Paper long abstract:

The transformation to a decentralized renewable energy system requires the transformation of communities. Increasingly, citizens become 'prosumers' and take energy production in their own hands. More and more citizens pool their resources to start a local energy initiative. In the Netherlands, more than 500 such initiatives seek to reshape the energy system in the face of constraints embedded in cultural, social, economic and political traditions. In this respect, the built environment poses considerable challenges, because of on the one hand the inscripted unsustainabilities in the layout of buildings and infrastructures in general, and on the other hand the heritage values attached to historical buildings in particular.

In this paper we reconstruct the heterogeneous networks of two local communities (Franeker and Zuidhorn) in the north of the Netherlands and analyse their approaches to transform the energy system while accounting for cultural heritage of the built environment. We depart from Actor-Network Theory, which allows a dynamic analysis of collective strategies, and use fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and design studies. The local networks consist of human actors as well as institutions, buildings, energy technologies and infrastructures. We specifically investigate the obduracy and scripts of the local environment, and clarify how this resists change and invites specific forms of energy use and energy generation.

We conclude that for local initiatives to be successful, they have to balance actions to open up the energy system, to create new viable scripts, and actions that involve the local community, to create continuity.

Paper long abstract:

In Ireland, over a 60 year period, condoms changed from symbolic objects of deviance to medical devices. Until 1993, the sale and distribution of condoms were heavily regulated, being limited first to narrowly defined groups and conditions, and later to specific points of sale. In this paper, based on documentary analysis and qualitative interviews with activists involved in resisting the restriction to the sales and distribution of condoms up to 1993, we aim to explore this shift in Irish political and legal discourse, and the parallel transformation of condoms as social objects. In doing so, we bring together insights from STS - in particular ANT and materiality-oriented approaches - with critical approaches to law, in order to question the entanglement of law, social movements and technologies. We start by mapping the history of the prohibition and legalisation of condom sales in Ireland 1935-1993, and situating it in the context of broader governmental projects designed to control sexual expression and reproductive autonomy. We then turn to analysing the emergence of resistance to state regulation of condoms by various social networks, and explore how this history sheds light on the complex ways in which legal change relates to resistance, disobedience and social movements in the context of medical technologies. Throughout we explore how shifting socio-legal constructions of the condom, organised practices of daily resistance, and official articulations of the public good evolved around a 60 year period to move from prohibition to the settling of condoms as an essential technology of health.

Paper long abstract:

In STS the capacity to act has been typically conceptualised as a precarious achievement, rather than as an inherent ability attributed to persons, institutions, devices, or other pre-given entities. Having said this, STS scholars have been more comfortable conceptualising agency this way in the context of the natural sciences, innovation and design, and market economy, than in the context of politics. This is all the more surprising, given that in STS rendering agencing processes visible has long been considered a political intervention in its own right. This paper is an attempt to shift the attention of STS scholars to situations that are explicitly political. More specifically, it examines the conditions of possibility of doing politics by drawing on two sets of materials: preliminary empirical data about a hunger strike that involved 23 illegal immigrants in Brussels in 2012, and political theoretical works that discuss hunger strikes as acts of challenging the logic of sovereignty. Our aim with an interwoven analysis of these two sets of materials is to show how physical bodies become political during a hunger strike, how different ways of enacting the physical-political body suggest different agencing processes centred around the figures of the citizen and the activist, and how the figure of the hunger striker as a non-activist non-citizen may challenge some widely held assumptions - both in STS and in political theory - about what it is to do politics in a liberal democracy.

Paper long abstract:

The ongoing economic and social crisis has spurred new modes of action and political mobilization for social movements throughout the western hemisphere but with particular notoriety in the Mediterranean region, including southern Europe. Citizens, groups and consolidated political movements from diverse and sometimes conflictive political backgrounds are joining efforts against austerity and to their chief representatives: International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and the European Commission, together with the national governments involved in the fiscal and economic adjustment strategy.

These movements use novel repertoires of political action and civic engagement, relying on a new and substantive use of technology to spread their word and will. The internet and social media, together with other artefacts such as cameras, banners, signs, murals, attire and adornments have a significant role on the viral spreading of political messages and on the publicity of massive political gatherings, both with significant effects on the political course of action.

ANT provides a challenging and innovative theoretical framework for analyzing these movements. Following human and non-human actors and the linkages they establish among them can offer new insights into the dynamics of social protest. This paper is based on case study evidence concerning Portuguese social movements, gathered in the course of the European Commission-funded MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) research project.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the archiving practices of activist projects of urban intervention, I elaborate the notion of urban archive and describe how these technologies turn into epistemic devices that bring into existence new urban sensibilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the archiving practices of activist projects of urban intervention, I elaborate the notion of urban archive and describe how these technologies turn into epistemic devices that bring into existence new urban sensibilities. Archives have proliferated in our societies accompanying the extension of digital technologies; any event is now documented and published on the Internet. Activist initiatives, civic projects and social movements have incorporated archives as part of their digital everyday practices. This is evident in different projects of urban intervention in Madrid like the occupation of allotments, urban gardens or initiatives of material interventions in the public space. I draw on an ethnography that turned into a collaborative project with two architectural collectives whose work is focused on urban interventions in the urban public space to describe how these collectives use archives to document specific places in the city. I contend that these archives are devices for the production of knowledge and sites for the apprenticeship of new urban sensibilities. My argument is that the urban archives points out to a spatial reconfiguration of the places of knowledge production over the city and they respond to the idea that digitization has made vanished the physical place of records. Urban archives signal the complex dynamics in which the past, present and future are articulated in specific places in the city through a particular device for remembering the past and expecting a different future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examines some of the methodological principles behind ANT's redefinition of social movements. Specifically, it explores the limits of agnosticism, one of the most celebrated principles of early ANT-oriented perspectives, as a guiding principle to release actors from modern reductionism(s). Whereas it is true that agnosticism has played a crucial role in redefining social movements, especially in releasing a too-purified unity of analysis from essentialist impulses, it is also true that it usually puts forward important limitations to the style of empirical research it promotes. As Isabelle Stengers (2006) pointed out, one of the main risks of the sceptical attitude of some STS scholars is to develop a style of speaking of actors where they are rendered as mere resources for the war against essential differences. Rather than considering what makes a difference to them, actors matter (basically) as arguments to debunk other approaches. To contest this, Stengers proposes a more diplomatic approach: to develop a style of speaking well of actors. To speak well, according to Stengers, means much more than simply defining what an actor is. It means to be engaged by it as something not appropriable either by the analyst or the actors involved but whose becoming concerns everyone involved both politically and vitally (López, 2012). To illustrate what entails to speak well of social movements, I will discuss fragments of my fieldwork with disability rights activists Spain and the UK.

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies of social movements and social media have proposed that activist groups like Occupy need no longer be defined by a common identity or a cohesive message but only by the "connectivity" of the medium (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) through which often conflicting individual demands are aggregated. Others insist that some notion of "collectivity" or intentionality persists beyond these individual micro-practices. In this paper, I will suggest that these debates may be a product of dichotomies between micro and macro and individual and collective, which can be partially resolved by viewing groups as relational actor networks, which are to some extent enacted through socio-technical, social media platforms.

This debate is also, however a product of methodological (quant and qual) divisions: how do we know groups do not advance or debate collective action frames if we rely primarily on quantitative analyses of patterns of participation rather than discursive analyses of the content of social media messages? To address this I will propose a "quanli-quantitative" technique, which combines social-networks and co-word networks to highlight the dynamic relationship between group participation and the content of messages. Through a pilot study relating to anti-nuclear groups on Facebook, I find that while social movements do not explicitly debate their existence on social media they are constantly discussing their relationship to a variety of external entities (other groups, media outlets, public figures, natural phenomena) and I propose that it is through these shifting associations that the unstable boundaries of the group are policed.

Paper long abstract:

The author would like to investigate the impact and role of "things" and assemblies of humans and non-humans during the uprisings or riots like the Egypt Revolution in 2011.The whole branch of political philosophy or political science focus on the agency, notion of freedom, economical issues or technological determinism when social movements are investigated. However, all of these traditional notions indicate either an anthropocentric perspective or dualistic way of thinking and as a result the role of non-human actors is completely displaced from the contemporary social movement analysis. Therefore, an aim of this proposal is to suggest a new way of thinking of uprisings and revolutions in terms of non-human agency, distributive agency and assembly of non-humans. By taking the Schmitt's notion of "state of exception" the author will depict how the relations within the "state" are changing through the relations and attachments to non-human actors during the protests. To achieve this aim the Actor-Network Theory will be incorporated as well as some examples from the New Materialism authors. The final conclusion should shed the light on the new, more processual and symmetrical, ways of defining the revolution, social movement and the state as well.