Annemarie Mol

O presente trabalho integra uma pesquisa dissertativa mais ampla, que tem como objetivo principal compreender diferentes modulações da articulação entre testosterona e masculinidades, a partir dos múltiplos atores e redes que se formam no agenciamento de seus diversos tipos e
processos de subjetivação articulados. Ou seja, pretende-se perceber as múltiplas maneiras pelas quais a testosterona é performada nessas articulações, de acordo com o modo de existência de sujeitos inscritos nas masculinidades que fazem uso da substância, seus efeitos na formação de suas subjetividades e na produção de seus corpos, considerando as diferenças de classe, escolaridade, raça e identidade de gênero que os atravessam. Parte-se da noção de Ontologias Múltiplas, de Annemarie Mol, bem como empreende-se uma análise sobre a utilização da testosterona para a materialização de corpos de sujeitos inscritos nas masculinidades, entendendo-se o uso de
substâncias para produção de si, baseada em aprimoramentos que integram uma rede onde se articulam diferentes campos – tais como médico/jurídico/mercadológico –, como sendo uma característica das sociedades contemporâneas.

Amateur astronomers and Networked Science call into question a series of binary distinctions traditionally found in books of epistemology and science studies (e.g., centre of calculation or periphery of calculation? exoteric or esoteric circles? literature or digital networks of propagability? Is there science without the construction of new knowlege? How to make a boundary?). Networked Science is remodelling, for instance, the work of scientific researchers, subverting the "science of academic journals". Such a subversion compels us to make a thorough reconsideration of the nature of scientific communication. Changes such as the ones related to the forms of transmitting scientific material using the Internet (from raw data to finished articles), the formation of discussion groups, and serendipity generators, that operate the "collective intelligence", are present in the most diverse fields. Today, many science divulgation problems are solved due to a complex system of propagability of information through social networks. There are many different forms of studying this event; one of them occurs under the viewpoint of the non-scientist, or the non-professional, who ends up gaining acess to the contents of Networked Science. He not only accesses the contents, but uses the same Internet mechanisms to execute his amateur activities, contributing both to the production of new contents and to the propagation of the preexisting ones. It is at this point that the theme of "Networked Science" meets the fundamental problem of this work: the amateurs. With this end in view, we perform multi-sited virtual ethnographies of Pro-Am (professional-amateur) collaborative projects, Citizen Science projects and social networks of serendipity and propagability (amateur-amateur collaboration), describing and problematizing a series of compositions in amateur astronomy that occur in a virtual environment. Through theoretical debates involving the so-called contemporaneous epistemes (Latour, Stengers, Fleck, Mol, Nielsen, Whitehead, Sloterdijk), we draw a series of considerations regarding the political-epistemological relationships of between professionals and amateurs. From that, we endeavor to discuss also the relations that the modern sciences (as institutions) maintain with their diverse ancestral avatars, such as natural history and natural philosophy. All this may result in deep debates about classical themes of political epistemology, like the very definition of knowledge, the boundaries between science and non-science and disciplined progress.

Enacting Environments is an ethnography of the midst of the encounter between corporations, sustainable development and climate change. At this intersection 'environmental management' and 'carbon accounting' are put into practice. Purportedly, these practices green capitalism. Drawing on fieldwork of day-to-day practices of corporate environmental accountants and managers, Ingmar Lippert reconstructs their work as achieving to produce a reality of environment that is simultaneously stable and flexible enough for a particular corporate project: to stage the company, and in consequence capitalism, as in control over its relations to an antecedent environment. Not confined to mere texts or meetings between shiny stakeholders co-governing the corporation – among them some of the world's biggest auditing firms, an environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) and standards – control is found to be distributed across as well as limited to a myriad of practical work situations, involving spreadsheets and slide shows. Carbon accounting takes place in the midst of docile as well as dissident humans and nonhumans. As a result of this analysis, Enacting Environments establishes how carbon emission facts are produced and co-configure climate change realities. Ingmar Lippert argues: within capitalism, environment does not exist in the singular but in the plural; and these environments are not existing out there to be read off some anterior Nature but they are brought into social, economic and political existence in the practices of accounting for them. Providing a portfolio of methods to study techno-managerial engagement with carbon, Ingmar Lippert shows how much is overlooked in received theories of corporate environmental accounting, theories of the performativity of environmental economics and, ultimately, the epistemic and ontic effects of fact-making in the heart of neoliberal capitalism.

cite as: Ingmar Lippert (2013). Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions. PhD Dissertation in Sociology, University of Augsburg, Augsburg.

In Khmer, the word prek designates a connection between things. In Kandal province in Cambodia, preks crisscross the landscape, connecting rivers with floodplains, supporting rich ecologies and a variety of livelihoods. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and critical water research, this paper explores prek(s) as a multiplicity. Rather than taking the prek as a passive object around which various practices occur, we examine how prek(s) are enacted as ontologically different: as irrigation infrastructure, as pathway to rice intensification, as device for Cambodian state-making, and as climate-friendly agricultural development. After analyzing interference patterns between enactments and their scale-making effects in- and outside the Mekong floodplains, we make explicit our own ontological politics. Focused on sustaining multiple uses and ecosystems, “our” prek is a socionatural mosaic landscape where many human and more-than-human actors and practices can co-exists. This ontological politics, we suggest, has implications for planetary environmental knowledges and delta management far beyond Kandal’s landscape.

Key words: Infrastructure, Enactments, Ontological Politics, Mekong delta, Cambodia

The thesis is dedicated to the study of the practices and relationships concerning the “Bolsa Família” Program in Brazilian cities located on the Amazonian triple boards, between Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. This work describes the social assistance as a government technology – the assistance network – performed mainly by women to reflect on gender and state production on the frontier. It also covered the study of institutional normative and data collected from social network, interviews and participant observation in different levels and services in the social-assistance network. From this starting point, it follows the line of life of both women who “benefits” and those who are “agents” of the income transfers policy. The tangled of lifelines, state formation process and forms of government has required an analytical self-reflective effort, which resulted in a claim for a mestiza ethnographic theory, located in-between places: an ambivalent cognizant experience that entwines life and research process. The thesis is organized into three parts: routes, boards, and meshes/network. The first part shapes the research’s paths and the principles of the mestiza ethnography theory. The Amazonian frontiers and its gender orientated forms of government are the object of the second part, which also tackle militarization, missionary efforts, and social assistance as forms of state presence in the region. The practices of “social assistance agents” are the raw material for describing how assistance and poverty, considered multiple objects, operates. In these practices, the actions categories to register, include and protect are central. The description and analysis of the government of women on the borderlands, through the assistance network allowed me to access – from a gender perspective point of view – to processes of state and processes of bordering which are not considered in studies about the Amazonian region. The Amazon region is also understood as a borderland: border, expansion front, but also a place of enduring social relationships proper of a transborder urban complex.

This chapter tries to stay faithful to the spirit of ANT and engage with politics empirically. More precisely, based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Lisbon in 2015, it shows how three key works – indicating three key episodes in the development of ANT – can be put to use in the realm of drug policy. The structure of the chapter is as follows: Drawing on Michel Callon’s classical study of scallop-farming, the first empirical story demonstrates the usefulness of the sociology of translation when it is applied to the problematisation of drug use in Europe. Then, centred on Bruno Latour’s introductory text, Reassembling the Social, the second empirical story shows how ANT refigures drug use as a social problem. Following Annemarie Mol’s work on care, the third empirical story highlights different ways of engaging with drug use, only some of which operate in terms of problem-solving. The final part of the chapter discusses the three processes together and argues for a shift in ANT-inspired thinking about politics – a shift from a concern with bad translation to good treason.

Перед нами «Логика заботы: здоровье и проблема выбора пациента» – книга-дом, которую голландский философ Аннемари Мол построила в небольшом междисциплинарном квартале на границе некогда изолированных районов Природы и Культуры. С 1980‑х гг. в этой части республики социальных наук орудовали сначала танки, а потом бульдозеры акторно-сетевой теории (actor-network theory, ANT) и ее союзников. Они сравняли или превратили в груды мусора стены между природой и культурой, фактами и ценностями, и другими сегрегирующими «достижениями» апартеида эпохи Модерна.

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 Actor-Network theory, 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 con-sequences, 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.

This paper defends the relevance of studying the objects of insurance: the things that are sold, priced and exchanged in insurance markets. With the help of authors such as Callon, Mol, Appadurai and Strathern, the process of bringing a new economic object forth is named ‘enactment’ and three different types of economic objects are distinguished: ‘good’, ‘property’ and ‘commodity’. The enactments of these objects are presented for a very particular case, the private health insurance in Chile. In this case the three objects are not only different but they are enacted in very different sites, namely sales encounters, parliament, and actuarial offices. Following economic objects in their own sites opens new ways of approaching questions posed by some of the key referents in insurance studies.

Sehen steht am Beginn medizinischer Praxis. Dabei ist das Sehen nicht nur eine notwendige Vorstufe des diagnostischen Verstehens und therapeutischen Urteilens, es weist auch eine komplexe normative Struktur auf. Das Sehen in der medizinischen Praxis stellt mittlerweile ein interdisziplinär breit reflektiertes und empirisch eingehend untersuchtes Themenfeld dar. Durch die Vervielfältigung von medizinischer Bildgebung und (digitalen) medizinischen Bildern – man denke an die Magnetresonanztomographie (MRT) und die Computertomographie (CT) seit den 1970ern – hat das Thema eine neue Brisanz erhalten. Fasst man unter Sehen auch die digitale Bildverarbeitung, Visualisierung und Mustererkennung unter Einsatz von Hochdurchsatztechnologien und maschinellem Lernen, so scheint doch das Sehen, obgleich seit jeher ein (ge)wichtiges Element in der medizinischen Praxis, in der technologisierten Medizin eine neue Form der Zentralität und Suprematie eingenommen zu haben. Der Einsatz von Technologien der Sichtbarmachung und Visualisierung verändert zum einen – so die (postphänomenologische und posthumanistische) arbeitsleitende These dieses Beitrags – die Konstitution und Rolle der menschlichen Akteure, der Konzepte von Gesundheit und Krankheit, der eingesetzten Maschinen (im weitesten Sinne des Wortes) und damit die Praxis des Sehens selbst. Die Mensch-Maschinen-Interaktion zeichnet allerdings nicht nur Effekte auf der Ebene des Begrifflichen und Epistemischen, sondern auch auf der Ebene der Ontologie, d. h. Menschen und Maschinen gehen eine Konstellation ein, in der sie einander nicht mehr als ontologische Einheiten (Individuen) bzw. Substanzen entgegentreten, sondern vielmehr eine ko-konstitutive Relation ausbilden, in der eingebettet sich das Sehen zu einem ‚technologischen Sehen‘ und einem „technologischen Blick“ transformiert. Zum anderen ver- ändert sich durch die enge Mensch-Maschinen-Relation auch das medizinische Sehen in normativer Hinsicht. Das wirft eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Welche normativen Implikationen und Hintergründe hat das technologische Sehen in der modernen Medizin? Welche normativen Effekte gehen vom technologischen Sehen in der Medizin aus, d. h. welche Bezüge zum (medizinischen) Normalen, Richtigen, Gesollten und Guten bildet es? Der vorliegende Beitrag versucht, verschiedene Aspekte und Ebenen der Normativität und der politischen Qualität des technologischen Sehens in der modernen Medizin aufzuspüren und auf die Frage nach einem guten Sehen in der Medizin hinzuführen. Dazu werden wir zunächst ein Panorama aus geisteswissenschaftlichen Perspektiven auf normative Aspekte und Implikationen der medizinischen Bildpraxis werfen. In einem zweiten Schritt führen wir in den von Annemarie Mol präsentierten Ansatz der ‚empirischen Philosophie‘ ein. Zu den besonderen Eigenschaften dieses Ansatzes zählt, dass er an die vorangehend skizzierten Perspektiven anschließt, darin aber zugleich die Betrachtung von Praktiken, Gegenständen und Akteuren zu einer ‚multiplen‘ empirischen Ontologie radikalisiert. Darüber hinaus verbindet Mols empirische Philosophie einen praxeographisch ontologischen Untersuchungsansatz mit einer Analyse normativer Gesichtspunkte von Praktiken. Die originelle Zusammenführung verschiedener Analyseebenen von Mol hilft uns, in einem dritten Schritt eine Antwortmöglichkeit auf die Frage zu präsentieren, wie gutes Sehen in der (digital-)technologisierten Medizin ermittelt werden kann.

Roundtable Title: "Ontologically Entangled: Rethinking Causality"
Abstract: The papers in this panel each rethink and reconceptualises the relationship between disease, disorder, normativity and treatment practices. We ask: How are problems (and patients) being produced through the systems designed to treat them? How have our concepts of disease and disorder predetermined the outcomes of treatment, health promotion techniques and strategies of protection? We take as our objects of analysis: endometriosis, poverty, HIV/AIDs, transsexuality, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among others. In particular, each paper challenges the commonplace view that these are separately determinate entities, which interact in linear, causal ways. Embracing Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and intra-activity, we propose that each of our examples is constituted through the very practices that are said to be consequential. In this way, poverty and disease, transsexuality and diagnosis, endometriosis and treatment, PrEP and online forums, object choice and sexual appetite are more usefully understood as ontologically entangled. On the basis of these alternative accounts, we propose that there are more effective, nuanced interventions that can be developed.

Chair: Dr Steven Angelides (La Trobe University, Macquarie University)

Speakers:
Dr Kate Seear (National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University)
‘The makings of a modern epidemic: Endometriosis, gender and politics’
Dr Kiran Pienaar (National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University)
‘HIV/AIDS, poverty and the making of disease’
J.R. Latham (La Trobe University), PhD Candidate, ARCSHS.
‘Making (trans) sense: Enacting maleness through sexual practices’
Emerich Daroya (La Trobe University), PhD Candidate, ARCSHS.
‘The emergence of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in online cultures of barebacking’
Jacinthe Flore (La Trobe University), PhD Candidate, Gender and Diversity Studies.
‘Traces and amounts: A medical historiography of sexual appetite’

Drawing from Annemarie Mol's conceptulisation of multiplicity, we explore how health care practices enact their object(s), using physiotherapy as our example. Our concern is particularly to mobilise ways of practicing or doing physiotherapy that are largely under-theorised, unexamined or marginalised. This approach explores those actions that reside in the interstitial spaces around, beneath and beyond the limits of established practices. Using Mol's understanding of multiplicity as a theoretical and methodological driver, we argue that physiotherapy in practice often subverts the ubiquitous reductive discourses of biomedicine. Physiotherapy thus enacts multiple objects that it then works to suppress. We argue that highlighting multiplicities opens up physiotherapy as a space which can broaden the objects of practice and resist the kinds of closure that have become emblematic of contemporary physiotherapy practice. Using an exemplar from a rehabilitation setting, we explore how physiotherapists construct their object(s) and consider how multiplicity informs an otherwise physiotherapy that has broader implications for health care and rehabilitation.

Este ensaio é a forma que encontrei de compartilhar minha apreciação do livro After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004), de autoria do sociólogo britânico John Law. Unindo o agradável ao útil, a ideia é que o texto sirva como um glossário em prosa que facilite um primeiro contato com a Teoria Ator-Rede (ANT, na sigla em inglês), da qual Law é expoente. Eu proponho usar After Method como um fio condutor para adentrar o emaranhado de conceitos associados a ANT.

O conceito de deficiência tem sido profundamente contestado nas últimas décadas, tanto política como epistemologicamente. Por um lado, está em causa o reconhecimento de que a filiação de determinadas diferenças sob a noção de deficiência constitui uma recente “invenção” da modernidade ocidental. Por outro, trata-se de pulsar as consequências dessa  construção para as pessoas marcadas pelo estigma da deficiência. Estabelecendo um diálogo com importantes contribuições da teoria crítica, recrutando noções como “páticas de separação” (Michel Foucault), “materialização” (Judith Butler), “corpo múltiplo” (Annemarie Mol) e “sociologia das ausências” (Boaventura de Santos), o presente artigo  procura entender como a noção de deficiência pode ser
desmobilizada por leituras insurgentes das hierarquias da modernidade.

This paper explores “the political” of political economy through an analysis of neoliberalised care.  Borrowing Glyn Daly’s metaphor of the political economy as a disorganised household, where the “political” disrupts the neat order of the oikonomia, we argue that in neoliberalism care is a central site of the political. Through Foucauldian biopolitics we define commodification as a central logic in the governance of care, and situate it in the wider context of neoliberal governmentality. Conceptualising care as a corporeal relation, and following Annemarie Mol’s logic of care, we show how despite the constant attempts to domesticate it, the hegemonic discourse fails to fully subsume care within the “order of the household”. Examining the ruptures produced when care resists its governance, the paper demonstrates how the corporeal relatedness of care continues to open up spaces for the political, hence ensuring that the economy remains political.

This paper examines what it means to live with a disease, type 1 diabetes, in tandem with complex technologies. For decades, patients have been tediously replicating the function of an organ on a constant basis, but due to digital developments the materiality of care has changed, with daily treatment now woven into a wide web of digital components. Based on empirical fieldwork, the paper seeks to outline the impact of these transformations on what daily care means. I argue that patients increasingly act as technical maintenance workers who need to be in a constant state of standby in order to be forever ready to re-organise and re-stabilise their disease management. In this, a shift from caring for the body towards caring for technical devices can be observed. The analysis draws from both a sociomaterial perspective and a growing body of work in the field of science and technology that is shifting attention from stability to maintenance and repair. I argue that, against the background of complex technical systems, maintenance as a practice dedicated to restoring order implies a state of vigilance and readiness that I name ‘being on standby’. Through the lens of standby, both the fragility of care and the affective tensions of intimate body-technology relations become apparent.

(Please note that a revised version of this presentation is published in Global Society, November 2014. See the section of publications). This paper explores corporeality and ‘the political’ of political economy through an analysis of care and commodification.  We follow the post-structuralist tradition and distinguish between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, where the latter is an open concept, understood as pertaining to power relations more widely than the former’s association with traditional political institutions. Through a reading of Foucauldian biopolitics we define commodification as a central logic in the (bio)politics of care, and situate it in the wider context of neoliberal governmentality. By way of a conceptualisation of care as a corporeal relation, and following Annemarie Mol’s articulation of the logic of care, we show how the hegemonic discourse fails to fully subsume care within the neoliberal ‘order of the household’. We examine the ruptures and the interplay which arise from the attempts to ‘domesticate’ care, and argue that a central site of ‘the political’ in present day political economy emerges through this struggle, in which care resists its governance. For care, its bodily need and the responses that the need invites create corporeal relatedness that continues to open up spaces for ‘the political’. As such, care itself continues to challenge the existing order. It continues to reorganise ‘politics’.

KEYWORDS: care, the political, biopolitics, body, commodification, neoliberalism

Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably John Law and Bruno Latour) have crystallized a fundamental disagreement about the scope and purpose of intervention in actor-network theory or what we here choose to bracket as empirical philosophy. While the precept of agnostic description is taken as a given, the desired effects of such descriptions are highly debated: Is the goal to interfere with the singularity of the real through the enactment of multiple and possibly conflicting ontologies? Or is it (also) to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure? In this paper we think about this disagreement as a question of research strategy (a normative discord about the desirable outcome of an intervention) in order to assess its implications for research tactics (a descriptive accord about the practical crafting of an adequate account). A key point here is to challenge the impermeability of s...

Sehen steht am Beginn medizinischer Praxis. Dabei ist das Sehen nicht nur eine notwendige Vorstufe des diagnostischen Verstehens und therapeutischen Urteilens, es weist auch eine komplexe normative Struktur auf. Durch die Entwicklung medizinischer Bildgebung und (digitaler) medizinischer Bilder – man denke an die Magnetresonanztomographie (MRT) und die Computertomographie (CT) seit den 1970ern – hat das Thema eine neue Brisanz erhalten. Der Aufsatz spürt Normativitäten des digitalen Sehens auf verschiedenen Ebenen auf und greift dabei auf das konzeptuelle Angebot der 'Ontonorms' von Annemarie Mol zurück.

Resumen: El presente escrito sintetiza, evalúa y amplia críticamente los debates contemporáneos sobre el ejercicio de contextualización para comprender los nuevos desafíos y posibilidades que acarrea la investigación social. Para esta tarea, primero, se introducirán las ideas centrales de los Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología con la finalidad de comprender cómo el proceso de contextualización afecta directamente el objeto de estudio. Segundo, se señalará que este objeto posee un estatus ontológico emergente puesto que se deben redefinir constantemente las relaciones que lo componen. Tercero, se resaltarán las contribuciones de Marilyn Strathern a los debates anteriores por medio de sus reflexiones sobre las escalas. Por último, mediante los conceptos de lógica-perceptiva, hacer-escala y mereología se sustentará que la ontología, la epistemología, la metodología y la reflexividad se encuentran en una retroalimentación permanente. Además, se resaltará que este vínculo implica reevaluar la posición política del investigador, la forma en que se entiende el trabajo de campo y el mundo no-humano. PALABRAS CLAVE Contexto, ontología, reflexividad, Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Marilyn Strathern.