Estudios de la Economía

Organizers: Ignacio Farias and Anders Blok

Large technical urban systems have represented a major source of STS insight and innovation (e.g. Hommels 2005). However, the city, urban life, and urban politics have only recently been subjected to the relentless relationalism of ANT and post-ANTstudies. In this context, the notion of ‘urban assemblages’ (Farías and Bender 2009, Blok 2011) has been mobilized to challenge a priori separations between users-producers of urban space (e.g. expert/lay), and to establish an explorative inquiry into the ways in which human and nonhuman entities come together in the city. Focusing on urban assemblages involves depicting the city as a multiple object, continuously crafted and performed at distributed sites.The assemblage approach to cities has not gone unnoticed in the larger field of (critical) urban studies, where passionate debate is taking place about the knowledge gains of STS and ANT (e.g. McFarlane 2011). Much of this debate concerns well-known STS issues of the proper meaning of ‘politics’. From an assemblage perspective, urban controversy cannot be reduced to the clash of human interests; rather, city-making processes resembles a form of object-oriented ‘cosmopolitics’ (Latour 2004). To establish the value of ANT (and STS) approaches to the city, we need more careful attention to how a common urban cosmos comes to be constructed in and across multiple sites of human and non-human practice.We welcome all paper presentations which, on the basis of empirical research, aims to further develop an assemblage approach to city-making and/or the study of urban cosmopolitics.

Open Panel: Disasters – Redesigning Collective Orders

Organized by Zuzana Hrdlickova (Goldsmiths, University of London), Manuel Tironi (Universidad Católica de Chile) and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).

This panel is interested in exploring the link between disasters, politics, material realities and social change. As Lowell Juilliard Carr already understood, writing in 1932, a crucial element of disasters is that they themselves are a form of social change. The world – as we experience and practice it – changes when disasters strike. As sites and moments that unfold ‘unknown unknowns’, catastrophes reshape routines, collectives, conventions and institutions. First, because disasters are not only sudden events caused by nature or man. They can also be of a protracted nature, such as armed conflicts. Second, disasters make existing ‘vital’ infrastructure (Collier and Lakoff, 2007) unmanageable or disappear. This creates new empty spaces, both political and technical. Third, catastrophes also create new political orders. The social change occurring through and with disasters is also a process in which the disentangling of constituent elements becomes problematic. The aftermath of disasters are frequently marked by an emergence of new sociomaterial realities in which the collective of things – including humans and nonhumans – has to be re-arranged. The new realities – such as life in camps, forced or voluntary migration – are often shaped by the way people conceptualize the disastrous event, but also by the political agentic properties of a myriad of heterogeneous entities and materials that become relevant in catastrophic situations. For example, the design of post-disaster planning brings together different (and often conflicting) technologies, political agents and definitions of what is desirable and how to manage and understand the temporality and spatiality of the event. Papers could thus cover the relationship between disasters and development, humanitarianism, politics, culture and any other relevant exploration of intersections between disasters and social change.

Please submit your abstract electronically via http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s12/  and make sure to suggest that your paper will fit into open panel 54, “Disasters – Redesigning Collective Orders”. You can read more about the conference on http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.