Truthful lies

1
Truthful lies

• Dr. Linda Hitchin
• University of Lincoln

2
Background

• Research interest human-technology relations
• Focus agency in STS
• Method deep field ethnography
• Key interest
• Social life as mundane, ambiguous and unequal
• Partial connections Strathern
• Multiple ontologies Mol
• Material performativity Latour and Law
• Connection to TPP
• Research objects wont stay in one place!

3
Research questions

• What is agency when living-in-tension?
• Two related ethnographies are relevant here
• Show and tell!
• The first was undertaken late 1990s and the
  second began in 2002
• Open now with a vignette from the earlier work

4
Science in practice

• Conference in January 1998
• University of Wessex
• Hosted by Artificial Intelligence Research Unit
• Prestigious international group
• Convened by Professor Tim Dextor
• Lead scientist on the Hyperbrain Project
• Conflict, risk to the public and loss of control
• First hint. When Prof Claudia Rowe (Biology,
  Wessex) has her paper dumped at the last minute

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Science is

• Multiple, mobile and light
• The meaning of the dropped paper
• Claudia knows
• buzz
• funding
• network
• kudos
• legitamacy
• her research is quite suddenly exposed as
  elsewhere

6
Science is

• Multiple, mobile and light
• The meaning of the dropped paper
• The coordinator of international cooperation
  knows
• Collaborative
• Competitive
• Disordered - slow to connect
• Special

7
Science is

• Multiple, mobile and light
• The meaning of the dropped paper
• Tim knows
• Collaborative
• Competitive
• Vulnerable
• Regulated

8
The crunch

• The international research coordinator is a power
  crazed loon
• You are all scientist. You all have curiosity
  about the world you live in. That is good.
  Without it there would be no progress. Professor
  Dexter has told you of his work on Hyperbrain.
  This is a huge breakthrough, a landmark in
  history
• pause for effect.
• Now all human knowledge can be gathered in one
  place and, eventually, in the hands of one
  person But what of ordinary people the
  great mass of human beings? What of them? They
  know too little and too much. A little
  learning is a dangerous thing.
• Murmurings throughout the hall
• Curiosity is the Curse of the Human Brain.
• cries of rubbish and no!

9
Fiction, fact and political description

• Fantasists, whether they use the ancient
  archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones
  of science and technology, may be talking as
  seriously as any sociologist - and a good deal
  more directly - about human life as lived. ...
  Le Guin 1989 48
• Fictions kinship to facts is close, but they are
  not identical twins. Facts are opposed to
  opinion, to prejudice, but not to fiction. Both
  fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology
  that appeals to experience A fact seems done,
  unchangeable, fit only to be recorded fiction
  seems always inventive, open to other
  possibilities, other fashionings of life Haraway
  1989 4

10
Kinship politics of lying

• Genre questions
• Problematising truth or using truthful lies
• Fiction and social imagination
• Ringing true
• Using ambiguity
• Prediction is the business of prophets,
  clairvoyants and futurologists. It is not the
  business of novelists. A novelists business is
  lying. Le Guin 1989 131

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Fieldwork authors

• Strong, political and active
• Critical practice to reveal the hidden
• Critical tool social imagination
• Example Helen and the social realists
• Commitment
• Subversive
• Crucial factor transgression boundary work

12
Slippery practice

• Drama focuses attention on the edges
• Example
• Character interaction in The Demon Headmaster
• Time Dexters science
• Loving father
• Vague genius
• Morally strong
• Vulnerable
• Explorer

13
Character, action and agency

• Character paradigm of traits
• Problem closest we come is in monolithic terms
  such as hybrid or heterogeneous or in
  psychoanalytic approaches
• 1. Allows us to continually reveal the problem
  across sites but not much help in thinking it
• 2. Carries strong traces of Freudian realisma
  risky approach
• Authorly approaches to character