Short Abstract

This panel investigates sociotechnical processes as enacted across scales of material transformations, and broader spatiotemporal scales of sociotechnical change, and how these are deployed in social localities/projects in order to engage with analytical and vernacular understandings of technology.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the inherent temporality of "technology", understood as a processual and transformational unfolding of complex heterogeneous assemblages of activities, people, materials, objects and environments. This angle acts as a starting point through which to investigate the question of socio-technical change as enacted in and across two scales:

1) The scale of material and bodily actions and transformations within technical objects, activities and infrastructures, and how such heterogeneous dynamics engender multiple milieux/effects, be they within a cosmological, ontological, conceptual or epistemological plane;

2) Broader spatial and temporal scales of sociotechnical change and transformation, and how these are conceptualised, enacted and lived through in social life, public discourse, ideological frameworks as well as within anthropological theory.

In moving across these two scales of analysis, our aim is to draw from ethnographies in order to challenge and critically engage with theorisations of "technology" and technicity, exploring the tension between thinking about and through these technical processes analytically, whilst engaging with their localised vernacularity. How are such analytical categories challenged by the current settings we look at? What can we say about such tensions?

In following these two intersecting axes, while maintaining a reflexive stance towards this constant tension, we invite papers that engage epistemologically, ethnographically and/or methodologically with these topics, including but not limited to:

• Innovation and invention

• Borrowing and transmission

• Crisis, rupture, tradition

• Chronicity and rhythm as techniques

• Formation, transformation and change at the level of subjectivities, collectivities, infrastructures

• Technical loss, continuities and discontinuities

• Techniques, technology and infrastructure as processes