Audio – CISP Online

On June 1, 2015, Professor Lucy Suchman delivered the CSISP/Sociology Annual Lecture at Goldsmiths entitled “Digital practices: some methodological reflections.” In this lecture, Suchman returns to her earlier ethnographic research on airline ground operations and the use of CAD software by structural engineers to develop an account of ‘digital practices.’ Connecting her earlier studies with current work on robotic warfare, the lecture outlines some of the important methodological issues these practices have raised and continue to raise in social research as well as in social life. Drawing on a variety of empirical materials – videos recordings, screenshots, and annotated documents – Suchman makes the case for an expanded understanding of the digital: the lecture shows how capacities that are often ascribed to technology – to represent reality, order information, sequence action – are actually accomplished in practice by a far more heterogenous assemblage of entities, including people, settings and things.… Continue reading

At a time when a myriad of birth certificates increasingly declare novel ‘turns’ in the modes of thinking and practice of the social sciences and STS, it becomes progressively difficult to know what one is turning from, where one is turning to, and whether the very notion of ‘turning’ has not itself become a means of remaining still while one continues to think in circles. In this sense, one might be left wondering about the implications of a certain biopolitics of objects and concepts at work in the development of social scientific and STS propositions. As Achille Mbembe (2003) has taught us through his incisive reflection on late modern colonial occupations, however, attention to the politics of life must also include questions around the politics of death– biopolitics and necropolitics go hand in hand.… Continue reading

On October 26 and 27 CSISP hosted a second event on Tactics of Issue Mapping, which David Moats discusses in his workshop report below. The first day featured a series of presentations on the role of creative practice in connecting research and intervention in issue mapping, and audio recordings of these talks can be downloaded here: Part 1 and Part 2. The second day was dedicated to groupwork on a selected tactic of issue mapping, namely bias detection, about which you can read more here. *** “Issue Mapping combines social theory, computing, design and advocacy. If one of those elements isn’t there it doesn’t work” – Noortje Marres, workshop co-organiser If the first Issue Mapping workshop, earlier this year, explored the arsenal of digital tools and tactics available to researchers, then this second instalment was concerned with how we might put them to good use in addressing specific problems.… Continue reading

Earlier this month, we were pleased to have CSISP visiting fellow Israel Rodriguez Giralt open the autumn term’s lecture series with the lecture ‘Issue-oriented activism: Comparing the emergence of concerned groups around care policies for dependent people in UK and Spain’. You can find links to a full audio recording of the talk and slides below. Below is Israel’s lecture summary. This talk analyses and compares two political situations: the launch of the “Act on Dependency”, an important and controversial social policy approved in 2006 by the Spanish Government with the aim of guaranteeing public support for people who cannot lead independent lives for reasons of illness, disability or age; and the austerity programme (also known as “the cuts”), promoted in 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of the United Kingdom as a way to tackle the UK’s budget deficit.… Continue reading

We are pleased to put online the next in our ‘The New in Social Research’ series, a recording of Javier Lezaun’s (March 20th) talk titled Cinematography and the Discovery of Social Kinetics (for download, not to stream). Lezaun’s talk looks at the use of film by two early 20th century social scientists: (1) Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, and his colleague (2) Kurt Lewin, the pioneer of Social Psychology. In the work of these two figures we find the idea of the social as a form of movement, as a kinetic event, most visibly manifested in the face-to-face interactions of small groups.… Continue reading

We are pleased to put online the next in our ‘The New in Social Research’ series, a recording of Evelyn Ruppert’s lecture titled ‘Doing the Transparent State: Methods and their Subjectifying Effects/Affects’ (Feb 28th). Building on themes explored in the previous talk by Fuller and Harwood, Ruppert looked at the effects (and affects) of the UK government’s data ‘Transparency Agenda’, insisting on the generative capacities of this device. This includes the release of detailed data, via publically accessible, comparatively easy-to-use online platforms (e.g. government produced data apps), ranging from details of MPs expenses to itemised lists of departmental spending. This data, in turn, can be – and increasingly is – downloaded, manipulated and mediated by organisations and institutions, whether by journalists looking to produce eye catching visualisations , or companies hoping to unearth market value hidden in the relations between and amongst different data sets.… Continue reading

As part of our ongoing series exploring claims to newness in social research, we are pleased to put online a recording of this week’s event (Feb 21st), ‘Database as funfair’. Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, drawing on work done by YoHa as part of the Invisible Airs project, explored what can be learnt from, and done with, relational databases released to researchers as part of a government drive towards data transparency (themes to be explored further by next week by Evelyn Ruppert – more details about upcoming events are on the CSISP homepage). Having been given access to the expenditure database of Bristol City Council, they soon worked out that the data – in itself – wasn’t particularly interesting (in fact, as they write, part of the power of this data operates specifically because of its inability to command interest, through the “multiple layers of boredom” which it generates in its readers), to a degree because of what was absent, excluded, or rendered unintelligible.… Continue reading

In the supposed season of goodwill, we at CSISP are pleased to be able to release two recordings from the recent series of lectures exploring issues of intellectual emnity. These feature talks from David Oswell from Goldsmiths and Steve Fuller from the University of Warwick. In these lectures, organised by Michael Guggenheim, CSISP and the Department of Sociology, four scholars were invited to reflect on their academic enemies, with the goal of investigating the productivity of intellectual enmities. Each speaker was invited to choose an enemy of their choice (from people, to movements, to disciplines), and analyse his, her or its productivity for their own thinking, their research and their career.… Continue reading