Turning People Into Silicon: an Ethnography of Users and User Centred Design

Alex Wilkie

PhD Project, 2003-2009

This project is funded by the EPRSC and forms part of the six year Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC).

The aim of this research project is to examine the discourse and practices in which multiple user representations facilitate user-centred design and innovation practices in relation to technological development. My research entails three core tasks: 1) to map empirically the diverse uses of the ‘user’ within research environment and development programmes that employ or are engaged with UCD practices and articulated as ‘user’ oriented outcomes. The ‘user’ will be analysed in terms of the multiple expectations it embodies around persons. How the capacities and, ultimately, functionality are modelled and organised around the attributes of the imagined end-user. Moreover, the performative role of such ‘expectation discourses’ will also be examined to see how design futures and the future of the organisation are enacted in the present. 2) To detail the ways in which different and multiple versions of the user are coordinated, contested and ordered in the course of specific practices and emerging corporate strategy. 3) To identify the conditions under which the multiple meanings of ‘user’ are accepted or discarded and explore how meanings of users emerge. How, for example, particular versions of the ‘user’ are enacted and exchanged amongst a wider community of practice.

Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethics and Responsibility

Vanessa Arena

PhD project, 2004-2008

My present research approaches the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) through the lens of the ethical, and, in doing so, critically encounters notions such as ‘generosity,’ ‘charity,’ and ‘responsibility’ itself.  Over the course of the past year I have focused on examining (amongst other things) the following issues: How the ‘ethical’ functions as an originating concept that acts to validate and justify CSR as a discourse; the ‘sites’ at and through which debates about the need for ‘responsible’ corporate behaviour become apparent; ‘compassion fatigue’ and the notion of affective inaccessibility in relation to regimes of calculability and measurement – evident in the ubiquity of ‘transparency’ as a corporate value, and the notion of ‘audited accountability’; and, most recently, the tensions between responsibility as that which individualises (implying blame and singularity) and the possibility (or impossibility) of ‘collective’ or ‘social’ responsibility. I am currently examining the temporal dimensions of responsibility by attending to notions such as risk, security and inventiveness.

'Teenage Pregnancy': A Genealogical Enquiry

Ofra Koffman

PhD project, 2004-2008

Offra Koffman's doctoral research looked at the emergence of governmental concern with 'teenage pregnancy' in Britain in the early 1960s, highlighting the role of psychological discourse in this process. Two particularly important notions were the concept of adolescence as a universal stage of development characterised by mismatch between a mature body and an immature psyche; and the notion that inadequate mothering has a lasting detrimental impact on the health of a child. A monograph based on this project will be published by Manchester University Press.

Mapping Stem Cell Innovation in Action

Mike Michael, Clare Williams, Alan Cribb, Bobbie Farsides, Nigel Heaton, Steven Wainwright

This interdisciplinary collaboration, funded by the ESRC, draws together expertise in the sociology of science and technology, medical sociology, medicine/biological science, biomedical ethics and public policy, in a study tracking the development trajectory of innovative stem cell research and clinical treatment. An ethnography of an international centre at the forefront of fetal and adult stem cell research for the treatment of liver disease and diabetes will be contextualised more broadly by interviews with key UK stakeholders. A social science, scientific, medical and ethics literature and policy document analysis will map discourses, debates and shifts in the area of stem cell research. Through early engagement with these important areas in stem cell research and treatment, the study will explore how a new technology might be encouraged or prevented from diffusing from ‘bench to bedside’, and potentially to market place. It will investigate how discursive and practical procedures and resources are aligned in the process of routinisation of stem cell treatments, and identify how different discourses about stem cells may be mobilised and interpreted by key stakeholders. Theoretically, the study will contribute to sociological literature in the areas of Science and Technology Studies, Risk, Time, and the Body. It will also contribute to the development of a more socially embedded account of ethical deliberation and decision making about policies and their effects, as well as to the social and policy contexts of professional and research ethics. This research will produce an insightful social scientific analysis that is commensurate with the pace of contemporary scientific stem cell research. The information gained will be of direct benefit to government and statutory advisory bodies and user groups. It will also contribute to the development of a UK/European legal, regulatory and policy framework, in addition to more general public debate about stem cell research and treatment.

Reconstituting Citizens: Public Involvement as an Enactment of Issue Entanglement

2007-2009

Dr Noortje Marres

Marie Curie Fellowship
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Expected start date: March 1, 2007

This research project addresses challenges to human-centered, dialogic understandings of citizen involvement in the politics of science and technology, by elaborating an object-oriented conception of such involvement. Focusing on civic engagements with climate change, it aims to develop an understanding of these practices as enactments of actors’ “entanglement in issues.” As part of this project, the research will explore the roles played by technological and natural entities in the performance of citizenship: domestic energy technology, botanic nature and water/ice. A second objective of the research project is the analysis of the formative role played by information technologies in enabling the performance of citizenship as issue-entanglement. Finally, the citizen involvement projects that are studied, along with the role of IT therein, will be subjected to a ‘realist’ evaluation: here the aim is to specify the effects that these enactments have or have not produced in wider configurations of climate change politics.

The project begins by evaluating criticisms of dialogic approaches to public participation in political theory and feminist social theory, and how constructivist studies of science, society and democracy help to address them. Thus, these latter studies direct attention to the affective, material and political dimensions of citizen involvement in two ways: by focusing on situated enactments of citizenship and by approaching them as interventions in public controversies. The research project aims to further develop theses sensibilities by conceptualizing citizen involvements as practices that draw on, activitate and operate upon the “attachments” by means of which actors are implicated in political issues. With the aid of Web analysis and fieldwork, studies will be conducted of a range of citizen involvement projects concerned with climate change, such as communication initiatives, public demonstrations and projects of sustainable consumption. In conceiving of these practices as enactments of issue-entanglement, the research will pay special attention to the natural and technological dimensions of performances of citizenship, and this in two respects.
Firstly, the research will seek to specify the affordances of particular non-human phenomena in facilitating citizen involvement in climate change, such as solar panels, gardens, natural ice, and floods. Here the aim is to explore how actors’ attachments to these particular entities provide the means by which their engagement with public affairs may take a concrete form. The involvement of citizens in issues — i.e. their implication in the partly antagonistic intertwinings of extensive relations that political affairs like climate change are made up of — must then be understood as mediated by the physical and material relations that sustain these actors. Secondly, the analysis will focus on the effects of socio-technical formats (e.g. blogs, cross-media campaigns) in facilitating and constraining the performance of citizenship as an enactment of issue-entanglement. Attending to the articulation of citizenship on the forums of the Internet also provides the analysis with a research site for detecting the wider effects of projects of citizen involvement in climate change. With the aid of tools of Web analysis, further mobilisations of projects of citizen involvement will be analysed, in order to determine the ways in which civic involvement practices influence the wider organisation of climate change issue spaces on the Web, or fail to do so.

The Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space

2007-2008

Dr Noortje Marres

"The Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space" is a series of conversations being developed by Jonathan Pugh, Chantal Mouffe, Francoise Verges, Doreen Massey and Noortje Marres, and an increasing number of academics from various disciplines, in many countries.  It is being directed by Jonathan Pugh, with assistance from Oliver Moss, who is the “Space of Democracy and Democracy of Space” co-ordinator. 

These conversations will bring together those who have explored the political aspects of spatial practices, with others who have developed constructivist approaches to democratic theory, particularly those concerned with radical politics.  The aim is to bridge a divide not only across these concerns, but to also reflect upon what radical politics means for different generations of academics, across the disciplines, as the spatialisation of politics throws up new challenges.

The re-organisation of spaces of politics is re-shaping our understanding of the concepts of space, democracy and the political themselves. The very meaning of space, democracy and the political is often different, contextual; specific to different locations.  This pluralisation in how we think about such basic concepts, so central to our underlying, human forms of life, has massive implications for how we think about the territorial institutions of governance which we engage with on a daily basis, as well for how we understand distributions of opportunity, responsibility and the emergence of new technologies or social movements, as just some examples.  And so, we are concerned with what "work" different concepts of space, democracy and the political do, as we encounter with, engage and transform them through practices.  Do they demand that we reject, or celebrate, territorial spaces of democracy, for example?  What conceptualisations of spatial practices, politics and the political are strong enough to address the challenges of inequality and inertia?  That is, how does critique of, and public engagement through, different geo-political concepts and practices, become transformative, into something positive and progressive? 

In order to explore these questions, the interdisciplinary network is presently concentrating upon establishing “nodes” from a core group of around 30 people, working across each of the following disciplines: political philosophy, politics, planning, geography, anthropology, technology, sociology, international relations and development studies.  This core group will eventually take the conversations through the different disciplines via academic workshops, academic journals, public debates, the general media and website interfaces, for examples. 

Academics that are so far involved include Tim Ignold, David Howarth, Uma Kothari, Nina Laurie, Scott Lash, John Forester, Patsy Healey, Susan Owens, Susan Fainstein, Susan Christopherson, Deborah Thien, Maarten Hajer, Jean Hillier.  We are also in discussions with David Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yannis Stavrakakis and David Wood, who have also expressed an interest in participating in this project. 

So far conversations are being organised for Harvard, Cornell, California, Newcastle, The Centre for the Study of Democracy, Goldsmiths, the Institute of British Geographers/ Royal Geographical Society and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.  Support is coming from these institutions, as well as the Economic and Social Research Council and through the public debating forum, the Great Debate.  The possibility of a special session on the Caribbean is also likely, given the recent strong interest from academics, activists, governmental and non-governmental agencies working in the region.

If you are interested in this project, please contact us via Oliver.Moss@ncl.ac.uk

Between Arts and Business: Reinventions of Social Engagement

2005-2008

 

James Marriott

AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts

 

Since the 1980s there has been an increase in socially engaged arts projects, whilst at the same time there has been an increase in the social engagement of business. This project assesses the implications of this social orientation for both constituencies, and how these parallel developments impact on each other. It develops new ways of visualising, researching and intervening in the social engagement of business. At the same time it critically interrogates theoretical accounts of socially engaged art. Socially engaged art is a field of practice which argues that there is a critical difference between an art taht engages in the politics of representation and the art institutions, and an art taht engages in wider political practices. The development of socially engaged art has tended to follow particular oatterns: (a) it has focused on communities defined by place; (b) artists have usually been in a strong position relative to the human community or enviornnment that forms the subject; and (c) it has been assumed that there is a clear distinction between the work of artists, who are able to give voice to disadvantaged communities, and the actions of business which has tended to ignore these voices. Since the mid-1990s there has been a marked shift in relations between business and society. An increasing number of businesses have made environmental sustainability and human rights central to their coporate identity. Leaders in the field are BP and Shell which are the focus of this research project. In order to maximise their 'social licence to operate' these two companies have sought to foster new levels of social engagement through techniques such as public consultation, human rights and environmental audits (Power 1997), cultural sponsorship, ethical brands, interactive websites (Rogers 2000) and alliances with NGOs. However, for oil companies this process has recently come into question, especially in the light of the governance crisis in Shell, the increasing public concern over the Iraq war, and the challenge of Climate Change. This research interrogates the given model of socially engaged art and asks:

 

1. What implication does the social engagement of business have for the practice of socially engaged art and vice versa?

2. How can socially engaged art both visualise and intervene in the social engagement of business?

3. What is the relationship between socially engaged artists, and experts in social engagement employed by business?

Pindices: Demonstrating Matters of Public Concern

2004-2006

Andrew Barry and Lucy Kimbell

In this interdisciplinary project we brought together out individual working practices and backgrounds in a collaboration that produced a time-based installation and website investigating day-to-day political activity.

How political have you been this week? How much of a citizen? Pindices sought to make individual political activity visible, but not in the ways typically measured by polling agencies or using the normal methods of social science. Rather than looking at political ideologies, institutions, groups or identities, in our project we started with the individual and their acts, and invited participants to make public a reckoning of their everyday political or citizenship identity by creating their own personal political indices. Somewhere between a public art project and bad social science, Pindices offers ways of thinking about what matters to individuals and how this is made visible.

'Pindices' was included in the exhibition 'Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy' curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe , March-October 2005.

Barry, A and Kimbell, L 'Pindices' in Latour, B and Weibel, P (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press (2005)

Interdisciplinarity and Society: A Critical Comparative Study

2004-2006

Gisa Weszkalnys (Goldsmiths), Andrew Barry, Marilyn Strathern (Social Anthropology, Cambridge) and Georgina Born (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge)

with

Alan Blackwell (Crucible, Cambridge) and James Leach (Social Anthropology Cambridge)

Although it has a long history in both scientific research and science policy, interdisciplinarity has recently acquired a new importance to policy and is taking new experimental forms. Large claims are made for it. Most saliently, it is claimed that interdisciplinary research will play a vital role not just in the development of new areas of scientific research, but in transformating the relations between scientific experts and society.

In the context of the new focus on interdisciplinarity, collaborations that cut across the boundaries between the natural sciences and engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences, arts and humanities, on the other, have acquired a special significance. There is, however, a serious lack of empirical studies of such collaborations. This study aims to remedy this lack through a critical comparative study. Specifically, the study addresses the following key questions:

1. What are the principal forms that interdisciplinary collaborations between natural scientists/engineers, and social scientists and artists take?

2. How do wider social concerns, demands and forms of knowledge figure in such collaborations?

3. Does interdisciplinary collaboration with social scientists or artists make scientists more responsive to public demands and concerns, and more open to other sources of knowledge and expertise?

4. Is the growing number of such interdisciplinary collaborations a sign of a broader transformation in the way that knowledge is produced?

5. How are such collaborations valued by participants, and what kinds of outputs do they produce?

This project addresses these questions through three complementary levels of research and analysis:

1. Through a worldwide survey the project will develop a map of the principal institutionalised forms of interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists/engineers, and social scientists or artists.

2. Through case studies of six well-established institutions (3 US, 2 European and 1 UK) the project will provide analyses of specific examples of different forms of interdisciplinarity in practice.

3. Through ethnographic study of one specific experiment in interdisciplinarity, the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park (CGKP).

4. A fourth crucial feature of the project is methodological innovation embodied in the ethnography through a related series of colloquia on social property and interdisciplinary design workshops,

The project forms part of phase 2 of the ESRC Science in Society programme.

Research Archive

Social and Human Rights Impact Assessment and the Governance of Technology

2003-2004

Andrew Barry and Joanna Ewart-James

with

Meltem Ahiska (Bosphurus University, Istanbul), Faredeh Hayet (SOAS, University of London) and Andy Stirling (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex)

This ESRC funded project addresses these new trends through two related case studies of large technological development projects in Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. They are the Ilusu dam project and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project. Both cases have brought together into a network of negotiation, British government agencies, international finance organisations, multinational firms and NGOs. International financial support for the Ilusu dam project was not given following a campaign by NGOs and criticism in Parliament. A debate concerning the potential impacts of the BTC pipeline project is on-going.

The study uses an innovative range of methods: interviews with government and financial institutions, companies, NGOs, activists, and parliamentarians; computer-based analysis of links between institutional websites; direct observation of public events and demonstrations; documentary research; and field visits to Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In addition to its significance for non-academic users, the study will contribute to the development of new sociological theories of the relations between social scientific expertise, technology, economy and society. The study forms part of phase 2 of the ESRC’s Science in Society programme.

Comedy Of Errors - Tragedy of Decisions

2004-2005

Dr. Andrea Stockl in collaboration with Xperiment!, Vienna, Austria

This project, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust SciArt programme, brings together academic and artistic approaches to manifest, and possibly resolve, questions of public and philosophical involvement in the production of science. The project is designed to help develop an art form (installation/performance) that depicts the messiness of social science research and our own involvement in the production of knowledge. Andrea Stöckl, and Xperiment!, a Vienna ( Austria) based art & science group, combine their experiences and work practices in order to conduct “research in the wild”. The field of experimental medical treatment will be juxtaposed with recent developments in palliative health care settings. Issues of patient involvement and autonomy of the involved persons will be addressed. The aim is to construct an audio-visual protocol (a topography ‘en miniature’) of the field by means of a structured collection of text, audio and video fragments, photographs and artefacts. The project outcome should serve as basis for the realization of a public intervention strategy called ‘Performing Shared Incompetence’ which will be exhibited at the Centre for Media and Art in Karlsruhe.

Images of Mind

2004-2006

Dr. Simon Cohn with Jo-Anne Bichard

Funded by the Innovative Health Technologies Programme (ESRC and Medical Research Council).

Extraordinary technological advances in brain scanning have led to the last ten years being heralded as the 'Decade of the Brain'. For the very first time in the history of medicine not only the intricate structure, but the living brain's function, its actual working, is beginning to be mapped in detail. The media is now flooded with brain images, reporting claims that the site for one behavioural characteristic or another has just been discovered. Feature films and documentaries alike extol the wonders of this new technology, implying that it is gaining access to the very essence of what it is to be human.

This research aims to investigate some of the cultural dimensions around ideas of the brain and neuroscience as they are being developed. Advancing visualisation technology is likely to have consequences not only for how the brain is conceived and represented, but also for the much broader understandings people have of the mind and body. Scientific studies claiming to establish the average or typical cognitive function is likely to influence the way in which normal behaviour is understood, while in clinical settings the ability to locate and identify neurological disorders is already having an impact on how certain conditions are perceived, not only medically, but also socially.

Gulf War Illnesses: An Anthropological Study

2004-2006

Dr. Simon Cohn and Claire Dyson.

Funded by the Levenshulme Trust.

From August 1990 to June 1991, 697,000 members of the armed forces were deployed to the Persian Gulf by the United States , 51,000 by the United Kingdom and 4,500 by Canada . Months after the end of the conflict random reports started to occur of various disorders affecting troops who served in the Gulf. This 'mysterious' illness became rapidly labelled as 'Gulf War Syndrome'. Whilst there has been a vast amount of research into this illness - no unique biological cause has yet to be found.

'Gulf War Syndrome' is now an established popular, media and social concept - how and why this has developed is vital. It is clear from the on-going controversy that surrounds Gulf War Illnesses that new perspectives are needed to provide insight into this cultural phenomenon.

This project aims to explore some of the cultural dimensions to the construction of 'Gulf War Syndrome' in the UK , as presented by sufferers themselves. In order to achieve this, their written accounts and a sample of interviews will be carefully mapped to existing survey data and compared both to veterans who served in Bosnia and those soldiers who have not seen active service. It will contrast their perspectives with the shifting views within the medical profession, and its general current consensus that there is no such specific disorder, or syndrome.

The research project will provide an anthropological perspective into the current debate by demonstrating what specific cultural assumptions, contradictions and ambiguities have influenced and become embedded in the term 'Gulf War Syndrome' and to look at the ways in which these may have influenced or shaped sufferers understandings in a broader forum, on their return.