School of Communication and Culture

TY - ABST

T1 - Experimenting with worlds

AU - Danholt, Peter

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - At the heart of many approaches in the fields of STS, design and participatory research are mutual engagement and involvement with others. Follow the actors, mutual learning, ecologies of practice are some of the famous credos of this concern. Engagement and participation arguably presume some sort of shared ontology or worlds with those that we engage with and undoubtedly, we do share ontologies. But which ontologies or worlds do we in fact share or how might we explore and experiment with what is shared and what is not? Inspired by recent work in STS and social anthropology and specifically and among others the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Jon Bialecki and Bruno Latour, I wish to discuss how we can think and practice participation and engagement as ‘experimenting with worlds’. For instance, inspired by de Castro and his amerindian ontology, we could propose that instead of researchers and participants having different practices, but share what ‘technology’, ‘workshop’ and ‘post-it’ is, we might inversely propose that we share the same practice, namely ‘work to accomplish something’, but what ‘technology’, ‘workshop’ and ‘post-it’ is, are entirely different things for the parties involved.

AB - At the heart of many approaches in the fields of STS, design and participatory research are mutual engagement and involvement with others. Follow the actors, mutual learning, ecologies of practice are some of the famous credos of this concern. Engagement and participation arguably presume some sort of shared ontology or worlds with those that we engage with and undoubtedly, we do share ontologies. But which ontologies or worlds do we in fact share or how might we explore and experiment with what is shared and what is not? Inspired by recent work in STS and social anthropology and specifically and among others the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Jon Bialecki and Bruno Latour, I wish to discuss how we can think and practice participation and engagement as ‘experimenting with worlds’. For instance, inspired by de Castro and his amerindian ontology, we could propose that instead of researchers and participants having different practices, but share what ‘technology’, ‘workshop’ and ‘post-it’ is, we might inversely propose that we share the same practice, namely ‘work to accomplish something’, but what ‘technology’, ‘workshop’ and ‘post-it’ is, are entirely different things for the parties involved.

UR - https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/past-meetings/4s-2021-toronto/

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

T2 - 4S Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science

Y2 - 6 October 2021 through 9 October 2021

ER -