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Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - II

Sat, September 7, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Eight, Proteus

Abstract

These panels stage a conversation about a central concern in STS: whether materiality prescribes meaning. Important works in the fields of STS and the social sciences have posed this question in a variety of ways (e.g., Akrich 1997, Hebdige 1979, Johnson 2010, Keane 2003, Barad 2007, Latour 1992, Latour 2014), interrogating the material determinism of things as disparate as value, agency, and morality. The panels bring together scholars working on topics as diverse as epigenetics, programming languages, technological governance, prehistoric pastoralists, energy infrastructures, and affect to counterpose different ways of understanding the irreducible imbrication of the material and the semiotic, and its implications for theorizing meaning, agency, and value.

Our panels bring together these questions through the work of diverse scholars who address them from different vantages. The panels tackle these questions from two directions: First, we argue that attention to actors’ ontologies or semiotic ideologies (Keane 2018, Kockelman 2013, Kohn 2013) fundamentally shapes the ways this question is answered. Second, we consider how field-specific epistemologies ground how scholars have approached issues of meaning, agency, and value. Panelists base their analyses in inter-action in a variety of contexts, and ask: When does the material appear to be restrictive or lax? How is the material understood to determine the scope and availability of meaning and agency? In doing so, the panelists address the key questions of how nonhumans act in the world, and how humans interpret these actions as agentive or not, constraining or not, and socially significant or not.

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