ANTHEM

A thought-provoking gathering took place yesterday (25 June 2008) at Oxford University, organised by the STS group at the James Martin Institute. “Is there a turn to ontology under way in Science and Technology Studies?” - asked the provocation piece written by Steve Woolgar and colleagues. Ted Schatzki, Mike Lynch, Noortje Marres, and Arie Rip laid out their thoughts in response, each presentation accompanied by the comments of two discussants. The papers and the comments can be downloaded from the Saïd Business School website. There are also additional comments by Annemarie Mol and John Law.

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Issue 16 of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory is out and  it is packed with interesting articles on the technologies of politics, several of them engaging with actor-network theory. Authors include Kristin Asdal, Noortje Marres, Peter Sloterdijk, John Law, Richie Nimmo, Guro Ådnegard Skarstad, and Nigel Thrift.

The 2008 Henry Myers Lecture of the Royal Anthropological Institute will be given by Bruno Latour on 25 September 2008 at the British Museum in London. The lecture is entitled “Nature and Creation: What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?” Further details can be found on the RAI website. Here is the abstract:

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The most recent issue of Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy has an interview with Graham Harman “On the Horrors of Realism.” Harman speaks to Tom Sparrow about object-oriented philosophy, phenomenology, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger’s fourfold, Meillassoux’s correlationism, Lingis, Derrida and Foucault, DeLanda’s realism and Latour’s relationism, speculative realism, Whitehead, Leibniz, Zubiri, H.P. Lovecraft and China Miéville, and of course metaphysics. Harman speaks of weird things, about the horror of the real.

The draft programme for the 2008 4S/EASST Conference in Rotterdam is now available from the 4S website [1MB PDF]. There are just too many interesting talks here for us to be able to even begin to list them, so we will stick with highlighting just the one session that is most closely in line with the ANTHEM theme: Session 1.3.16 “Actor Network Theory meets (Post)Phenomenology,” between 13:30-15:30 on 21 August 2008 in Room T3-31. Session organisers: Jack Post and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The talks:

• “I have never been Modern - nor has Postphenomenology been so,” by Don Ihde, State University of New York at Stony Brook
• “Posthuman Perceptions: on hybrids and human-technology relations,” by Peter-Paul Verbeek, University of Twente

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Two calls for papers from the new International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation (IJANTTI):

1. for the Special Issue:”Approaches to Technological Innovation,” due 1st August 2008
2. for the regular issue: due 1st September 2008

On 6 June 2008 Bruno Latour will be giving a lecture entitled “Can Modernity be Modernized?” at the University of Bologna, on the occasion of receiving the ISA Medal for Science from the Institute of Advanced Studies.

A lot seems to be going on in Canada next week… In addition to the objectivity conference in Toronto there is also the “What is an Organization? Materiality, Agency, and Discourse” ‘preconference’ (to the ICA’s 58th annual conference) on 21-22 May 2008 at the Université de Montréal, in, you guessed it, Montreal.

Keynote Speakers:

• Barbara Czarniawska (U Göteborg, Sweden)
• Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris, France)
• Haridimos Tsoukas (ALBA, Greece, University of Warwick, UK)
• Linda Putnam (U of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

The main conference page with the detailed programme is here. During the conference Bruno Latour will be awarded an Université de Montréal honorary doctorate.

If you happen to be in Canada and near Toronto next weekend, you might be interested in this conference on the nature of objectivity organised at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto: “Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity,” 23-25 May 2008. The keynote speaker is Bruno Latour. The programme is available here [PDF] and some abstracts and papers can be downloaded from here.

Those of you who have read Graham Harman’s manuscript Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics will know that Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of correlationism features prominently in Harman’s assessment of Latour’s philosophy. Meillassoux will be speaking in London on the topic of “Time without Becoming” on 8 May 2008, at 5:30 pm at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency is now also available in English in Ray Brassier’s translation and with Alain Badiou’s preface from Amazon UK. Further details about the event including directions available here.