How to Read the How-to, Part I: Rethinking the Tacit

Abstract

Salomé Skvirsky (2020) defines the process genre, or “how-to”-ness, as “the sequentially ordered representations of making or doing something.” Moving beyond the question of replicability in experimentation (e.g., Collins 1985), we take inspiration from Skvirsky to invite submissions that explore aesthetic qualities of the how-to genre in knowledge-making practices. Specifically, we want to extend her analysis to scientific and social-scientific manuals. In thinking about objects like field guides, ethnographic textbooks, ecological surveys, personal research journals, archeological codes and conventions, we ask: what kind of affects, attachments and aesthetic experiences are produced and reproduced in the doing of science and through its representation in manuals? Svkirsky focuses on absorption, but we also invite papers that explore other feelings like boredom, love, anxiety, resentment, awe, etc. How are they enabled by the “how-to” genre of the manual? And how does this genre produce, reproduce, and disrupt relations, good or otherwise, between knowledge producers, objects of study, disciplines, institutions, and places?

The manual is also a genre of theory seen in the exemplar of J. L. Austin’s How to do Things With Words, Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society and, to a certain extent, in Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival. We therefore invite submissions that interrogate a “how-to” manual as an object of analysis, but also as a mode of STS analysis and theorization, or, better yet, written in the how-to genre itself!

Chair

• Emma Pask, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• How To … Make Clinical Sense - Anna Harris, Maastricht University

• Kitchen Cognition: Crafting Experiments for Opening Science - Sarah Klein, University of Waterloo

• Tips in Science: Notes from Ugandan Molecular Biology - Sandra Calkins, Free University of Berlin

• Typography of a Nation: How to Craft Digital Typefaces in Post-Crash Thailand - Boyd Ruamcharoen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Session Organizer

• Boyd Ruamcharoen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)