Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

When rabbits became humans (and humans, rabbits): stability, order, and history in the study of populations

“Population” is often a significant unit of analysis, and a point of passage for facts and models moving between the natural and social sciences, and between animals and humans. But the very existence of a population is a “fact” fraught with challenges: What distinguishes a population from an economy, an ecosystem, a society? Are populations simply memory-less aggregates of solitary individuals, or do they constitute groups with unique histories and agency? Looking at how populations of humans and populations of rabbits were thought of in terms of one another, this paper examines several interlinked episodes in the history of “population” as an organizing concept in 20th century science, tracking the transfer of facts from rabbit populations to human populations (and vice versa) through economics, infectious disease modelling, and macro-histories. What happens when rabbits become human, and when humans become rabbits

Documenting the World: Film, Photography and the Scientific Record

The link below is for the introduction of this book.Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that defined historical moments and generations: the Battle of the Somme, the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. The introduction of photography, and subsequently, film in documenting the present created new types of records that altered notions of historical, legal, and scientific evidence, changed interactions among scientists and their subjects, and challenged the very construction and meaning of the archive. Together, the still and moving image helped to instill a documentary impulse that combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to visually capture the world, order it and render it useful for future generations. In the virtual world of images, it is easy to lose sight of the material dimensions of the film and photographic record left behind in this quixotic quest. But the sheer mass of photograph and film documents that take up space in archives and consume vast resources in their virtual state on the web is a reminder of their material impact. At 100 million images and counting, Corbis, for example, one of the largest sites for one-stop shopping for digital still and moving images, is dependent upon a gigantic physical infrastructure of fiber optic cables, routers, hubs, and servers that greatly expand the material footprint of the archival image. This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. Each step of documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has physically transformed natural and built environments, altered the lives of human subjects, reconstituted disciplines of knowledge, and changed economic and social relationships. Drawing upon scholars from across the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the essays in this volume explore the work that photographs and films do as evidentiary documents, narrative objects, and the stuff of archives spanning more than a century of photographic and film history

The Documentary Impulse

This article has two interconnected goals. It is, first of all, a review of the film The Land Beneath Our Feet, an exemplary documentary that combines the history of technology, science and technology studies, and environmental history in its exploration of the social, cultural, and natural consequences of the rubber industry’s expansion in Liberia. The essay’s larger purpose, however, is to explore the powerful role documentary film-making practices have to play in the development of new approaches in the history of technology. Here, an interview with historian and film co-director Gregg Mitman provides the framework for an expansive conversation about both the “documentary impulse” that he explores in his film and related written works, and also the growing role of audiovisual practice in scholarly work