Category: materials

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caring infrastructures concepts ethics ethics, politics and economy of care maintenance and repair objects of care and care practices open sourcing participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures politics and economy of care resources urban and personal devices

How to care for the opening of care infrastructures?

[EN] How to care for the opening of care infrastructures?

(Versión en castellano más abajo)

The mess we’re in has accentuated two recurring concerns, perhaps with newer nuances: (1) the importance of tinkering and opening up care infrastructures and equipment; (2) the relevance of experimenting with their documentation (precisely in the distance of a remote confinement)

(1) Here we are again in an austerity crisis, again care as the main mode of response, and yet again in need of proprietary equipment, closed down by patents and strict rules of circulation (where the health expertocracy & free market meet). But there are also mismatches…

The previous crisis brought out a wealth of forms of tinkering and inventiveness, DIY hacks and 3D printed contraptions in all kinds of initiatives. That crisis deeply impacted architecture and design, but health systems protected themselves from what was though to be a dangerous experiment …

Health struggles revolved around supporting public infrastructures, but beyond a discussion around generic drugs, the ‘question concerning technology’ did not seem to pop up much, even though its importance was highlighted (e.g. open orthopedics and technical aids)

The urban experimentation of many DIY urbanism, collective architecture and handmade urbanism… made emerge a context to explore other ways of opening up the city’s infrastructures and their rights. All of this has been sadly crumbling: too much personal – and too little institutional – an effort

Now a new techno-political field seems to emerge, even more closed than the previous one: Will this situation of health infrastructural collapse allow for an experimentation with seizing the means of care, opening up an inquiry on how this might be supported by public infrastructures? Time will tell

(2) Now, as it happened, those findings and practical solutions need to be traced and circulated, knowledge of an expert and experiential kind sprout and turn ideas that come and go. We document to share, but also not to forget…

And, also, a great variety of digital platforms erupt, wishing to centralise the archiving of such experiences, their tagging and categorization: websites, telegram channels, but also Twitter as an archive of a tinkering society in need of auto-inscribing to endure, when not just to be…

With a big difference: ten years ago, online presence was treated as a mere support, an aid, main-staging embodied togetherness. However, in the distance of a remote confinement digital documentation takes on a different – and greater – relevance

Many of the insurgent archives documenting the critical experiences of years ago have now disappeared: we didn’t have the time, the will, the conditions to work to maintain and care for all of them – some have survived, many thanks to the use of commercial platforms whose servers are still intact

Will we forget and obliterate what we have learned, the traces of the new that emerge, the timeless solutions that always reemerge, the dramas of the moment? Sure, we need to forget in order to go on, but digital records are deeply fragile. Will we let the same thing happen to us again? What to do?

P.S. This thread is a testimony of many conversations in the last years with @entornoalasilla @adolfoestalella @acorsin @cboserman @jararocha @blancallen @birrabel @dlopezgom @ CareNet_IN3 @zuloark @Makeatuvida @Alephvoid @autofabricantes @ alafuente @ janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno

P.S.2. But also a reflection after witnessing what @frenalacurva @ItaliaCovid19 @CovidAidUK @nwspk are making emerge, together with the great number of health practitioners and makers documenting their inventiveness – here on Twitter, for instance – around the globe

**

Slightly amended version of a thread published on Twitter

[ES] ¿Cómo cuidar de la apertura de las infraestructuras del cuidado?

Este momento delirante ha acentuado dos preocupaciones recurrentes, con nuevos matices: (1) la importancia del cacharreo o la apertura de infraestructuras y equipamientos del cuidado; (2) la experimentación con su documentación (en la distancia de un confinamiento a distancia)

(1) De nuevo una crisis por austeridad, de nuevo la centralidad del cuidado como respuesta, de nuevo la necesidad de equipamientos cerrados por patentes y reglas estrictas de circulación (donde cruzan la expertocracia sanitaria y el libre mercado). Pero con algunas diferencias…

La anterior crisis sacó la inventiva cacharrera, un despliegue de ñapas, makeos, impresión 3D e iniciativas do-it-yourself para todo tipo de actividades. Esa crisis afectó de lleno a arquitectura y diseño, pero el mundo de la salud se protegió: era una experimentación peligrosa…

La lucha de la salud se centró en torno a su sostenimiento público, pero más allá de la discusión sobre los medicamentos genéricos, la pregunta por la tecnología no parecía abrirse, aun cuando se planteó su importancia con fuerza (e.g. ortopedias y ayudas técnicas abiertas)

La experimentación urbana de lugares como Can Batlló o el Campo de Cebada, el handmade urbanism… generaron un contexto para explorar otros modos de hacer ciudad con infraestructuras abiertas. Todo eso ha ido cayendo tristemente en desgracia: mucho esfuerzo y poca institución

Ahora se abre un nuevo campo tecno-político, todavía más clausurado que el anterior: ¿Permitirá esta situación de colapso sanitario abrir a indagación y sostenimiento con infraestructuras públicas la experimentación con la reapropiación de los medios del cuidado? El tiempo dirá

(2) Ahora, como entonces, eso hallazgos y soluciones prácticas necesitan abrirse y circular, saberes y conocimientos experienciales que brotan y se convierten en ideas que vienen y van. Se documenta para compartir, pero también para no olvidar

Y, de nuevo, comienza la panoplia de plataformas digitales para su archivado centralizado, su etiquetado y categorización: webs, canales de telegram, pero también Twitter como archivo de una sociedad cacharrera que busca auto-inscribirse para subsistir, cuando no existir…

Con una gran diferencia: hace diez años, lo online era un apoyo o soporte, quedando el vínculo corpóreo en una centralidad; en la distancia de un confinamiento a distancia, sin embargo, esa documentación digital cobra una importancia nuclear

Desaparecieron muchos de esos archivos insurgentes de la experiencia crítica de hace años: no les pudimos meter ganas, esfuerzo, manutención y cuidado a todos ellos – algunos han subsistido, muchos gracias al uso de plataformas blog cuyos servidores siguen en activo

¿Olvidaremos y haremos caer en el olvido todo lo aprendido, los trazos de lo nuevo que emerge, las soluciones atemporales, los dramas del momento? Cierto, necesitamos olvidar para vivir, pero el registro digital es frágil ¿Dejaremos que nos pase lo mismo otra vez? ¿Qué hacer?

PD. Aquí acordándome mucho de cientos de conversaciones con @entornoalasilla @adolfoestalella @acorsin @cboserman @jararocha @blancallen @birrabel @dlopezgom @CareNet_IN3 @zuloark @Makeatuvida @Alephvoid @autofabricantes @alafuente@janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno

PD2. Pero también pensando en todo lo que están abriendo @frenalacurva @ItaliaCovid19 @CovidAidUK @nwspk y la cantidad de profesionales del mundo sanitario documentando su inventiva

PD3. Y también muchas de las conversaciones recientes con @janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno – fuente de tantas reflexiones interesantes

Adaptación de un hilo publicado originalmente en Twitter

Picture credits: Patent spec of Le Prieur regulator (1946-47) (Wikimedia Commons)

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experimental collaborations intravention publications

Remaining in confusion: An unfocused manifesto?! *

How to experiment with the modes of public engagement, as well as with the necessary equipment to research in confused and confusing times?

What could we learn from this puzzlement, the strangeness, the confusion of the last weeks?

Might there be something to explore and experiment in this mess we’re in?

– A manifesto in 30 tweets

– Also including an added Disclaimer (10 tweets), reflecting on ‘why this now??!!’

https://twitter.com/tscriado/status/1244662290370244608

Hey, what happened to 10??

Categories
events experimental collaborations intravention objects of care and care practices re-learning design urban and personal devices

4.02.2020 – DIE ZUKUNFT DER STADT(FORSCHUNG) | HCU Kultur der Metropole

https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/fileadmin/documents/KM_Website/10_Jahre_KM-flackern.gif

Das Studienprogramm Kultur der Metropole an der HafenCity Universität Hamburg feiert zehnjähriges Bestehen auf Kampnagel

Das Wissen der Stadt in Bewegung halten – dazu diskutieren diverse Stadtforschende und -machende am 4. Februar 2020 auf Kampnagel.

Die Diskussion ist Teil eines abendfüllenden Programms anlässlich des zehnjährigen Bestehens des Studiengangs „Kultur der Metropole“ an der HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Den Auftakt macht die Schweizer Kulturwissenschaftlerin Monika Litscher, die einmal mehr anschaulich macht, dass die aktuellen gesellschaftlichen und vor allem in Städten zu verortenden Herausforderungen und Krisen nicht ohne die Geisteswissenschaften zu meistern sind.
Studierende präsentieren in Form von Werkstattberichten ihre Projektarbeit zum Deutschen Hafenmuseum, zu den Rändern des Urbanen und zu neuen Mensch-Tier-Verhältnissen in der Stadt.
Eingeladen sind Stadtinteressierte, städtische Akteur*innen, Projektpartner*innen, Studierende und Studieninteressierte. Der Eintritt ist frei.

Seit seiner Gründung 2009 ist das Studienprogramm „Kultur der Metropole“ mit seinem Profil einzigartig in der deutschsprachigen Hochschullandschaft und steht für kulturwissen-schaftliche Stadtforschung und kreativ-angewandte Kulturarbeit im urbanen Kontext. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die kulturellen Dimensionen von Stadt (und ihre Wirkung auf alle Handlungsfelder des Städtischen). Gelehrt werden Grundlagen in Kultur- und Raumtheorie, Stadtethnographie, historische Stadtforschung, Museologie sowie künstlerische Forschung – und der Transfer in verschiedene Anwendungsfelder wie städtische Kulturarbeit, aktuelle Stadtentwicklungsprogramme bzw. partizipative Stadtgestaltung, Quartiersmanagement u.v.m.
Absolvent*innen von Kultur der Metropole arbeiten heute erfolgreich auf vielen Feldern der Stadtkultur: in den Deichtorhallen, bei der Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, bei der Kreativgesellschaft, sie promovieren, gründen Modelabels, werden Filmemacher*innen, und Journalist*innen u.v.a.

Wann: Dienstag, 04.02.2020, 19:00 Uhr

Wo: Kampnagel | Jarrestrasse 20 | 22303 Hamburg Veranstaltungsprogramm

DIE ZUKUNFT DER STADT(FORSCHUNG)

19:00 Uhr BEGRÜSSUNG UND VORTRAG
Monika Litscher (Kulturwissenschaftlerin, Zürich) über die »Values of Humanities« und kulturwissenschaftliche Stadtforschung

19:45 Uhr PODIUMSDISKUSSION
Es diskutieren u.a. Tomás Sánchez Criado (Anthropologe, HU Berlin), Amelie Deuflhard (Intendantin Kampnagel, Hamburg), Lisa Kosok (Historikerin, HCU Hamburg), Alexa Färber (Stadtanthropologin, Universität Wien); Moderation: Kathrin Wildner (Stadtethnologin, Berlin/HCU Hamburg) und Laurenz Gottstein (Student Kultur der Metropole /HCU Hamburg)

ab 21:00 UHR PROJEKTPRÄSENTATIONEN VON STUDIERENDEN UND GET TOGETHER

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caring infrastructures experimental collaborations intravention objects of care and care practices open sourcing politics and economy of care publications urban and personal devices

DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis

Adolfo Estalella and I take part in a thematic section of the ANUAC. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, titled Changing margins and relations within European anthropology. In it we shift from a discussion around the geo-political identity of anthropology to its status as a scholarly discipline.

Ours is a situated account of how a particular setting and moment in time affected our anthropological practice: The beginning of the 2010s was a period of political unrest in Spain. Like many other countries, it suffered the harsh effects of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. However, despite the crisis (or maybe because of it) cities experienced a moment of political creativity and urban inventiveness: People occupied empty buildings and unused plots of vacant land to create all kind of projects, refurnishing the city with an impulse to reanimate collective forms of life. All kind of knowledges blossomed in these initiatives. Our several-years-long ethnographic investigations were carried out in this period in Spain’s main two cities (Madrid and Barcelona)

Thrown into an urban landscape left behind by a policy of financial austerity, we worked intimately with architects, activist designers, and bodily diverse people. Singularly and unexpectedly for us, we found in them the companions we lacked in our local institutional academic contexts. They turned into epistemic partners: companions in the shared endeavour of producing anthropological problematisations. Under these circumstances, the knowledge we produced at the time emerged out of a moment of crisis: knowledge in crisis

We do not intend to argue on the European condition of our anthropological practice, neither we are interested in tracing geo-political frontiers of disciplinary imaginations. Instead, drawing on our ethnographic experience – and the collaborations we established with our epistemic partners in the field – we feel urged to problematize the disciplinary boundaries anthropology conventionally tends to assume…

Hence, in the article we offer an account of the interstitial spaces that we both inhabited “in the vacuum of tradition” in the recent Spanish crisis, and how that enabled us to articulate singular relations with variegated epistemic partners with whom we set up distinct ambiances of care. In our ethnographic description we pay attention to the blurring of institutional and scholarly infrastructures and modes of togetherness. In describing the particular transformations – or “intraventions” – that these joint spaces enacted, we would like to intimate a different figuration anthropology took in our practice: Not a disciplinary field but a field of experimental collaborations.

As we show, treating our ethnographic counterparts as epistemic partners has the potential to retrofit our institutionalized settings and disciplinary practices. The anthropology we describe, hence, is one assembled from scratch, caring for the mundane issues that very often are forgotten and rendered invisible: an anthropology done with others, a DIY anthropology?

El Campo de Cebada CC BY 2014 Manuel Domínguez Fernández

Abstract

This is an account of the transformations in our anthropological practice derived from working in the many interstitial spaces that opened up in the wake of the recent Spanish economic crisis. Ambulating in void spaces of Madrid and Barcelona, our anthropological practice was there re-built in ways that blurred our disciplinary boundaries. What there emerged was anthropology not as a disciplinary field, but as a field of experimental collaborations. A practice that re-learnt its ways treating counterparts as true epistemic partners, and setting up distinct ambiances of care with them: not only to care for one another in situations of great difficulty, but mostly to care for our different forms of inquiry, addressing the very situations we were under. An anthropology done together with others, assembling from scratch a conceptual body, caring for the mundane issues that are very often forgotten and rendered invisible by disciplinary fields: A DIY anthropology?

Published in Anuac. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, 8(2): 143-165 (co-written with Adolfo Estalella) | PDF

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caring infrastructures ethics, politics and economy of care maintenance and repair publications techniques & ways of doing

Repair as repopulating the devastated desert of our political and social imaginations

Drawing together a wide variety of contributions and approaches to different strategies of repair and recovery in post-crisis Portugal, Francisco Martínez has compiled the volume Politics of Recuperation, a comprehensive anthropological approach to the meanings of the crises in Southern Europe. As explained in the back cover:

How did Portuguese society recover after the economic crisis? Through a range of ethnographic case studies focusing on the Portuguese recovery, this book begins a conversation about the experience of recuperation and repair. It addresses how the recovery of relations creates something transcendental, adds a human dimension to the public sphere and expands our conception of what constitutes the political.

Located in the cracks and gaps between the state and society, recuperation appears as a social and infrastructural answer linked to reciprocity, critical urbanity, generational interweaving, alternate ordering and reconnection of different bodies and histories. With chapters looking at public art in Lisbon and recuperative modes of action, this collection takes a thorough look at a society in crisis and shows how the people of the community create micro-politics of resistance. Ultimately, Politics of Recuperation reflects on the meaning of personal and collective resilience in Europe today, as well as on the limits and interstices of contemporary politics.

Repair as repopulating the devastated desert of our political and social imaginations

In my contribution––originally conceived as a comment in a workshop where the different chapters were discussed, and here framed as a conclusion to the volume––, I reflect on how the different works resonate with a growing series of recent works addressing Southern Europe in/as Crisis. Indeed, the recent post-2008 crises have rekindled the fear of ‘going backwards,’ still very vivid in migration tropes from the 1960s–70s. However, this assessment of ‘backwardness’ unfolds a wider European genre of telling ‘what the problem is’, with peculiar connotations for Southern Europe: where ‘modernity’ and its alleged univocal drive towards ‘progress’ comes centre stage: Europe, here, appears as a particular poetics of infrastructure.

But these crises have also rekindled a ‘slight orientalism’ of Southern Europe: a nearby place conjuring images of the far away or, more precisely, a slightly far away nearby place. This slight orientalism has been over the years conveniently mobilised over and over again in the ways in which tourism is branded and marketed. Interestingly, it has also served later on to underpin the ‘exceptionality of Europe’ trope and its violent incarnation in the perceived threats of non-European migration: fierce – when not most of the time overly brutal – border and sea control, detention and containment or racialised police checks. Southern Europe as both leisure resort and boundary-maker of ‘Fortress Europe’.

However, beyond these tropes, and in a context of experimentation with ‘neoliberal’ forms of government the financialisation of life and the expansion of indebtedness have also brought with them other explanations for what the problem was and what to do about it. Indeed, to many, the Common Market, and later the European Union, have been quintessential mechanisms for that economic transformation. One in which the developmental issue of Southern and Eastern Europe was addressed beyond explicitly racialised terms, yet forcefully reinstating a particularly modernist ontology of the social: a scalar one, which not only classifies actors in terms of a grid of the big and the small (macro and micro; the state and the people; society/group and the individual), but also creates concomitant orders of worth and causality with regards to what it might mean to take political action.

Against this background, the works here compiled offer alternative accounts. Notably, the Portuguese verb reparar has a nuance that the English ‘to repair’ does not have: one that goes beyond ‘to fix something that is broken or damaged’ and ‘to take action in order to improve a bad situation’ (the two main definitions found in the Macmillan English Dictionary). Reparar also means ‘to observe’, ‘to pay attention’. The descriptive repertoire that this anthology brings forward would thus help us shed light on the distinct nuances that different groups, people and collectives might be bringing about, unsettling unified narratives around what might have happened and what to do with it. Observing, paying attention to the forms of repair, hence, might be the best antidote to ready-made explanations of the ‘what’ and ‘why’, and any ready-made concepts or frameworks suggesting what should be done and how: an unsettled response to an unsettling condition, perhaps?

In my opinion, what is at stake in the particularly reparative practices and relations beyond scale, assembled in this anthology (dances, moneylending, the retrieval of ancient legacies, caring for discarded goods or engaging in different forms of urban activism) is a dispute of the actual definition of ‘welfare’. In other words, the works here compiled might portray a reinvention of ‘welfare society’ that does not bear the mark of disaster, but of hope: a hope that in these particularly disastrous times of ours – when crises do not seem to have an end – they might be ‘repopulating the devastated desert of our [social and political] imaginations’, to say it with Stengers.

As I see it, the allegedly small has never been more important to recasting our hopes, to repopulating our imaginations of the greater good, devastated by austerity and the path-dependency of neoliberal rule. Especially when everything seems lost, these modes of repair show the hopeful character of how things might be created anew: not going back to ‘what we were’, but experimenting with modes of togetherness yet to be defined.

Published in Politics of Recuperation (pp.207-220). Oxford: Bloomsbury (2020, F. Martínez, ed.) | PDF

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accessibility caring infrastructures collectives design intraventions ethics, politics and economy of care experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights independent-living open sourcing press releases re-learning design technical aids urban and personal devices

Diseño y Diáspora #79: Diseñando para la diversidad funcional

Estando en Helsinki para el NORDES tuve el placer de charlar con Mariana Salgado en Diseño y Diáspora sobre el cuidado como una activación de otros diseños posibles: aquellos que aparecen pensando desde la diversidad funcional en En torno a la silla o desde el re-aprender a diseñar para todxs.

Diseño y Diáspora: El podcast de diseño social en español y portuñol. Conversaciones entre una diseñadora y Otros: a veces amigos, a veces investigadores en diseño, la mayoría de las veces diseñadores trabajando en innovación social o en practicas de diseño emergentes. Desde Helsinki, con ganas por Mariana Salgado.

#79: Diseñando para la diversidad funcional

En esta charla Tomás Criado nos cuenta sobre su trabajo en el ámbito del diseño desde la antropología. Él es antropólogo con especialización en STS (estudios de ciencia y tecnología). Trabaja en la Universidad de Humboldt en Berlín (Alemania). Nos explica conceptos como el cuidado, la diversidad funcional y las tecnologías de la amistad. A la vez describe algunos proyectos de diseño concreto en los que se comprometió luego del 15M, en España. Nos convoca a pensar el diseño desde la incertidumbre y entender los vínculos que se producen en procesos de diseño colaborativos. Al final de la entrevista también hablamos de la enseñanza de diseño a partir de un proyecto donde exploró con alumnos el diseño en situaciones de crisis. 

Escuchar en Spotify | Escuchar en Anchor
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art events experimental collaborations intravention materials multimodal

Spiele als Stadtforschung / Games as urban research

Our Stadtlabor for multimodal anthropology‘s explorations around urban games feature at the exhibition „Open Form neu Denken“ organized by Z/KU at the Werkstatt of Haus der Statistik.

When? October 25–27 2019
Where? Werkstatt Haus der Statistik – Karl-Marx-Allee 1, 10178 Berlin

Come by and play with us!

Events

Friday, 25.10.2019: Opening

Saturday, 26.10.2019: Conference
A conference in the exhibition will be focusing on the concept of open form and how it travels between design, architecture, politics and anthropology. Ignacio Farías and Tomás Criado will give a short input on games as a form of urban research.

Sunday, 27.10.2019: Playing
The Stadtlabor team that worked on the games will be hosting the exhibition and playing and explaining the games to the visitors

Picture by Francisco Montoya, 2019 [CC]

More information (German & English)

DE | Spiele als Stadtforschung

Als Stadtlabor entwickeln wir konzeptuelle, spekulative und materielle Werkzeuge, wie etwa Spiele, um auf die aktuellen Krisen des modernen Urbanismus zu reagieren. Trotz oder gerade aufgrund ihrer spielerischen Dimension befähigen uns Spiele, die Art und Weise zu verändern wie wir Themen in Frage stellen, Wissen teilen, Bewusstsein schaffen, kritische Öffentlichkeiten generieren, Zukünfte imaginieren und Fürsorge erlernen.

Die von uns entwickelten Spiele sind keine finalen Produkte, sondern offene Prototypen. Sie sind Ergebnis und Methode unserer Forschung und Werkzeug, um Stadtentwicklungsprozesse gemeinsam zu gestalten. Als solche sind sie offen für Veränderung und Versionierung, damit ihre spezifischen Sprachen, Logiken, Spielweisen und Effekte an spezifische Situationen und unterschiedliche städtische Akteure angepasst werden können.

Unsere Explorationen rund um Spiele begannen im Kontext eines einjährigen ethnographischen MA-Studierendenprojekts The Only Game in Town?, das die aktuelle Krise des Berliner Wohnraums und Immobilienmarkts analysierte. Inspiriert von der Geschichte des Spiels Monopoly – registriert im Jahr 1904 von Elizabeth Magie als The Landlord’s Game und konzipiert als pädagogisches und politisches Instrument, um über die Gefahren von Landmonopolen aufzuklären – haben wir uns vorgenommen, Spielprototypen zu entwickeln, um unsere Forschungsergebnisse zu teilen.

In Zusammenarbeit mit dem ZK/U haben wir drei Spiele entwickelt: (1) House of Gossip problematisiert die drohende Verdrängung von Mieter*innen aus ihrem Wohnraum; (2) in Sue Them All setzt sich ein Kollektiv für gerechte Wohnpolitik ein; und (3) das Kiez Mind Archive schafft einen performativen Raum der Wissensproduktion. In diesem Prozess stellten wir fest, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit Spielen auch unseren Bezug zur Wissensproduktion verändert: vom Beschreiben zum Eingreifen, von Repräsentation zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeiten, und damit auch zu einem Experimentieren mit der Bedeutung von Politik und Kritik bei der Entwicklung und Nutzung von Spielen.

EN | Games as urban research
In the Stadtlabor for multimodal anthropology, we are developing conceptual, speculative and material tools, such as games, to respond to the current crises of modern urbanism. In spite, or even because of their ludic dimension, games are capable to alter the ways in which we discuss issues, share knowledge, raise awareness, make urban problems public, imagine futures, and learn to care.

The games we have developed are not final products but open prototypes. They are result and method of our research, and work as devices to intervene in urban development processes. As such, they are open to be transformed and re-versioned, so that their specific languages, logics, gameplay, and effects could be adapted to specific situations and concerns of various urban actors.

Our exploration around games started in the context of a one-year ethnographic MA student project The Only Game in Town? analysing the contemporary crisis of housing and real estate markets in Berlin. Inspired by the history of the game Monopoly–registered in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as The Landlord’s Game and conceived as an educational and political tool to reveal the dangers of land monopolies–, we then set to prototype games as a means to share our research results. In collaboration with ZK/U, we have produced three games: (1) House of Gossip problematizes the threat of displacement of tenants from their homes; (2) in Sue Them All a collective advocates for fair housing policy; and (3) the Kiez Mind Archive creates a performative space of knowledge production. In the process, we discovered that developing games also impacts how we could do research: from describing to intervening, from representing to performing (and breaching) reality, thus experimenting with what politics and critique might mean whenever we prototype and play.

Testing games at Open Form Exhibition,  2019 [CC]
Hackaton with Invisible Playground, 2019 [CC]
Neighborhood festival KMA, 2019 [CC]

Games: Open Documentation

House of Gossip

House of Gossip is problematising the threat of displacement of tenants from their homes. The opaque information during a house selling process leads to rumours among the tenants. Through improvised encounters and the exchange of rumours the players are trying to ally with each other and to fight for their interests.

Sue Them All

In Sue Them All, a collective advocates fair housing policy. The aim is to bring inadmissible leases. Individual and collective interests are coming together. Whether you pursue a competitive or cooperative strategy, change your tactics during the game or compromise is up to you.

Kiez Mind Archive 

You move through the district with an open task. It creates an associative game with the everyday and the unknown. Through your photographic interpretations you create an alternative visual archive of the neighbourhood.

Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology

DE | Das Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology ist eine Forschungsplattform, in der Anthropolog*innen, die an aktuellen Stadtthemen interessiert sind, multimediale Formate der Wissensproduktion und -intervention in Zusammenarbeit mit städtischen Akteuren erkunden und wird vom Lehrstuhl für Stadtanthropologie der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin geführt. Mitglieder, die an der Entwicklung der Spiele beteiligt waren, sind: Diana Mammana, Tan Weigand, Lilian Krischer, Lena Heiss, Leonie Schipke, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Marie Aline Klinger, Tomás Sánchez Criado und Ignacio Farías.

EN | The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology is a research platform, where anthropologists interested in contemporary urban issues explore multimedia formats of knowledge production and intervention in collaboration with other urban actors and is run by the Chair of Urban Anthropology at Humboldt University of Berlin. The members who participated in the development of these games are: Diana Mammana, Tan Weigand, Lilian Krischer, Lena Heiss, Leonie Schipke, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Marie Aline Klinger, Tomás Sánchez Criado and Ignacio Farías.

**

Texts adapted and expanded from the official invitation & the documentation of the exhibition

Categories
design intraventions events experimental collaborations intravention more-than-human objects of care and care practices open sourcing re-learning design techniques & ways of doing

DGSKA 2019 Konstanz – Plenary ‘Envisioning Anthropological Futures’

Under the theme ‘The End of Negotiations? / Das Ende der Aushandlungen?‘ the DGSKA (German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology) celebrated it’s 2019 conference from September 29th till October 2nd at the Universität Konstanz.

Kristina Mashimi and Thomas Stodulka (on behalf of the DGSKA board) organised and moderated the following plenary session, to which they invited some of us “mid-career scholars” – Janina Kehr (Universität Bern), Sandra Calkins (FU Berlin), Michaela Haug (Universität zu Köln) and yours truly – to envision anthropological futures departing from our own experiences engaging in public, inter and transdisciplinary settings, their epistemic and methodological opportunities and limitations.

Below you could find further information on the session, as well as links to the videos / audio files of our interventions. Hope you enjoy it.

Plenary session IV: Envisioning anthropological futures

Tuesday, 1.10.2019, 9.00-11.00h, Audimax

In the wake of political, economic, and ecological transformations of the contemporary world, and the far-reaching impact of digitalization and mediatization, social and cultural anthropologists are challenged to continuously rethink their theoretical, methodological, and professional practices. Not only are they required to respond to the emerging topical challenges of globalizing, postcolonial research settings by engaging the expertise from other social science and humanities’ disciplines, the wider field of area studies, and the natural and health sciences. They also face growing expectations from their interlocutors, funding organizations, and their immediate professional environments in regard to shifting standards of research ethics and data management, the engagement in various modes of collaborative research, and meeting their responsibilities to society and the public.

This plenary assembles presentations from 4-5 early to mid-career scholars who discuss the challenges and tensions they face when doing anthropology today. They will outline their visions for future positionings of the discipline regarding its epistemological and methodological opportunities and limitations in inter- and transdisciplinary research settings. Furthermore, the panelists will discuss the discipline’s engagement in academic teaching and the move towards open access publishing, as well as its intervention in public debates. As a forum for innovation, the plenary session is less concerned with systematic reviews of previous disciplinary discussions than with the articulation of future visions for practice and collaboration in and beyond the context of anthropology (or, in the German-speaking context, Ethnologie or Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie). The contributions will be published in the upcoming 150th anniversary issue of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (ZfE, 2019) which will be edited collectively by the DGSKA board and is due to appear in time for the 2019 conference.

Videos / Audio files

Janina Kehr (Universität Bern): Crafting the Otherwise in Medicine and Anthropology

Tomás Criado (HU Berlin): Anthropology as a careful design practice?

Sandra Calkins (FU Berlin): Writing planetary futures: Plants, loss, and intersections of STS and anthropology in Germany

Michaela Haug (Universität zu Köln): Looking into the future through the lens of hope: environmental change, diverse hopes and the challenge of engagement

Categories
caring infrastructures independent-living maintenance and repair older people publications telecare

“The Lady is Not There”: Repairing Tita Meme as a Telecare User

Francisco Martínez & Patrick Laviolette have recently compiled the edited volume Repair, Breakages, Breakthroughs: Ethnographic Responses, which they explain as follows:

What does it mean to claim that something is broken? What is the connection between tinkering and innovation? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have? Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings and leftovers. The set of contributions illustrates the strong affective power hidden in situations of disrepair and repair; broken objects often bring strong emotions into play, but also energising reactions of creative action.

In response to their kind invitation, I contribute with a short piece, summarising a chapter published in 2012 in Spanish as part of my PhD. In an ethnographic snapshot–in the vocabulary of the editors–I address ‘repair’ from the particular work of underpinning users in a telecare service for older people.

ABSTRACT

Repair has been addressed in the growing body of literature in the social sciences either as a restoration of social order or as a form of care for fragile things. Drawing from ethnographic work on a telecare service for older people in Spain between 2007 and 2011, I address here repair from the ‘flesh and bones’ side of it. In particular, I focus on the work undertaken by service workers, users and contacts alike that helps to maintain an infrastructure of usership: not a restorative form of medical rehabilitation, but a constant restoration of a web of embodied, legal and technical practices so that someone could be considered a user of a service. That is, an infrastructure creating and ensuring the conditions for (tele)care to happen or take place in compliance with contractual terms. Rather than as a form of ‘re-instauration’ (going back to square one, revitalising and polishing in practice the terms of the contract), I call their form of repair ‘underpinning’. It entails going with the flow, and acting thereon. Underpinning could be described as a form of repair that addresses habits as things going beyond the skin, in and through different mediators that connect uneven events and places. To underpin, hence, is to ensure on the go a certain topology of habit: a habitality.

Published in Repair, Breakages, Breakthroughs: Ethnographic Responses (pp. 67–72). Oxford: Berghahn | PDF

Categories
accessibility experimental collaborations intravention participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures publications

Erfahren: Experimente mit technischer Demokratie in Entwurfskursen

Séverine Marguin, Henrike Rabe, Wolfgang Schäffner and Friedrich Schmidgall have recently edited a compilation in German featuring interesting and relevant work in different creative disciplines foregrounding modes of experimenting.

Titled Experimentieren. Einblicke in Praktiken und Versuchsaufbauten zwischen Wissenschaft und Gestaltung (published open access by Transcript Verlag) the scope of the book is as follows:

Forschen und Gestalten sind experimentelle Vorgehensweisen, die darauf ausgerichtet sind, etwas Neues, noch nicht Existierendes hervorzubringen. Sie haben beide Projektcharakter, denn sie führen an einen Nullpunkt des Wissens. Doch welche Strategien und Verfahren sind es, die aus diesem Nichtwissen, diesen Vermutungen und Ideen zu konkreten Ergebnissen führen?

ForscherInnen aus 23 Wissenschafts- und Gestaltungsdisziplinen berichten in diesem Band über ihr Experimentieren und geben Einblicke in ihre Praktiken und Versuchsaufbauten. Er bietet damit eine Bestandsaufnahme zeitgenössischer Experimentalkulturen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Wissenschaft und Gestaltung und skizziert eine Praxeologie des Experiments.

Ignacio Farías and I contribute to the volume with a chapter, where we adapt and translate into German some of the insights from our pedagogical experiments with technical democracy’ at the TU München’s Department of Architecture.

Erfahren: Experimente mit technischer Demokratie in Entwurfskursen

CC BY NC ND 2017 Design in Crisis 2: Coming to our senses (Sofia Ruíz, Irene Landa, Sophie Razaire, Emilie Charrier, Léo Godebout and Lambert Drapeau, Technische Universität München, 2017)

Abstract

In diesem Aufsatz erzählen wir von pädagogischen Herausforderungen, denen wir an einem der größten deutschen Institute für Wissenschafts­ und Technikforschung (STS), dem 2013 an der Technischen Universität München gegründeten Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), begegnet sind. Konzipiert als „integratives Forschungszentrum“ mit Lehrstühlen an verschiedenen Fakultäten, will das MCTS nicht nur verschiedene STS­Traditionen unter einem Dach zusammenbringen, sondern auch mit Formen der Kollaboration und Intervention in den Natur- und Technikwissenschaften experimentieren. Zwischen 2015 und 2018 lehrten wir an der Fakultät für Architektur, wo wir einen vom STS geprägten stadtanthropologischen Ansatz zu aktuellen Herausforderungen technischer Demokratisierung vertraten. Im Folgenden möchten wir experimentelle Strategien aufzeigen, die bei den Entwurfskursen für Masterstudierende der Architektur zum Einsatz kamen. Unsere Experimente hatten ein zentrales konzeptionelles Anliegen: die Bedeutung und die Möglichkeiten von technischer Demokratie für die Ausbildung zukünftiger EntscheidungsträgerInnen in Sachen gebaute Umwelt entfalten.

Published in Experimentieren. Vergleich experimenteller Kulturen in Wissenschaft und Gestaltung Repair (pp. 57-70). Bielefeld: Transcript | PDF