2013 GAD Distinguished Lecture: Bruno Latour

This year the General Anthropology Division (GAD) welcomed Bruno Latour as its Distinguished Lecturer at the 112^th Annual Meeting of the AAA. Latour’s talk, “What Is the Recommended Dose of Ontological Pluralism for a Safe Anthropological Diplomacy?” was recorded on video.

h/t  Chris Furlow.

Harman on “Early and Late Latour,” Oregon State, 25-Feb-2014

Graham Harman: “Early and Late Latour,” Critical Questions Lecture Series, School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University, 25th February 2014

The French theorist Bruno Latour continues to expand his already extensive influence in the social sciences, and is slowly emerging as a force to reckon with in philosophy as well. Latour has long been known for his actor-network theory. But beginning in 1987, Latour worked in secret on a parallel philosophical system in which networks are just one among fourteen separate modes of existence. This secret system was recently unveiled in Latour’s new book An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Harvard University Press, 2013). This lecture will examine the principal features of Latour’s new system and ask whether Latour’s proclaimed philosophical shift is significant in its own right, and also whether it might have new implications for the various fields that take inspiration from Latour’s work.

Latour video on The Modes of Existence project

“The Modes of Existence project: an exercise in collective inquiry and digital humanities” – by Bruno Latour, 6 November 2012.

Understanding Society Lecture Series, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

Material Participation

Check out Noortje Marres’s new book, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics from Palgrave. A recording of the book launch (involving Javier Lezaun (Oxford), Celia Lury (Warwick), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths) and moderated by Monika Krause (Goldsmiths)) can be listened to here.

What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technology and settings in public involvement. It makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the role of things in democracy, but it also offers empirical analyses of contemporary devices of participation, such as smart meters, demonstrational eco-homes and sustainable living gadgets.

Between ontology and methods

I only just saw that CSISP at Goldsmiths have posted the audio and video of Richard Rogers and Bruno Latour’s talk on “Digital Societies: between Ontology and Methods” (March 7, 2012 16:30-18:00) on their website.

In this joint event, Bruno Latour and Richard Rogers will present their respective programmes for researching digital social life. If digital networked media are transforming social life as well as social research, what are the implications for our analysis of digital societies? In taking up this question, Latour and Rogers will examine the changing relations between technology, research methods and ontology in digital social life, and what this means for the emerging field of digital sociology.

Enemies like Bruno Latour

Two recordings of talks in the “My Best Fiend” series at Goldsmiths discussing Latour (among others), by David Oswell from Goldsmiths and Steve Fuller from the University of Warwick, have now been made available at the CSISP blog.

• David Oswell: ‘Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us’ (December 6th, 2011) [The first part of the title in fact alludes to the “wolf” metaphor that emerged from The Prince and the Wolf debate]

• Steve Fuller: ‘Bruno Latour and Some Notes on Some Also Rans’ (December 13th, 2011)

Speculative realism recordings

Readers in the past have requested an alternative way to download recordings from this site, as there were apparently some problems with downloading them from eSnips. I’m happy to report that Modestos Stavrakis has now very kindly rehosted the recordings on his blog, alongside a variety of recordings from other sources as well. See his Speculative Realism Recordings. Thank you, Modestos.

The curious marketing fate of human curiosity

A presentation by Professor Franck Cochoy, CERTOP, University of Toulouse

‘The curious marketing fate of human curiosity: Technologizing consumers’ inner states to build market attachments‘

Wednesday March 16th, 4-6pm
Goldsmiths, University of London
Richard Hoggart Building, Room 308

Abstract:

STS has done a terrific job in exploring the sociology of technical devices, but in so doing it has somewhat tended to neglect the properties of human subjects. I would like to suggest a more symmetrical analytical approach, by focusing on some market dynamics that bring “devices” and “dispositions” together. More precisely, I would like to focus on a particular disposition – curiosity – and the technologies market professionals have developed as a means to seduce consumers. The idea is that, more than any other disposition, focusing on curiosity can help in understanding how market professionals and technologies, in playing on human subjects’ inner states, may reinvent their very identity and behavioral logic. I will show that from Genesis to the curiosity cabinets of the 15th-18th centuries, to modern shop windows and the “teasing” strategies of today’s advertising, seducers and merchants have constantly built “curiosity devices”, that have helped ordinary persons to become curious and/or to become consumers. In the process, they have freed themselves from previous action schemes – routine and tradition for example –, as well as coming to behave in patterns very different from those  understood according to the more familiar logics of interest and calculation. The contemporary commercial game introduces a real market of consumer drives, where “Blue Beard’s curiosity” ends up facing a real “rainbow market” of competing dispositions.

Organised by the Department of Sociology, Goldsmith University of London

Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation

Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation

25-26 March 2011
Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford

The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) is organising a two-day conference on 25-26 March 2011 at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, with support from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the Oxford e-Social Science project, Digital Social Research, eResearch South and C4D.

The theme of the conference is the permeation of science and research with computational seeing. How does computer mediated vision as a mode of engagement with information as well as with one another affect what we see (or think we see), and what we take ourselves to know?

Keynote speakers are:

*Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

*Michael Lynch, Professor, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

*Steve Woolgar, Professor of Marketing and Head of the the Science and Technology Studies research group with the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Saïd Business School

Registration is free and now open. The programme and other details are available here.

A Compositionist Manifesto

“A Compositionist Manifesto” – A lecture given by Bruno Latour as part of the Literature and Science Seminar Series at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford.

5.30pm, Wednesday 12 May 2010

St Cross Building, Lecture Theatre 2

http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/375-literature-and-science-special-lecture-professor-bruno-latour-12-may-2010.html