Dear Colleagues,
We welcome you to submit an abstract for a Special Issue of TSANTSA, the
Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association:
Natural, Synthetic, and Digital: Socio-material Connections
Deadline for abstracts: 7th January 2020
Full articles: May 2020
Publication: Spring 2021
Please send paper abstracts (max. 2000 characters) to:
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Call For Papers, TSANTSA - Special Issue 26
Natural, Synthetic, and Digital: Socio-material Connections
The world is experiencing today new relations between synthetic, ‘natural’,
and digital materialities, from industrial laboratories to tropical
rainforests, in agrifood systems and synthetic meat production, from
computer simulations to medical bio-technology. In spite of their empirical
imbrication across various industries and economic processes,
anthropological approaches have commonly privileged the material specificity
and separateness of the synthetic and the digital in their relation towards
what is framed as “natural”. Rather than considering natural, synthetic and
digital worlds as politically antagonistic, materially distinct, or
ontologically separate, this Special Issue of Tsantsa interrogates how
digital, synthetic and natural materialities are interlocked in
socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation and valuation. Drawing
inspiration from earlier conceptualizations of “hybrid” collectives of human
and non-humans (Latour 2005), the frictions of global interconnections of
movement, forms, and agency (Tsing 2005), or the cyborg blurring of natural
and artificial boundaries (Mitchell 2003), we seek to highlight how the
separateness and distinctness of these material orders are produced, and the
interconnections between them. Our approach to mediation privileges the
conceptual and actual entanglements between materialities; transmutation
takes into account the transformations of forms and substance across
material orders; valuation, finally, implicates the commensuration,
evaluation, and marketization of biosocial and economic processes within and
across natural, synthetic and digital orders.
Synthetic fibers, plastics, and fabrics have long been a mainstay of modern
mass consumerism. With recent attempts to engineer and synthesize life
itself, and the growing prospects of digitally-mediated, algorithm-powered,
and AI-driven futures, social scientists are now taking stock of the
emergence of, and transgressions between, natural, synthetic and digital
products in a wide range of socio-cultural, political, and economic
contexts. Along with studies of virtual realities, anthropologists and other
social scientists have examined the social and political effects of digital
and algorithmic processes, including the interface and mediation between
humans and computers (Coleman 2013; Kockelman 2017), and have taken an acute
interest in exploring how scientists engineer new life forms (e.g. Roosth
2017). We push these analyses further through the prism of socio-material
processes of mediation, transmutation, and valuation. For example, diamonds
or human cells are organic-based material substances that can be grown in a
laboratory and be the target of digitally-mediated crypto-certification and
data management. In these transmutations, synthetic, digital and natural
materialities are imbricated in ways that lead to new forms of mediation,
bio-economies, and valuation.
This Special Issue inaugurates a reflection of anthropological relevance
around the following questions: Can the synthetic or digital be biologic,
and what is natural about artificial materials and processes? What are the
boundaries, leakages, or forms of contamination between human and artificial
intelligence, digital and synthetic production, from economic spaces to
intimate spheres of life? What questions and challenges do ever-more
synthetic and digital material cultures raise about the conditions of the
human, and the posthuman? How is health, labor, or sociality transformed by
digital or synthetic production processes? How is value created and defined
across these different social, epistemological, and material orders? What
are the political, epistemological, ecological, and social conditions
underpinning a future that promises to be increasingly enmeshed in synthetic
and digital properties?
By providing answers to these questions, this Special Issue will pursue two
main objectives. First, we theorize the social in processes of mediation,
transmutation, and valuation of natural synthetics, the humanness of
artificial intelligence, or the materiality of digital elements. Second,
this Special Issue examines the relationship between digital and material
properties, organic and synthetic substances, to move beyond their essential
qualities. We welcome ethnographic contributions along these lines of
enquiry with the aim of opening up a new space for reflection on the
naturalness of digital and synthetic propperties; the phenomenological
experience of embodying synthetic substances and inhabiting digital spaces;
as well as the meaning of new social and working practices enabled by the
entanglement of natural, digital and synthetic materialities.
References
Coleman, G. 2013. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Kockelman, P. 2017. The art of interpretation in the age of computation.
Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to
Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP
Mitchell, W. J. 2003. Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city.
Cambridge: MIT Press
Roosth, S. 2017. Synthetic. How Life Got Made. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press
Tsing, A. L. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton
University Press.
For more information: https://www.tsantsa.ch/en/next-issues/issue-26-2021
Thank you for your time and attention,
Matthieu Bolay,
With Filipe Calvão and Lindsay Bell
----
Matthieu Bolay
Postdoctoral researcher
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding
Ch. Eugène-Rigot 2A, 1211 Geneva
Office: +41 (0)22 908 58 83
Mobile: +41 (0)79 883 00 78
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