News & Events: Events, Conferences and Workshops
The Stuff of Politics: Technoscience, democracy and public life
University of Oxford, 7th - 10th December 2006
Please Note: This event has finished. For information on our current seminar series please see our Events, Conferences and Workshops listing.
Some suggested readings
There is no canon ready at hand for discussing the political life of things. We have listed a collection of texts from a variety of intellectual traditions that you may find helpful as you prepare for the workshop. Since one of the objectives of the workshop is to expand and evaluate the concepts and traditions that inform how we think about 'things', we invite you to introduce other, perhaps unexpected, lines of thought.
I. Philosophical resources for a technoscience age
- Agamben, Giorgio (2004) The Open: Man and Animal Stanford University Press: Stanford
- Braidotti, Rosi (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming Polity Press, Cambridge
- Deleuze, Gilles (1968/1994) Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (see especially pp: )
- Diprose, Rosalyn (2002). Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Grosz, Elizabeth (2004) The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely Durham: Duke University Press
- Harman, Graham (2002) Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court.
- Heidegger, Martin (1951/1975) "The thing" Poetry, language, thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper Colophon Books [see also: Heidegger (1954/1977) "The question concerning technology" The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays Ed. and trans. W. Lovitt, Harper Torchbooks: 3-35]
- Kirby, Vicky (1997) Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal Routledge: London
- Massumi, Brian. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Stengers, Isabelle (1997) Power and invention: situating science University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
- Whitehead, Alfred North (1929) Process and reality, an essay in cosmology New York, Cambridge, UK: The Macmillan Company; University Press
II. Matters of concern: technoscience, political reason and democracy
- Barad, Karen (2003) 'Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-832
- Barry, Andrew (2001) Political machines: Governing a technological society London, New York: Athlone Press
- Bennett, Jane (2005) 'In parliament with things', in L. Toender & L. Thomassen (eds.), Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 133-148
- Dewey, John (1927/1991) The Public and Its Problems. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.
- Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire New York: Penguin
- Hinchliffe, Steve and Sarah Whatmore (2006) "Living cities: towards a politics of conviviality" Science as Culture 15(2): 123-138
- Latour, Bruno (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
- Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibe (eds) (2005) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy Cambridge, MA/Karlsruhe, Germany: MIT Press/ZKM
- Lippmann, Walter (1927/2002) The Phantom Public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Marres, Noortje (2005) "Issues spark a public into being" In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy Ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel, Cambridge, MA/Karlsruhe, Germany: MIT Press/ZKM, pp. 208-217.
- Rose, Nikolas (2001) "The politics of life itself" Theory, Culture and Society 18(6): 1-30
- Terranova, Tiziana (2004) Network culture: Politics for the information age London, Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press
III. Bioethics and neuropolitics: on bodies and their capacities
- Brown, N. and A. Webster (2004) New Medical Technologies and Society. Reordering Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Connolly, William E. (2002) Neuropolitics: Thinking, culture, speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Doyle R. (2003) Wetwares: experiments in postvital living. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Forbes, Nick (2004) Imitation of Life. How Biology is Inspiring Computing. Cambridge: Mass., MIT Press.
- Grandin, Temple and Catharine Johnson (2005) Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour. Bloomsbury, London
- Ingold, Tim (2006) "Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought" Ethnos 71 (1) 9-20
- Lakoff, Andrew (2006) Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Mol, Annemarie (2003) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice Durham: Duke University Press
- Thacker, Eugene (2005) The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
- Thrift, Nigel (2005) "From born to made: technology, biology, space" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 463 -476
- Turner, S. (2002) Brains/Practices/Relativism. Social Theory after Cognitive Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Woese, C. (2004) 'A new biology for a new century' Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 68 173-186.
Papers
Background papers for the workshop are available online, but available for participants only.