Facts can always be otherwise, down a rabbit hole.

Science is made, it does not exist outside of our making.

This is not to say that the world, the universe, the salad in my fridge...does not exist. However, our knowledge of such things, our science of what is/is not,  is a communicated one, a negotiated one, a shared one.  Or as stated by Latour,  in an interview reported in Science magazine,  "To have common facts, you need a common reality." (de Vrieze, 2017).
Expanding on this Latour goes on to explain that, "Science has never been immune to political bias. On issues with huge policy implications, you cannot produce unbiased data. That does not mean you cannot produce good science, but scientists should explicitly state their interests, their values, and what sort of proof will make them change their mind."
Oddly, we forget this. We have an amnesiac tendency to blackbox our accepted knowledges, that is-we forget how we come to our beliefs. Oftentimes we no longer have access to how our thinking even occurs... but knowledge is something constructed, it doesn’t exist in some ready-made jar to be consumed, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum sealed pack. It doesnt occur in some individual...
"there is no sense for an isolated scientists to exclaim "cogito!" or "eureka!". Laboratories think, communities discover, disciplines progress, instruments see, not individual minds." (Latour, 1996).  What's accepted as fact or as an alternative fact, requires not only our own thinking but that our thoughts (and those of others) hit up alongside previously held thoughts. Current and past. A gathering of garlands in time as Serres is described as having said . This may seem a very esoteric or even ephemeral approach to an understanding of knowledge, but our thoughts, our cognitions, evolve and when espoused, verbally or in writing,  our views may then become aligned with those of others, allies if you will, or which also oftentimes, engage resistance. A 'science war' ensues. A tussle perhaps, or even a merger,  a resistance maybe, or outright denial and a rallying of others or their thoughts to negate such facts being accepted by oneself or by others. And so science is made, though not commonly thought of as a making.
And in these times of truths, counter truths, inconvenient truths, through to alternative facts, that might assume we ever had facts that were insurmountable then we enter a space of post modernism.  This could lead to the postmodern quagmire of anything goes, however, not just anything is ok. We have as Latour rightly points out responsibility in science to win back and to earn respect,  and to do so, he argues that there is need to present science as science in action.
This is a risky undertaking because when we make the uncertainties and controversies explicit, such acknowledgement provides fodder for everyone from creationists, to anti climate changers,  anti-vaxxers, believers in a flat earth, Santa Clause, fairies,  unicorns, or the need for a wall... etc etc.

Our 'facts' are made and they are political.
Socrates drank poison as punishment for asking unpopular questions.
Freud changed his beliefs with the Venice circle accepting that women telling of incest must be hysterical.
British PM Disraeli claiming "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Currently  USA President Trump claiming alternative facts.

This is then open acknowledgement of our world-making potential and of ontological politics at play. As Donna Haraway has said, "This is not some kind of blissed-out techno- bunny joy in information. It is a statement that we had better get it – this is a worlding operation."

Facts/knowledge/statistics/stuff is always elusive. That it devlops substance, becoming seemingly immobile, occurs as alignments hold it in place. To not acknowledge this, to not enter into open dialogue of how such stuff comes to be known, to be indifferent to alternatives as  Katherine Behar writes, is a “newfound inhospitability” giving face to “Botox ethics”: an ethic that seeks not to articulate connections but to inhibit them; to create not unbounded subjects but enclosed objects; it recommends not outward-directed networking and changeability but inward-directed unexpressivity and singularity.
It is the very reason for why science as a subject exists, and why studies of science and technology have to continue.

Refs
de Vrieze, J. (2017). Bruno Latour, a veteran of the Science Wars, has a new mission. Interview with Bruno Latour. Retrieved from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/bruno-latour-veteran-science-wars-has-new-mission

Gane, N. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture and Society, 23, 135-158.

Latour, B. (1996). Cogito Ergo Sumus! Or psychology swept inside out by the fresh air of the upper deck. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3, 54-63.

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Sheldon, R. (2017).You can't have me: Feminist infiltrations in Object-Oriented Ontology. Retrieved from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/you-cant-have-me-feminist-infiltrations-in-object-oriented-ontology/#!


 Worth noting what generated this blog:
 I was invited to do a blind review. It wasn’t very blind. The opening sentence referred to  to the author’s xxxx book xxxx (he was responding to a critical review). I started reading the manuscript. I was out of my depth - I instantly regretted not being as immersed in ANT as I had been during my PhD studies and I was missing this. 
Not having been immersed in said book, or  said critique- how to attest to the value of the article or its accuracy- I was going to have to do some further investigating. Reviewing can be truly exhilarating and rewarding and it’s great when it is (like today).
So, down an enticing bunny hole inside of which  my fluffy white tail got a tad grubby... (a ref to Stephen Fry and QI repeats) and I found myself (as much as I ever can)  back in the foundations of how knowledge is made. Part of the enticement is that this is area I have been mulling for a while, ever since a friend Ibrar Bhatt piqued my curiousity with a call for papers on 'Lies, Bullshit and Fake News Online: Should We Be Worried?'
In looking for a Donna Haraway reference to blissed out bunnies and the need to be aware of world making ontologies,  I fluked across the article by Sheldon. And regretted that the current day job is a sad distraction on what I might otherwise do.  The article by Sheldon is well worth the read, a story of bunnies of the less reputable kind that led to a deliberate defeminized portrayal.  Visual ethnography is no less susceptible to HIStory making than any other form of science.
Triggered also is the mullings of recent times on how reflexivity does not give wings (a bon mot of Chris Bigum's, my very excellent phd supervisor.. 

From the FB ANT group, I had also been thinking about how reflective writing is asked for /demanded by some methodologies, some PhD supervisions, as an add on. to tick a box which would in some way make the research more hygienic. It doesn’t. And Steve Wright referred me to the useful article by Passoth and Rowland (2013). Beware of Allies! Qualitative Sociology 36(4).

We are through and through implicated. As Latour has said in a lightly veiled response to Haraway's critical feminism: To explicate the implicit, unfolding  comes with refoldings and  the creation of further opaqueness...there is no enlightenment vs darkness. The light only exists because we also have shadow, and the reverse is also true. Such a position is encapsulated in Latour's calling for a science of the science, or more prosaically,  a technology of the technology.

Nonetheless, crude and flawed as they are, reflexivity and referencing are utilised in tracing how this argument is or isnt informed, it shows the allies drawn upon as well as those refuted if not neglected.

Going to need some of these...after all, I didnt reference Lewis Caroll...the first chapter book i ever read :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Alice-in-Wonderland-Writing-Gloves/dp/B01FRJZEAE

beautifully entwined

Dont show them, tell them,
a beautiful example of this writing technique:
http://tinyurl.com/2ak6582
And I dont even like tennis, nor does Andre Agassi it seems.
He's beautifully entwined, mind, body, family, the tennis opens...
The opening pages just pull.
What tennis means to his children- failure would mean a new puppy...
Realities are multiple.
His children 1, and 3 know not to run into him, his body is known by so many others in so many ways. For himself in these opening pages he knows his body as pain, his children, such young children, know his body as fragile.

There's seamless movement from one aspect of the network to another, Ramon his racket stringer, the art of tension held physically in his Agassis' own body and also within the focused work of the craftsman tennis rackett stringer and within the physical entity of the rackets.

This is a beautifully written illustration of actor-network theory, beautifully descriptive, the network just gets shown.

Flipping thoughts

Two days of not writing, and a mini sized crisis of confidence...
And then some thinking that came in on a tangent :)

I'd been reading Tatnall, A., & Davey, B. (2003). An actor network approach to informing clients through portals. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 771-779.
Their very clear description of a network described from the perspective, primarily, of those creating the change, who happen to be service providers, had me do a flip on my thinking.
I was spot on way back when i thought the mobile was an obligatory passage point (in ANT speak). I just was unable to make it fit because i was coming at it from the wrong direction. AND was unable to hold that point of tension because of the multiple OPPs involved, which could all be explained in a pre and after Ant way.
ANT has been criticised for its management centred approach and i was blind to the bias as it resided within me. I knew the options for counselling made it far from obligatory...until today.
Turning this on its head I get this:
From the users perspective; the text format on the mobile is an OPP as its "use this or we dont talk."
Its the users who are binding the other actors into place.
Text counselling wasnt the first choice of counsellors, the organisation or its techy people.
Here's an example of an organisation that prides itself on its responsiveness to its target group...and inside of this is an example where the target gp even tho it never meets and has no 'leader' , and only has artefacts, or one-on-one conversations, is driving a change. Even where there is voice given to their concern, its created by users... This is a pretty unique experience in change theory. Unique in actor-network worlds also by putting the focus on the users in the network. It is relational and the change might be seen as initiated more by the ebb than the flow.
Worth following up a bit more Clay Shirkey in Here comes everybody, of how social media used in this way is shaping those it connects.

Working with a primarily volunteer / not for profit organisation, and with a service claiming to be responsive to its consumer group, challenges the conventional thinking on how change occurs.

Seems so obvious in hindsight...

same and different

Holding contradictions seems to be the norm for this week.
I had thought it difficult to get a handle on my data, I now know why.
The practices i observe feed off contradictions with a voracious appetite!
I observed the teaching of text counselling to counselling training facilitators last night.
I was told that the skills were the same and different.

allegory in research; the presence of absence

Mostimes its presence that's studied.
So much easier when there's something to explain, it takes a bit more imagination to look at what's not there.
An object on a stark background or the inverse?

I look at the things i set out to see, and find instead a recurring theme of absence.
In looking at whats changing there's a sense of the unknown, of changes yet to be seen, of secondary changes unrecognised.
And then there's finding voice of participants within inaudible and invisible relationships.
And where the working space constrains interactions to 160 characters or less. When so little is available, working with unknowns is the norm.
There's also the instability of funding and of connections … of strangers ... of acts of hope and faith that someone/s will be there, available, helpful.
In addition there are connection drop offs with the major telecos blaming each other for interference resulting in connections lost.
Plus there's the work required to establish and maintain the means through which messages are conveyed, these include prepay or contract being established and maintained, the ph being charged, the cell ph coverage being in range, the number being known...and the service being associated with positives when it is usually negatives that provide the impetus to call...
And that the service has funding to deliver, even when funding can be contingent on the fickleness of nz weather and appeals dependent on selling the attractiveness of services.
There's vulnerability through and through and yet philosophically the organisation makes use of what they name is a strengths based model.

Despite the contingent types of relationships such vulnerabilities create, there is no sense of a grasping at straws.
The service remains; adaptive, resilient, present.

There's something here about being vulnerable and strong, like the bush pumps, adaptability lends itself to resilience.
There's also something about being strong and soft, fostering independence whilst being dependable; the brick mother.
There's also the inaudible with voice, and invisible with presence.
Less is more; the requirement to be succinct also creates the conditions for being direct.

And I'm reminded also that attending to whats on the margins, moves things more centrally;
creating greater solidity and durability of something ephemeral.

As I was walking up the stairs
I met a man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today,
I wish that man would go away.

adapted from "Antigonish" William Hughes Mearns (1899).

On power, durability, resistance and survival in a climate of change

Bruno Latour writes

Strenght does not come from concentration, purity and unity, but
from dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties.
This feeling that resistance, obduracy and sturdiness is more easily
achieved through netting, lacing, weaving, twisting, of ties that are weak
by themselves, and that each tie, no matter how strong, is itself woven out
of still weaker threads, permeates for instance Foucault's analysis of
micro-powers as well as recent sociology of technology. But the less
intuitive philosophical basis for accepting an ANT is a
background/foreground reversal: instead of starting from universal laws
-social or natural- and to take local contingencies as so many queer
particularities that should be either eliminated or protected, it starts
from irreducible, incommensurable, unconnected localities, which then, at a
great price, sometimes end into provisionnaly commensurable connections.

This is a reminder to me that 'power' is not something to curl up and die in the face of...its made of little things. Its not nebulous, its not plaited ropes of sand.

I am reminded, again, of my background in critical social theory, and how to reconcile this with the descriptive form of actor- network theory. Here I have it. Power is plaited.

The man who writes to the masters of Pig Island
about the love they dread
plaits ropes of sand
but i was born among them
and someday will lie amngst their dead

James K Baxter (New Zealand poet)

netWORKING CCK08

This week has seen me doing less in the threads and more in the blogs. There's a depth in the blogs, a thoughtfulness that i am not experiencing in the threads (these feel like a tug of war played with spiders webs....)

The links made by Stephen in the daily, make for easy networking.
I am captured with provocative titles such as I need more blog friends. This gets to the heart of networking, if nodes dont connect, there is no net. And as one other person noted on Heli's blog, this is the actual work of networking, not just a theorising. I also tracked back in her bog a bit, and enjoyed the use of a photo gallery instead of the connector map concept formation which i have found too linear, too constraining- shape and sizes and lack of ability to put things in whether pdfs or pictures... Such a frustration. And am suddenly reminded of John Laws pinboard approach.
And this is what network connectivism learning is about, this fires off that synapse and a new thing happens that then fires into another synaptic space and where there are receptors again something else then happens...

The other blog of importance to me was Shelleys where there seemed an ah hah moment,
I had read through Krebs notes and wasnt in awe (went to his website and was much more impressed). The ppt didnt seem to mention work, it mentioned things like herds of cows and i was thinking rubbish. Takes work for it to be a network, its not the lego in a box, or if it is that's at a trivial level. There are maybe 2000 people in the course but its not a network unless they connect.
So its not connectivist learning unless they are connecting and learning...

The connecting may be quieter, doesnt have to be loud, or visible, but it does have to occur. Susan Leigh Star on invisible work would be a worthwhile tangent to explore on this...Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. (1999 ). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of
Visible and Invisible Work Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 9-30.

While this is interesting, I think actor-network theory has it covered. The only difference is the concepts are being drawn into education by another name. The social is seen more than the technological, but i think this too will come.