Authors: Endre Dányi, Michaela Spencer, Dženeta Hodžić, Matt Campbell, Helen Verran, Martina Klausner, Caroline Anna Salling, Brit Ross Winthereik
Editor: Aaron Gregory
14/10/2024 | Report-backs
Can seas roar, rivers mumble, creeks whisper, and groundwater generate silence? Can data flows be loud or quiet? And are we, STS scholars, capable of finding good ways of relating to such places/phenomena through sound? Or, to put it somewhat differently: what happens to our academic practices if our focus is finding good ways of taking part in soundings?
Our panel at the EASST/4S meeting in Amsterdam aimed to address these and related questions through the concept of ‘voicing’. We understood the term less as an act of ‘giving voice’ to places and more as the sounding of an instrument: a doing that involves specific sites, elements such as air and water, local entities, and necessarily us, researchers, trying – and often failing – to get things right. If ‘giving voice’ is a standard political gesture that also prefigures ‘correct’ ways of speaking, what politics becomes possible through diverse and distributed practices of voicing? And how does that politics translate into STS knowledge work that is attuned to soundings, rather than seeking to represent or promote certain voices elsewhere?
Our panel did not come from nowhere. It was the continuation of various conversations we’ve been having over the years, in one configuration or another. Michaela Spencer and Endre Dányi’s collaboration called ‘Landscapes of Democracy’ has focused on the site-specific character of democratic politics in Europe and Australia; Michaela and her colleagues’ work at The Northern Institute in Darwin, with collaborators in Melbourne and Canberra, has engaged with ‘watery places’ as central participants in Australian collective life; Endre’s discussions with Martina Klausner and Dženeta Hodžić in Frankfurt have been organised around the implications of ‘breaking ground’ in governance and social research; Brit Ross Winthereik and Andrea Ballestero’s open-minded and open-ended textbook on Experimenting with Ethnography sensitised us to the intricacies of doing analysis; and a workshop on ‘parlementing places’, convened last year by Helen Verran, drew our attention to the mutual constitution of ‘noise’ and ‘sound’ or ‘noise’ and ‘message’ in the parler – the speaking – of (watery) places.
In Amsterdam, we sought to nurture and enhance these tentative explorations not through inviting panellists to share polished and finished pieces of work, but by initiating another staging of our ethnographic methods and questionings. We wanted to recognise experimental and exploratory collaborations as legitimate foci of STS inquiry in their own right, and so in this particular instance we invited collaborators to participate in a closed panel, sharing stories of their embodied methods and involvements in means by which places perform themselves and are performed by many varied participants. This slight turning on its head of a normal conference format provoked a spilling out of sounds, images, stops, starts and stories into two conference sessions, as lively participants joined in our discussions together. In the first session, beginning with his efforts to trace the origins of the Danube, Endre found the upwelling not of different and contested water sources, but differences in practicings of acoustic archives holding very different European histories: those of monumental events, and those of bubbling and gurgling sounds of flows. Helen Verran and Matt Campbell’s work likewise had us experience both flows of water and the flows of practisings of different insitutionalities, with stories detailing the work of becoming ‘flood ready’ as also doing resonant socio-materialities of ‘people-places’ and the way they configure those who know them. While Dženeta drew us into the flow of Karstic groundwater and to the challenges of hearing stories of pasts and futures when the sounds of pumping stations drawing these waters to the surface are too loud to permit conversation at all.
In the second session, it was the ways in which traffic data plots and sounds cities that Martina was worrying away at, drawing attention to how such shadow-versions of cities may quietly become more real than the beeping and bustling of the traffic itself. It was such silence, generated by the very mundane and almost unnoticed materialisation of large data centres across Denmark that Brit and Caroline Salling suggested needed ‘louding’ or ‘sounding’ in attending to the changing actualities of landscapes in concert with digital economies and digitalisation strategies. While moving between images and stories of collaborative work with Larrakia elders, Michaela tried to nurture a growing sensitivity to living and working in places as never just sounding themselves, as singular, but also always already performed as multiple in the disparate practices of the epistemic institutions of Aboriginal people-place and the Australian state.
If it was not findings or outcomes of research that were most significant in these two sessions, what then, on reflection, was our ‘Voicing Places’ panel about? On the one hand, it was a continuation of the wonderful collegiate atmosphere that we expect from EASST and 4S gatherings, where puzzling together is not only permitted but encouraged as generative scholarly practice. On the other hand, this panel was also about taking serious and tentative steps, feeling a way towards the habits, demeanours, methods and practices of performative STS that draws on actor-network theory, material semiotics and northern Australian traditions of making and doing STS and is explicit about its own involvement in worlds in the making.
When we take seriously the politico-epistemics of situated knowledge making, with and amongst many and varied participants, and within already vibrant and routinised situations in which some entities are louder than others, then what does STS knowledge work look – and sound like? How might it account for itself? What might be its checks and balances? This positioning learns from and takes seriously what STS has always said about science, technology and other knowledge practices. In addition to cultivating new arts of listening, it begins to inhabit positionalities of knowledge making where how we live within the situations of our practices matters – both morally (as forms of good engagement) and epistemically (as forms of collectively accountable knowledge work).
Stepping into our embodied, emplaced involvements feels exciting. It seems to invite discussion, and it feels like something that we want to pursue together. But we want to do so slowly and tentatively. We find new forms, associations and questions with each different staging of this work. We anticipate that we will need quite a few more of them before the practices we have been exploring in sounding various watery places, data centres and urban hinterlands eventually become academic papers. But for now, we wish to hold onto the ambiguous relations between noise and message, and continue to inquire into the transformative effects of voicings and politics on our STS knowledge practices.
Biographies:
Matt Campbell is a lecturer and researcher in the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His work attends to the decision-making space, emerging in Australia, where Indigenous entities and the state engage, focusing on contemporary Treaty processes. The foundation of this work is Matt’s interest in the ethics, responsibilities and accountabilities that inhere in situations where knowers of different political and epistemic traditions come together.
Endre Dányi is Professor of the Sociology of Globalisation at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Affairs at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. His research focuses on places and material practices associated with democratic politics, including – but not limited to – parliamentary settings, public demonstrations, care work, and cosmopolitical initiatives. Endre is also co-founder and co-editor of the OA book publisher Mattering Press.
Michaela Spencer is a Senior Research Fellow with the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University. Her current research involves working from the ‘Ground Up’ with Indigenous knowledge authorities, and differing traditions of knowledge and governance. This involves collaborative research for policy development, and engaging with government, service providers, university staff and Yolŋu and other Aboriginal knowledge authorities.
Brit Ross Winthereik is Professor of Human-Centred Digitalisation at the Department of Technology, Management and Economics at the Technical University of Denmark. Her research revolves around digitalization processes and the use of data in the public sector of welfare societies with a particular focus on information infrastructures and human life within. Her methodological approach is ethnographic. She is co-founder of the Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies (DASTS), co-author of 'Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships' (MIT Press, 2013, with Casper Bruun Jensen), co-editor of 'Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis' (Duke University Press, 2021, with Andrea Ballestero), and 'Handbook for the Anthropology of Technology' (Palgrave Handbook Series, 2021, with Maja Hojer Bruun el al).
Dženeta Hodžić is a researcher at the ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research Frankfurt am Main and a PhD candidate at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. In her current ethnographic research on groundwater management, she focuses on negotiations of (embodied) knowledge, expertise and policy implementation in post-Yugoslav karst landscapes.
Martina Klausner is Professor of Digital Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research topics cover a spectrum of current social phenomena: digitization and datafication processes of/in cities; the changes in political participation through online platforms and data activism; the regulation of new digital technologies and processes, such as Artificial Intelligence, as well as the use of smart technologies in health. Martina Klausner is also PI of the STS Research Training Group “Fixing Futures. Technologies of Anticipation” at Goethe-University.
Helen Verran holds the position of Professorial Research Fellow in the Northern Institute in Charles Darwin University in northern Australia.
Esteemed Panelists also include: Caroline Anna Salling
