Category: participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures

Categories
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

Categories
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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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
Categories
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
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

Categories
collectives experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights independent-living participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures urban and personal devices

Can ANT be a form of activism?

Throughout the last couple of years Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias, and Celia Roberts have been editing The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory.

As they conceived it, rather than as an hagiographic repetition of ANT ‘as is’, the companion has been crafted singularly so that each contribution shows and develops a question whereby ANT is mobilised, expanded, put to a test and taken further: In explorations and inquiries where all contributors have felt accompanied in different ways ‘near ANT’, as the editors describe in the introduction.

This companion explores Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume

In our contribution, Israel Rodríguez-Giralt and I mobilise the ANT-inspired repertoire of ‘activation’ to discuss not only how to study forms of collective action or techno-scientific activisms, but also–and mainly– ‘experimentally collaborative’ or ‘activated’ modes of research deriving from those engagements. Drawing from our several years long work together with the Spanish independent-living movement, and in particular with their activist explorations into the worlds of design, in our chapter we ask:

Can ANT be a form of activism?

CC BY SA 2011 Diversitat funcional BCN 15M

Abstract

In this chapter we search to think with a concrete set of activist practices: the En torno a la silla collective, and in particular the research engagement afforded by its intense social and material explorations in the environmental intervention and remaking of wheelchair users and their surroundings. We characterize this particular form of research activism as ‘joint problem-making’: comprising a series of social and material interventions to problematize, transform, and account for the worlds being produced together with others. Building upon this, the chapter analyses the impact it had on us as researchers: or, to be more specific, on our ways of engaging ethnographically, and to consider how this might inspire the ‘experimentally collaborative’ or ‘activated’ ways in which ANT researchers might engage in other activist ecologies. Our hope is that in exploring our engagements with activism, ANT could become a more open and nonconformist research space: an ‘activated’ practice, problematizing in newer ways the relationship between description and action, exploring the manifold ways of being an analyst or a researcher that might be available when engaging in activist settings.

Published in The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory (pp. 360–368). London: Routledge | PDF

Categories
collectives ethics events experimental collaborations more-than-human objects of care and care practices

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

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), titled:

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?

https://www2.hu-berlin.de/stadtlabor/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IK-Plakat19-02a-1.png

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