{"id":363,"date":"2017-11-01T18:09:49","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T18:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/?p=363"},"modified":"2021-11-15T11:49:52","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T11:49:52","slug":"when-worlds-meet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/2017\/11\/01\/when-worlds-meet\/","title":{"rendered":"When Worlds Meet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Endre D\u00e1nyi<\/a>, <\/strong>Department of Sociology, Goethe University, <\/strong>Frankfurt am Main, Germany, shares his thoughts on the conference theme of ‘Meetings’ for EASST 2018 at Lancaster University, 25-28 July 2018.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I\u2019m writing this, alone in the office, I\u2019m already looking forward to the 2018 EASST conference (https:\/\/easst.net\/easst-2018\/<\/a>). I will be happy to return to Lancaster, and it will be wonderful to see so many friends again. It will be a meeting<\/em> \u2013 not a skype call, a quick exchange of emails, a fragmented discussion in a coffee break, but an event where interesting conversations can develop and continue to resonate for many years to come.<\/p>\n

Yes, the 2018 EASST conference will be a meeting, but it will also be a collective reflection on meetings<\/em>. I remember thinking about this theme obsessively while working on my PhD on parliaments (http:\/\/we-aggregate.org\/piece\/walking-as-knowing-and-interfering<\/a>). Meetings necessarily imply politics (who<\/em> are in and who are out? what<\/em> is this about? how<\/em> to engage well?), but that politics is often delegated to the architecture and the infrastructure of the meetings themselves. So many parliaments and quasi-parliaments, with their agendas, comfy and not-so-comfy chairs, papers and pens, tablets and mobile phones, minutes and decisions.<\/p>\n

We, of course, know this, both as STS scholars and as participants in countless and (seemingly) endless meetings. To a large extent, they constitute<\/em> our world. But how to think about meetings that challenge<\/em> our world \u2013 or, to put it differently, about instances \u2018when worlds meet\u2019? In my postdoc research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, I\u2019ve been looking at three such instances. The first is a hunger strike that took place in Brussels shortly before what came to be known as the European refugee crisis. Together with Sebastian Abrahamsson (http:\/\/saxoinstitute.ku.dk\/staff\/?pure=en\/persons\/527388<\/a>) I\u2019ve been thinking about that hunger strike, which involved 23 undocumented migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, as an event where the breakdown of a Western logic of sovereignty was briefly made visible. It posed a challenge not only for Belgium or the EU, but also for us, STS scholars, trying to describe what it is to be political\/act politically. (Our paper titled \u2018Becoming Stronger by Becoming Weaker\u2019 will be soon published by the Journal of International Relations and Development.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The second instance is related to drugs, and the ways in which they are constituted as a problem<\/em>. In some cases, drugs are celebrated as means through which different worlds become accessible \u2013 or, to be more precise, through which our own world becomes accessible differently. Think of Walter Benjamin\u2019s use of hashish to learn the language of things (http:\/\/www.cabinetmagazine.org\/issues\/30\/taussig.php<\/a>) and Michel Foucault\u2019s experiments with LSD in California (https:\/\/boomcalifornia.com\/2017\/09\/10\/michel-foucault-in-death-valley-a-boom-interview-with-simeon-wade\/<\/a>). But more often drugs are associated with crime and sickness, and therefore feared and regulated through national and international regulations \u2013 with mixed results. The spectacular failure of the \u2018War on Drugs\u2019 (https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2016\/apr\/19\/war-on-drugs-statistics-systematic-policy-failure-united-nations)<\/a> shows how difficult it is in principle<\/em> to come up with a solution to this problem, while harm reduction programmes in large cities across the globe demonstrate that in practice<\/em> it\u2019s always possible to find better ways of living with it. (A chapter based on my fieldwork in Lisbon appears in World Politics in Translation<\/em> https:\/\/www.routledge.com\/World-Politics-in-Translation-Power-Relationality-and-Difference-in-Global\/Berger-Esguerra\/p\/book\/9781138630574)<\/a><\/p>\n

The third instance highlights that while liberal democracy is relatively good at accommodating different worldviews<\/em>, it\u2019s rather ill-equipped to deal with different worlds<\/em>. Together with Michaela Spencer (http:\/\/www.cdu.edu.au\/northern-institute\/our-teams\/michaela-spencer<\/a>) I\u2019ve been involved in series of ethnographic studies in the Northern Territory in Australia, which in one way or another all examine how Yolngu Aboriginal modes of knowing and doing relate to Western political institutions. One of our studies is centred around a Yolngu parliamentary ceremony, recorded in a short video called Riyyawaray \u2013 Common Ground (https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ytfqf1LWdQI<\/a>). The ceremony was organised in 2008 to formally object to the Australian Government\u2019s design and execution of \u2018the Intervention\u2019 (https:\/\/www.monash.edu\/law\/research\/centres\/castancentre\/our-research-areas\/indigenous-research\/the-northern-territory-intervention\/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation\/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention<\/a>) \u2013 a bundle of laws that were supposed to address a range of problems in Aboriginal communities without much prior consultation. As some Yolngu elders explained in the video, the parliamentary ceremony was a deliberate political act during which a world otherwise invisible to the Australian Parliament was momentarily made visible. The participants of the ceremony did not ask for a symbolic<\/em> recognition of sameness<\/em> (as humans or Australians); what they asked for was a very practical recognition of difference<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, these three instances associated with the European refugee crisis, global drug policy and indigenous initiatives are quite disparate \u2013 they are worlds apart<\/em>. At the same time, they also make worlds meet<\/em>, and suggest forms of politics that resonate strongly with several concerns in STS. I can\u2019t wait to discuss them further at the 2018 EASST conference in Lancaster, at that meeting of meetings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Endre D\u00e1nyi, Department of Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, shares his thoughts on the conference theme of ‘Meetings’ for EASST 2018 at Lancaster University, 25-28 July 2018. As I\u2019m writing this, alone in the office, I\u2019m already looking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":581,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-css-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8AUaG-5R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/581"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":364,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}