This thesis investigates events prior to, during and after the founding of the Swedish Museum of Architecture, in November 1962. Through the application of concepts derived from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, traces of the actors involved in the processes are followed, such as the activities of the museum’s first head archivist and superintendent, Birgitta Wallgren. The Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibition Visionary Architecture is studied as an example of how, in Latour’s sense, actors transform ”the elements that they are supposed to carry”. The thesis is thus looking for activity, the ”doing” of the museum. The institution’s earliest years is a previously rather unstudied topic. Thus, the thesis aims to contribute to the growing research field that focuses on how architectural history has been written in Sweden.

This paper explores through Donna Haraway's storytelling practices feminist approaches to collaborative writing. Employing a phenomenological qualitative research approach, the thesis aims to analyze how Haraway herself exercises feminist writing and facilitates the learning of collaborative storytelling. The first research question: How does Haraway practice storytelling while simultaneously situating herself as well as others, is focused on investigating Symbiosis, Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble, a chapter from Haraway's publication Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). Drawing on the qualitative analysis carried out through the process of phenomological re-telling, two case studies are presented. The two publications The Books of the Books, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in association with dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and Critical Zones – The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour building on the exhibition Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics in 2020 are examined in terms of their curatorial and editorial orientations in order to answer the question: How can the position of a curator perform as a multidisciplinary editor without resigning to its own singularity or acting omnisciently? In the proposed practice of a phenomological approach of re-telling, it is referred to Rosi Braidotti's remarks on the nomadic subject, along with feminist modes of (academic) writing, as motivated by scholars such as Mona Livholts and Nina Lykke. The thesis demonstrates that collaborative storytelling and writing directs the emphasis on methods of citation and referencing, just as their various possible layouts. In highlighting these, the paper also reveals the challenges of such writing to produce perceived hegemonic knowledge while not being collaboratively situated.

This thesis is a post qualitative inquiry that explores a different research approach concerning climate change and what Bruno Latour calls the Terrestrial. We are now living in a New Climatic Regime or locked-down age, according to Latour, where life continues – yet is ever more suspended and disorienting. This frozen image of modern life is drawn in our new landscape – that is political, organizational and it concerns terrestrial sustainability – along with an emerging worldview (of Gaia) that is challenging to understand and manage for. It also reorients how we are managing sustainability and what we connect to it. This new landscape – that is also a mapping of dominant trajectories for organizing and Terrestrial reorientation with the world – is traversed, extended, and explored with two blockchain projects for sustainability. The projects are organizing their own currency for putting-on-chain, tokenizing, or attaching to nature, carbon and other actors. The key coordinates and blockages of this new landscape for sustainability are also drawn from these two cases – mapping their organizing trajectories and Terrestrial reorientation. The research and writing of this inquiry gathers with Terrestrial earth-bound movement for managing, living and organizing in connection with the common world for habitability.

Living Disability: Ways Forward from Decontextual Models of Disability consists of six articles that provide both theoretical and pragmatic commentaries on decontextual approaches to vulnerability and disability. In What Contemporary Models of Disability Miss: The Case for a Phenomenological Hermeneutic Analysis I argue many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people. A hermeneutic investigation of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will provide an epistemological tool to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. In A Phenomenological Hermeneutic Resolution to the Principlist- Narrative Bioethics Debate Narrative, I note narrative approaches to bioethics and principlist approaches to bioethics have often been presented in fundamental opposition to each other. I argue that a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to the debate finds a compromise between both positions that maintains what is valuable in each of them. Justifying an Adequate Response to the Vulnerable Other examines the possibility of endorsing the position that I, as a moral agent, ought to do my best to respond adequately to the other’s vulnerability. I contend that, insofar as I value my personal identity, it is consistent to work toward responding adequately to the vulnerability of the other both ontologically and ethically. Who Can Make a Yes?: Disability, Gender, Sexual Consent and ‘Yes Means Yes’ examines the ‘yes means yes’ model of sexual consent, and the political and ethical commitments that underpin this model, noting three fundamental Ph.D. Thesis – C. Kavanagh; McMaster University - Philosophy v disadvantages. This position unfairly polices the sexual expression of participants, particularly vulnerable participants such as disabled people, it demands an unreasonably high standard for defining sexual interaction as consensual, and allows perpetrators of sexual violence to define consent. In Craving Sameness, Accepting Difference: The Possibility of Solidarity and Social Justice I note realist accounts typically define solidarity on the basis of a static feature of human nature. We stand in solidarity with some other person, or group of people, because we share important features in common. In opposition to such realist accounts, Richard Rorty defines solidarity as a practical tool, within which there is always an ‘us’, with whom we stand in solidarity, and a ‘them’, with whom we are contrasted. I argue that by understanding Rorty’s pragmatic solidarity in terms of the relational view of solidarity offered by Alexis Shotwell, it is possible to conceptualise solidarity in a manner that allows for extending the boundaries of the community with whom we stand in solidarity. In Translating Non-Human Actors I examine Bruno Latour’s position that nonhuman things can be made to leave interpretable statements, and have a place in democracy. With the right types of mediators, the scientist can translate for non-humans, and those voices will allow for nonhuman political representation. I wish to suggest that, like scientists, people with disabilities are particularly capable of building networks that facilitate translation between humans and non-humans. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Living Disability: Ways Forward from Decontextual Models of Disability consists of six separate articles that provide both theoretical and pragmatic commentaries on decontextual approaches to vulnerability and disability. The first three articles examine contemporary approaches to understanding vulnerability and disability, and explore what a contextual theoretical approach, one that puts the experiences of people with disabilities at the centre, might look like. The second three articles provide a bioethical examination of practical ethical questions associated with the treatment of people with disabilities when it comes to social and political positions on disability and sexuality, solidarity with people with disabilities, and the relationship between people with disabilities and objects.