Material Semiotics

Bodies of science and law: forensic DNA profiling, biological bodies and biopower

by Victor Toom

Toom, Victor. 2012. "Bodies of science and law: forensic DNA profiling, biological bodies and biopower." Journal of Law and Society 39(1):150-66.
The paper is part of the Special Issue 'Material Worlds: Intersections of Law, Science, Technology, and Society', edited by Chris Lawless and Alex Faulkner.

How is jurisdiction transferred from an individual’s biological body to agents of power such as the police, public... more How is jurisdiction transferred from an individual’s biological body to agents of power such as the police, public prosecutor and judiciary, and what happens to these biological bodies when transformed from private into public objects? These questions are examined by analyzing bodies situated at the intersection of science and law. More specifically, the transformation of ‘private bodies’ into ‘public bodies’ shall be analyzed by going into the details of forensic DNA profiling in the Dutch jurisdiction. It will be argued that various ‘forensic genetic practices’ enact different ‘forensic genetic bodies’. These enacted forensic genetic bodies are connected with various infringements of civil rights, which become articulated in exploring these forensic genetic bodies’ ‘normative registers’.
The pdf is freely available, click the Wiley button.

Technology and the Body Public

by Stephen Read

in press: Inflexions

Arakawa and Gins are concerned with the configuration of life and agency in the relation of the body with its... more Arakawa and Gins are concerned with the configuration of life and agency in the relation of the body with its surround, which they understand as a matter of technique. They aim to take research on the body and surround into the heterogeneous conditions and situations of life in order to find ways to the enhancement of personal agency. They join here with a larger effort to understand the nature of life and agency from a broadly phenomenological perspective. I see the aim of this contribution as technical, to open further the subject-object, body-surround, relation using insights from hermeneutical phenomenology and a hermeneutical philosophy of science. In particular my target is the spaces and times of agency and the historical and ‘public’ nature of the body-surround relation. My conclusion is that the body-surround involves us in interrelationalities with ‘indeterminate others’ and with material and organisational co-constructions that go beyond individual cognition and subjective points of view to the orders and ‘senses’ already built into our surrounds. This involves recentrings of bodies with objects in historically formed technical-relational ‘spaces’ that are materially and organisationally articulated with one another and with human practices. I argue it is in this already prepared landscape of ‘technological spaces’ that our research efforts concerning enhancements of agency need to be concentrated. We need also to be cognisant of the power structures already embedded in this landscape. Power here is decentred and distributed between multiple spaces, but also involves access to the particular spaces which enable particular actions.

While this paper is again about the publicness and technicity of our conditions of life and agency, the point it emphasises is that spaces are technically maintained optics on the world that incorporate particular rationalities. The sense the world seen from these spaces makes depends on these spaces so that they are not something to be 'compressed' or 'overcome' but are each a condition for the knowledge and capacity for action we have in that space. Each space is in itself a 'technological paradigm' (in 'Another form' I opposed this to Castells' version of the 'technological paradigm').

Gathering, Translating, Enacting. A study of interdisciplinary research and development practices in Technology Enhanced Learning

by Sanna Rimpilainen

A PhD Thesis

This is an ethnographic case-study of research and development practices taking place in an interdisciplinary project... more This is an ethnographic case-study of research and development practices taking place in an interdisciplinary project between education and computer sciences. The Ensemble-project, part of the Technology Enhanced Learning programme (2008-12), has studied case-based learning in a number of diverse settings in Higher Education, working to develop semantic technologies for supporting that learning. Focussing on one of the six research settings, the discipline of archaeology, the current study has had three purposes. By opening up to scrutiny the practices of research and development, it has firstly sought to understand how a shared research question is answered in practice when divergent research approaches are brought to bear upon it. Secondly, the study has followed the emergence of a piece of semantic technology through these practices. The third aim has been to assess the advantages and disadvantages of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in studying unfolding, open-ended processes in real time. Through critical ethnographic participation, multiple ethnographic research methods, and by drawing on ANT as theoretical practice, the study has shown the precarious and unpredictable nature of research and development work, the political nature of research methods and how multiple realities can be produced using them, and the need for technology development to flexibly respond to changing circumstances. We have also seen the mutual adoption and extension of practices by the two strands of the project into each others’ domains, and how interdisciplinary tensions resolved, while they did not disappear, through pragmatic changes within the project. The study contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) where studies on the ‘soft sciences’, such as education, are few, and a new field of Studies in Social Science and Humanities (SSH) which is emerging alongside and from within the STS. Interdisciplinary endeavours between fields pertaining largely to the natural and the social sciences respectively have not been studied commonly within either field.

On sign production

by Tommaso Guariento

Sul problema della produzione segnica a partire dal Trattato di semiotica generale di Eco. Analisi del concetto... more Sul problema della produzione segnica a partire dal Trattato di semiotica generale di Eco. Analisi del concetto semiotico di 'materia' e di 'produzione segnica' alla luce di una ricognizione delle cosmogonie orfiche e della semantica di Ramon Llull.

The mediating role of objects in recollections of adult women survivors of child sexual abuse

by Paula Reavey

The Materials of STS

by Vanessa Ferraz Leite

Dwelling the Telecare Home: Place, Location and Habitality

by Tomás Sánchez Criado

D. López & T. Sánchez-Criado (2009). In Space & Culture, 12(3), 343-358

Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a... more Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a result, thinking about how the home's spatialities are configured and how they might transform caring has become an important issue for the social sciences. This article is a contribution to this line of thought and looks at being-at-home from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By focusing on the telecare cases of an ongoing ethnographic project and drawing on Heideggerian insights on dwelling and place, we coin the term habitality. We think this term is useful for two purposes: (1) to think about the home as a materially heterogeneous set of spatialities and subjectivities and (2) to understand being-at-home not as a way of living in an enclosed and protected shelter of routine activities, but as a way of combining those spatialities and subjectivities and the differences (and oddities) they might bring.