Lochlann Jain, Center for Dissolution

Denver 2015: Pedagogy

Many of STS’s methodological innovations address the question of how some versions of knowledge gain traction while others do not. Thomas Kuhn, for example, was influenced by work in psychology that studied perceptual expectancies, and demonstrated how people had difficulty moving beyond accepted explanations in such simple scenarios, for example, as a subject recognizing a red 6 of spades as red rather than finding ways of explaining it into the more recognizable black spade by characterizing it as dark red or purple. The concept of categorization lies at the heart of STS concepts of paradigm, paradigm shift, knowledge construction, and power.

Thinking at the interface between things as objects and things as assemblages, I play with notions of common sense categories by offering a new way to explore how we author the categories we live by, and by inviting readers/observers into that process of authorship through a series of postcard sized drawings.