This companion explores 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.
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.
Author(s): Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias, Celia Roberts
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 458
Tags: Bruno Latour, Daniel López-Gómez,Adrian Mackenzie,Brit Ross Winthereik,Atsuro Morita,José Ossandón,Fabian Muniesa,Michael Guggenheim,Casper Bruun Jensen,Alvise Mattozzi,Jérôme D. Pontille,Noortje Marres,Ericka Johnson,Michael Schillmeier,Martin Savransky,Nigel Clark,Kane Race,Derek P. McCormack,Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent,Francis Halsall,Marcelo C. Rosa,Wen-Yuan Lin,Amade M’charek,Irene van Oorschot,Uli Beisel,Liliana Doganova,Alexa Färber,Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira,David J. Denis,Endre Dán
Actor-Network Theory as a Companion: An Inquiry Into Intellectual Practices by Ignacio Farías, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts
SECTION 1: SOME ELEMENTS OF THE ANT PARADIGM(S)
Introduction by Ignacio Farías, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts
1. What if ANT Wouldn’t Pursue Agnosticism but Care? by Daniel López-Gómez
2. How to Make ANT Concepts More Real? by Adrian Mackenzie
3. Is ANT’s Radical Empiricism Ethnographic? by Brit Ross Winthereik
4. Can ANT Compare with Anthropology? by Atsuro Morita
5. How to Write After Performativity? by José Ossandón
6. Is ANT a Critique of Capital? by Fabian Muniesa
7. How to Use ANT in Inventive Ways So That Its Critique Will Not Run Out of Steam? by Michael Guggenheim
SECTION 2: ENGAGING DIALOGUES WITH KEY INTELLECTUAL COMPANIONS
Introduction by Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías and Celia Roberts
8. Is Actant-Rhizome Ontology a More Appropriate Term for ANT? by Casper Bruun Jensen
9. What Can ANT Still Learn From Semiotics? by Alvise Mattozzi
10. What Did We Forget About ANT’s Roots in Anthropology of Writing? by Jérôme D. Pontille
11. As ANT is Getting Undone, Can Pragmatism Help Us Re-Do It? by Noortje Marres
12. Why Does ANT Need Haraway for Thinking About (Gendered) Bodies? by Ericka Johnson
13. How Does Thinking with Dementing Bodies and a. N. Whitehead Reassemble Central Propositions of ANT? by Michael Schillmeier
14. What is the Relevance of Isabelle Stengers’ Philosophy to ANT? by Martin Savransky
SECTION 3: TRADING ZONES OF ANT: PROBLEMATISATIONS AND AMBIVALENCES
Introduction by Ignacio Farías, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts
15. What Can Go Wrong When People Become Interested in the Non-Human? by Nigel Clark
16. What Possibilities Would a Queer ANT Generate? by Kane Race
17. Is ANT Capable of Tracing Spaces of Affect? by Derek P. McCormack
18. How to Care for Our Accounts? by Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent
19. Is ANT an Artistic Practice? by Francis Halsall
20. How to Stage a Convergence Between ANT and Southern Sociologies? by Marcelo C. Rosa
21. What Might ANT Learn From Chinese Medicine About Difference? by Wen-Yuan Lin
SECTION 4: TRANSLATING ANT BEYOND SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Introduction by Celia Roberts, Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías
22. What About Race? by Amade M'charek and Irene Van Oorschot
23. What Might We Learn From ANT for Studying Healthcare Issues in the Majority World, and What Might ANT Learn in Turn? by Uli Beisel
24. What is the Value of ANT Research Into Economic Valuation Devices? by Liliana Doganova
25. How Does ANT Help Us to Rethink the City and Its Promises? by Alexa Färber
26. How to Study the Construction of Subjectivity with ANT? by Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira
27. Why Do Maintenance and Repair Matter? by David J. Denis
SECTION 5: THE SITES AND SCALES OF ANT
Introduction by Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías and Celia Roberts
28. Are Parliaments Still Privileged Sites for Studying Politics and Liberal Democracy? by Endre Dányi
29. How Does an ANT Approach Help Us Rethink the Notion of Site? by Albena Yaneva and Brett Mommersteeg
30. How Does the South Korean City of Kyŏngju Help ANT Think Place and Scale? by Robert Oppenheim
31. How Can ANT Trace Slow-Moving Environmental Harms as They Become Eventful Political Disruptions? by Kregg Hetherington
32. Is ANT Equally Good in Dealing with Local, National and Global Natures? by Kristin Asdal
33. What Happens to ANT and Its Emphasis on the Socio-Material Grounding of the Social, in Digital Sociology? by Carolin Gerlitz and Esther Weltevrede
SECTION 6: THE USES OF ANT FOR PUBLIC–PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT
Introduction by Celia Roberts, Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías
34. Can ANT Be a Form of Activism? by Tomás Sánchez Criado and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt
35. How Has ANT Been Helpful for Public Anthropologists After the 3.11 Disaster in Japan? by Shuhei Kimura and Kohei Inose
36. How to Move Beyond the Dialogism of the ‘parliament of Things’ and the ‘hybrid Forum’ When Rethinking Participatory Experiments with ANT? by Emma Cardwell and Claire Waterton
37. How Well Does ANT Equip Designers for Socio-Material Speculations? by Alex Wilkie
38. How to Run a Hospital with ANT? by Yuri Carvajal Bañados
