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Paper long abstract:

Sustainability discourses have become almost compulsory among corporate actors nowadays, especially as they operate on an increasingly global scale. STS-based case studies have importantly contributed to understand the complexity of such discourses, showing how they produce always precarious effects that depend on the coordination of multiple agencies and whose materialization is never strange to overflowings. While doing this analyses, the researches involved have usually been less preoccupied with the issue of reflexivity or the differences that their presence on the field makes in the object under study. More in particular, they haven't really explored the differences that an STS-based conceptual framework as such makes on the sustainability discourses of the actors being studied. In order to contribute to fill this void, and making an autoethnography, this paper analyses three presentations made by the author to actors from the sustainability area of a mayor Chilean Mining Corporation. Being a part of the process of getting access to do fieldwork on their mine, the presentations were mostly focused on explaining and discussing what is STS and how an STS-based analysis can help them to improve the measures they were implementing to make more sustainable the mine's waste management system. The final aim of such exercise is to explore the political ontology of emerging sustainability/STS assemblages, especially in relation with taking into account the differences that we and our conceptual devices made with our presence on the field.