Materializing Power to Recover Corporate Social Responsibility

Through the development of CSR ratings, metrics and management tools, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is currently materialized at an unprecedented scale within and across organizations. However, the material dimension of CSR and the inherent political potential in this materialization have been neglected. Drawing on insights from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the critical discussion of current approaches to power in CSR studies, we offer an alternative sociomaterial conceptualization of power in order to clarify how power works through materialized forms of CSR. We develop a framework that explains both how power is constituted within materialized forms of CSR through processes of ‘assembling / disassembling’, and how power is mobilized through materialized forms of CSR through processes of ‘overflowing / framing’. From this framework, we derive four tactics that clarify how CSR materializations can be seized by marginalized actors to ‘recover’ CSR. Our analysis aims to renew CSR studies by showing the potential of CSR for progressive politics

Performative ontologies. Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning

Sociomaterial approaches to researching education, such as those generated by actornetwork theory and complexity theory, have been growing in significance in recent years, both theoretically and methodologically. Such approaches are based upon a performative ontology rather than the more characteristic representational epistemology that informs much research. In this article, we outline certain aspects of sociomaterial sensibilities in researching education, and some of the uptakes on issues related to the education of adults. We further suggest some possibilities emerging for adult education and lifelong learning researchers from taking up such theories and methodologies. (DIPF/Orig.

Speculative Machines and Technical Mentalities. A philosophical approach to designing the future

‘Beyond their instrumental functions,’ writes Rivka Oxman in an article about design, creativity and innovation (2013), ‘advanced digital and computational environments are also becoming tools for thinking design’. At the leading edge of creativity and innovation design does not only speculate the plausible, possible or potential, but pragmatically inserts such futures into the present (as Whitehead says any ‘immediate existence’ (1962) must). Using concepts mainly from Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Simondon, I will position such design speculation as pragmatic, divergent, complex and emergent. That is, as manifesting the technical mentalities (Simondon) that provide the milieu in which we can show what we ‘might be capable of’ (Stengers)

From the cosmos to the polis: On denizens, art and postmigration worldmaking

The concept of “postmigration”, as a non-binary way of understanding the exchange and movement of people and ideas across imaginative and materially-enforced boundaries, is a compelling way to engage with contemporary politics, art and culture. It also has much to say to a contemporary cosmopolitanism that stresses the significance of embodied, responsible and intersubjective agency as the basis of an ethical worldmaking project. This essay deploys an alternative figuration, the denizen, as a means by which to materialise the imaginative force of art beyond the limits of representation and, in so doing, propose it as an active mode of experimental world- making. Arguing with and through a small number of specific case studies, the text brings the insights of feminist corporeal-materialism together with a postcolonial praxis of reading, writing and making within, and yet against, the grain of the exclusive limits of the “nation” and “her citizens”. The willful act of the denizen in making herself at home everywhere becomes a way of imagining and materialising creative ecologies of belonging that are neither premised upon an essential call to blood nor an authentic claim to soil. Rather, the postmigration worldmaking explored here posits a radically open cosmos that emerges in mutual exchange with a response-able and responsible polis

Social Sustainability: A design research approach to sustainable development

While issues such as clean production and energy efficiency are still central in sustainable development discourse, attention is increasingly on patterns of consumption at multiple levels in society. This opens new opportunities and responsibilities for design research, as we shift from a focus on product lifecycles to people’s lifestyles. It also requires further understanding the ‘social sustainability’ aspects of the environment and development, including the complexity of problematics characterized by uncertainties, contradictions and controversies. In response, we propose a programmatic approach, in which a tentative assemblage of theoretical and experimental strategies frame a common ground for a collaborative and practice-led inquiry. We present a design research program based on two propositions: socio-cultural practices are the basic unit for design, and; transitions, and transition management, are the basic points of design intervention. Rather than affirming the status quo or the prevailing discourse, we argue for design research as a ‘critical practice’, in which cultural diversity, non-humans and multiple futures are considered

Art, public authorship and the possibility of re-democratization

The subject of this study is a large public art project by German artist Jochen Gerz, which was part of the urban regeneration program The Phoenix Initiative in Coventry City, 1999-2004. The study presents a short historical backdrop to Gerz’s work by way of defining ‘public authorship’ of which the Coventry project is one example. It extends the literature on contemporary countermonument by assessing Gerz’s artistic strategy in using a monument to exploring the conditions of public culture and possible shape of a cultural public sphere in the contemporary city. The public art project lasted over five years and was a mechanism by which the political issues at stake in the public life of Coventry, particularly the socio-historic conflicts that are constitutive of its civic identity, were articulated. The study argues that public authorship succeeded in identifying some crucial coordinates in the political constitution of public culture in Coventry, but in the face of competing civic rhetoric and new urban policy initiatives, the project remains an open inquiry. This study concludes by identifying some critical lines of inquiry for future studies in art’s critical role in the public sphere

One and the Same: Ethical Attribution and Distributed Reasoning in ML-driven Systems

In this position paper, I propose that the technical, designerly as well as the ethical dimension of interpretability for machine learning (ML) are irreducibly intertwined, and even commensurate. With ML-driven systems, engineers and designers wield considerable power in shaping the values of the artefacts that govern our access to the world. This statement in itself is neither radical or new, with Winner's article on the politics of technological artefacts a ubiquitous reference, and the post-phenomenological stance of mediation theory gaining ground in the ethical discussions of HCI. Additionally, design methodologies such as participatory (PD) or value-sensitive design (VSD) are well articulated and poised to enter the discourse on interpretability. As a caveat, however, I suggest that any according assessment and design attempts for ML-driven systems ought to consider two co-constitutive factors: distributed hybrid reasoning and emergent values

“The embodiment of pure thought”? Digital fabrication, disability and new possibilities for auto/biography

This essay draws on findings from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project: “In the Making” (AH/M006026/1) to argue that the digital turn in art therapy – particularly 3D printing – makes possible new forms of disability agency, engaging post-humanist theory to suggest re-conceptualizations of embodied person-hood. Keywords: digital fabrication; disability; auto/biography; embodimen

Negotiating open source software adoption in the UK public sector

Drawing on two case studies in the UK public sector our qualitative study explains how and why open source software has seen such a mixed response. Our narratives indicate that for both cases there was strong goodwill towards open source yet the trajectories of implementation differed widely. Drawing upon ideas of change(ing), mutability and materiality we unpack the process of adoption. The study shows that open source software has certain facets; code, community, coordination mechanisms, license and documentation. Each facet is not stable; indeed, it is changing and mutable. This creates possibilities, potential but also recalcitrance, and barriers. The interesting point of departure of our study is how open source software — a much touted transparent and open phenomenon — is by its nuanced and layered mutability able to make the process and practices surrounding it less visible. It concludes with clear policy recommendations developing from this research that could help to make open source adoption more sustainable in the public sector