New ways of becoming an artisan: digital artefacts, making and empowerment

Thursday June 18th, 2.00 – 5.30 p.m.

Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, Meeting Room 1 (7th Floor)

The recent emergence of ‘Maker movements’, along with trends in radical ecology, is symptomatic of a desire to use digital artefacts as means to democratise artisanal practices and to enrich ways of getting in touch withmaterials. These movements have placed centre stage the questions of territory, manual gesture, practical cooperation and the organisation of relations with others. Based on observations in the Middle East and Europe (including France and Scotland), in this seminar we will explore how emergent artisanal practices offer new openings forthe social sciences concerned with environmental aesthetics and the ecology of perception.

Questions to be addressed include the following:

  • What kinds of ‘thinking-in-doing’ are implied in new ways of becoming an artisan? What are the grounds for seeking to amplify contact with materials through the use of software? What are the relations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ craftsmen in Maker movements? What skills are formed, and how do they relate to ideas of empowerment?
  • How, in these new artisanal practices, do people attend to, and co-ordinate their activities with, one another? How can we study them, and what methods can we use besides long-term participant observation and video recording?
  • Ordinary activities, evincing ordinary language, are ways of knowing, but are not generally motivated by explicit political or aesthetic objectives. Nevertheless they call both kinds of objectives into question. What role does ecological awareness play in this? For instance, Maker movements stress that the facilitation of individual access to tools creates environmental waste and leads to unsustainable levels of energy expenditure. What political tensions are involved here? What new perspectives can the social sciences throw on them?

Presentations to the seminar (each of 30 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion) will be based on recent fieldwork: in an ‘open carpenter workshop’ in centre of Paris where people can repair and renovate old furniture using new kinds of software (Auray); looking at architecture from the perspective of ecological protest movements (Bulle); on building apertures and entry spaces in public places which drive non-persistent locomotionand form serial arrangements of pedestrians (Conein); and on learning to perceive spatial relations in the manipulation of wood and tools in carpentry (Vergunst).

Speakers

Nicolas Auray is Associate Professor of Sociology in Télécom ParisTech. His fields of research include the sociology of hackers, new forms of dawdling and control involving Big Data. He is developing a series of reflections on the contemporary articulation between social science and social critique.

Sylvaine Bulle is Associate Professor of Sociology and member of Laboratoire Théorie
du Politique (Université de Paris 8). Her fields of research includethe sociology of the conflicts and public problems, and pragmatist sociology. She is collaborating with artists and architects in Europe and the Middle East, and teaches social sciences for architects.

Bernard Conein is Professor of Sociology at Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France. He works on ethnomethodology and cognitive sociology and has published or coordinated many works, amongst them Les sens sociaux: Trois essais de sociologie cognitive (Economica, 2005).

Jo Vergunst is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His work is on relations between people and landscape in Scotland, and he is contributing to Tim Ingold’s ‘Knowing From the Inside’ project with research about the cultural value of forests and wood.

The seminar will be chaired by Tim Ingold, who is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and Principal Investigator for the ERC-funded project ‘Knowing From the Inside’. Following his explorations of the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, Ingold is currently working on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.