The Annual Department of Sociology Lecture
Hosted by the Centre for Invention & Social Process
5.30-7:00pm, Thursday 14th March 2019
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Whitehead Building, Goldsmiths, University
of London
Title: The dangers of participation - speaking for the social in
large-scale engineering projects
Penny Harvey, University of Manchester
The lecture offers a critical analysis of the ways in which ‘the social’
is elicited as an interlocutor in projects that seek to deploy technical
means to achieve social transformation. The discussion focuses on the
staging of an experimental ‘hybrid forum’ that was designed to
demonstrate a method to professionals engaged in the design and delivery
of large-scale engineering projects. The method cuts across established
ways in which such professionals would routinely look for support from
social sciences who might otherwise be expected to speak for the social
through the techniques of aggregation or abstraction that form the
bedrock of quantitative approaches. The hybrid forum by contrast seeks
to elicit a complex and dynamic social field, to identify controversies,
contradictions and ambiguities. The method is a collaborative process in
which the social gradually emerges as a potentially fragile entity
rather than a stable form that could be represented and/or spoken for.
Beyond the experiment the hybrid forum offers a possibility for
participants to reflect on how to configure ‘the social’ as an active
participant in projects for social transformation. The chapter will also
reflect on the relationship between the hybrid forum and more
conventional ethnographic methods where researchers do not attempt to
speak for the social but seek rather to extend their understanding of
human sociality as a dynamic and intrinsically relational process.
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of 2019 Penny Harvery AL.pdf]
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