Excessive Meshworks

• In Event: Anthropology and STS: Dis/Encounters and Potential South-North Exchanges II

Abstract

Three physical science fields rely on research facilities costing billions of dollars: astronomy, fusion physics, and high energy physics. Their cost is so large that no single nation, no matter how rich, can afford such facilities. Nonetheless, two are under construction (ALMA in Chile and ITER in France); a third (ILC) is likely to be built in Japan. International organizations (UNESCO, OECD, EU, G-8) compete to manage these projects financially; through those organizations nations struggle to maintain control of these gargantuan prosthetic devices, once so crucial to cold war science and engineering as sites for crafting the knowledge makers who then would staff the more prosaic facilities of late industrialism. Nations want to turn these projects into taxable technoparks.

These newest prosthetic devices develop through decades-long strategic formations of glocal coalitions. These rural projects demand and generate a glocal workforce that converges in new villages around the new devices: architects, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, regional planners, scientists, social scientists, teachers, etc. The global and local scale of their ventures exceed and elude the control of nation-states and their inter/national bureaucracies. They also exceed and elude the reach of the agonistic conceptual and methodological resources deployed in STS during the last 50 years. Drawing on the work of deLanda, Escobar, Fricker, Harcourt, Ingold, and Paulson I argue that feminist and cultural studies epistemologies are required to grapple with these new meshworks, crafted of new kinds of knowers and makers, designed to exceed the grasp of late industrial political economies.

Author

• Sharon Traweek, UCLA