The study combines Science and Technology Studies interest on materiality with knowledge creation and transmission, typical concepts of Practicebased Studies. Knowledge is meant here as a process of socio-material connections. The analysis focuses on a “typical” place of knowledge transmission such as a training course, namely on safety connected to wild fire-fighting. The discursive mobilization of some safety objects during the training makes evident the conflicting positions between the Fire-Brigade and volunteers on safety and fire-fighting. In literature this communicative split is often considered as an obstacle to the development of common understanding and coordinated action. A deeper analysis of discursive interactions highlights the role that dissonance and conflict may play in softening the boundaries between communities of practice and in producing knowledge. The aim of the contribution is also to underline that knowledge not only is an effect of alignment but also of dis-alignment of human and non-human actors.
This article provides an overview of the discussion animating the track “Doing research in technoscience as affective engagement” organised at the VIII STS Italia Conference. By acknowledging the inheritance of feminist STS scholars in expanding the theoretical scope of care beyond its traditional sites, this session was devoted to exploring knowledge production as a matter of care as well as a form of affective engagement and entanglement with multiple Others while doing research. Two contributions were presented. The first ethnographically investigates Canadian blood donation practices by drawing on Haraway’s SF figure to develop what the speaker calls ‘Sanguine Figuration’. The second presentation relies on research of women’s animist practices amongst horses in Swiss Alps through a filmmaking practice influenced by Haraway’s work on the natureculture continuum and situated knowledge. Both studies embody efforts to develop non-representational research practices and experimental approaches showing the affective entanglement between researchers and researched, subject and object. Further, these contributions have highlighted the importance of conceptual creativity and imagination in building an apparatus that enables accounting for affective engagements in doing research in STS.
Ageing is not only a chronological matter. The following contributions at the crossroad of STS, material gerontology, design, and medical sociology offer alternative views on ageing and care. Ageing emerges as a boundary object through which authors explore the relationship with technologies and technology-based processes and practices. Authors point out that becoming older is a sociomaterial process and emphasize the importance of thinking with care when designing technology as well as the relevance of the socio-technical imaginary in conceptualizing older people.