Category: objects of care and care practices

The world/s at the ends of the city – Institutskolloquium, IfEE, summer semester 2019

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It is our great pleasure to invite you all to the upcoming summer semester 2019 edition of the Institut für Europäische Ethnology’s (Humboldt-University of Berlin) Institutskolloquium (our departmental lecture series):

The world/s at the ends of the city

Explorations in urban and environmental anthropology

These public lecture series will take place each Tuesday 2-4pm (except otherwise stated, *) from April 9, 2019 until July 2, 2019 in the Room 0007 at Hausvogteiplatz 5-7 10117 Berlin. 

We would be really grateful if you could share it with anyone interested.

If you happen to be in Berlin any of those dates, don’t hesitate to come!

Organised by Ignacio Farías, Tomás Criado & Jörg Niewöhner

Rationale

What if the city was not a world in itself, but an interface to multiple, overlapping, often invisible and conflicting worldings? That is, more or less powerful, more or less precarious ways of composing urban ecologies that sustain–and impede–forms of life. But also, what if those worldings were the end of the city as we have come to know it to date? This departmental lecture series wishes to explore the world/s at the ends of the city, giving this term a twofold sense:

• Firstly, the series pays attention to nonhuman worldly forces both shaping and challenging urban cohabitation. The challenges these forces bring with them lead us to explore the potential shape of an urban cosmopolitics in the Anthropocene. We are thus interested in understanding how organic and inorganic, geological, chemical and biological forces challenge our understanding of the city and the modes of operating in it.
• Secondly, we want to zoom into critical and experimental ecologies of practices un-doing and re-doing the city at the edges of habitability. That is, social movements but also movements or, rather, displacements of the social be they reclaiming infrastructures, apprehending or appropriating urban ecologies. We aim to explore what it could mean to rethink urbanism, in its constructive and moral/citizenship dimensions, from different kinds of engagements of human and nonhuman others. We aim to make visible arts of survival, inquiry, and design that unfold in the ruins of the city as a modern project of social integration through infrastructural connection.

The departmental lecture series ‘the world/s at the ends of the city’ will thus shed light onto what an urban politics might involve in the face of disruptive irruptions of both nonhuman and unruly forces through the boundaries, thresholds and interstices of urban worlds: that is, the spaces where what we call ‘the city’ not topographically, but mainly ontologically, ends. Exploring these ends is critical, especially considering that while in policy worlds cities are increasingly targeted as a key site to achieve a sustainable future, many other critical voices suggest we should dismiss the city as a useful analytical and political category. In this context, it seems crucial to articulate the discussion about worldly forces at the ends of the city with the question of the ends (telos) of our inquiries and interventions in urban worlds. At stake are not just the conceptual apparatuses to decenter the city, but most prominently the necessary re-articulation of the epistemic politics of an urban and environmental anthropology.

Three interrelated avenues of disciplinary reflection might shape our conversation: How to follow and immerse ourselves in the life of urban biomes, bees, microclimates, tsunamis, so that we can represent and give a voice to such urban actors? How to learn from the methods invented by different urban ecologies of practices and collectives to know, represent, intervene and engage with unknown worldly forces? How to collaborate with scientists and artists in the production of in/commensurable accounts of the world/s at the end of the city?

Programme

9. April | NaturenKulturen: Denkräume und Werkzeuge für neue politische Ökologien – Book Launch
Michi Knecht / Katrin Amelang (Uni Bremen). Commented by Tahani Nadim (MfN/HU Berlin)

16. April | Growing city surfaces: anthropology and the urban soil sciences
Germain Meulemans (EHESS, Paris)

23. April |The air as an end of the city?
Nerea Calvillo (CIM, Warwick)

30. April | Beyond Concrete: Imagination, Material Futures and Construction in Times of Ecological Crisis
Rachel Harkness (University of Edinburgh)

7. Mai | Integrating edible city solutions for socially resilient and sustainably productive cities
Ina Säumel (IRI THESys, HU Berlin)

14. Mai | Quer-denken – A cosmo-politics of urbanthropocene?
Anders Blok (University of Copenhagen) / Regina Römhild (HU Berlin) / Jörg Niewöhner (HU Berlin)

21. Mai | Ruderal City
Bettina Stoetzer (MIT)

28. Mai* | Violence and vigilance: on militarized sentience and phantasms of terror in Paris, France [*Sondertermin: 6-8pm c.t.]
Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence, NY)

4. Juni | Autonomia ethnographica: liberal designs, designs for liberation, and the liberation of design
Alberto Corsín Jiménez (CSIC, Madrid)

11. Juni | Low Tide: Submerged Humanism in a Colombian Port-City
Austin Zeiderman (LSE)

18. Juni | Re-imagining detoxification beyond the molecular register
Nick Shapiro (UCLA)

25. Juni | Quer-denken – Remaking the city: How to care?
Tomás Criado / Martina Klausner / Beate Binder (HU Berlin)

2. Juli* | Für eine Anthropologie des Urbanismus (inaugural lecture/Antrittsvorlesung) [*Sondertermin: 6-8pm c.t. am IfEE, Raum 408]
Ignacio Farías (HU Berlin)

For more information, please follow the events at IfEE’s FB channel

Technologies of friendship: Accessibility politics in the ‘how to’ mode

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Thanks to the joyful invitation by Joanna Latimer & Daniel López–possibly two of the best editors in the planet, capable of hosting the nicest people and make all of us enjoy wonderful and lively debates–, I am honoured to take part in their absolutely flabbergasting Sociological Review monograph ‘Intimate Entanglements‘ with an impressive line-up. Do not miss this one!

The monograph focuses on rethinking the relation between “the abstract and general connection between entanglement and knowledge-making by grounding it within specific socio­material relations”, proposing us to pay special attention to intimacy not as a category of the local and experiential as opposed to the scientific or universal. Instead, as the editors suggest, “by foregrounding what is often made invisible in extant accounts of how knowledge is done, the authors explore how a focus on affect restructures possibilities for more situated knowledge, that involves non-anthropocentric modes of relatedness in a wide range of substantive domains and communities of practice”.

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My own humble contribution to this collective effort is a particular ode, entangling intimately with the practices and spaces of ‘mutual access’ we pried open when searching to inhabit En torno a la silla.

Technologies of friendship: Accessibility politics in the ‘how to’ mode

Abstract

This text is an ethnographic account of a singular, Barcelona-based activist endeavour called En torno a la silla (ETS): a do-it-yourself and open design and making collective engaging in a very peculiar form of accessibility politics beyond a ‘disability rights’ framework. In it, I entangle intimately with ETS’s relational interventions, in the form of making and documentation processes. What animates me is a political engagement with the practice of ‘re-description’, paying attention to the singularity of what relational vocabularies and practices bring to the fore. In describing the context of its appearance, as well as several of the collective’s endeavours, I address ETS’s relational register. Rather than being a clear-cut activist group with the aim of materialising the ‘inclusion’ of ‘disabled people’ through ‘technical aids’, ETS engaged in producing what they called ‘technologies of friendship’: frail and careful material explorations opening up interstitial relational spaces of ‘mutual access’ between bodily diverse people. Through circulating tutorials, poetic accounts, digitally and in workshops and presentations, ETS’s technologies of friendship became also ways of addressing how relations can be materialised and reflexively described, making available in its wake ways to re-enact them. Thus it produced an inspiring ‘how to’ accessibility politics: a material-political concern with the speculative opening up and materialisation of conditions for the very happening of relations, relating at the hinges of unrelatability.

Published in the Sociological Review, 67 (2) 408–427 | PDF

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from a series of kind spaces functioning as ‘technologies of friendship’ in themselves. I would here like to warmly thank: Isaac Marrero Guillamón and the 2016 Goldsmiths’ Anthropology ‘Research >< Practice’ seminar series; Gonzalo Correa and the 2016 MA in Social Psychology students at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo; Marisol de la Cadena and the attendees at a 2017 UC Davis ‘STS Food for Thought’ event; Joanna Latimer, Daniel López, and the commentators at the 2018 ‘Intimate Entanglements’ workshop in York; and a 2018 seminar of the CareNet group in Barcelona, all of whom greatly helped me finetune the article’s main ideas. I dedicate this account to my friends from En torno a la silla, in the hope that this could serve to bring ourselves closer to yet-to-be-found intimate others.

Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) 2019 conference “Who cares?”- Keynote on ‘how to care’

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The Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) organises its 8th biannual conference next 3–4 June 2019 at the Aalto University in Helsinki (Finland), under the timely topic ‘Who cares?‘, whose call looks fantastic:

 What do, or should, we care about in design and design research today? Underpinning the question are issues of culture and agency – who cares, for whom, and how? Taking care, or being cared for, evokes the choice of roles, and processes of interaction, co-creation and even decision-making. Caring, as a verb, emphasizes care as intention, action and labor in relation to others. Care can be understood as concern for that beyond oneself, for others and, thus, human, societal and even material and ecological relations are at stake. The question of care is also a call for questioning relationships, participation and responsibility, democratic and sustainable ways of co-existing. From this expansive societal standpoint, we could even ask who cares about design? And what should we do about it? The 8th biennial Nordes conference poses the question, “Who cares?”, exploring related questions, issues and propositions concerning responsibilities, relationships, ways of doing and directing design today.

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In the 2019 Nordes conference, we draw inspiration from notions of care as a lens through which to reflect upon and critique as well as potentially to refocus and redirect design and design research. Care might be understood in relation to philosophical lines of inquiry in other disciplines exploring theories, politics and ethics of care. Care might be understood concretely in relation to the ideals and infrastructures of welfare and healthcare systems, or service interactions. Care might be understood personally as a mindset seeking out what is meaningful for people, and for life, and with design as reflective and skilled action concerned with improving things and preferred situations.

Thanks to the generous invitation of the organising committee I will have the immense honour to act as one of the keynote speakers, contributing to one of the main themes of the conference: ‘How to care?’ (Care and care-ful materials, methods and processes in design and design research) – For this, I will be sharing my anthropological work on and my different modes of engagement with inclusive design.

Relatar una ecología documental – Intervención en el seminario “Más que texto” (UCM)

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El martes 19 de febrero, de 16.00-18-00, participaré en el tercer seminario del ciclo ‘Más que texto. De la mono/grafía antropológica a la inventiva multi-modal‘ que tendrá lugar en el Seminario del Área de Antropología Departamento de Antropología Social y Psicología Social (UCM)

Relatar una ecología documental: En torno a la silla como dispositivo de campo multimodal

¿Qué implica hacer trabajo de campo, tomar notas y producir interpretaciones etnográficas en contextos como los de la cultura libre, poblados por sujetos que documentan ampliamente sus actividades con una inventiva descriptiva, gráfica y textual, que excede las competencias y maneras tradicionales de los profesionales de la antropología? ¿Qué aporta el trabajo antropológico cuando esos mismos actores leen y producen interpretaciones sobre los mundos en que se mueven, empleando referencias académicas análogas a las nuestras? En suma, ¿en qué se convierte la práctica etnográfica o la investigación antropológica en este tipo de sitios ‘para-etnográficos’, como los llamarían Marcus & Holmes? El presente relato recorre las transformaciones experimentales y aprendizajes que mis indagaciones sufrieron a partir de mi participación en el proyecto En torno a la silla–un colectivo de diseño libre desde la diversidad funcional que comenzó a operar en 2012, primordialmente en la ciudad de Barcelona–en el que comencé a colaborar desde sus inicios, documentando los diferentes procesos y actividades o gestionado la ecología documental digital del colectivo.
De ser un ‘estudio de caso’ parte de mi proyecto de investigación postdoctoral sobre el diseño participativo de tecnologías de cuidado, en ese proceso se produjo una transformación. Pasé de ser un etnógrafo a un documentador y, como explicaré, mi etnografía pasó a tener lugar a través de la gestión del blog y otras plataformas digitales así como los eventos–presentaciones y talleres de creación. Esta implicación etnográfica tuvo un impacto también en En torno a la silla, en tanto que esa documentación y reflexión pasaron a ser un problema compartido. Como contaré, en ese proceso, En torno a la silla se convirtió en un ‘dispositivo de campo multimodal’ en torno al relacionarse para relatar y relatar para relacionarse, una plataforma colaborativa y experimental, desde la que problematizar conjuntamente el diseño abierto desde la diversidad funcional.

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Más que texto. De la mono/grafía antropológica a la inventiva multi-modal – Ciclo de seminarios dedicado a investigaciones cuyo conocimiento etnográfico se expresa a través de formas multimodales: representaciones teatrales, formatos visuales, repositorios documentales, manuales didácticos o infraestructuras etnográficas (programa completo aquí).

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Imagen CC BY NC SA Carla Boserman 2014

Public Lecture Series of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (TU Berlin) – WiSe 2018/2019 “Technologies of the City”

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I am particularly happy to take part in this Winter Semester’s Public Lecture Series of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (TU Berlin), under the theme “Technologies of the City”.

Hence, next February 5th 2019 I will be presenting the following talk:

Infrastructure as ‘the people’: The social-technocracy of Barcelona’s accessible sidewalk standards

Disability rights activists have for a long time advocated for cities hospitable to bodily difference: de-stigmatizing, enabling, and supportive of their bodily diversity. Since the 1970s protests, many cities of the Global North have developed processes to sensitize architects, engineers, and civil servants so that such environments could be made to exist, creating the conditions for urban infrastructures to embody concrete arrangements of ‘sidewalk democracy.’ Drawing from archival, interview and observational work in the city of Barcelona, I would like to show different attempts at this: from the instalment of ‘free-barrier’ policies and architectural standards to more contemporary problematizations around ‘cultural’ and ‘multisensory’ approaches. Grounding on STS and Anthropology works, I would like to provide an account of the particular ‘infrastructural style’ of these undertakings, and the challenge it poses: or how a de-stigmatizing agenda is predated by its very mode of implementation.

To exemplify, I would like to reflect on the ways in which the city’s accessible sidewalks and crossings have been made and implemented to stand as infrastructures for ‘the people’. First, I will delineate the participatory governance processes–involving several representatives and associative movements of people with disabilities–through which the system of ‘urban elements’, including accessible sidewalks, was developed by the city hall. Second, I will show recent civic, techno-legal and techno-political controversies that have arisen after the enactment of a newer state-wide regulation, entailing an alternative sidewalk configuration: this will allow me to pay special attention to a ‘shared streets’ implementation in the iconic Passeig de Gràcia, which created as a response a united front of disability rights activists self-denominated ‘streets for all’, whose articulate demands were put on hold because ‘a technical solution was needed’.

In paying attention to the contested modes of composing those accessible urban infrastructures, I would like to analyze the relational architectures there arising, also reflecting on the challenges they pose to urban democracy. Even though the aspiration is openly and overtly social-democratic–these infrastructures standing for an aspiration to achieve an inclusive society for all, undoing and reworking the stigma of bodily diversity–, I call this infrastructure of public space and mobility an instance of ‘social technocracy’. In order to democratically respond to the many social demands of different stigmatized collectives and activist initiatives wishing to further use the city and move around, the only available strategy is a very paradoxical one: to produce an expert-managed, materially sealed, and procedurally closed-down to public scrutiny type of urban infrastructure. Rather tragically, in seeking to provide urban infrastructures and practices to tackle with manifold forms bodily stigma and social cohesion, newer versions of ‘inclusive exclusion’ are invented, of technocratic origin. Or, put otherwise, the material mode of expression and urban articulation of these political aspirations foregrounds infrastructures as ‘the people’. Against this background, alternative politicizations around accessibility, both intra- and extra-institutional might show us a way through: how, rather than engaging in classic political contestation, a technical democratization of these urban infrastructures is needed to avoid redoubling technocratically the harsh effects of stigma.


Experimental Collaborations – Book launch events

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‘Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices‘ (#xcol), Adolfo Estalella and I’s co-edited book (Berghahn, 2018), is finally out! *

As stated in the book description:

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as ‘fieldwork devices’—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of ‘experimental collaborations’ to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality

The introduction’s PDF is freely available for download here

It has been a long journey, full of conversations and collaborative writing: A process of learning together how to practice contemporary anthropology; a collective project that required the generosity and effort of many people involved in the project. Therefore, we would like to share some of our joy and open up conversations of what it might imply in a series of forthcoming events:

#xcol-book launch event_1 Barcelona, 3 de mayo de 2018, 18–20h [ES]

‘Colaboraciones experimentales. Un inventario de dispositivos para la etnografía contemporánea‘.

Departament d’Antropologia Social, Universitat de Barcelona (Aula 207, 2º piso de la Facultat de Geografia i Història) – Organizado por el Grup de treball sobre Antropologia, Imatge i Cultura Visual (IVAC) de l’ICA y el Grup de Recerca en Antropologia i Pràctiques Artístiques (GRAPA)

#xcol-book launch event_2 Berlin, 3.7.2018 12-14h [EN]

‘Ethnographic Experimentation: An Inventory of Fieldwork Devices‘

Humboldt University of Berlin’s Department of European Ethnology Institutskolloquium ‘Conjunctures & Creations: Anthropological Transformations/Transforming Anthropology’. Moderated by Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías.

#xcol-book launch event_3 Granada, 4.9.2018 17-18:30h [ES]

Conversation with Prof. Aurora Álvarez Veinguer (Social Anthropology, Granada) at the 4th AIBR International Conference of Anthropology, Granada (Spain)

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* In the next months, Berghahn is offering a 50% discount code (EST533 & AIBR18) for all individual online orders placed directly on their website

DISEÑA 12 (2018) RE-APRENDIENDO A DISEÑAR: EXPERIMENTOS PEDAGÓGICOS CON STS EN TALLERES DE DISEÑO | RE-LEARNING DESIGN: PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH STS IN DESIGN STUDIO COURSES

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[ES]  Diseña 12: Esta edición explora las intersecciones entre diseño y STS en talleres académicos y espacios pedagógicos de diseño

[EN] Diseña 12: This special issue explores the crossroads of design and STS in design studio courses

Ignacio Farías & Tomás Sánchez Criado (Eds.)

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Editorial
Renato Bernasconi

4-11 PDF

Introducción | introduction

Re-aprendiendo a diseñar: Experimentos pedagógicos con STS en talleres de diseño | RE-LEARNING DESIGN: PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH STS IN DESIGN STUDIO courses
Ignacio Farías, Tomás Sánchez Criado

14-29 PDF

Diseñar y crear con los sts | ON DESIGN AND MAKING WITH STS
Hannah M. Varga

30-51 PDF

Enseñando todo en forma interrelacionada: La integración de las ciencias sociales y el diseño en la enseñanza y la práctica profesional | TEACHING EVERYTHING IN RELATIONSHIP: INTEGRATING SOCIAL SCIENCES AND DESIGN IN TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Alvise Mattozzi

104-125 PDF

El Diseño de sistemas sustentables en la Universidad de Aalborg, Dinamarca | SUSTAINABLE SYSTEM DESIGN AT AALBORG UNIVERSITY, DENMARK
Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda, Ulrik Jørgensen

126-149 PDF

Diseño experimental como práctica arqueológica | EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AS ARCHEOLOGICAL PRACTICE
Diego Gómez-Venegas

150-171 PDF 

Tender infrastructures: Diseñando con cuidado, o aportaciones entre los “asuntos de los cuidados” y la arquitectura | TENDER INFRASTRUCTURES: DESIGNING WITH CARE, OR CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘MATTERS OF CARE’ IN ARCHITECTURE
Nerea Calvillo González, Miguel Mesa del Castillo

172-195 PDF

Impugnaciones pedagógicas: prototipado interespecies y encuentros cosmopolíticos | PEDAGOGICAL IMPUGNATION: INTERSPECIES PROTOTYPING AND COSMOPOLITICAL ENCOUNTERS
Pablo Hermansen, Martín Tironi

196-227 PDF

Co-laboraciones, atrapamientos e intravenciones: Aproximaciones pedagógicas a la democracia técnica en el diseño arquitectónico | CO-LABORATIONS, ENTRAPMENTS, INTRAVENTIONS: PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES TO TECHNICAL DEMOCRACY IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
Ignacio Farías, Tomás Sánchez Criado

228-255 PDF

 

Aprender diseño con insectos sociales: la hormiga, la araña y la avispa | LEARNING DESIGN WITH SOCIAL INSECTS: THE ANT, THE SPIDER, AND THE WASP
Ester Gisbert Alemany

256-283 PDF

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Lanzamientos oficiales | Official launches

27.3.2018, 19:00 Santiago de Chile.

 

27.7.2018, 12:30-14:00 Lancaster (EASST conference)

If you plan to attend Lancaster’s 2018 EASST conference, please feel welcome to come to our special issue launch: “Pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses”

It will take place Friday July 27th at the Marketplace 13:00-14:00 (this will be a brown bag event, so from 12:30 to 13:00 feel welcome to grab your lunch before coming), and we will have Yana Boeva (York University, Toronto) and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak (Linköping University) as guest commentators.
In the last decades, the institutionalization of STS in technical universities has made urgent the challenge of how to teach STS sensibilities and political commitments to a project of technical democracy when operating in the belly of the beast. Focusing on the crossroads of design and STS, “Re-learning Design: Pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses” is a bilingual issue of DISEÑA recently edited by Ignacio Farías and Tomás S. Criado, which features a series of interviews and articles on pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses undertaken by a diverse range of academics from Europe and the Americas.