Feeling our way: Experiential practices of Cosmopolitical inquiry

• In Event: Doing Cosmopolitics: Exploring Everyday Potentials Within STS Research

Abstract

This paper draws on our experience of teaching and researching in which we sought to better understand cosmopolitical inquiry, and feel our way towards articulating how such inquiry might extend STS analysis. During a research project situated in the remote community of Milingimbi, we participated as ethnographers invited into a water management research team at the last minute. At a workshop where hydro-geologists and Yolngu Traditional Owners discuss potential futures for Milingimbi’s water infrastructures, we witnessed work which actively sought to bring together different worlds, as well as much knowledge work which exceeded each side’s capacity to attend. While teaching in classrooms in Frankfurt (one of us in-body and the other on the screen) we presented ethnographic stories to new Masters students. We juxtaposed these stories with STS texts (Latour, 2004; de la Cadena, 2010; Verran, 2002) in working with students, to induce a reflexive ‘feel’ for intersections in knowledge work when different worlds meet. Juxtaposing these stories of these experiences, we foreground differing means for holding together radically different knowledge practices that come to life and the political institutions that participate such settings. Through articulating these experiential examples we attempt to adduce a vague notion of cosmopolitical inquiry and suggest several possibilities for enriching and expanding approaches in STS analysis.

Authors

• Endre Dányi, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

• Michaela Spencer, Charles Darwin University