Paper short abstract:

¿How the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare tradition influenced the FARC-EP strategy, tactic, and technology?

Paper long abstract:

¿How the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare tradition influenced the FARC-EP strategy, tactic, and technology? Through the examination of the various ways in which a guerrilla group learns, we analyze how the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare tradition influenced the FARC-EP strategy, tactics, and technology. Based on interviews and historical materials, we document a phenomenon of learning by tradition. It refers to the processes by which comprehensive perspective is gained from a legacy that has been constituted through layers; in other words: the local adaptation/transformation of Mao’s PPW, the Bolshevik’s insurrectionary war, the Vietnamese version of both plus its own experience and the Cuban, Salvadorian and Colombian filters. We track the FARC-EP early reception of literature on Vietnamese and Maoist guerrilla strategy and tactics, training in Vietnamese methods from secondary and tertiary parties, and direct learning by traveling to Vietnam and receiving training near Hanoi in 1990.

Paper short abstract:

Women in southern Colombia have been able to transform their lives and their context through "mutant" uses of ICT tools, searching for the buen vivir. These uses are made to improve access to knowledge, strengthening the agency, as in the work of a bricoleur, working with what is at hand.

Paper long abstract:

This research looks at the use of some ICT tools by a group of women in Putumayo and Nariño; these uses are characterized as ‘deviant’ (Oudshoorn and Pinch (eds.), 2003), ‘mutant’ (Barreneche, 2018), tactical (De Certeau, 1990) or part of a mental revolution (Baricco, 2019). These women use digital tools as a bricoleur (Levi-Strauss, 1964), picking up various fragments to break down barriers of access, to find information and knowledge, to apply informal employment tactics, among other uses.

The main question is, what transformations in the capacity of agency do these ICT tools create when implemented in a particular community? Official figures show that using ICT tools has not significantly improved women's 'formal' working and economic situation in the South. However, in this research fieldwork, we found that ICT tools were being appropriated, transformed, and used in communities boosting the informal economy; promoting agency, helping in the creation of networks, acting as a trainer, as an informer, and also as a transformer of social dynamics, not always in ‘legal’ ways. This way of acting is studied by approaches such as those of diverse economies (Escobar, 2014) and shaped by the worldview of ancestral communities expressed in the buen vivir.

This presentation looks at some of these 'mutant' uses and how they affect some women's daily lives in southern Colombia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to reappraise the roles of people and production of knowledge at the fringes of the international drug control system by stripping existing labels and frameworks to understand drug markets, namely through their prohibition and criminality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the growing body of research that seeks to undo pre-existing legal and methodological categories that obscure health-related knowledge and technological production in illicit drug markets. By stripping the criminal labels, and re-examining instead on examples and anecdotes of knowledge-making and techno-innovations by consumers, producers, harm reduction activists, the aim is to reframe methods for understanding what counts as legitimate or illegitimate knowledges produced at the fringes of restrictive drug control laws. Indeed, countries are researching or reforming access to plant-based controlled substances, New Psychoactive Substances pose different challenges.

In other words, not all practices are safe, and not all vendors seek to advance human health, broadly conceived (Lancaster, 2017). Rather than undoing completely with ideas of what is legitimate or illegitimate knowledge about health practices within illegal spaces, it may still be important to fine-tune the impact or negligible or indeed, negative impact of some practices by conceptualising actors in the supply chain differently. For example, what if we conceived some producers, suppliers and dealers as ‘quacks’ (Porter, 1989), insofar their relationship to consumers is not about the ‘fakery’ of the medicines sold, but about the ‘transactional’ model which seeks to generate profit through the sale of discredited chemical substances, like nitazenes and other new synthetic opioids. In short, whilst undoing legalistic labels may support understanding and fleshing out health-related knowledge-making at the fringes, old categories may help to describe actors whose knowledge of chemical and pharmaceutical substances with a negligible or dangerous impact on human health.

Paper short abstract:

This study explores research within the context of the Polish drug trade darknet site. It discusses methodological challenges in crime-related digital ethnography and shows how data gathering and user engagement methods offer insights into the online drug trade’s dynamics and community interactions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores digital ethnography within the unique context of Cebulka, the foremost Polish darknet forum dedicated to drug trade activities via TOR. In Cebulka, the users not only buy drugs with particular safety mechanisms imposed, but some engage in active community debating drug-related and more general issues. This aspect challenges the prevailing narrative in the literature that online drug trading spaces are solely transactional. The netnography, conducted from February 2023 to January 2024, employed a dual approach: semi-automatic coding of site data supplemented with field notes and user interviews. This study’s purpose is twofold. Firstly, it indicates meanings ascribed to illegal activities and illuminates the complex dynamics of drug trading by revealing its communal aspects, contrasting with its typically transactional portrayal. This includes emphasizing how the aforementioned approaches to data gathering yielded different insights. Secondly, the methodological side of the study is explained, including the problems and specificity of netnography in a particular crime-related environment. Numerous modifications to standard procedures had to be implemented to gain access to data, some of it hidden, based on the users’ status. Additionally, due to highly suspicious and safety-oriented users, unconventional measures had to be taken to engage them ethically and in a relevant manner. The paper discusses what this particular case study can teach us when conducting digital ethnography in general. The research presented is part of a larger ongoing project on online drug trade financed by the Polish National Science Center.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will present a case study of Sherrie Levine’s “After Walkers Evans” (1981), seen through the concept of Plunderphonics by Jhon Oswald, aiming to discuss the relations of plagiarism and piracy in art works, and the role of technology and technoscientific governanceover art.

Paper long abstract:

"After Walker Evans" (1981) by photographer Sherrie Levine was an exhibition featuring images taken from the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941), by author James Agee alongside photos by Walker Evans. Intending to critique originality in art, Levine faced legal threats from Evans' Estate for Copyright infringement. She ceased using Evans' work and the lawsuit was dropped, after, the Estate ended up purchasing the images. This analysis will examine Levine's work in the context of John Oswald's concept of Plunderphonics, exploring piracy, plagiarism, and the appropriation of existing art to question originality and challenge copyright. Oswald proposes that any body of work should be open for appropriation, regardless of authorization or payment of rights, but always citing the original creator, as quotation does in literature.

This paper employs a case study methodology centered around Sherrie Levine's exhibition as a pivotal illustration. Drawing on John Oswald's concept, the paper argues that Levine's actions could be considered a plunderphonic work. Ultimately, this analysis will delve into the technological aspect of piracy and plagiarism in art, also covered in Oswald’s Plunderphonics, engaging with current discussions in STS on technoscientific governance, by examining the ways in which science and technology intersect with governance structures, and assessing the implications of interference of the State in artistic contexts.

Therefore, in analyzing Levine's work through the relation between Oswald's Plunderphonics and STS studies, discussions about plagiarism and artistic recontextualization can be raised, complicating further the binomials of good-bad, legal-illegal.

Paper short abstract:

Since the 1980s, Colombia's oil pipelines have symbolized energy and modernity. The oil is disputed and siphoned by illegal actors to produce pategrillo, a ‘dirty’ fuel. Pategrillo profoundly affects northeastern Colombia, while materializing as a local innovation created from chaos to power.

Paper long abstract:

Crude oil exploitation has been a significant matter in Colombian economic development, mainly since the early 1980s. Infrastructures, such as the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, were built by the industry and the state, based on understandings of energy and their entanglement with modernity. Ecologies of organized crime also adhered to the pipeline even before it was built, compromising and intervening in its flows of energy and profits. The pipeline itself has been shaping landscapes along its route, while becoming controversial, contingent, and disputed as an anticipatory energy destination. Today, the pipeline is being siphoned illegally. The obtained crude oil is distilled within clandestine and transitory refineries in the middle of the mountains and jungles. One resulting material is a 'dirty' kerosene known as pategrillo, considered inherently a risk to the oil industry but big business for illegal actors; armed groups and pategrilleros—the pategrillo makers—supply illicit markets. This paper investigates how oil and pategrillo sculpt the northeastern border regions of Colombia, crossed by the pipeline and heavily involved in coca plantations and cocaine production, beyond environmental degradation. Pategrillo is assumed by this work as a local innovation that does not emerge suddenly, but stems from Colombian historicities. Pategrillo is created from chaos, through unsophisticated technologies, illicit mobilities, and violence at the heart of discredited spaces and communities. Yet pategrillo is a “thing-power” capable enough to meet energy expectations, choreographing engineering knowledges and stabilizing out-of-sight fuel epistemologies.

Paper short abstract:

We argue that Latin American STS should contribute to the research on the production of technologies and knowledge in non-traditional spaces, largely outside the purview of the State.

Paper long abstract:

Social Sciences, particularly Terrorism Studies and Criminology, have employed a perspective from the State to generate knowledge about the actions of those deemed deviant, criminal, outside the law, among others (Gootenberg, 2005). This type of approach commonly constructs dualistic divisions, separating practices, actions and artifacts considered destructive, undesirable, or hostile from the rest of society, revealing certain ontologies, epistemologies and, certainly, politics of knowledge.

In this paper, we argue that Latin American STS should contribute to the research on the production of technologies and knowledge in non-traditional spaces, largely outside the purview of the State. Instead of adhering to rigid dichotomies between the “social” and the “asocial”, the grey approach defends a more nuanced sociological perspective regarding “criminal actors”, advocating for the analysis of these practices from a non-dualistic social standpoint (Martin, 2022). Based on previous research on drug trafficking and guerrilla warfare in Colombia, we propose addressing technologies and knowledge in grey zones from different interconnected elements that takes into account the geographies and histories of such technologies.