Marloes' introduction to Susan Leigh Star's text ''Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology''

Fictional Quilt entry: Not 'getting it'

This short text is an introduction to Susan Leigh Star's Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology. discussed during a methods class of SI23. Thanks to a great discussion with XPUB1 2023/2024! You can find the text in the bootleg library --->>> https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/book/863

This text [1] is hard to access for some. Ironically this is very much an example of the topic of the text. This hard work of trying to access and 'get it' is the articulation/invisible work Star is writing about, and the text is itself a boundary object that comes from an academic, American context from 30 years ago, and we as readers need to bridge these gaps (language, time, academic discipline) and work at understanding it from our own context [2]. This bridging or articulation work is not the same for everyone. The text is not equally accessible to everyone in the group. Acknowledging this and helping each other with this work of translation is important. You don't have to do this alone and it is not a personal failure nor an individual burden. The goal of taking a full day to digest this text is to do this together.

The feeling of 'not getting it' is valuable, as the text also tries to convey. It is 'the promise of monsters' Haraway discusses in her writing [3] and to which Star refers (assuming familiarity with Haraway's work). Feel entitled to be upset about this, even if Star didn't write the text for us here in 2024 (30 years in the future) at XPUB, with a group of people from different cultural backgrounds speaking different languages. The XPUB staff is asking you to read it, asking you to learn something from it, not to torture you but because we feel there is something very important being said in it and what is being said relates to exactly this problem of not being able to acces this text (or a certain technology!).

Taking the example of this text requiring so much effort to access being an example of what the text tries to describe as point of departure to discuss it would constitute a perfectly feminist method. Membership of a community of practice is not the same for everyone, some people are part of multiple communities (multiple languages, cultures, academic disciplines, ages) and this can create frictions. Someone who is not a native Engish speaker might find the vocabulary of this text hard to understand, especially because it contains a lot of terms that are coined or invented by the author or explained in more detail in other texts by other authors (Haraway, Anzaldua). The text assumes a lot of knowledge [4] in the domain of feminist Science and Technology Studies (of the Californian kind). It is also an old text, so its context has faded a bit over time and requires some historical awareness in its current reader, which is harder if you are younger and haven't lived through these developments as an adult member of this particular academic discipline.

You are very much encouraged to engage with a text like this on this level, on the level of you not understanding it and how upsetting and tiring this can be, because it demands more work from you than from others. It is your entrypoint to the text and it is feminist methodology as proposed by Star. You are making yourself known as someone who is facing this struggle of 'monsters in borderlands' and lived experience and situated knowledge are at the heart of knowledge building. This class is not about outsmarting each other, it is about learning something together. We are a small enough community of practice to hear each other, to make room for this and to respond to such struggles. We can 'stretch out to affiliate with multiplicity and tend to how we hear each other as a matter of “listening forth” from silence, an active listening' (Star, 1994). Freely translated that means being mindful of things lost in translation and doing the work of figuring out what it all means to us, together [5].

[1] Star, S.L. (1994) Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology. In: Bowker, G. et al. (eds) Boundary objects and beyond: working with Leigh Star. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

[2] This relates to what Raymond Williams described in his introduction to Keywords as an inquiry into a vocabulary, figuring out the development of the way a certain word is understood historically and in times of cultural shifts, when meanings become 'brittle'.

[3] Haraway, D. (1992). The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. [online] Available at: http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/monsters.html

[4] The same goes for software and tools and the way they are communicated!

[5] All this on etherpad, a naturalized object in the XPUB community of practice. We use it for everything, collective note taking, making coffee, no questions asked.