbus (Germany) and from the Sub-Committee on Education and Research (SCEaR) of MoW. As this book is the first of its kind on MoW, it is a pioneering endeavor. The Introduction explains how this fact has led to the choice of authors – many of them leading experts and practitioners within MoW – and shaped its approaches, combining reflections, reports, essays, and research contributions. The Introduction elucidates the structure of the book, which is divided into six sections, including afterwords by each of the editors, and it offers summaries of the individual chapters. It concludes with a basic guide to UNESCO itself, together with its normative (legal) instruments, bodies and Guidelines of relevance to MoW.
This chapter provides reflections on the role MoW could play in the context of Heritage Studies, enlarging its scope. It starts by problematizing the lack of visibility of the Memory of the World Programme (MoW) in Heritage Studies, and in the “mainstream heritage discourse”, which have centred on the two most popular UNESCO normative tools for heritage: The Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, respectively. Arguing that MoW should take its rightful place among other heritage concepts, the chapter provides examples in support. They show that MoW has the potential to broaden our understanding of the intersections between heritage and human rights, of the dichotomy tangible-intangible and of the notion of community involvement. At the same time, also MoW would benefit from being anchored in Heritage Studies, where, through theorization, a scientifically grounded justification could emerge for why documentary heritage is worth our efforts.
This essay provides a conceptual contribution to the understanding of solidarity rights and their relevance in an increasingly interconnected world, focusing on the common heritage of humanity. The analysis lies at the intersection of human rights with international heritage law, two areas that have developed along different historical trajectories. Recently policymakers and scholars have emphasized their interrelationships, suggesting that heritage is a human right, that human rights provide a framework for heritage protection, and that human rights themselves are a common heritage of humanity. Yet less attention has been given to the fact that the common heritage of humanity is also a principle of international law. As a legal formulation of the stewardship philosophy known in many religions and cultures, the common heritage of humanity embodies altruistic, equalitarian, and moral ideals. It is at the same time a controversial principle, because it introduces humanity as subject of law and triggers duties of solidarity and commitments that challenge state sovereignty. Drawing on the common heritage of humanity as principle of law in different historical and legal contexts, this essay explores its potential to illustrate the underlying message of solidarity rights and the implications of solidarity rights.
Ausgehend von meiner Expertise in Technikphilosophie und Ökologie beschäftige ich mich mit der Beobachtung und Beschreibung der Genese und Transformation von Objekten und Prozessen in einer technisierten Umwelt. Die Objekte können im wissenschaftlichen Kontext entstanden sein und für die Alltagspraxis relevant werden, die Prozesse epistemischer, technischer oder sozioökologischer Art sein.
Mit der technisierten Umwelt sind in meiner Forschung Beziehungsgefüge von Natur, Technik und Mensch gemeint. Solche Beziehungsgefüge bieten sich an als produktiver Denk- und Aktionsraum, in dem Fragen nach der Entstehung von Entitäten aus Beziehungen und von Beziehungen aus Entitäten verfolgt werden. Sind die Objekte einfach da und gehen Relationen ein oder sind die Relationen vorrangig? Wie ist ein Smartphone oder eine Zuchtpflanze dann zu beschreiben, wie die Konstituierung, Durchdringung und Gestaltung des Untersuchungs-gegenstands zu verstehen? Damit schließen wir an Fragen an, wie sie im Forschungsbereich des sogenannten neuen Materialismus gestellt werden.
Im Gegensatz zum Homo faber schlägt sich der Homo hortensis nicht auf die Seite der technischen Hervorbringung. Er ist angewiesen auf den Umgang mit inhomogenen, ‚unreinen‘ Ensembles und kann so im Zeitalter des Anthropozän ein interessantes Handlungsangebot machen. Der Umgang mit der Verschränkung von Natürlichem und Artifiziellem, von Handwerk, Technik und Wissenschaft ist der gärtnerischen Praxis inhärent und dies schon seit Jahrhunderten. Der Homo hortensis ist ein genuin technowissenschaftlicher Mensch, dem der Garten ein technologisches
Produkt von handwerklich und wissenschaftlich ko-produziertem Wissen ist, das immer wieder neu in der Auseinandersetzung mit der vom Garten hervorgebrachten Ordnung ausgehandelt wird. Der Garten nötigt zur Situiertheit, fordert als Gegenüber dem Gärtner permanent eine Positionierung in seinem gärtnerischen Handeln ab. Darin unterscheidet sich der Homo hortensis von anderen Formen des gärtnerischen
Managements etwa im Geoengineering, in der industriellen Landwirtschaft, auch vieler Nachhaltigkeitsindustrien. Der Homo hortensis ist eine Fortschreibung des Arendt’schen Zoon politicon, gestaltend muss er die Grenzen seines intervenierenden Handelns permanent verhandeln mit einem Gegenüber, das ihm eine Ordnung
setzt.
A wave of applications for private concessions to build run-of-the-river dams swept Costa Rica during the 2010s. These hydroelectric project plans caused concern among residents adjacent to the targeted rivers to the extent that a water conflict erupted in several communities of the southern Pacific side of the country. In this article, I use a multi-sited ethnographic approach, including a visual analysis, to explore the resistance of local people to
these plans. My focus is on the contestation over the assumptions about water that are present in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report of a hydroelectric project plan. By showing the underlying socioenvironmental imaginaries that underpin the conflict over dam development, my article reveals ontological differences between institutionalised and non-institutionalised ways of knowing (and relating to) water. Reflecting on what I consider to be ontological disjunctions, I conclude that some of the technical aspects of the EIA report – such as the here-employed notion of environmental flow, which is estimated using only a hydrological approach – have constituted a technical orthodoxy, or dogma, that requires a rethinking of the institutionally dominant assumptions about the understanding and being of water and rivers in southern Costa Rica.
An der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert war die wissenschaftliche Ökologie noch so gut wie gar nicht präsent, das Ökosystem und auch der Begriff ‚Umwelt‘ als Fachbegriffe noch nicht in der Welt und schon gar nicht in der Bedeutung eines ‚Umweltproblems‘. Das ökologische Denken nahm also im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts enorm an Fahrt auf, und es wurde dabei befeuert durch kosmologische Denkfiguren, wie sie insbesondere im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert verbreitet waren. Argumentieren möchte ich, dass diese Kosmos-Imaginationen als relationale Gefüge konstituierend für die ökologische Theoriebildung wurden und es bis heute geblieben sind. Die ökologische Einbildungskraft lässt sich in all jenen Zwischenräumen ausmachen, die durch Projekte auf dem Weg der epistemischen Reinigungsarbeit von kulturellen und literarischen Imaginationen hin zu einer wissenschaftlichen Ökologie überhaupt erst entstanden.
Current efforts to integrate heritage practices in the sustainable management of wetlands in postcolonial nation-states assume that these practices have always existed in the forms they are now. The colonial order, whether deliberately or otherwise, suppressed many local traditional practices. The postcolonial authority’s adoption of Western science invariably continued the suppression, albeit in a more liberal form. In the Ramsar Convention, natural scientists were assigned the role of conserving wetlands ‘‘for the benefit of humankind in a way compatible with the maintenance of natural properties of the ecosystem.’’ This became known as the wise use principle. This article highlights the history of the Keta wetlands and proposes an integration of key knowledge holders into management plans for a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states. The colonial and postcolonial regimes made the knowledge holders invisible. Modern imaginaries – Western legal institutions, Western science and Christianity – were privileged over local heritage practices. It therefore requires historical and heritage expertise to uncover local sustainable knowledge for integration into the Ramsar management plan, hence a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states.
Nebst dem omnipräsenten Cat-Industrial Complex findet sich im World Wide Web etwas versteckter der möglicherweise umfangreichste schriftliche Fragenkatalog, der jemals von Menschen angelegt wurde. Erstmals von Eugene Miya und Mark Horton in den 1980er-Jahren auf dem Use- und Arpanet zu FAQs gebündelt, zeichnet das Archiv in seinem heterogenen Dasein ein unscharfes, organisches, sich ständig wandelndes Bild menschlicher Fragekultur. Frequently Asked Questions - und die damit implizierten Frequently Answered Questions - rücken in neuartiger Bündelung auf sogenannten Q&A-Websites – wie beispielsweise Quora, Ask.com, gutefrage.net, Yahoo!Answers oder Stack Exchange – nebst der ursprünglichen angelegten Listenform zunehmend ein Community-Prinzip ins Zentrum ihrer Dienste. So wandelten sich zahlreiche 'Hilf-Dir-Selbst-Initiativen' von Listen zu umfangreichen Online-Hilfekolosse, die in Ihrer Komplexität nicht zuletzt ökonomischen und technologischen Kriterien genügen müssen. Dabei werden Fragen und Antworten schon lange nicht mehr gelistet und zur Verfügung gestellt. Viel mehr wird ein von den Communities und Users auf Q&A-Websites erarbeitetes Wissen als wertvolles Handelsgut verstanden. Unklar bleibt dabei jedoch, aus welchen Komponenten das verhandelte Wissen überhaupt besteht und welche Mehrwerte dieses generieren soll. Die vorliegende Publikation infiltriert fragend, als spekulatives Tutorial angelegt, den sogenannten Knowledge Market.
This book offers critical and insightful discussions on successes and failures of implementing the 1972 World Heritage Convention. It presents creative, people-centric solutions and strategies to strengthen heritage protection and short and long term use. It examines new heritage challenges, including climate change, global governance, and urban development
This chapter provides reflections on the consequences of technological change in relation to World Heritage properties. While technological change is a core means of human adaptation and survival, it becomes a risk if the pace is too fast. This has increasingly affected societies worldwide since the industrial revolution, resulting in many negative consequences for people and the environment. Technological change is also associated with positive developments, such as those brought about by digital technology. Insights into both risks and opportunities are given in this chapter, and they are illustrated with examples, such as mining and digital geomedia. Technological change appears as a double-edged sword, but there is currently no methodology for assessing its consequences for World Heritage properties. Therefore, the chapter turns to lessons learnt from the Historic Urban Landscape approach, the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme, and from impact assessment methods. While these provide useful inspiration and a basis for further reflection, the chapter concludes by emphasizing the necessity of a methodology for assessing the impacts of technological change on World Heritage properties against the background of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The papers by Marco Tamborini „Philosophy of Biorobotics: Translating and Composing Biohybrid Forms“ and Astrid Schwarz „Composing and Combining: Opposing Constructive Principles?“ outline different positions on mimesis and composition as the fundamental practices of homo faber. A critical commentary seeks to highlight their differences. Tamborini specifies homo faber as homo translator who moves between different media of presentation and expression. Reproduction in another medium entails a back and forth which defines the work of the translator: a novel is reproduced by a film, the movement of a salamander is reproduced by a machine, an architectural design is reproduced by a physical building. Schwarz promotes homo hortensis who practices gardening, widely understood, in different ways – by composing and imposing a plan, or by combining and incorporating the dynamics of physical and biological processes. She foregrounds a creative and constructive act which is profoundly mundane in that it assimilates the world into the works of technology and art. Engineers, designers, architects, and planners are gardeners of sorts in that they are world-makers, tending to works and worlds. This resonates, of course, with ideas of the anthropocene and the epochal role of humans in planetary affairs. – The authors then respond constructively to the critical commentary, seeking common ground among the three positions.
Abstract
The distinction between the constructive principles of combining and composing is discussed in terms of works of art, nature, and technology. How is the work that emerges from these different principles ultimately constituted and perceived as a definable entity and how is this important for the philosophy of technology? In contrast to composition, combining is presented as a strategy to give more importance to the processual, to the various spatial and temporal couplings and decoupling of the components of a work, to their relationship to their surroundings and also to the relatedness of the observer to the work. Gardenworks can stand for principles of combination as well as principles of composition. They are nature-culture hybrid forms, examples are discussed referring to 17th and 18th-century pleasure gardens. The emphasis on the principle of combination in the case of the English landscape garden ultimately produced a model for a sociotechnical handling with nature-culture constellations based on a policy of democratic principles. This combinational play in the garden can also be seen as a suitable heuristic for dealing with the comprehensive transformation processes occurring in the Anthropocene and for practicing corresponding forms of action.
Supposedly, digitalisation offers new capacities and directions for environmental politics and governance. This chapter critically introduces the discursive trajectories of three 'developments', sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist acceleration. Analytically, I approach these trajectories with the sociology of promises, environmental sociology and science and technology studies. To illustrate how subjects and environments are differently (con)figured at the intersection of these trajectories, I attend to two contexts and ask for each how subjects and environments are (con)figured. The contexts are global discourses and local dispositifs of smart cities and of carbon accounting/datafication. The chapter concludes in terms of digitalisation as promissory infrastructural relations that cut across these contexts. This raises avenues for critical environmental politics studies that are sensitive to discourses and dispositifs of greening in relation to recent innovations in analytics that recognise both epistemic/epistemological and ontic/ontological politics. With such attention, interesting problematisations and questions about transformative and conservative potentials emerge.
It is now becoming clear that climate change is and increasingly will be the biggest challenge facing the world. Yet, far less clear, is how to integrate climate change into schooling to cultivate enduring educational experiences. The goals of this paper are twofold. The first is to explore and identify the visions and trends that guide climate change educational research. In this sense, we aimed to answer the following question: what visions and roles does climate change educational research propose (and also foreclose) for children and teachers in a changing world? To address this question, we conducted a literature review of about fifty relevant publications on education and climate change spanning across countries in the last decade. Our findings indicate that the emphasis of climate change educational research so far has been mainly on the literacy rate of pupils and teachers, and also on the conceptualizations and framing of this theme. This means that, for the most part, climate change educational research has been concerned with visions of deficits of knowledge and misunderstandings of basic scientific principles, especially by pupils.
Drawing from a variety of influences, such as critical pedagogy, cultural, and science studies, the second goal of this paper is to assess the main implications of such visions and roles enacted through climate change educational research. In this sense, we critically highlight the functions that they propose for children and teachers in a world of shifting climates where increasing uncertainty is inescapable. As a result of this discussion, we urge a reassessment of learning about climate change in the classrooms based on more socially and ecologically situated explorations that overcome the limitations of current trends in climate change educational research.
Ecotechnology
(2022)
Ecotechnology is both broad and widespread, yet it has never been given a universally shared definition; this remains the case even in the early 21st century. Given that it is used in the natural, engineering, and social sciences, as well as in design studies, in the philosophy and history of technology and in science policy, perhaps this is not surprising. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous definition for ecotechnology: It should be understood rather as an umbrella term that facilitates connections among different scientific fields and science policy and, in so doing, offers a robust trading zone of ideas and concepts. The term is part of a cultural and sociopolitical framework and, as such, wields explanatory power. Ecotechnology approaches argue for the design of ensembles that embed human action within an ecologically functional environment and mediating this relationship by technological means. Related terms, such as ecotechnics, ecotechniques, ecotechnologies, and eco-technology, are used similarly.
In the 1970s, “ecotechnology,” along with other terms, gave a voice to an unease and a concern with sociotechnical transformations. This eventually gave rise to the first global environmental movement expressing a comprehensive eco-cultural critique of society-environment relations. Ecotechnology was part of the language used by activists, as well as by social theorists and natural scientists working in the transdisciplinary field of applied ecology. The concept of ecotechnology helped to both establish and “smooth over” environmental matters of concern in the worlds of economics, science, and policymaking. The process of deliberation about a green modernity is still ongoing and characterizes the search for a constructive intermediation between artificial and natural systems following environmentally benign design principles.
During the 1980s, disciplinary endeavors flourished in the global academic world, lending ecotechnology more and more visibility. Some of these endeavors, such as restoration ecology and ecological engineering, were rooted in the engineering sciences, but mobilized quite different traditions, namely population biology and systems biology. To date, ecotechnology has been replaced by and large by other terms in applied ecology. Another strand of work resulted in the discipline of social ecology, which developed different focal points, most notably critical political economy and a concern with nature-culture issues in the context of cultural ecology. Finally, more recently, ecotechnology has been discussed in several branches of philosophy that offer different narratives about the epistemic and ontological transformations triggered by an “ecologization” of societies and a theoretical turn toward relationality.
For the past two decades, dozens of rivers in Costa Rica have been threatened by the plans of hydroelectric developers to build private run-of-the-river dams. Local communities adjacent to the rivers located between the Talamanca Mountain range and the Pacific Ocean stopped this attempt at hydroextractive expansion after a years-long struggle against dams and in defense of life. Based on a multi-species ethnography, in this article I show how the otters that inhabit these rivers, are also protagonists of this struggle. To do so, I expose the multi-species coalition formed in these communities in response to the absence of otters in the Environmental Impact Assessment of the San Rafael hydroelectric project.
新冠与身体环境:生态技术的探究
(2021)
Methods have been recognised in STS as mattering for a long time. STS ethnographies establish a boundary object with which STS scholars weave a pattern: From such ethnographic accounts we learn that knowledge is produced locally. Ethnography has over the recent decades been highlighted as a key method in STS. And that STS ethnography is specifically shaped by being often configured to consider its forms of collaboration or intervention in the field. This special issue focuses on how methods matter, specifically on how STS ethnographic collaboration and its data are translated into ethnographic writing, or performative of other reality effects. Exploring STS’s own methods-in-action brings to attention the messy landscape of method practice. Our objective in this exploration is to develop a genre of writing about method that fosters response-ability and enables the audience of research output to position themselves between the research materials and practices that were invested into the study. This special issue hopes to contribute to STS engagement with its methods by way of methodography. Methodography serves as a genre of analytic writing, that articulates specificity and scrutinises the situated practices of producing STS knowledge.
Die hier versammelten Texte entstanden im Zusammenhang unserer ersten Ringvorlesung in Cottbus 2017/18 und wurden von Vortragendenden beigesteuert sowie von Studierenden, die auf diese Vorträge reagierten. Wir bedanken uns sehr herzlich bei Allen, die zum Gelingen dieser interessanten Begegnungen beigetragen haben. „Technik und Spiel“ ist ein Thema, das sich quer durch die Wissenschaft und durch verschiedene Epochen zieht, entsprechend vielfältig sind die Gegenstandsbereiche, die sich teilweise bis in die Alltagsgeschichte ausdehnen. Gemeinsam ist den Texten, daß die Konjunktion „Technik und Spiel“ ernst genommen und aus verschiedenen Perspektiven nach dem Spielerischen im technischen Handeln und mit technischen Objekten gefragt wird.
Die Texte in diesem Band wurden im Rahmen einer Lehrveranstaltung im Modul „Philosophy of Technology and Nature“ geschrieben. Der Kurs setzt sich zusammen aus verschiedenen Studiengängen, die Studierenden kommen aus Ländern der ganzen Welt. Gegenstand der Vorlesungen und Seminare sind die Vorstellungen von Technik und Natur, die Geschichte dieses Verhältnisses, und die unterschiedlichen Konzeptualisierungen insbesondere in der westlichen Welt. Die Konzeptualisierung der Natur als Wildnis spielt hier eine wichtige Rolle, eingeführt wurde diese Problematik mit der Lektüre und Diskussion eines Kapitels aus dem einschlägigen Buch von William Cronnon (1996) “The trouble with wilderness”. Die Studierenden wurden aufgefordert einen Essay von maximal 3 Seiten zum Thema “My Wilderness” zu schreiben auf der Basis von Methoden des kreativen Schreibens. In der folgenden Sitzung wurde eine Lesung veranstaltet, wobei immer andere als die Autor*innen die Texte vorlasen. Jenseits der Lehrveranstaltung, wurden sämtliche nun vorliegenden Texte noch einmal redigiert und mit Bildern versehen.
With the thesis «Without a frame there is no landscape» I suggest to draw attention to the praxis of a relationship to nature that comes into play when we look at a part of nature as landscape. It is discussed why it should be ascribed neither completely to the realm of a concept which alone constitutes landscape nor to a completely concept-free mode of acting and seeing. Instead, the framing of landscape must be linked to a quite particular praxis: boundaries must be drawn, details defined, materials selected and formed – paper, wood, plants, paving. The frame theory suggests three forms of landscape all being «really constructed». The practical significance of framing is discussed using the example of Kant’s landscaped garden, Humboldt’s landscape, and Greenaway’s cinematic garden drawings. It is shown that, for the time being at least, we will not be able to escape the mode of framed landscape.
This part investigates some of the limits and contradictions of management of the environment and its resources, through detailed discussions of key dimensions of applied environmental management. This part introduces studies of 1) resource management (rivers as well as recycling), 2) specific techniques drawn on in corporate and public environmental management (suggestion schemes, and respectively, visualisation techniques), and finally, 3) policy discourses (Clean Development Mechanism). The studies presented here are linked by a common thread which recognises that the historicity of environmental management as a social practice requires us to scrutinise its specificity as a practical, social, cultural as well as political achievement. The ascension of science and modernity gave rise to a qualitative change in cultural conceptualisations of the human-nature relationship: nature became an object to be ‘managed’ by so-called experts. By now, however, environmental management has come under critique in that what it proposes as solutions may simultaneously comprise the causes of environmental problems. First, the means used by environmental management can be identified as instances of modernism, industrialism as well as capitalism. Second, scholars of environmental problems criticise the ‘instruments’ of environmental ‘management’ for reproducing the problems, rather than solving them. To examine how environmental problems ought to be approached a critical stance is now seen as essential. Necessarily then, do issues of ideology, epistemology and theory crop up.
New markets are key in debates concerning environmental regimes. Critics and proponents share a discourse that characterises environmental markets in terms of scale; many discuss how to scale environmental markets ‘the right way’. Building on previous work in human geography, actor–network theory, and governmentality studies, we unpack the dual but always interwoven politics of scale-making in doing environmental policies, which consists of material-semiotic practices of producing and using scales as ontologically real ordering devices. Drawing from the results of three studies conducted independently by the authors, we analyse material-semiotic scale-making practices in different ways of enacting environmental markets. By revealing the dual politics of scale production and use in environmental markets, our analysis contributes to the study of developing and implementing environmental governance.
Herrschende Umweltpolitik will evidenzbasiert sein, will Umweltfakten nutzen. Auf Grundlage einer Ethnografie der Produktion betrieblicher CO2-Fußabdrücke werden Umweltfakten als Effekt von Arbeit und Datenverarbeitung analysiert. Arbeitspraktisch existiert Umwelt in einem hybriden und taktischen Datenraum. Daraus ergeben sich umweltpolitische Implikationen, die sowohl die Prämissen ökologischer Modernisierung wie auch staatlicher Umweltkontrolle infrage stellen.
Wir entwickeln eine kritische studentische Perspektive auf Nachhaltigkeitspolitik an Hochschulen. Dabei betrachten wir den reduzierenden Fokus hochschulischer Nachhaltigkeistarbeit auf Umweltmanagementsysteme im Verhältnis auf die Potentiale der Hinterfragung von Lehre und Forschung aus der Perspektive des Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses. Für einen Prozess der nachhaltigen Hochschulentwicklung erscheint als wesentlich, Studium, hochschulpolitische Engagementmöglichkeiten sowie Forschung selbst zum Objekt von Nachhaltigkeitsdiskussionen in den Vordergrund zu stellen.
Attempting to tackle climate change with market solutions hinges on the existence of emissions. We know much about the politics of undoing emissions – via offsets. But where do emissions come from? How are they done? Carbon footprinting seems to be the simple answer. Is this merely a ‘technical’ matter? I explore how emissions come into being; carbon accounting emerges as techno-political practice, fraught with non-transparency.
This chapter argues that ‘successful’ corporate carbon accounting practices efficiently and skilfully ignore significant political implications of the company's practical relation to climate change. ‘Successful’ in this case signifies what matters for the company to compete well in capitalist markets. By examining voluntary carbon accounting at a financial services corporation, I invite an engagement with how the technicality and politics of carbon interrelate in accounting. I ground my analysis in ethnographic fieldwork across 20 months in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) unit at one of the 50 largest companies globally. Over this period, I supported the CSR unit’s management of their sustainability data, in exchange for overt and explicit research access to the CSR unit’s activities.
In, with and of STS
(2020)
How do we narrate about how we ‘use’ STS for social scientific research? How do we study STS research practices? Do all research practices that involve STS concepts contribute to STS? This text constitutes the afterword to an edited volume that contributes to providing answers in the borderlands of these questions. The afterword problematises how we perform reflexivity, how we are (not) analysing STS's own research practices, and how we tell simultaneous stories of what STS as a field is or might be. With this problematisation, this essay argues for a praxeography of STS, involving methodographic, conceptographic and cartographic analyses.
Verran, Helen
(2020)
Helen Verran is a postcolonial historian and philosopher of science at Charles Darwin University in Australia. Her contributions, addressing concepts’ performances and effects, are groundbreaking in the study of generalising logics, difference, and ontological politics. This analysis of how concepts get enacted responds to key challenges of social sciences and humanities inquiry.Verran’s ‘relational empiricism’ analyses the many and various practices of conceptualising and their effects. Making relations is a central practice in conceptualising and, thus, part of her analysis. Her approach is relational in that the concepts she analyses are understood as doing something: They relate and separate entities. It is empirical as Verran analyses embodied experiences of worlds/worldings. Central in relational empiricism is the inquiry into tensions and overlaps between concepts as doing differences. Verran is best known for her ethnographic work, particularly on the concept of ‘number’ (Lippert & Verran, 2018; Verran, 2001).For Verran, concepts are not merely an intellectual category. Rather, concepts are also embodied and lived, collectively shared and performed in ‘repeated routine performances’ (Verran, 2001, p. 157). In Verran’s material-semiotic analysis, concepts have a realness and are performed or reperformed in situations. This renders concepts as particular in time and place.A world shaped by particular and situated concepts, then, is a world of differences. These differences are not threatening but workable, albeit amid generative dissensus. This take allows possibilities for creating ‘futures that are different from the past’ (Verran, 2001, p. 35). Verran has developed analytical tools for recognising and doing difference together, for ongoing relating and going-on with others.Before this entry presents three Verranian tools, it locates Verran’s work and influences. Then, it introduces and illustrates Verran’s key method—storytelling—and presents central tools. The final section addresses politics in Verran’s work.
In a context of increasing liberalization and privatization of the energy sector in Costa Rica, a wave of applications for private concessions to build run-of-the-river dams has swept over the country during the last decade. These hydroelectric projects have caused concern among residents adjacent to the targeted rivers to the extent that a socioenvironmental conflict has erupted in several communities in the southern Pacific side of the country, which I refer to as “water worlds”. I use the term “water worlds” both to transcend the limits of a human-focused notion of community, and to refer to the mutually sustaining confluence of relations between the materiality of water, human and non-human living beings, knowledge claims and practices (acts-of-knowing) and their corresponding socioenvironmental imaginaries in particular territories and river water areas. This dissertation focuses on the acts-of-knowing and the underlying socioenvironmental imaginaries of these “water worlds”.
My empirical study seeks a postphemenological ethnographic approach, and draws theoretical connections between Cornelius Castoriadis and Science & Technology Studies. Using advocacy research, it was conducted in 34 fieldwork sites, involved 14 unstructured interviews and dozens of conversations with community participants, and drew on numerous documents and visual resources.
My analysis shows how:
The Environmental Impact Study (EIS) report of the San Rafael River over-simplifies the knowledge capacities of neighbor communities and environmental groups. The EIS report does not fully take into account knowledge about biophysical dynamics that members of the communities are able to co-create using alternative acts-of-knowing, such as: (i) giving attention to historical perspectives, (ii) embodying practices, and (iii) creating community coalitions in response to perceived knowledge deficits.
Local communities co-create imaginaries of water worlds associated with ways of living and the maintenance of community relations, upon which rivers have significant influence. This notion of imaginaries as a life force of connectivity challenges the underlying (modern) assumptions and treatments of rivers, as expressed in the EIS report. That is, it defies the imaginary of rivers as quantifiable, determinable, divisible, and isolated from the human and non-human communities.
Multispecies encounters in daily situations represent an important element in understanding acts-of-knowing articulated by the local communities in the “water worlds” of this dissertation. Drawing from Cornelius Castoriadis’ perspective of living beings, I offer alternative imaginaries of the role of non-human animals in Costa Rica that are more intimate and affective than what I understand as mechanical and passive notions of non-human animals in the multiple spaces that they share together with humans.
Overall, this dissertation contributes to a deeper (and politically significant) understanding of acts-of-knowing in a particular conflict over (more than) water. In doing so, it contributes to existing work on sociotechnical and environmental imaginaries in Science & Technology Studies and political ecology by adopting a postphenomenological perspective, which aims to transcend taken-for-granted assumptions about acts-of-knowing under the sustainable development approach in Costa Rica.
The communicative methodology of research (CMR) engages members of communities at risk of exclusion with researchers to jointly transform their social reality. The aim of this paper is to situate the CMR within the context of public science. First, we will provide a brief historical account of the relationship between science and the public. Next, we will examine the variety of “participatory activities and methods” in science that have flourished in the last decades. In the last two sections of this paper, we will show the main characteristics of the CMR, comparing and contrasting them with those of other participatory approaches.
The stability of a discourse is not given but produced. It is achieved in the configuration of the dispositif. The paper approaches dispositif as a practical ongoing assembling of semiotic and material entities. The article presents an assemblage of theories, methods and methodologies that allow tracing how heterogeneous entities are (re)(con)figured to achieve performing a discourse's stability. Using mundane office practices that configure the corporate sustainability/carbon discourse as an example, the article spells out how qualitative data analysis, grounded theory and Science and Technology Studies approaches can be interwoven to pursue a grounded and generalisable ethnographic study of discourse.
Energy poverty, a condition whereby people cannot secure adequate home energy services, is gaining prominence in public discourse and on political and policy agendas. As its measurement is operationalised, metrical developments are being socially shaped. A European Union mandate for biennial reporting on energy poverty presents an opportunity to institutionalise new metrics and thus privilege certain measurements as standards. While combining indicators at multiple scales is desirable to measure multi-dimensional aspects, it entails challenges such as database availability, coverage and limited disaggregated resolution. This article converges scholarship on metrics – which problematises the act of measurement – and on energy poverty – which apprehends socio-political and techno-economic particulars. Scholarship on metrics suggests that any basket of indicators risks silencing significant but hard to measure aspects, or unwarrantedly privileging others. State-of-the-art energy poverty scholarship calls for indicators that represent contextualised energy use issues, including energy access and quality, expenditure in relation to income, built environment related aspects and thermal comfort levels, while retaining simplicity and comparability for policy traction. We frame energy poverty metrology as the socially shaped measurement of a varied, multi-dimensional phenomenon within historically bureaucratic and publicly distant energy sectors, and assess the risks and opportunities that must be negotiated. To generate actionable knowledge, we propose an analytical framework with five dimensions of energy poverty metrology, and illustrate it using multi-scalar cases from three European countries. Dimensions include historical trajectories, data flattening, contextualised identification, new representation and policy uptake. We argue that the measurement of energy poverty must be informed by the politics of data and scale in order to institutionalise emerging metrics, while safeguarding against their co-optation for purposes other than the deep and rapid alleviation of energy poverty. This ‘dimensioned’ understanding of metrology can provide leverage to push for decisive action to address the structural underpinnings of domestic energy deprivation.
Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO2) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.
Corporate carbon footprint data has become ubiquitous. This data is also highly promissory. But as this paper argues, such data fails both consumers and citizens. The governance of climate change seemingly requires a strong foundation of data on emission sources. Economists approach climate change as a market failure, where the optimisation of the atmosphere is to be evidence based and data driven. Citizens or consumers, state or private agents of control, all require deep access to information to judge emission realities. Whether we are interested in state-led or in neoliberal ‘solutions’ for either democratic participatory decision-making or for preventing market failure, companies’ emissions need to be known. This paper draws on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Fortune 50 company’s environmental accounting unit to show how carbon reporting interferes with information symmetry requirements, which further troubles possibilities for contesting data. A material-semiotic analysis of the data practices and infrastructures employed in the context of corporate emissions disclosure details the situated political economies of data labour along the data processing chain. The explicit consideration of how information asymmetries are socially and computationally shaped, how contexts are shifted and how data is systematically straightened out informs a reflexive engagement with Big Data. The paper argues that attempts to automatise environmental accounting’s veracity management by means of computing metadata or to ensure that data quality meets requirements through third-party control are not satisfactory. The crossover of Big Data with corporate environmental governance does not promise to trouble the political economy that hitherto sustained unsustainability.
We propose an analysis of environmental management (EM) as work and as practical activity. This approach enables empirical studies of the diverse ways in which professionals, scientists, NGO staffers, and activists achieve the partial manageability of specific “environments”. In this introduction, we sketch the debates in Human Geography, Management Studies, and Science and Technology Studies to which this special issue contributes. We identify the limits of understanding EM though the framework of ecological modernisation, and show how political ecology and work-place studies provide important departures towards a more critical approach. Developing these further, into a cosmopolitical direction, we propose studying EM as sets of socially and materially situated practices. This enables a shift away from established approaches which treat EM either as a toolbox whose efficiency has to be assessed, or as simply the implementation of dominant projects and the materialisation of hegemonic discourse. Such a shift renders EM as always messy practices of engagement, critique and improvisation. We conclude that studying the distributed and situated managing agencies, actors and their practices allows to imagine new forms of critical interventions.
After Numbers? Innovations in Science and Technology Studies' analytics of Numbers and Numbering
(2018)
Locating studies of numbers in STS-and the proposed position of this SI Number studies have featured often in past STS scholarship. Indeed, one might articulate a history of STS analytic concepts and theories by tracking number studies. One might begin such an undertaking by pointing out that studies in STS followed anthropology in proposing numbers as social entities, noting that in anthropology number studies have featured since the end of the nineteenth century. When STS studies generally were focussing on epistemology, the analytic framings of number scholarship in STS reflected that. From the 1970s until the end of the century number studies proliferated. In line with other areas of STS, a focus on ontology began to appear in number studies in the mid 1990s, albeit at first hesitantly (Watson, 1990; Watson-Verran, 1995). But it was not the STS past with its range of number studies that interested us when we set out to assemble this special issue of Science & Technology Studies. We were more interested to show how contemporary number studies were deploying new analytics that are emerging in STS. To this end we were concerned to have contributors reflect on the analytic framing they were using to make their STS number study and to comparatively articulate the analytic affordances it offered. In beginning we register our delighted surprise at how this special issue turned out, noting how much we learned along the way from the authors who have contributed. We offer six papers each of which we see as broaching a novel issue in STS number studies. They attend to a very wide range of sociotech-nical situations where numbers and/or algorithms feature. The nexus numbers and/as algorithms is puzzlingly relevant to taking on numbers. Recognising that numbers both are and are not algorithms (and vice versa) we begin by making clear how we see relations between numbers and algorithms. While algorithms mobilise a protocol that elaborates how to work relations between numbers, e.g. embedded in a database, numbers express a protocol that lays out how to work relations embedded within a number as it comes into being in the banal routines of enumeration, as for example in Watson (1990).
Carbon Classified? Unpacking Heterogeneous Relations Inscribed Into Corporate Carbon Emissions
(2012)
How does a corporation know it emits carbon? Acquiring such knowledge starts with the classification of environmentally relevant consumption information. This paper visits the corporate location at which this underlying element for their knowledge is assembled to give rise to carbon emissions. Using an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, the aim is to investigate the actors who bring together the elements needed to classify their carbon emission sources and unpack the heterogeneous relations drawn on. Based on an ethnographic study of corporate agents of ecological modernisation over a period of 13 months, this paper provides an exploration of three cases of enacting classification. Drawing on ANT, we problematise the silencing of a range of possible modalities of consumption facts and point to the ontological ethics involved in such performances. In a context of global warming and corporations construing themselves as able and suitable to manage their emissions, and, additionally, given that the construction of carbon emissions has performative consequences, the underlying practices need to be declassified, i.e. opened for public scrutiny. Hence the paper concludes by arguing for a collective engagement with the ontological politics of carbon.
Carbon matters. And it is computed. In a culture. Underlying calculations are configured; and they could be configured otherwise. To open a space for conceptual discussion about carbon, this article attempts to reconstruct the extended and distributed practices of knowing carbon emissions with the help of scholarship from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) on heterogeneity and qualculation. To that end, the following pages serve to characterise the machinic quality of a specific technology, one which is often construed as a means for reconciling capitalism with “Nature”: the corporate social construction and accounting of carbon dioxide emissions. This allows us to problematise and contextualise the distributed and heterogeneous intelligence assembled by human and non-humans to make intelligible their corporation’s carbon footprint. Politically, engagement with this kind of intelligence is key to a critical understanding of the limits to managing the environment. By engaging empirically with carbon accounting, this article offers a contribution to the analysis of the hegemonic to dealing with environmental issues (ecological modernisation) and illustrates the generative quality of conceptual work on heterogeneous assemblages.
On Not Muddling Lunches and Flights: Narrating a Number, Qualculation, and Ontologising Troubles
(2018)
Calculating and making public carbon footprints is becoming self-evident for multinational corporations. Drawing on ethnographic data I narrate of the calculative routine practices involved in that process. The narration shows how routine yet sophisticated mathematical transformations are involved in retrieving salient information, and second that mathematical consistency is readily interrupted by ‘dirty data’. Such interruptions call for opportunistic data management in devising work-arounds, which effect enough mathematical coherence for the number to hold together. Foregrounding an episode of calculative data retrieval, interruption and work-around contrivance, I employ it to make a comparative reading of two STS analytics, arguing: whereas Callon and Law’s (2005) analytic technique of qualculation reveals the episode of data management and work around contrivance as a teleologically oriented process that manages to bridge mathematical inconsistency, Verran’s technique of ontologising troubles enables us to recognise how a number-as-network configures its particular kind of certainty and coherence, how it sticks.
Capitalism manages to enact environments in the midst of its centres by means of keeping other environments out. The fundamental practice which allows for this contradictory and generative move is that capitalist agents enact environments. Capitalism does not require a clear, neat, distinct, singular environment. Multiple, fluid, dynamic environments allow far better the tactical and strategical project of staging capitalism as having its destructive environmental impacts in control. That control is a decisive fiction sustaining the unsustainable.
These theses are the result of an ethnography, reported in this book, that scrutinised corporate carbon accounting practices as a site at which we are able to simultaneously explore two significant issues for the management of environments: on the one hand studying practices of corporate environmental accounting allows us to engage with agents' practical work reality by which capitalism seeks to render itself 'green' and 'sustainable'; on the other hand the focus on precisely how accountants achieve taking carbon into account is able to sharpen our understanding of how quantifying practices perform in a non-substantial area of business, such as engaging with climate change.
In the received view, corporate carbon accounting is about providing the facts and figures about the emissions which a company produces. Accounting for these emissions is supposedly a condition to take carbon into account – economists would call this process internalisation. The discourse which assumes that 'if only capitalist society is able to internalise its environmental problems' (like carbon emissions which are identified as the culprit of global warming and, in consequence, climate change) 'then capitalist society will be able to solve environmental crises' – this discourse is called ecological modernisation. Within environmental sociology arguments over whether that discourse is actually materially reflected abound. Ecological modernisation theory proposes that capitalist organisations do get green(er). In the midst of debate, little attention, if at all, has been paid to those agents who are, supposedly, implementing the programmes of ecological modernisation, such as environmental management systems (EMS) and carbon accounting. This study contributes to understanding how capitalism organises its relation to environments by means of scrutinising the work practices of these agents. To conduct that study, I have carefully avoided to make assumptions about whether a particular organisation would be conducting greenwash. Much rather, the intentionally open question was: what do agents of ecological modernisation do and how do they achieve it?
With this orientation, this study turned to sociological theory and methodology which does not presume any overarching structure as determining agents. Instead, by means of methodological triangulation between ethnomethodology, actor-network theory (ANT) and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this study reconstructs by which specific practices and discursive action agents manage to make greening more central to capitalism. The decisive finding is that while agents do manage to bring environmental data into the heart of the corporation – the centre of capitalism – what that data is about (the things this data is related and presumably representing, the material hinterland of that data) is simultaneously distanced from the corporate core. This study, thus, shows how capitalism manages to enact a epicentral movement of 'environment' and, in parallel, to ensure that environmental issues and concerns do not challenge orinterfere in that centre. It manages by means of keeping the largest degrees of environments out.
The overarching thesis of this study is, thus, that environments, such as carbon, are not existing – for all practical purposes of corporate agents – out-there but, rather, they are carefully crafted and enacted into corporate, social and, eventually, economic reality. Environments are enacted. The plural matters. Within the organisational practices of capitalism, agents may imagine to refer to 'the' environment. Their everyday practices of taking environments into account, however, relate to specific materials, such as spreadsheets, pieces of papers, flip-charts. Environments exist through these multiple materials, in multiple versions; ontologically, thus they do not exist in the singular but they are staged as such. If the carbon emission fact of a company is established, that fact may well be out-dated a few micro-seconds or years later; it may differ several kilometres off or in a neighbouring storage unit in a computer. Any global fact is enacted in particular located situations. Emissions facts are not stable but fluid, flowing in and between myriads of situations. They are hold together by means of humans' material-discursive performances. And they shift with agents' practices just like with the dynamics in-built into materials, like a database. These processes produce artefacts, versions of environments. And these versions matter. What a society is dealing with when encountering a corporate emission fact is not Nature but a version of an environment. Next year, the same fact (as in, signifying the same imagined out-there) may have changed.
Vis-à-vis Science and Technology Studies (STS), my analysis of the effects of enacting environments is indicative of a potentially general characteristic in digital quantification practices – whether in offices or in laboratories: data flows are not that clean and under control. While workers may achieve staging being in control, in practice parallel versions of realities may proliferate – for the better or worse. What we find is that the reality of corporate carbon emissions is enacted as mutable, mobile and multiple. In the practical work of corporate fact finders, it is not necessary, albeit it is deemed required, that facts are singularised and immutablised. In consequence, social and economic reality is confronted with diverse carbon emission accounts, all implying universal truths. Societies and politics which resist engaging with parallel realities and insist on singular ones may not be well equipped to manage those crises that may be co-constituted by these parallel realities.
Ethnographic work underlying this argument involved participant observation over a period of twenty months as well as document analysis. The study took place at a Fortune 50 financial services provider positioned in a legitimising network involving one of the largest international environmental NGO's and one of the four largest auditing firms. The findings of this study are, thus, considered to point to practices indicative of widely organisationally accepted and shared realities within hegemonic modern capitalist culture.
The present paper undertakes a new interpretation of Herder’s first approaches to Hemsterhuis. The first step is a critical retracement of the history of reception with regards to three phases and to related influential editors, intellectuals and researchers: the late Eighteenth century (Blankenburg and Jansen), the second half of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century (Meyboom, Giesebrecht, Haym, Bulle, Funder), the contemporary research (Moenkemeyer, Proß, Heinz). The second step analyses several neglected, misunderstood or otherwise used sources such as letters and reviews in order to outline the influence of both the Darmstadt circle of Sensitives (Empfindsamen) and the Göttingen popular philosophy on Herder’s first perception of Hemsterhuis. Against the common view that Herder was attracted from the outset by Hemsterhuis and his Lettre sur les désirs, the present investigation demonstrates that at the beginning (and in consequence of Leuchsenring’s distorted use of Hemsterhuis) he mistrusted Hemsterhuis as a champion of egotical and self-related sensitivness and that only in a second moment – through the influence among others of the public debate on his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache und Hemsterhuis’ Lettre sur l’homme – he discovered and entusiastically claimed his own affinity to Hemsterhuis.
The dissertation is a study of a lost form of sensibility, Gemütlichkeit, which flourished in 19th century Germany and was, by all accounts, feIt most acutely in the Biedermeier period. This sensibility was generated by the operations of the Gemüth, a "soul-organ" taken by those who believed in its influence to be both mental and physical as weIl as individual and collective. The conceptual and phenomenal framework which structured experiences of Gemüth is unearthed from the history of psychiatric practice in the southern German asylum Illenau during the period 1842-1889. This institution fumishes a vivid demonstration of that framework because its practitioners held mental illnesses to be, literally "illnesses of the Gemüth (Gemüthskrankheiten). Consequently, they geared their treatment methods towards observing, regulating, and cajoling the afflicted organ.
At Illenau the medication to be administered to patients was experience itself and the asylum was arranged around a phannaeology of experience in which every ward constituted a separate world. The physician's task was to move patients between wards according to their shifting psychiatric needs, a skill that depended most crucially on timing (Takt). Much of the thesis is devoted to reconstructing the phenomenology of asylum life from the organization of space, through its landscape and architecture, and of time, through the use of music and gymnastics. The relationship between Gemüth and sexuality is explored with respect to Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1877), a text informed by, yet at odds with, the culture of Gemüth at Illenau where its author trained for five years, 1864-1869.
The research for this study is based on medical publications by Illenau physicians and other members of staff, such as asylum chaplains, music instructors and gymnastics teachers, on an asylum joumal called the Illenau Weekly (1867-1896) and on the Illenau patient records.
Gemüt
(2018)
Netzwerk Stanford
(1990)
Seit jeher hat die Institution Universität Kritiker produziert, die, wie der Greis in Nietzsches Szenario „Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten“, den jeweiligen Zustand der Universitäten als Zerfall in eine „akroamatische“1 Maschine beklagen. Doch hört dieser Zerfall nicht auf, nicht aufzuhören, hat sich doch die Verschaltung von Professorenmündern und Studentenohren als bündig und effizient erwiesen. Auch wenn sich heute das interne Netz der Universitätsmaschine nicht mehr vorwiegend akroamatisch von Mund zu Ohr realisiert, sondern von sprechenden Fingern zu lauschenden Augen, können noch immer Gespräche überhört werden, in denen der Verfall der Bildung, ihre Verbreitung und Verflachung beklagt werden.
In 1995 Bill Gates purchased the Bettmann Archive, canonical repository of the pictorial past. Gates’ corporation Corbis moved the collection to Iron Mountain, an underground data-prison, promising to digitize a fraction of the collection and restrict access to the rest. This was not a break with established routines of picture trafficking, but a continuation of the cultural commerce of Otto Bettmann himself. This chapter juxtaposes the career of the Bettmann cultural establishment with the pictorial output of other Weimar practitioners, notably Eduard Fuchs and Herbert Bayer, illuminating what was at stake in rival modes of global image banking. Despite continuities in service delivery, a profound difference of aesthetic allegiance separates Bettmann and Corbis–Bettmann, centered on the role of historicity in the manufacture of image banks.
Cardboard: Thinking the Box
(2017)
Structure of the Handbook
(2011)
"Wrap-up"
(2016)
International Workshop "Transmedia Matters: Researching Electronic Waste" organized by the research project „Times of
Critical Media Lab, Institut für Experimentelle Design- und
Medienkulturen HGK FHNW Basel, November 3.-4., 2016
"Wrap-Up Session: Overall Commentary“ at the International Workshop "Maps and Apps: Mobile media and the reconfigurations of knowledge“, University of Marburg November, 10.-11.2016
Hydrocarinae
(1998)