The Thing About Things

A review of Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe's Second-hand Cultures (Berg, Oxford, 2003)

Bottled water practices: Reconfiguring drinking in Bangkok households

This chapter examines bottled water practices in Bangkok: how they function practically; how they become meaningful and normalised; and how they interact with everyday household water routines. Single-serve bottled water is generally classified as a fast food commodity driven by the logics of the global beverage industry and designed to be consumed outside the house. Drinking water from a branded bottle is seen as a form of leisure consumption vastly different from turning on the tap and interacting with a state utility. But can bottles and taps be so easily set in opposition, one emblematic of a product, the other of a service? Is the distinction between these two drinking practices as clear-cut as this? What of the many places where state or commercial water utilities are non-existent, underdeveloped or unsafe? In these settings the meanings and efficacy of bottled water, bought from street vendors or home delivered, operate far beyond the registers of frivolous leisure consumption. This is just one of many examples that blur the distinction between taps and bottles and reveal the complexity of drinking water practices. Both bottles and taps deliver water and discipline its consumption via a variety of socio-technical and economic arrangements. And in many settings these different arrangements are inter-articulated, in the sense that they influence and interact with each other in complex and various ways. The challenge is to understand these interactions and to investigate the processes whereby drinking practices are made meaningful. Our interest is in how the matter ofthe plastic bottle comes to matter in different settings. How does a fully materialised account of drinking practices make it possible to think about the interactions between bottles and taps in more productive ways?A focus on drinking practices foregrounds the efficacy ofbottles in different settings. It also shows how objects and practices are mutually constitutive. This approach situates the water bottle within the routines and habits of everyday life and the ways in which artefacts participate in these routines and help constitute the social. Practices, then, are always more-than-human. Rather than see them as an expression of human agency or culture they have to be understood as complex associations of materials, technologies, norms and bodily habits that are sustained and modified through repeated performance or enactment. In the case of the plastic water bottle, these practices vary significantly according to context. As an object designed for portability and single use it is most alive outside the home. How, then, does the bottle mediate inside and outside, or stasis and mobility? And how does it impact on household water practices? In what ways does the tap as the endpoint of a service interact with the bottle as beverage or commodity? How do these distinctions reverberate on the 'economy ofqualities' (Callon et al. 2002) that variously values water? These are the larger questions driving this chapter, but first we explain our approach to the question of practice

Introducing contagion design

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, economies, habits and data configure contagion? Across a program of four weeks of discussion and debate from October to November 2020, the international symposium Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data explored the current conjuncture through these vectors to critically address issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? The essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnological conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? Taken as a whole, the essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnical conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

The speculative turn in IVF: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility

Although egg freezing has received much scholarly attention, the pivotal role of financialisation in the fertility (preservation) sector remains understudied. This article discusses how processes of financialisation have instigated a step-change in the organisation of contemporary US IVF and why egg freezing is at the heart of a wider consolidating trend in the sector. The financialisation of fertility, in this context, references the financial investments in a future in which ever more women freeze their eggs, the role of capital markets in establishing new clinical and commercial infrastructures through which egg freezing becomes accessible and the role of financial products in shaping both the stories and the streamlining of fertility treatments. Together, these developments signal a shift from reproduction to fertility in IVF, in which treatment is not aimed at having a child at present, but rather at the proactive management of a more speculative fertility throughout the life course.Alan Turing Institut

Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers

The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results of a pilot study into the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo volunteers, and define a technique to determine motivations from free responses that can be used in larger multiple-choice surveys with similar populations. Our categories form the basis for a future survey, with the goal of determining the prevalence of each motivation.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure