Nik Brown discussing Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen’s presentation on the selling of life insurance in Finland.

Despite the claims of Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty, social scientists are seriously engaged in addressing and analysing ‘the’ financial crisis. Yesterday, one such initiative, the Austerity Futures programme, met to explore the role of expectations and promises in enacting socio-economic futures.

Graffiti saluting the 14th of November anti-cuts strike, Barçelona, Spain.

The next session of the Austerity Futures seminar series has been announced and is scheduled to take place on the 13th of March at the University of York. Here’s the blurb:

Performative futures: expectations, promises and failures pre- and post-austerity

It is often argued that we should understand expectations as ‘constitutive’ or ‘performative’, but more needs to be said about how this is so. How do some visions and expectations of the future emerge as accepted versions of how things will be while others do not? In what ways are these visions altered in an austerity society? What performative role is played by the discourses, events and practices associated with austerity? In what way does austerity articulate with fundamental changes in the restructuring of the state, welfare, the private sector? How do these forces articulation with personal futures, personal liability, risk and individual accountability?

Speakers

Dr Nik Brown, Sociology, University of York

Dr Nick Gane, Sociology, University of York

Dr Michaela Benson, Sociology, University of York

Prof. Paul Martin, Sociology, University of Sheffield

Prof. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Sociology, Helsinki University

Dr. Kevin Farnsworth, Social Policy, University of Sheffield

Dr Zoe Irving, Social Policy, University of Sheffield

For more info on grant applicants and core members click here.

Next week I’m participating in an PhD training event organised by the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education entitled ‘Re-Assembling the Social’. Naturally, the event is working on Latourian concepts of the social as well as participation and issue mapping.

Click here for more info.

Here’s a description from the Goldsmiths web site. “Grounded in Interaction Design, this programme offers a unique synthesis of practice-based research and cutting edge sociological concepts and methods, and will equip you to play 
a leading role in the development and understanding of emerging technology in society. Building on Goldsmiths’ unique position in design-led and sociological research, you will learn how to shape your designs through the collection and analysis of social data, employing cutting-edge research methods. This masters offers you a distinctive opportunity to challenge and develop your existing practice. You will develop the skills and confidence to work in various settings where an understanding of design in society is key. Career paths include design in industry, independent design consultancy and academic research.”

Here’s some info from the site:

“Austerity Futures? Imagining and Materialising the Future in an ‘Age of Austerity’ is a two year programme of events that examines whether the current ‘age of austerity’ in the UK, Europe and some other parts of the developed Western world, changes the ways in which the future is imagined, planned for, worked towards and brought into being.

Funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council and organised by a group of academics based at Lancaster, York, Durham and Goldsmiths, the series of seminars, workshops and conference bring together leading researchers from the UK, America, Canada, Australia and Europe with those working on methodologies for mapping the future in the public, private and third sectors.”

In this paper I explore processes of engagement occasioned in an innovative energy-demand reduction research project. I present a case involving three Twitter research probes employed as part of an interdisciplinary research project tasked with understanding community-led energy-demand reduction practices and informing new initiatives. In doing so, I consider three conceptual figures – the idiot, the parasite and the diplomat – drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers, respectively, to explore how design-led interventions, collaborations between designers and sociologists of science and technology, might be understood as cosmopolitical research processes.

Fine Art Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London

Outdoor Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London

Alongside Ignacio Farias, I organised an open panel at the EASST/4S meeting in Copenhagen this October (17-20th). Here’s the description of the panel we sent out:

Given the importance placed on ‘creativity’, ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative industry’ in both national and international policy contexts, it is surprising that understanding of creativity-in-action remains largely underdeveloped. What is more surprising is that creativity is commonly associated with (unobservable) cognitive activity that can only be stimulated by the environment, which has led many scholars to see social networks and/or urban environments as the main sources for creativity. What gets lost here are the concrete practices through which the ‘new’ comes into being in different disciplines and in different economic sectors. In foregrounding the view of creativity as a local process distributed amongst heterogeneous actors this panel seeks to explore and compare accounts of sites of creative practice. Our insight is that the studio is a defining feature of creative production. Thus, building on workplace and laboratory studies this panel aims to draw together emerging ethnographic work on creative practice and in doing so define and investigate a lacuna in the STS imagination. To address the studio, as a key site of creative production, we welcome presentations based on in-depth case studies that focus on key ‘creative industries’, including the arts, crafts and cultural and creative industries. Accordingly, this panel invites comparison of different creative models and practices, thereby acknowledging the diversity of in-situ creative practice as well as providing a survey of different creative disciplines. And here’s who participated:

Participants:

• Off the studio. Accounting for sensible practices within the engineering processes of a design chair in Italy. Alvise Mattozzi, Free University of Bozen; Laura Lucia Parolin, Milano Bicocca University.
• Collective Bodies: Theorizing the Positions of the Glassblowing Team from the Dispositions of Practice. Erin Elizabeth O’Connor, Marymount Manhattan College.
• Creative Collision: Designers, Test-Persons and Artefacts in the Lab. Julian Stubbe, TU Berlin.
• Propagating experimental idioms with a networked laptop orchestra. Patrick Valiquet, University of Oxford
• Perfume-making: The studio as a site of scientific practice and creative production. Claus Noppeney, Bern University of Applied Sciences; Nada Endrissat, Bern University of Applied Sciences.
• Epistemic dissonance: how do architects come up with alternatives. Ignacio Farias, Social Science Research Center Berlin
• Making Studio Practice Public: Assembling a DigiLab through Case Studying Virtual Research Inscriptions. Amanda Nita Windle, University of the Arts, London.
• The cultural (dis)empowerment as shaped in research on algorithms for image processing. Dominique Vinck, University of Lausanne.

Thanks to everyone who participated. The session was well attended and many interesting issues came up, not least the relationship between the studio and scientific laboratories, the relation between ‘nature’ and the studio and the studio a setting for expunging the ‘social’ in order to produce socio-cultural objects.