Christopher Gad

The Conceptual and the Empirical in Science and Technology Studies

It is the purpose of this special issue to acknowledge the shifting definitions and uses of the conceptual and empirical in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and to explore the constructive potential of this condition. In this introductory essay we point to four formulations in STS for the relation between the conceptual and the empirical which do not figure them as binaries or opposites: (1) the empirical as a path to the conceptual, (2) the conceptual as practical and empirical, (3) the empirical as an instantiation of the conceptual (and the dangers of that view), and (4) a conceptual minimalism. We then point to some inspirations in contemporary thought for engaging creatively with the conceptual and empirical, and conclude by summarizing the contributions to this issue.

A Public Trial De Novo: Rethinking "Industrial Interests".

This article addresses the concept of “industrial interests” and examines its role in a topical controversy about a large research grant from a private foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, to the University of Copenhagen. The authors suggest that the debate took the form of a “public trial” where the grant and close(r) intermingling between industry and public research was prosecuted and defended. First, the authors address how the grant was framed in the media. Second, they redescribe the case by introducing new “evidence” that, because of this framing, did not reach “the court.” The article ends with a discussion of some implications of the analysis, including that policy making, academic research, and public debates might benefit from more detailed accounts of interests and stakes.

Disability as infra-critique: a compositionist approach to the election process in Denmark

ABSTRACT This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a ‘critique from within’. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical ‘breakup’. To do so, we promote a ‘compositionist’ post-actor-network theory approach to disability and to polling and investigate what entry-point for critique this offers. We analyze an incident at a polling booth during the 2013 Danish Municipal election. This renders visible some of the complex socio-material processes through which citizens and the Danish state co-enact and co-authorize one another. We highlight how ‘detachments’ are vital to such processes and we examine parts of the historical background for the production of authority in the context of managing disability as exception during polling. In doing so we point out that as the organization of electoral processes evolves, new potentialities for infra-critique also emerge.

Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places

ABSTRACT This article discusses how a small place – the polling booth – can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case – a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit influences that computer experts argued would enter the polling booth and challenge the secrecy and the privacy of the vote, the transparency of the electoral process, and thus the electoral enactment of democracy itself. In this way the polling booth potentially works as an ethnographic entry point for following shifts in contemporary debates.

RESISTANCE IS FERTILE – OM OVERVÅGNINGENS OLIGOPTISKE BLIK

RESISTANCE IS FERTILE – ON THE OLIGOPTIC GAZE OF SURVEILLANCE This article sets media artist Jill Magid’s performative artefact “Surveillance Shoe | Legoland” (2000‑7) in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of oligopticon. Both address and discuss the possibility of conceptualizing surveillance as an always specific, multiple, and situated phenomenon, and thus question dominant metaphors in surveillance discourse, e.g. panopticon and Big Brother. The surveillance of Danish citizens commences at their first breath, as they are assigned a personal identification number immediately after being born. This enables inspections and interventions in many diverse ways by the state and other actors during the citizen’s life. Being merely one example of how surveillance seems to penetrate every aspect of everyday life, it seems fair to suggest that surveillance is, indeed, a ubiquitous phenomenon of modern society. On first glance, Jill Magid’s artefact exemplifies this ubiquitous surveillance situation. The artefact comprises a stiletto, an IR surveillance camera, a battery pack, and a wireless transmitter. The surveillance camera is pointed up the performer’s leg, thus presenting us with an extreme worm’s eye view of the world, focusing on the performer’s lower leg and often on her thigh and crutch as well. From one perspective, Jill Magid’s “Surveillance Shoe” addresses how everything is potentially subject to a surveillant gaze — nothing is too intimate. From another perspective, however, the artefact is an example of how contemporary art investigates the limits and detailed aspects of particular surveillance situations, and of how surveillance technologies co-produce exactly those versions of the reality they gaze upon. In accordance with Bruno Latour’s concept ‘oligopticon’, the artefact points out that the surveillor holds a very precise — yet limited and fragile — view whose only way of seing anything meaningful is by being aggregated to a larger composition. The concept of the oligopticon questions generalized notions of surveillance such as ‘Big Brother’ and the panopticon, and the dystopian angst and utopian thrills, that such notions often evoke. Directly as well as indirectly, those models of surveillance are widely referred to in both surveillance studies and in public discussions of surveillance and as such they have become ‘ideal models’, against which surveillance situations are often compared. In contrast, this paper argues with Latour and Magid that such models are unable to help us grasp the ‘core’ of surveillance precisely because they claim that there is such a core, wheras all there is in fact are particular compositions of surveillance with each their specific effects. The concept of oligopticon offers, on the other hand, a sensitivity towards the possibility of resisting preconceived notions of what surveillance is supposedly about. And even though it can by no means be understood as an alternate general model of surveillance, the concept makes it possible to conduct a richer enquiry into the particular composition of surveillance phenomena.