During the workshop, participants discussed papers that deal with ways of grasping how nature and nature objects intersect with, shape and are shaped by the economic. A starting-point for these conversations, as defined by the organizers, was the observation that social studies often present the economy as a given, driven by either unknown forces, or large ideological programs such as ‘neoliberalism’ or large capital flows such as ‘biocapital’. What happens, the workshop participants were asked, if we instead approach the economy not so much as ‘force’ but rather as a series of valuation practices? And moreover, as practices that are not linear and smooth, but which cause friction, and even resistance, and that may fail or go in unexpected ways?
Workshop participants tackled these questions through work on quite different objects, among them climate change, soy beans, salmon and cod fish, microbes and the biocapital of pharmaceutical companies. Participants questioned what the tools applied in economic and market work do to these objects, but also, conversely, what they do to the economy. The workshop contributed greatly to the Little Tools team’s work on the notion of co-modification, and we would like to extend a great thanks to all participants for their spirited involvement and valuable contributions.
Talks and presentations (in chronological order)
Day 1 - 08.06.2018
‘The Good Economy’, Kristin Asdal
‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value in Biomedicine’, Kaushik Sunder Rajan
‘Carbon, Footprints, Objects and the Endlessness of Relations’, Hannah Knox
‘Salmon in the Global Protein Space’, Bård Hobæk
‘Agribiopolitics (or the Long Green Revolution)’, Kregg Hetherington
‘Paper Care, or the Exercise of Harm-Benefit Analysis in Animal Research Economies’, Tone Druglitrø
Day 2 - 09.06.2018
‘Discounting the Future, a Political Technology’, Liliana Doganova
‘Commodification and Valuation Experiments’, Beatrice Cointe
‘Economising the Rural: How new markets and property rights transform rural economies’, Alexander Dobeson
‘Co-modification and the Domestication of the North Atlantic Cod’, Tone Huse
‘The Public Life of Microbes: Infrastructuring public issues in the age of the digital’, Ana Delgado
‘Extracting, Scaling, Re-producing: How mathematical modelling re-aligns and valuates salmon and public health’, Susanne Bauer
Participants
Kristin Asdal, Professor, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Susanne Bauer, Professor, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Beatrice Cointe, Postdoctoral Fellow, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Ana Delgado, Associate professor, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Alexander Dobeson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Uppsala
Liliana Doganova, Associate professor, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation
Tone Druglitrø, Associate professor, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Kregg Hetherington, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University
Bård Hobæk, Doctoral Research Fellow, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Tone Huse, Postdoctoral Fellow, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Hannah Knox, Lecturer, Dept of Anthropology, University College London
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
