Rethinking construction expertise with posthumanism

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Construction Management and Economics on 14th January 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01446193.2015.1122201.Expertise is commonly understood to be a distinct, even defining, aspect of being human – an attribute related to our efficacies to come to know and influence the, mostly nonhuman, world around us. In construction, expertise is commonly defined as the acquisition of skill and knowledge related to new technical processes, organizational routines, health and safety codes, even cultural norms. Despite the development of rule-following ‘expert systems’ in construction and beyond, the proposal that nonhuman technologies and artefacts can share our expertise is thus to be regarded with doubt: humans are human because of their lived expertise to undertake tasks faster and better than machines and other nonhumans. Increasingly, however, this anthropocentric view of expertise can be challenged by a ‘posthuman turn’ that is gathering pace across the social sciences and humanities. In this paper I evaluate, via the work of four seminal posthuman thinkers, the distinct, and varied, contribution that posthumanism might make to how we understand notions of construction expertise. In so doing I draw upon fictional examples of construction practices to illustrate the challenge and theoretical and practical opportunities in rethinking construction expertise via posthumanism

Agony at a Distance : Investigating Digital Witnessing on YouTube

Peer reviewe

Violence and creation: the recovery of the body in the work of Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain justly deserves it place as one the pivotal works that opened up the field of ‘body studies’. The text needs to be evaluated in the retrospective terms of the field it established, and also with respect to the changing status of both ‘torture’ and ‘war’ in contemporary state politics. Scarry’s analysis of the relationship between making and unmaking, tools and weapons, under-estimates the reversibility and the situated relational character of these processes and artefacts. The changing nature of modern conflict, and the rising concern with global terrorism rather than ‘conventional’ and ‘nuclear’ war, makes the ‘referential instability’ of the body difficult to recuperate in post-conflict discourse. At the same, the normalisation of the logic of torture in the contemporary governance of the bodies of the most vulnerable in society makes Scarry’s analysis all the more prescient

Persuasion architectures: Consumer spaces, affective engineering and (criminal) harm

Drawing together recent theoretical work from both within and beyond criminology, this article considers the role of strategically designed consumer spaces in eliciting potentially criminogenic and harmful dispositions and behaviours. First, the article introduces recent work in cultural geography and urban studies, which has drawn attention to the manipulation of affect through spatial design. Second, by way of example, the article considers how such strategies are deployed in three types of consumer environments: shopping malls and retail spaces; casinos and other gambling environments; and the so-called night time economy. Third, the article engages such developments theoretically. It is suggested we rethink the distinctions and interrelationships between human subjectivity and agency and the built environment. The implications of this proposed conceptual reorientation are explored – first, for our understandings of agency, intentionality, moral responsibility and political accountability; and second, for criminological thinking around embodied difference, power and exclusio

Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change

Simon ZB. Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change. History of European Ideas. 2019;45(8):1171-1190.A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization