The purpose of this research was to describe technopolitics on a permaculture farm. The literature on technology and technopolitics is beginning to take shape around a series of unanswered questions regarding the role and potential of objects in social life. Using an actor-network theory framework and relying on Callon's (1984) sociology of translation and its principles, I identified the concept of defect and tracked how it was mobilized at Manitoulin Permaculture through participant observation across two summers. The concept of defect incorporated both sociopolitical as well as technological factors. The makers at Manitoulin Permaculture made sense of their choice to defect to a new life at Manitoulin Permaculture. In addition, their technologies, both new and old, became defective, animating their community in new and unforeseen ways.

No description available.

The thesis provides an account of the development and the eventual elimination of the illegal horserace gambling market. Prior to the introduction of totalisators in 1870 bookmakers (bookies) provided the only option for legal on-course horserace gambling. Using an Actor-Network approach (Latour 1986) I track the transformations of totalisators across times and places to provide a historical account of the development and the co-existence of both legal and illegal horserace gambling markets, documenting the 100 year struggle by racing clubs and successive Governments to remove illegal bookmakers from horserace gambling markets. My argument is that the illegal gambling market survived for as long as it did because bookmakers' constructed extensive actor-networks that enabled them to provide a faster and more accessible betting service to punters. A significant feature in their survival was also the public and police tolerance of their presence. I argue that no one actually 'kills the bookies'. At each stage in the transformation of the scale and operation of totalisators, punters gradually began to use the services provided by a legal market. I document how the drift of legislation, coupled with technological changes and the establishment of new legal gambling sites, led to the expansion of global legal gambling markets that included sport bookmakers and legal horse racing bookmakers. These developments, especially computerisation, enabled the legal market to expand and reconfigure networks providing flexible, real and online access points for betting. These developments ultimately eliminate the comparative advantages of the local illegal bookmakers and bring to an end the illegal horserace gambling market.

No description available.

Mobility on a global scale as a product of increased interconnectivity has been a subject of interest for writers working within various disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. Few accounts, however, examine how mobility is performed by the operations of international airports. Through data acquired in interviews conducted with the management of an international airport administration, this project adds to existing accounts of mobility with an examination of the strategies, techniques, and performances that allow an international airport to operate, and which in turn, enable transportation worldwide. To analyse an airport as an organisation, this project employs a model advocated in John Law's (1994) influential study Organizing Modernity. Law's (1994) framework focuses attention on the often hidden performances within organisations that strain towards governance, regulation, durability, and routine. Incorporating Law's (1994) framework, this project illuminates aspects of an airport's operation in four thematic chapters, 'Ordering'; 'Communication'; 'Materials'; and 'Space'. Overall, this project depicts the international airport as a complex socio-technical assemblage that requires multiple, varied, and interwoven ordering performances to operate effectively.

Sustainability responds to crises of ecology and human development and the relationships between them. Sustainability cannot be adequately described using disciplinary categories arising from the modern dichotomy between nature and culture. Sustainability research requires a methodology that reflects the reality of its subject. This thesis presents material semiotics as a methodology for sustainability research. Material semiotics refers to the work of actor-network theorists and latter developments of alternate spatial metaphors for material relationality. Actor-network theory is a methodology that describes human and non-human actors in the same terms. It follows actor through networks of material relationships that they constitute and are constituted by, depicting heterogeneous objects without recourse to prior categories of nature or culture. The description of material relationships in fluid and regional, as well as network, spaces expands the descriptive power of material semiotics to include Others and to better represent complexity. The Oil Mallee Project is a case study of sustainability in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Indigenous eucalypts, oil mallees, are planted on land that was cleared for agriculture. The above ground biomass can be processed for eucalyptus oil, electricity and activated carbon, and the rights to carbon stored in the extensive mallee roots, or in unharvested trees, can be sold. The Project responds to a number of sustainability issues, including ozone depletion, land degradation, climate change and rural decline. This thesis follows the actors that comprise the Oil Mallee Project to describe its complexity, multiplicity and sustainability. Qualitative interviews with actors in the Project and the wheatbelt provided the primary data, which is supported by documentary material. Three contingent phases can be identified in the history of the Oil Mallee Project – eucalyptus oil industry, dryland salinity management, and greenhouse response. The Project has persisted because it is simultaneously a regional, network and fluid object. Mallees grow well in the tough conditions of the wheatbelt. Mallees can be integrated with existing networks of industrial agriculture. The Project has achieved contingent stability in policy documents and the networks of scientific research. The fluidity of the Project has enabled it to change shape and identity in response to threats and opportunities, and as relationships break and form, without complete disruption. Specific humans have been central heroes in different phases of the Project. The mallees themselves are the only actors that have been consistently central to the identity of the Project. Sustainability requires knowledge of the relationships between humans and non-humans that constitute the multiple crises of ecology and human development. Sustainability is the re-ordering of those relationships in ways that make possible ecological integrity and human fulfilment. Material semiotics is a methodology for knowing sustainability in ways that reveal the possibilities for such re-orderings.

Zugl.: Mannheim, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

This is a study of architectural competitions as they engage with the design practices of architects within the UK and Europe. Since only one firm or one design emerges at the end, and the project programme exists prior to the submissions, there tends to be a gap between programme and practice, past and future, language and situation. It is the aim of this research to investigate what changes in our understanding of architectural practice when we acknowledge that architects work to linear programmes and submit deliverables within the set of relations that make up the competition. In conducting this research I address a gap in the social scientific understanding of architectural practice. While ethnographies of architectural studios have described the way design emerges through an interplay of humans and nonhumans, formats or structures like the competition have not yet become analytical categories in the ethnographic literature. To bridge what seems like a gap between the immaterial world of the competition and the material world of the studio, I draw from actor-network theory to view the competition as a set of relations that include objects and practices. Considering the technology of the competition, I follow five different strands of research. I identify the matters of concern that architects talk about when they talk about competitions; examine the documents involved in administering a competition; follow an atelier at an architectural school where students participate regularly in competitions; observe the Office of Metropolitan Architecture prepare a concept design; and visit an exhibition of submissions. Here I describe the ways in which competitions come together within the practice of architects. This study makes three contributions. First, the study adds to our understanding of architecture as a set of relations, rather than a stable identity. The second contribution has to do with language and practice, demonstrating that ‘big’ categories like ‘building’ nevertheless act within collectives of architects, clients, contractors and so on. A final implication is for methods. Since certain categories exist between sites, organising the activity of actors in different offices across what might be hundreds of miles, ethnographic fieldwork on architecture can become fragmented and multi-sited. The implications of the architectural competition for an ethnographic understanding of architectural practice, then, are to see more and ‘bigger’ collectives within the lives of architects.

An anthropological study of urban practice, this thesis contributes a nuanced understanding of the role of visual art in regeneration. Inspired by the experiential philosophy of Dewey (1934), we have traced the effects mobilised by art as part of urban transformation. The literature of cultural policy and ‘culture-led regeneration’ (Vickery, 2007), discusses art as physical artworks, in support of development; or as socially-engaged practice, in support of social renewal. Through tracing the movements of all the actors involved, our research goes beyond explanation in support of policy targets. We have described what happens in practice, on its own terms. To account for a range of professional perspectives, the research included four empirical studies at different proximities to practice: an exploratory study embedded in art practice; eighteen in-depth interviews with a range of art and regeneration professionals; sixteen in-depth interviews with practitioners of an Urban Regeneration Company (URC) case study; and a six-month ethnography of the same URC case. Accounting for the agency of humans and non-humans (Latour, 2007a), our explications took close account of the effects produced by the associations of urban relationships, between: engineers, planners, construction workers, and artists; as well as plans and drawings, objects, materials, concepts, ideas and natural elements. Through tracing actors at the ‘microscopic’ (Geertz, 1973) scale, we did not observe art as ‘works’, but the way art works as a driver for re-imagining the urban. In practice, we see regeneration not as buildings or communities, but as a continuous process of re-shaping human-physical relationships. As part of this relational network, art ‘mediates’ (Hennion, 1997) participation, collaboration and reflection on the ambitions of regeneration: producing new ideas for urban possibilities. The effects are produced through the continuous associations between ‘inner’ (human) and ‘outer’ (physical) materials. These material associations meld to create a neutral platform for professionals to shift from their usual remit; to re-consider the ‘big picture’ from a new perspective. Regeneration is an active part of the political landscape. As a catalyst for urban imagination, rather than deliver policy objectives, art re-shapes them. Through tracing practice this research contributes new understandings to the study of art and regeneration. By revealing urban networks through tracing art, rather than explaining regeneration as physical or social, we have made a contribution to urban studies by describing the micro movements of regeneration as a relational practice. As a contribution to art studies, through tracing how art works in regeneration, we have produced nuanced descriptions of how art ‘mediates’ action and reflection in and on urban practice. As a contribution to policy and practice, we have articulated the role of visual art in regeneration as: mediating emergent imaginings; re-shaping rather than delivering objectives. As a tool for the policies of the time, ‘regeneration’ has a shelf-life. As an articulation of the role of art as a catalyst for collaboration in support of positive urban transformation, the findings of this study continue to be relevant.

Especially since the publication of Hernando De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital in 2000, there has been a great deal of scholarship on the relationship between property rights and economic growth. There is fairly broad consensus among policy makers and many academics that secure property rights have a wide range of benefits but significantly less agreement on what impedes secure property rights in developing countries, what types of rights work best and under what circumstances, or how to improve the situation in developing countries. Through a case study of land institutions and reform in the Greater Accra Region of Southern Ghana this thesis examines the complexities of overlapping and often contradictory land tenure regimes. Actor Network Theory is used to analyze the role of the various actors, including humans, organizations, and material actors, like documents. I argue that although the system of land rights institutions in Ghana is extremely complex, one of the main challenges is a relatively simple one: the materiality of the documents, and the related costs of producing, storing, managing, and maintaining them., Despite attempts by the state, with the support of the World Bank, to codify existing land relations, transaction costs have not been dramatically reduced. The result is a complicated environment of institutional pluralism, in which the documents involved in registration have taken on a life of their own, where users must recruit these material actors to support their land claims if they wish to have their rights protected. This process of producing and collecting documents to support their land claims can be costly for landholders, in terms of both time and money. In this way, the centrality of documents can be burdensome for landholders, but also creates interesting opportunities for landholders to mobilize land documents in unconventional ways in order to support their claims and seek protection for their rights to land. Especially since the publication of Hernando De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital in 2000, there has been a great deal of scholarship on the relationship between property rights and economic growth. There is fairly broad consensus among policy makers and many academics that secure property rights have a wide range of benefits but significantly less agreement on what impedes secure property rights in developing countries, what types of rights work best and under what circumstances, or how to improve the situation in developing countries. Through a case study of land institutions and reform in the Greater Accra Region of Southern Ghana this thesis examines the complexities of overlapping and often contradictory land tenure regimes. Actor Network Theory is used to analyze the role of the various actors, including humans, organizations, and material actors, like documents. I argue that although the system of land rights institutions in Ghana is extremely complex, one of the main challenges is a relatively simple one: the materiality of the documents, and the related costs of producing, storing, managing, and maintaining them., Despite attempts by the state, with the support of the World Bank, to codify existing land relations, transaction costs have not been dramatically reduced. The result is a complicated environment of institutional pluralism, in which the documents involved in registration have taken on a life of their own, where users must recruit these material actors to support their land claims if they wish to have their rights protected. This process of producing and collecting documents to support their land claims can be costly for landholders, in terms of both time and money. In this way, the centrality of documents can be burdensome for landholders, but also creates interesting opportunities for landholders to mobilize land documents in unconventional ways in order to support their claims and seek protection for their rights to land.