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- Convenors:
-
Michaela Spencer
(Charles Darwin University)
Endre Dányi (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
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- Discussant:
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Amade Aouatef M'charek
(University of Amsterdam)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Long Abstract:
It may be tempting to read ‘voicing’ as an attempt to give voice to places, to make them talk and thereby integrate them into a particular understanding of politics – one that works through speeches and arguments and carries an emancipatory impulse. But here our intention is different: the ‘voicing’ we have in mind is closer to sounding a musical instrument, to hearing and responding to harmonies and discordances. What might it mean to inhabit places in this way, and what might that mean for our scholarly methods and analyses? In this panel we aim to bring together a series of empirical stories that foreground our methods as arising in specific places and finding a resonance between such places and various attempts to know and govern them. Understood in this way, ‘voicing places’ requires learning, making mistakes, being clumsy, but also becoming proficient. It sensitises us to the difference between speeches and cries, grunts and gurgles, vibrations and silences embedded in sites (such as rivers and waterways, farmlands, data centres, councils and ceremonies). Through attention to multiple senses of voicing, our proposal expresses a methodological sensibility to the various ways in which places ‘are,’ and explores STS dispositions by which we may participate carefully, and lyrically, within their making and doing (as a politics).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Endre Dányi (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
Long abstract:
It is more or less clear what politics does to rivers: it turns them into well-policed borders, busy transportation routes and sources of hydraulic energy. But what do rivers do to politics? More precisely, what kinds of politics becomes thinkable and doable if we foreground rivers and their modalities? In this paper I engage with this question with the help of the Danube: the only river in Europe that connects the Eastern and the Western parts of the continent, flowing from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania and Ukraine. Blurring the boundaries between the past and the present, nature and culture, and the East and the West, my contribution to the ‘Voicing Places’ panel revisits the Danube Confederacy – a more than a century old proposal to organise countries along the river into a political entity – as an impossible political imaginary. It then uses ethnographic fragments collected along the Danube to indicate how the impossibility of this political imaginary has been shaping political practices on the shores of the river, both within the world of nation states and beyond it.
Helen Verran (Charles Darwin University)
Long abstract:
‘Coranderrk’ is an Indigenous Australian Wurundjeri term that circulates in contemporary Australia public life. It names a creek and its catchment and a shrub with pretty white bell-shaped flowers whose leaves smell like the European herb, mint—'Coranderrk mint bush’. It also names a small 19th century Indigenous sovereign polity that established a vibrant modern economy in the Coranderrk Creek catchment. Being too successful by half its institutions were liquidated for a second time by the British colonial officials.
Today, two public bridges span the creek. One spans the creek just downstream from a weir, which allows most of its water to be diverted to provide water for a small town where I live. It's very sweet water. The second public bridge spans the creek about halfway along its course, more or less in the middle of Melbourne's Australian wildlife park. The large Scottish brown trout that inhabit this reach of the creek are often remarked upon admiringly by zoo visitors.
In this presentation I will develop a taxonomy of the epistemic scats that can be glimpsed, heard or imagined, from the perspectives of standing on these two bridges. Epistemic scats are the droppings of institutions that have had their way with this creek in the past and present.
Dženeta Hodžić (ISOE - Institute for social-ecological research)
Long abstract:
“As you know, here we are in karst, and in karst there are no rules,” declared a civil servant working for a water authority during my ethnographic fieldwork about groundwater management in the Dinarides. The Dinarides are a mountain range in South-Eastern Europe known for stunning mountainous and (ground-) water rich landscapes, characterized by highly karstified environments. The term karst denotes landscapes both subterranean and aboveground, characterized by highly permeable carbonate rock formations. Here, groundwater stands in special relation to karst as it contributes to corrosion of the underground rock formations, a process known as karstification. Simulatenously, the geological sub-disciplines studying karst, in turn, stand in special relation to the Dinaric karst, the first karst systematically studied and proclaimed ‘locus typicus’ in Western academia at the end of the 19th century. Ever since then, karstic groundwater has had a reputation of being difficult to live with due to low agricultural value, to model hydro(geo)logically, therefore to know and to manage. However, inhabiting karst also relates to spaces of death, detainment and refuge during the 1990s warfare in Yugoslavia, which also posed extraordinary challenges in maintaining groundwater infrastructures. Hence, this contribution explores how tracing karstic groundwater ethnographically in administrative bodies, water utility companies, and local and international karst scholarship amidst post-war infrastructural legacies can voice karstic dissonances between its materiality, management and their intimate geomorphologies.
Caroline Anna Salling (Technical University of Denmark) Brit Winthereik (IT University of Copenhagen)
Long abstract:
Big Tech’s hyperscale datacentres are built in a variety of landscapes often mobilised via public/private and transnational partnerships, national digitalisation strategies and major investments. Curiously, their impacts to both livelihoods and environments, datacentres are rarely problematised in the municipalities where they are built and function. Why, we ask, do these hyperscale structures not attract more attention in Denmark, where 9 have been built or are in process?
Much work, politics and resource go into building them, but as we show there is more to a hyperscale datacentre than strategy, planning, and global collaboration. Datacentres form a lens into the uneventful, a public, yet not problematized political issue. Our empirical investigation begins with a Meta datacentre in Denmark which despite public attention to it business model and energy consumption is locally somewhat of an un-event. Local utility engineers voice concerns around infrastructural connections, but the resource transformation of the local landscape is not a public issue. We draw on the anthropology of silence to establish a counterpoint to the panel’s suggestion that STS is well-positioned to develop ‘listening techniques’ to sound the composite nature of place. Our analysis shows that to make datacentres politically relevant we need to sound behind the scenes concerns by builders, engineers, a forgotten forest, and surplus light. It shows that potentials and limits for place-based engagements are designed from the outset before construction. To test this point. we compare with Microsoft’s current attempts at what they refer to as ‘leapfrogging’ a Danish datacentre region.
Martina Klausner (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Long abstract:
Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planing and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways. To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.
Michaela Spencer (Charles Darwin University)
Long abstract:
This paper reflects on beginning stages of collaborative work with Larrakia elders as together we walk, talk, see, write, hear, sing Gurambai/Rapid Creek. My tasks and roles here are very different to theirs and as we move along the creek together, and amidst quite different configurations of people, seasons, stories, actions. But there is a hope that working together at and with the creek is possible; and that something, we don’t yet know what, will come out of it. It seems odd to make this the subject of a talk in an academic panel, and at the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam. And yet, it is this bumbling and grappling and missing and connecting which is exactly what I wonder might travel. If it is THIS that is ‘doing creek work’, that voices places, then how might I account such activities? Telling stories of this work together I experiment with articulating such efforts as a nascent (cosmo)politics and ask under what conditions, and via what kinds of specifications, might such a politics be cultivated. Then beyond this, also explore the kind of STS knowledge work that this implies.