In 1886, the Supreme Court granted corporations personhood, or at least the same rights as were granted to any living person, and justified the decision based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The 1886 legal transformation (or imbuement) now, in retrospect, appears to figure prominently in theoretical models of organizations, corporations, and states, especially, the idea that these entities are straightforward actors, unsurprisingly, able to act. Most obviously this fits into the work of Alexander Wendt who famous (and controversially) claimed “states are people too” in his famous article in Review of International Studies, “The state as person in international theory”.

For some background on corporations and corporate entitivity, I turn to David Korten’s (1995:185-6) well-known book The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, wherein we learn that:

In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.

Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that

The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.

The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery – a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

Shifting gears back to thinking about states, the language that is used sometimes in International Relations, political sociology, and political science is “entitivity”. This is a description of legal reality, meaning that a corporation (which is really just an idea or organizational form) can be treated as an actor, entity, or, in this case, person. This is also more than a description because it has been so profoundly reified over the last decades, by which I mean to say that the we assume states are in fact the free-standing actors that we assume-them-into-being and this happens to such a great extent that statements like "The US just sent a strong message to China" can actually be comprehended by average people. So reified is the state actor idea during the neo-statist turn in sociology, history, and political science during the 1980s/90s that one got the feeling that you could have actually snapped a picture of the state.

Regarding the action or behavior of “entities” such as states or corporations, there is a rule amongst neo institutional scholars, especially in organizational analysis, to avoid saying, for example, that "Apple just released the iPhone 4S" because the corporation actually did not do that and instead this comment is a shorthand for going to the trouble to say that Apple executives, based on the work of myriad employees, decided to release their product into a particular set of markets. This also explains the massive emphasis on leadership and management in organizational studies because the behavior of leadership is often mistaken for how an organization behaves or how an institution – like a university – thinks (thank you, Mary Douglas).

In this way, group-level behavior is sometimes subsumed in the emphasis on leaders (i.e., the group is spoken for by the management that leads them); other times, group-level and leader behavior (and whatever infinite nuance must go into all that) get subsumed under the seemingly single behavior/activity of the overarching entity (i.e., the entity appears to act/behave/speak for both group and its leadership). In all, there is no easy way to sort out these sorts of issues, at least, to my knowledge, as it is mainly a matter of perspective and whatever the analytical starting point is. Some might say, however, that this whole debate can be explained away because it is merely a case of category error; for example, the student taking a tour of campus during orientation is shown around The Pennsylvania State University, and, at the very end of the tour, says “I've seen the buildings, and the faculty and the students, but where is the University?”. The obvious and logical conclusion, therefore, must be that states, organizations, and corporations are simply operating at a different (read: hierarchically superior) level of organization from individual human beings. That might sound reasonable for sociologists from the 1950s (or even some of them now); however, while hierarchy and terms like “power” are useful for understanding such relationships, the two terms are also a shortcut for doing the hard work of describing what happens when, for example, a state appears to act in some fashion. Put another way, and one that I subscribe to: if we assume no hierarchies, and assume whatever appear to be hierarchical power relations are actually people on the ground in various network formations operating on a flat plane of existence, then we have another view (one more akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the world as composed of A Thousand Plateaus).

A final option exists, and that is to treat this entire issue not as a legal reality or scholarly conception, and instead suggest that this is a perception issue, which has the potential to satisfy both camps. This is an argument under development, so forgive its crudeness. Consider social psychologist Jennifer L Welbourne’s very traditional paper “The Impact of Perceived Entitivity on Inconsistency Resolution for Groups and Individuals” published in the conservative psychology journal, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The thrust of her argument is nicely encapsulated in the final line of her abstract:

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that differences in perceived target entitivity influence the degree to which information about a group or individual is processed online. The current set of studies examines whether perceptions of entitivity are also associated with differences in the content of impressions formed of groups and individuals. Specifically, if perceptions of high entitivity motivate perceivers to seek coherence in a target, impressions of individual (high-entitivity) targets should be characterized by greater resolution of behavioral inconsistencies than impressions of group (low-entitivity) targets. Study 1 provided evidence for this hypothesis by demonstrating that perceivers were more likely to apply restrictive diagnosticity schemas to resolve inconsistent behaviors in a predicted direction when the target was an individual than when the target was a group. Two additional studies were conducted to determine the specific aspect of target entitivity that produced these results: perceiver expectations about the similarity and consistency of a target's behaviors (Study 2) and perceiver expectations about the unity of a target's intentions and goals (Study 3) were manipulated and the resulting impressions were examined. The results suggest that perceptions of unity in a target's intentions and goals underlie the assumptions of entitivity and the obtained impression effects.

All we need to do is to uncover a set of cases that allow us to empirically observe instances where the perceived unity of a state’s intentions and goals fuel the underlying assumption that indeed the state is an entity, which produce the impression effects. Now, if we don’t assume states are entities in advance, which we must if we are going to chalk-up their entitivity to impression effects, then we must assume that states are, to some extent, made “anew” each time we invoke them and fortified by routine invocation. So, who does this sort of performative invocation? Finding a few cases like that would make a fine book…

Once, the phrase "politics by other means" was a way to know about technology. The same sh/could be said of infrastructure; so often we conceptualize infrastructural entities by what they are made of, which is legitimate in my mind, but is there room to see infrastructure as made of "other" stuff?

As soon as Jan-Hendrik Passoth and I (Nicholas Rowland) finished writing "Actor-Network State: Integrating Actor-Network Theory and State Theory,"  (International Sociology 2010 25: 818-841 (2010)), I started to wonder with renewed interest “what are states made of?”

(http://go.hrw.com/atlas/norm_htm/world.htm)

One answer might be to accept a line of thinking Jan and I outline in the above paper and suggest that the question has become something irrelevant. As we write:

"This direction for state theory does not ask same old question ‘what a state is’ – it is an actor-network, of course – because that does not say much, and instead asks ‘how states are’." (Ibid., 826).

However, now I’m thinking there might be something more to it; that is, if the question can be reformulated so that we in political sociology, political science, and international relations and international law stop asking “what are states?” and instead start asking “what are states made of?” Perhaps this new “entry point” will aid us in rethinking states and the role of states.

Larry makes the point that we turn our attention to theories of action (mainly, an actor-network approach to the state) in the above article, which implies (to some extent) that states are what states do. If that’s an accurate and/or legitimate assumption, then the “hollow state” writers might be in some serious trouble, or at least have some serious explaining to do. If states are playing a more and more restricted role in the shape of international affairs as compared to, for example, global credit-rating firms or multi-national corporations (which Larry writes about with great success: Backer, Larry Catá, On the Tension between Public and Private Governance in the Emerging Transnational Legal Order: State Ideology and Corporation in Polycentric Asymmetric Global Orders (April 16, 2012).), then two possibilities exist.

(http://www.get-into-medicalschool.com/high-fructose-corn-syrup-wolf/)

First, if states are what they do, then this could imply that whatever it was that states previously “did” is no longer needed or privileged in international affairs, hence, because states are what they do, they are doing qualitatively less of it and shrink as a result (sometimes this logic seems to underlie the thinking in “governance without government” (Gw/oG) schools of thought, which Larry also writes about with success: Backer, Larry Catá, Governance Without Government: An Overview and Application of Interactions Between Law-State and Governance-Corporate Systems  in  Beyond Territoriality: Transnational Legal Authority in an Age of Globalization (Günther Handl and Joachim Zekoll Editors, Leiden, Netherlands & Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2012). (March 1, 2010). Penn State Legal Studies Research 10-2010.). Thus, whatever it was that states did, we no longer need it. Note: this is a hardcore functionalist argument. Sometimes this sort of an argument is utilized when discussing the reduced role of government not only as a descriptive account of contemporary affairs (usually, documenting liberal bellyachers fondly reminiscing a largely imagined understanding of the role of government, for example, in the US or UK) or a prescriptive account of contemporary affairs (usually, promoting a particular agenda to “save” government from having its power usurped by other actors on the international stage or, in some cases, promoted by government agencies with pro-market solutions to otherwise historically government tasks or duties such as how to “best” (by which, “most efficient” seems to be the placeholder) deliver social provisions to a deserving public (please note: this sort of a dynamic replete with descriptive and prescriptive accounts opens the door to observing “political performativity” where our ideas about the political reality unfolding in front of us is prescribed by its descriptors and described by its prescriptors – as noted in the original post by Larry, this is a potential well-spring for new research).

Second, if states are what they do, then this could imply that whatever it was that states previously “did”, someone/something else is now conducting these actions in international affairs in the stead of states, hence, because states are what they do, when someone/something steps in to assume the role(s) previously monopolized by the state, the state shrinks as a result (this logic is also adopted in “governance without government” schools of thought, although to a much different end).

Another line of reasoning, consistent with the actor-network action orientation avoids either line of reasoning described above (which currently plague the Gw/oG groups), is to see the state as it is made up of “other” stuff. As in the previous post about actor-networks, materiality (or “the physical”) plays a central role and has nearly become synonymous with ANT anytime it is invoked for the purposes of, usually, of criticism. However, this special attention to the material can result in a fantastic re-understanding of the “state ideology” (the terms Larry sometimes uses to encapsulate the notion that something like a state actually exists and occasionally acts in a concerted way in relation to its public/subjects and/or in relation to other actors like states on the international stage). I like to call this the “state hypothesis”, which explicitly reminds us that when the earliest neostatists started their writing (before full-entitivity was assumed by neostatists carte blanche) that writers like Skocpol required that “the state” was something that unfolded in historical comparative relief and that we, thus, should not simply assume the state exists but that it occasionally appears to exist under a particular set of historical contingencies. Please note: “entitivity” is just something that I pull from organizational analysis in sociology circles, which is a term to describe what is invoked when, for example, journalist say (and can actually be understood by common people) that “Apple Unveils iPhone 4S With Voice-Recognition Features” (NY Times: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/live-blogging-the-apple-iphone-5-announcement/) or that “Goldman-Sachs profits mask revenue decline” (LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-goldman-earns-20120417,0,7737808.story). Somehow in these moments, Apple is a thing and not just the concerted efforts of its managers and board members, hence, the entitivity is a reflection of this “acting thing” called Apple. Keep in mind, that if a state is what it does, then by that same logic Apple is what it does meaning that it is what releases iPhone 4S, that is, Apple is made of iPhone in the same way that states are made of, as a soon to be published example shows, other stuff such as water.

In water infrastructure research (and for those interested in STS and state theory of course), check out Patrick Carroll’s "Water, and Technoscientific State Formation in California" which has just been published as an "online-first" article by STS journal Social Studies of Science.

(http://www.aquafornia.com/where-does-californias-water-come-from)

His abstract offers the thrust of analysis:

“This paper argues that water gradually became, over a period of more than half a century, a critical boundary object between science and governance in California. The paper historicizes ‘water’, and argues that a series of discrete problems that involved water, particularly the reclamation of ‘swampland’ in the Sacramento Valley, gradually came to be viewed as a single ‘water problem’ with many facets. My overarching theoretical aim is to rethink the ontology of the technoscientific state through the tools of actor-network theory. I conclude with the following paradox: the more the technoscientific state forms into a complex gathering – or ‘thing’ – of which humans are part, the more it is represented and perceived as a simplified and singular actor set apart from those same humans” (at:  http://sss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/03/06/0306312712437977.abstract).

Patrick seems to be saying, and this is quite smart, that states are made of non-state stuff, in this case, water; that states can be invoked in relation to other (typically nonhuman) stuff. Although he does not go into great reflection on this matter, the empirical results very much support the position I’m staking-out here. One way to understand what states are is to observe what they do and recognize that they are constituted by this in a double-sense: they are made of their actions and whatever material constitutes their actions.

Please note: this will appear at: http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/ and was featured May 7, 2012 on "Law at the End of the Day."

... as material leftovers, structures for mega-events stand as forensic evidence that states are communicating to each other on an international platform through a material language.

Derelict Olympic Stadiums Correlate with Trade Increases?

Recently, Jan-H. posted about the "pro-durability" bias in STS (or the possibility of it) and used the all too familiar case of derelict Olympic stadiums that pepper large urban settings; the leftovers of mega-events that struggle to find suitable use.

Athens, Greece, comes to mind...

(image from here)

In the city there is a large leftover infrastructure that was quite a joy to run on as a visitor, although, because of the intense smog in Athens' city-center, it was difficult to run up and down the steps sometimes ... well, without coughing. The stadium above is the Panathenaic Stadium, and doing some background research on it, I found a really cool blog "Urban Ghosts: Forgotten Places and Urban Curiosities" written by Tom, a journalist from Sheffield, UK. He writes:

The one stadium that refuses to give up the Olympic ghost and enjoys the lion’s share of the tourists is not a state-of the-art 21st century arena, but the Panathenaic Stadium of the ancient world.  The structure was originally used to host the athletic portion of the Panathenaic Games in honour of the Goddess Athena.  It was rebuilt in 329 BC – the only major stadium in the world to be built of white marble.  Once seating 50,000 people, the Panathenaic Stadium also hosted the Olympics in 1870, 1875 and 1896.  Its modern brethren pale into insignificance alongside such an impressive track record.

But surely vast investment like that cannot be recouped ... can they?

Well, maybe, leftover infrastructure may be the by-product and correlate of trade increases.

hosting – or even bidding on — “mega-events” like the Olympics leads to a 30% increase in trade for those countries (check it out here in the Wall Street Journal).

What is so outstanding about this is how durable the trade increases are. In the academic paper, Andrew K Rose and Mark Spiegel say this in their abstract:

Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policy-makers and the population, who are typically quite enthusiastic about such spectacles. In this paper, we reconcile these positions by examining the economic impact of hosting mega-events like the Olympics; we focus on trade. Using a variety of trade models, we show that hosting a mega-event like the Olympics has a positive impact on national exports. This effect is statistically robust, permanent, and large; trade is around 30% higher for countries that have hosted the Olympics. Interestingly however, we also find that unsuccessful bids to host the Olympics have a similar positive impact on exports. We conclude that the Olympic effect on trade is attributable to the signal a country sends when bidding to host the games, rather than the act of actually holding a mega-event. We develop a political economy model that formalizes this idea, and derives the conditions under which a signal like this is used by countries wishing to liberalize.

Such structures suggest that the hosting nation "is open to trade liberalization"; however, as Tom mentions (and as world events have shown), the Greeks are not enjoying this trade benefit.

(image from here)

As Greece grapples with more than $370 billion of public debt, the dormant arenas have fueled anger over a lack of forward planning as the country ramped up to the 2004 Summer Olympics.  For many, the disused venues – with their operating costs adding more pressure to the already-strained city coffers – stand as visible reminders of Greece’s age of excess spending.

Conclusion

These sorts of material leftovers stand as forensic evidence that states are communicating to each other on an international platform through a material language. If so, the durability of these structures can be seen as either an outstanding reminder of a nation's openness to liberalized trade, or operate like a vestigal organ no longer needed that can only harm you when it does not operate properly...

Seems as though one of the infrastructrual foundations of science is being challenged, and the call is form some form of process reform.

As you know, only the 8% of the Scientific Research Society's members agreed that 'peer review works well as it is'(Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192). Consequently, we invite you to participate in identifying means to improve Peer Review effectiveness.
***********************
Call for Participations through any of the following three ways to contribute in the improvement of Peer Review processes:
•   Research Blogging, and/or
•   Submitting an abstract and CV to a Conference Special Track (submission deadline: May 18, 2012), and/or
•   Submitting an article to the Journal on systemic, Cybernetics and Informatics (JSCI)
***********************
Details at http://www.peer-reviewing.org/pr12 (Where authors and articles referenced in this are included among a larger list of references)
***********************
An exponentially increasing number of studies and experience-based editors' opinions are clear and explicit about peer review weaknesses and failures. The following affirmations are a very small sample (Many more can be found at the references included in the above mentioned URL)
***********************
"A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research. Far from filtering out junk science, peer review may be blocking the flow of innovation and corrupting public support of science." (Horrobin,2001) Horrobin concludes that peer review "is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance."

"If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market" affirmed Drummond Rennie (Smith, 2010, p.1), deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and who intellectually provided support for the international congresses of peer review that have been held, since 1989, every four years. If peer review was a drug, he added, it "would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws." (Ibid)

Few days ago, Carl Zimmer (2012) reported in the New York Time that, according to a study made by PubMed data base, the number of articles retracted from scientific journals increased from 3 in 2000 to 180 in 2009. 6000% of increment in 10 years! This "Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform." (Ibid)

But, "Peer Review is one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice" (Goodstein, 2000), it is completely necessary as quality assurance for Scientific/Engineering publications, and "Peer Review is central to the organization of modern science… why not apply scientific [and engineering] methods to the peer review process" (Horrobin, 2001).

This is the purpose of this call for participation via 1) blogging, 2) submitting an article to the Special Track on Peer Reviewing: PR 2012, and/or 3) submitting an article to the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics. More details for each of these three ways of participating can be found at http://www.peer-reviewing.org/pr12.

Sincerely,

PR 2012 Organizing Committee

Since the old times of "inscription research" or maybe even longer one of the main frameworks for analyzing the social and cultural shaping of technology, infrastructure and socio-technical arrangements is build on the idea that material enactments of ideological or normative patterns are at least adding one specific (mostly valuable, sometimes problematic) feature to these otherwise quite instable phenomena: Technology is society made durable (Latour 1991). This "Durabilty Bias" has made its way straight from Winners "Moses´ Bridges" to Latours´ "Sleeping Policeman" 

When I walked the streets of Athens last summer and especially the modern ruins of the 2004 Olympic Games stadium complex I started thinking about an interesting issue of that durability bias that emerges once you turn the problem upside down. All these massive and nearly unused buildings, the immense work of finding (valuable?) ways of reusing this wasteland of steel and concrete - it appeared to me that it is not a case of creative appropriation, but that the sheer stability of this infrastructural setting localized in a greek suburb is creating the need for keeping it maintained and used (and if only in trivial ways). The backside of infrastructural stability seems to be that relics and ruins of abandoned infrastructure are just not going away, their stability is a problem, not a sollution.

What if that is far more common issue? We all know about some similar effects: technological pathways for example or technological and institutional lock-ins. But the issues we decribe with that concepts have one thing in common: The are still with us (like the QWERTY keyboard) and we want to explain why other arrangements are not accepted. But if we start searching for lefovers, ruins and abandonded technologies and infrastructures...what could we learn from them? Are we living in a world littered with of institutional waste?

Jan and I's paper about the possibility of unlocking the performativity of political science through an actor-network approach to states was just plugged on Larry Backer's exciting blog on international relations.

Larry's summary is outstanding, and as good summaries go, it adds to the discussion in the process of reviewing it. Of particular interest to me (and presummably others) is the following point below about using an actor-network approach to understand the relationship between form and function (of presummably any object):

Taken together,  the [actor-network] framework suggests a way of de-centering ideology from the understanding of the state, or for that matter any entity with operational or situational effects.  'We know it when we feel it' is a powerful tool for  examining a thing, especially  dynamic thing that is itself an abstraction.  That applied with equal force to states as it does to multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International. The notion that character is not inherent in organization--a core presumption in the ideological construction of the state--is particularly useful.  Yet it may also be true that particular clusters of actors gathered within a construct that acts may indeed exhibit a proclivity to particular forms of behavior that may well be inherent in the networked relation though it may not be in the organization itself.  As such, ANT may explain that the character of states is not inherent in the form of the state, but it does not explain why peculiarities of action appear to be replicated in states and multinational corporations when they exhibit particular amalgamations that produce effect.  More importantly, the de-privileging of formal consideration s may produce distortion.  It is well understood in law (and customary system) that function may sometimes follow form, or lmore likely, that from may constrain function.  That leads to a further insight--that form itself has function.  ANT tends to avoid those considerations and thus may become overly indifferent to the form of action (law versus norm; consultation versus imposition for legitimacy effects; etc.).  The focus on ex post effects may also make it harder to provide  insights on future actions.  ANYT, in this sense, may be an approach always seeking to catch up to the present.   Yet for all that, the approach is powerfully sensitive to the internal construction of action and the importance of action on those ideological systems (also an effect) that themselves then produce and contain both the reality of the world within which action is deemed possible and impossible and their justification (also an effect designed to produce self restraint in those who are charged with behaving in appropriate ways).

Law at the end of the day is run by Law Professor Larry Backer (PSU, Dickinson School). Between some of the issues we deal with here and those found at a favorite site of mine (orgtheory.org), there is the potential for some synergy between organizations, law, and infrastructure.

Check it out: these days, Larry seems to be interested in the goverance without government debates that have been gonig on in IR, public administration, and international law. In particular, check out his most recent post: its about the re-stating (let's say) of the oil infrastructure/industry in Argentina and putting it back into the hands of the state (where it previously was before mid-1990) even though a Spanish company now owns much of the industry privately. State or public intervention into market or private operations with heavy, highly-localized non-transportable/transferable infrastructure might be uniquely appreciated/analyzed from an infrastructure perspective too (although as a law professor, Larry prefer law as the inroads for analysis)...

While this edited book came out in 2003, I only just learned about it today. The Infrastructure of Play is a book about building tourist locations in cities or "tourist friendly cities". The editor is Judd, who also co-edited the The Tourist City in 1999.

Increasingly, city tourism plays an important role in urban economics and thus downtown areas and, in particular, waterfronts have been transformed from purely (if that was ever true) commerce/business oriented operations into pedestrian friendly spaces for "hanging out" and places to "take in". The authors, and this is a strained metaphor, look at what it takes to turn a city into a tourist Mecca (of sorts). In the earlier book, an interesting, but not entirely explored idea was hidden in there; a kernel, really, and it goes like this: 

As cities become places to play, the authors show, tourism recasts their spatial form. In some cities, separate spaces devoted to tourism and leisure are carved out. Other cities more readily absorb tourists into daily urban life, though even these cities undergo transformation of their character.

You see the tension!? As the city recasts its form, planners must balance changing the city system enough to attract tourists but not so much that that which attracts tourists to the city (especially historical elements/places) is/are marred. Still, the newer book is all about North American cities, so this tension (given that US citites are just not that old) cannot be fully developed (in my opinion).

In a final comment, another issue that struck me while review these titles: they were about people having fun ... and upon a little refelction, why is it that so little research on infrastructure is about fun?

Just got this from Peer Schouten, PhD Researcher, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg and it looks promising:

Call for papers

 Accounting for heterogeneities in the international: writing symmetry, engaging with criticality

A double panel and a seminar hosted by Theory Talks & Millennium during the 2012 Annual Millennium Conference

 

October 20-22 2012, at the London School of Economics

Conveners: Rocco Bellanova, Julien Jeandesboz, Peer Schouten

 Background

Technical devices such as algorithms, databases, and robots mediate the production of (in)security and the conduct of war; ‘non-places’ such as financial markets remap and reshape the exercise of state sovereignty; previously established distributions such as between ‘private’ and ‘public’ entities are increasingly entangled in hybrid assemblages. These and other heterogeneities of the international are part of a renewed focus on materialities and material practices in international relations (IR).

World politics is thus increasingly recognized as involving the participation of multiplicities of heterogeneous elements, many of which were until now smoothened out in mainstream IR accounts. When IR researchers shift their analytical lenses, they bring into focus agencies and practices that actively contribute to the assembling of the international—in doing so, they intervene in, and reformulate some of, IR’s most classical concerns. Point of departure for this workshop is that dealing with such seemingly new world politics, and accounting for these constitutive heterogeneities, however remains a difficult challenge.

 Aim of the event

The main goal of the event is to bring together researchers that, in different ways, depart from an understanding of IR premised on homogeneity and engage with entanglements and multiplicities that go beyond rational choice and inter-subjective social constructions. The ambition is to foster debates and exchanges on shared concerns with accounting for heterogeneities in the international. In particular, the aim of this event is to bring to the fore the potentialities and pitfalls of working with ‘thinking tools’ that hail from beyond the traditional disciplinary horizons of IR, such actor-network-theory (ANT), science, technology and society studies (STS), or performance theories.

 Structure of the event

This event consists of two conference panels and a seminar. The seminar, structured around two sessions and a keynote speech, will take place on Monday the 22^nd, the day after the Millennium Conference.

 Conference panels

Each conference panel revolves around a specific theme: first, symmetries in the international; and second, the black-boxing of security. The first panel—symmetries—opens up analysis of entanglements of discourse and practice, social and material, in the constitution of the international; the second panel—black-boxing—addresses the politics of ‘securitization’ from a different angle, focusing on the processes of silencing, stabilizing, and separating out people, flows, and practices.

The participants are expected to contribute papers presenting their angle on, and use of, these concepts in relation to their own research. In order to foster a hybrid discussion, each panel will have two discussants, both an ‘outsider’ (from the fields of STS, ANT, or sociology) and a senior IR scholar discussing papers and presenting their understandings/applications of the notions at hand. The two conference panels will translate into two homonymous workshop sessions.

 Panel 1: Accounting for symmetries in the international

The first panel opens up analysis of assemblages or entanglements of for instance, discourse and practice, social and material, human and technical in the constitution of the international. It opens up space for contributions specifically trying to create balanced accounts of international phenomena that can most fruitfully be approached as heterogeneous or constituted across the ontological divides that traditionally structure analysis of international relations.

 Panel 2: Black-boxing international security

This second panel addresses the politics of ‘securitization’ from a different angle, focusing on the processes of silencing, stabilizing, and separating out people, flows, and practices. How do dominant security solutions and securitizations arise out of controversies and how are competing understandings, configurations and practices silenced and how are security practices themselves used to stabilize other assemblages?

 All participants need to submit a paper specifically focusing on one of the two panels. Co-authored contributions are particularly welcomed. Abstracts of around 300 words are due by May 1 and should be submitted both to millennium@lse.ac.uk and to peer@theory-talks.org.

 Seminar

This second part of the event shifts the accent to ethical and methodological issues, that is, the question of how to account for heterogeneities. It will take the form of two roundtables connected to the homonymous panels in which participants (both previous paper-givers and discussants/chairs) will be asked to share and discuss their own hesitancies, their tactics and ploys when confronted with the challenge of writing accounts of heterogeneities in the international. The seminar additionally aims at addressing questions as: what are the limits of translating STS/ANT into new fields? Is critical engagement still possible when the starting point of the research is symmetry? How can we be reflexive (and do we need to be) with regard to the researcher’s own practices of translating, black-boxing and assembling?

Participation to the seminar is open to all researchers participating to the Millennium conference. While presentations will trigger the debate among participants, the chairs will ensure that stimulating questions (and answers) coming from the public will not be lost.

 Seminar: How-to account for heterogeneities in the international?

 09:00-10:30     Roundtable session 1. Accounting for symmetries in the international

Chairs: Rocco Bellanova & Nick Srnicek

 10:30-10:45     Coffee break

 10:45-12:15     Roundtable session 2. Black-boxing international security

Chairs: Julien Jeandesboz & Peer Schouten

 12:15-13:00     Keynote speech: John Law (tbc)

 13:00               Closing by Millennium/Theory Talks