User:Alessia/special issue xxiii

Misplaces Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology (S. Leight Star)

misplaced concretism concept from John Dewey
A manifesto for Cyborgs Haraway

grounded theory=paradigma interpretativo

The marginal person who doesn't fit in a social/racial category falls as an outsider in a so called "residual category". Residal categories are omnipresent in all working classification systems (none of the above, not otherwise specified, other...) and they show how within the descriptive nature of reality something always escapes formal description (Gödel, Wittgenstein, Bateson, Dewey...)
Residual categories existence add a new point of view were an individual or group classed as "other" becomes a new category, a new lived residual category.
As the world expands it gets more difficult to define universal ideas about representation or information, while aknowledge how much the boundaries are becoming blurred.

All things inhabit some-one’s residual category in some category system

"just don’t kill us"

Among other things, we took the misplaced concretism of sex and re-situated it within the concrete experience of gender and relationships

Our sons of lesbian mothers was only one of dozens of contradictions and complexities that we have articulated and survived. deconstruction of gender, the centering of gender/sexual ambiguity and multiplicity, the fight for erasure of gender differences under some circumstances, the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppres-sion, and the honoring of historical and cultural traditions of masculinity and feminin-ity in various ethnic cultures: all at once.
method vs methodology

method not as position, system or artifact. its nature is complex, it is a way to survive experience

Any transmission of information involves encoding and decoding. Information becomes valuable when it exists in multiple context. To make sense, different contexts must be connected through some form of comparison? Information is only information when there are multiple interpretations.

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), a research field devoted to understanding cooperative work practices to improve the development of collaborative computing, that is computing technologies that mediates people interdependent activities.

We lack good relational language here. There is a permanent tension between the formal and the empirical, the local/situated and attempts to represent information across localities. It is this tension itself which is underexplored and undertheorized; it is not just a set of interesting metaphysical observations, but also a pragmatic unit of analysis. How can something be simultaneously concrete and abstract? The same and yet different? We are not used to thinking in this fashion in science, although it is more common in art and literature, especially in surrealist art and Bakhtinian aspects of the novel—and in feminism.

The medium of an information system is not just wires and plugs, bits and bytes, but also conventions of representation, information both formal and empirical. A system becomes a system in design and use, not the one without the other. The medium is the message, certainly, and it is also the case that the medium is a political creation.

This reminded me about a nice conversation I had with Thijs, we were analysing Wes Anderson obsession with a medium-driven/focused style.
When we talk about people and things existing in different situations, and when information systems try to share information across these situations, we need a way to represent everything involved. This includes people, objects, how we show them, and details about how the system is set up. One solution has always been standardization (interfaces, formats...), but standards are not monolites, they can change.

ecological relations: Social ecology is the study of how individuals interact with and respond to the environment around them, and how these interactions affect society and the environment as a whole.

Lave and Wenger (1992 ) have called such contexts “communities of practice,” a term which I like because it emphasizes the ways in which people work together and act together to form communities, not just traditional orga-nizational forms and boundaries "object" as stuff, thing, tool and techniques, story and memory, parts that are treated as things by community members? Used in the service of an action. "naturalization" is what happens when an object becomes a seamless part of the community. Naturalized objects lose the sense of being unique or strange, they become so integrated that community members forget their local and specific meaningsm, they not question it existence (example, electricity we take for granted), this way the object sink into the community's infrastructure.

In a community of practice, people come together based on shared interests and activities. The key element is the shared use of certain things or tools, as all activities involve using some objects. When someone new joins, their connection to the community is mainly about how they engage with these shared objects, not necessarily about direct interactions with people. Being accepted or considered legitimate in the community comes from how familiar the newcomer becomes with the actions involving these shared objects.

Membership can be described individually as the experience of encountering objects, and increasingly being in a naturalized relationship with them