Andrew Barry

Logics of interdisciplinarity

Abstract This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.

Material politics : disputes along the pipeline

Series Editors Preface viii List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Georgian Route: Between Political and Physical Geography 31 3 Transparency s Witness 57 4 Ethical Performances 75 5 The Affected Public 95 6 Visible Impacts 116 7 Material Politics 137 8 Economy and the Archive 154 9 Conclusions 177 Notes 187 References 202 Index

Introduction: the technological economy

This article is an overview of Michel Callons contribution to the reformulation of economic sociology and anthropology. It contextualizes Callons concepts within science and technology studies, and indicates the main lines of influence on his thinking about economic processes. Callons work also opens up a number of debates and challenges to current perspectives within economic sociology. Finally, the article considers the way in which Callons perspective reconfigures both the relation of politics and economics, and the nature of politics itself.

Gabriel Tarde: imitation, invention and economy

Abstract This paper provides an introduction to the sociology of Gabriel Tarde and to the papers in this special issue. The first part of the paper examines how Tarde conceived of the relations between sociology and the natural sciences, including astronomy and physical geography. It also discusses Tardes account of the significance and value of statistics and archaeology as sociological methods. The second part of the paper focuses on the importance of the concepts of imitation and suggestion in Tardes economic psychology, and discusses the contemporary relevance of his work.

Pharmaceutical Matters The Invention of Informed Materials

Drawing on the work of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers on the history of chemistry, this article develops the idea that drug molecules can be understood as ‘informed materials’. This study argues that molecules should not be viewed as discrete objects, but as constituted in their relations to complex informational and material environments. Through a case study of commercial pharmaceutical R&D, the article examines the role of combinatorial and computational chemistry in enriching the informational and material environment of potential drug molecules. Within the contemporary pharmaceutical laboratory, experiments on molecules can be conducted not just in vitro and in vivo but also, according to researchers, in silico. Molecules come to exist not just as physical reagents but also as elements of arrays, libraries and databases of other molecules, and in a virtual form in computer simulations and virtual libraries. Molecules are also understood by researchers to exist in a ‘chemical space’ of other different molecules, where the notion of chemical space is used both to refer to differences in molecular structure and to territories owned or occupied by particular firms. The article argues that pharmaceutical companies do not merely discover molecular structures that potentially could exist, but also invent novel forms of chemical entity.

The European Community and European government: harmonization, mobility and space

Although the European Community does not possess many of the usual attributes of a nation state, it is none the less expected to provide a framework within which Europes economic and social problems might be governed. This paper examines the methods with which the Community has sought to establish the possibility of European government. The focus of the paper is on the single market programme and the associated project of ‘harmonization’. It is argued that the harmonization project can be seen both as a way of realizing a novel organization of European space, and as a process directed at establishing this space as a governable entity. The paper examines the specific character of this spatial order, and its articulation with neo-liberal and neo-social democratic conceptions of European government.

The Translation Zone: Between Actor-Network Theory and International Relations:

This article examines the problem of how to translate actor-network theory into the field of international relations, and develops three arguments. Firstly, the article draws on Emily Apter’s notion of the ‘translation zone’ both to rethink the concept of translation in actor-network theory and to highlight the relation between translation and politics. Secondly, the article interrogates the relation between actor-network theory and empirical research, emphasising the ways in which empirical case studies can have theoretically generative implications. Indeed, actor-network theory should not be understood as a body of theory that can be simply applied to a range of empirical examples. Finally, the article examines a number of problems that international relations poses for actor-network theory. I argue that actor-network theory needs to be adjusted and reconfigured in response to the challenge of international relations.

ART-SCIENCE: From public understanding to public experiment

In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snows ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment.

Demonstrations: sites and sights of direct action

The term demonstration refers both to political and to scientific and technical activity. On the one hand, A demonstration is a public political protest. On the other hand, the condcut of a demonstration is, in a scientific or tecnical context, a matter of witnessing a natural phenomenon or atecnological possibility. the subject of this paper is the conduct of direct action against the construction of the Newbury bypass and the development of the A30 trunk road in Devon. The Paper argues that such actions can be understood as demonstrations in the tecnical as much as in the political sense. In doings so, the paper draws attention to the tecnical and ethical practices involved in the conduct of a demonstration.

Political situations: knowledge controversies in transnational governance

This article develops two arguments. The first revolves around the importance of studies of knowledge controversies, originally developed within the field of science and technology studies (STS), to accounts of innovation in transnational governance. Innovation in transnational governance, I contend, has catalyzed the emergence of transnational knowledge controversies, including controversies about the operation of transnational governance mechanisms. An argument turns on the need to supplement existing approaches to the study of knowledge controversies in STS. To this end I introduce the concept of the political situation. This concept highlights the ways in which the significance of a controversy needs to be understood in relation to a shifting and contested field of others controversies and events that have occurred elsewhere and at other times. The concept of the political situation also points to the part played by the social sciences themselves in the constitution and contestation of the situation within which knowledge controversies come to have significance.