The Performativity of Code : Software and Cultures of Circulation

This article analyses a specific piece of computer code, the Linux operating system kernel, as an example of how technical operationality figures in contemporary culture. The analysis works at two levels. First of all, it attempts to account for the increasing visibility and significance of code or software-related events. Second, it seeks to extend familiar concepts of performativity to include cultural processes in which the creation of meaning is not central, and in which processes of circulation play a primary role. The analysis concentrates on the practices and patterns of circulation of Linux through versions, distributions, clones and reconfigurations. It argues that technical ‘culture-objects’ such as Linux take on a social existence within contemporary technological cultures because of the authorizing contexts in which the reading, writing and execution of code occur. The ‘force’ or performance of certain technical objects, their operationality, can be understood more as the stabilized nexus of diverse social practices, rules and personae than as a formal property of the objects themselves

A walk in the park: considering practice for \ud outdoor environmental education through an \ud immanent take on the material turn

This article considers practice for environmental education from the perspective of the material turn by taking the reader along on an outdoor learning session in a park. We present a fictional walk where we encounter plants, trees, wasp-orchids, stones, walking sticks, plastic bags, people, weather, and kites, each of which has a story to tell that demonstrates ontological immanence and the material process of being alive. These stories help suggest some practical ways in which environmental education can be reoriented from an essentialist paradigm to one of becoming, tackling prevailing conceptions of the human mind as disembodied from the world