27th August 2015: Training in the Contact Zone: Power, Play, and Invention in the Sport of Agility
The upcoming Mobilities Reading Group will take place in the Mobilities Lab (Bowland North B37) Thursday August 27, 2015 from 4PM to 5PM.
note: change of day to Thursday this week only.
The reading is Chapter 8 from Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet.
All are welcome to attend!
Really enjoyed the discussion. Left wondering around asymmetries. I no longer know whether ‘technologies’ like the GPS, or like the dog training method (or my Skype connection!) really only ‘react’ to a – on their part – very thinly perceived slice of the situation or whether they ‘respond’, too.
When you pointed out the situated and cultural diversity in how technologies are used, and consequently in how the agency of the technology – human – animal is performed, then the technologies – as fluid assemblages could be seen to respond to the situation. Not as a preexisting singular capital T Technology on a stage where there’s separated human | animal | technology, actors but as a ephemeral agency that emerges in the particular assemblage.
For example, the GPS in one kind of rescue situation is used to track rescue teams’ movements. It reacts to the movement of people carrying GPS devices and drawing the tracks in the system the rescue teams have designed. It doesn’t perceive any of the reasoning around the search and respond by being more or less accurate. However, when the rescuers then use the track not just as a means to ‘tick off’ quadrants they’ve searched, but to read the tracks as a documentation of the size and intensity of the search, to figure out where dogs are needed, how the dogs should be guided, then I think I can say the GPS as a human-animal-machine assemblage ‘responds’ to the situation differently, the tracks become something different in how the rescuers appropriate them. It becomes a different kind of GPS. Just like the the agency of human animal is shaped reflexively.
But human and animal can know themselves, reason and respond creatively and reflexively. Technology mhhhh. Maybe IT resonates in contact?
So the human-animal-machine-weather* assemblage shouldn’t be seperated into ‘is the dog responding’ or ‘is the GPS responding’, because they’re not isolated. If we’re serious about Haraway’s ‘becoming with’ then we can’t seperate out the machine and say it is only reactive, because its not just a machine, its part of a specific assemblage, and will act differently depending on context.
I’m wondering what the appropriate methods are to research this kind of assemblage. Should the same method be applied to all facets of it – e.g. using gopro and gps on all elements** – which would be relatively straight forward, but then is how to analyse it different for dog, human, GPS, computer, radio network etc. Do we end up always analysing the human part of the interaction.
(*I like to include weather as its another kind of thing & wind direction and speed really effects what the dog can smell, solar flares effect GPS accuracy etc).
(**Trying to GPS track the wind was the way we originally discovered the kite as a good metaphor).