The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

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Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Actor-network theory as a companion: an inquiry into intellectual practices SECTION 1 Some elements of the ANT paradigm(s) 1 What if ANT wouldn’t pursue agnosticism but care? 2 How to make ANT concepts more real? 3 Is ANT’s radical empiricism ethnographic? 4 Can ANT compare with anthropology? 5 How to write after performativity? 6 Is ANT a critique of capital? 7 How to use ANT in inventive ways so that its critique will not run out of steam? SECTION 2 Engaging dialogues with key intellectual companions 8 Is actant-rhizome ontology a more appropriate term for ANT? 9 What can ANT still learn from semiotics? 10 What did we forget about ANT’s roots in anthropology of writing? 11 As ANT is getting undone, can Pragmatism help us re-do it? 12 Why does ANT need Haraway for thinking about (gendered) bodies? 13 How does thinking with dementing bodies and A. N. Whitehead reassemble ce ntral propositions of ANT? 14 What is the relevance of Isabelle Stengers’ philosophy to ANT? SECTION 3 Trading zones of ANT: problematisations and ambivalences 15 What can go wrong when people become interested in the non-human? 16 What possibilities would a queer ANT generate? 17 Is ANT capable of tracing spaces of affect? 18 How to care for our accounts? 19 Is ANT an artistic practice? 20 How to stage a convergence between ANT and Southern sociologies? 21 What might ANT learn from Chinese medicine about difference? SECTION 4 Translating ANT beyond science and technology 22 What about race? 23 What might we learn from ANT for studying healthcare issues in the majority world, and what might ANT learn in turn? 24 What is the value of ANT research into economic valuation devices? 25 How does ANT help us to rethink the city and its promises? 26 How to study the construction of subjectivity with ANT? 27 Why do maintenance and repair matter? SECTION 5 The sites and scales of ANT 28 Are parliaments still privileged sites for studying politics and liberal democracy? 29 How does an ANT approach help us rethink the notion of site? 30 How does the South Korean city of Kyŏngju help ANT think place and scale? 31 How can ANT trace slow- moving environmental harms as they become eventful political disruptions? 32 Is ANT equally good in dealing with local, national and global natures? 33 What happens to ANT, and its emphasis on the socio-material grounding of the social, in digital sociology? SECTION 6 The uses of ANT for public–professional engagement 34 Can ANT be a form of activism? 35 How has ANT been helpful for public anthropologists after the 3.11 disaster in Japan? 36 How to move beyond the dialogism of the ‘Parliament of Things’ and the ‘Hybrid Forum’ when rethinking participatory experiments with ANT? 37 How well does ANT equip designers for socio-material speculations? 38 How to run a hospital with ANT? Index