Frankfurt Kitchen STS

As many of you already know, next week Eduardo Viveiros de Castro will be in Frankfurt. He’ll deliver this year’s Kantorowicz lecture on Wednesday the 15th November; on Thursday the 16th November he’ll participate in a discussion in Mousonturm; and on Friday the 17th November an exhibition of his photographs will open at the Weltkulturen Museum.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s works – especially his paper on perspectivism – have been widely discussed in STS, so it’s more than justified to dedicate next week’s kitchen session to him and his oeuvre. Hope to see many of you at the Wednesday lecture and the Thursday discussion.

The title of this post is the name of a new STS masters programme in Frankfurt, ran jointly by the cultural anthropology department, the human geography department, and the department of sociology (http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/66719699?).

Our first meeting, together with some of the new masters students, will take place on the 19th October, between 18:00 and 20:00 in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204).

Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Our special guest this week will be Andy Pickering, with whom we will continue our ongoing conversation about the analytical and political implications of holding different worlds together. We’ll meet at 6pm on the 4th July, in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204) to discuss one of Andy’s recent papers on the ontological turn. (Do let Endre know if you can’t access the PDF.)

See many of you soon!

Related to our previous conversation on the composition of collectives, the special guests of the next kitchen meeting will be Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, who will tell us about their recent fieldwork on trans care in Argentina. The session will take place between 18.00 and 20.00 on the 29th June, in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204). Please send Endre an email for the PDF.

See many of you soon!

Last time we talked quite a bit about the possible roles of STS in post-truth politics. In light of current political developments (e.g. the US leaving the Paris Accord) it’s difficult to see things in a productive way, but current discussions about science and politics might open up new possibilities for STS to make itself politically relevant. Bruno Latour’s ‘compositionist manifesto‘ outlines one such possibility…

We’ll meet to discuss Latour’s manifesto (and a more recent writing of his in Harper’s Magazine) on the 8th June, at 18.00, in the soc. kitchen area. See you soon!

Our next kitchen STS meeting will be held at 18.00 on the 11th May in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204). The topic for this week’s discussion is post-truth politics and the ways in which STS is implicated in this story. Please have a look at Sergio Sismondo’s editorial to the previous issue of SSS and the latest issue of the EASST review, particularly Steve Fuller’s contribution.

Looking forward to seeing many of you on Thursday!

The first meeting of the summer term will take place on the 20th April, between 18.00 and 20.00 in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204). As many of you know already, the cultural anthropology department, the human geography department, and the sociology department are working together to launch a new STS masters programme – the accreditation process is well under way. This raises a new intellectual and practical question for us: how to teach STS? This is what we’ll be discussing on Thursday, and quite possibly in the next couple of sessions.

In his opening lecture at last month’s ‘Values of Critique’ symposium, which almost exactly coincided with Donald Trump’s inauguration, Bruno Latour suggested that the mandate of STS has radically changed. ‘Forty years ago the main enemy was positivism; today no one believes in science any more.’ We’re in the era of ruins, all the iconic institutions of modernity have been deconstructed. In this new setting, what is STS going to be about?

In our next meeting we’ll discuss this rather heavy question with the help of Steve Woolgar and his colleagues’ paper titled ‘Does STS mean business?‘. The meeting will be held on the 9th February, starting at 6pm in the soc. kitchen area (PEG 3G 204). Steve has kindly agreed to respond to our questions and comments, if any.

We’ll start the New Year with a fascinating symposium on the Values of Critique, organised by the Normative Orders excellence cluster. The event will take place on the 19th and 20th January in the Städelschule, and include talks by Luc Boltanski, Rahel Jaeggi, Bruno Latour, among  others. No registration is necessary, but make sure you arrive early, since the hall is likely to be packed.

Our next kitchen session will address a methodological problem that was articulated during our discussion with Louise Amoore, namely the problem of black boxes. Louise has argued that in the era of algorithms opening black boxes – the default methodological strategy in STS – will no longer do: many research objects in the field are not boxes, they are not black, and opening them is not necessarily the best way of engaging with them. So, what do we do?

The problem seems new, but versions of it have already been addressed in STS. In our next session, we’ll discuss a classic text: ‘Upon opening the black box and finding it empty‘ by Langdon Winner. The session will take place at the usual place (PEG 3G 204) at the usual time (18.00-20.00) on the 8th December.