Summer Term
30 April: Dr Daniel Speich (ETH Zurich):
Travelling with the GDP through early development economics' history
In 1940, the British economist Colin Clark published a comparative study of the economic performance of all existing states. The study was widely appraised for showing that more than half of the world population was living in countries with an average income below 200 international currency units, what amounted to less than one-sixth of the average income of the USA. The conclusion Clark drew was that "the world is a wretchedly poor place" and that charitable action was necessary. But Clark not only advocated new global development policies. He also pioneered in establishing a new comparative perspective on world economic issues which was firmly based upon the technique of national accounting. Thanks to Clark (and others, notably Simon Kuznets) the Gross Domestic Product has become the most widely used indicator for economic performance in development thinking.
My paper will set out from the epistemic space that Clark (and others) opened up and will follow the history of early development economics until - roughly - 1960. I will make use of the travelling metaphor in three respects. The first use is methodical: I travel through the history of early development economics by studying the uses of GDP as a knowledge creating device. The second and third uses are rather analytical. The second focuses on GDP as a travelling fact: I argue that this specific abstraction has helped transforming national economic performances into transportable things allowing for cascades of inscriptions in a Latourian sense. The third use of the travelling metaphor focuses on the conditions of the possibility of this mobilization. The technique of national accounting also has travelled widely around the globe. I argue that a reduction of local complexities is inherent to the accounting procedures and I conclude that this reductionism created the transparent space, in which GDP and other macroeconomic abstractions travel easily.
Daniel Speich was born in Rwanda and grew up in Kenya and Switzerland.He studied history, philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Zurich. In 1997 he joined the ETH Zurich as a research assistant at the Institute for the History of Technology (Prof. D. Gugerli). He earned his Ph. D. in history with a study on hydro-technical engineering in Swiss agrarian reform around 1800. Additionally, he co-authored a monograph on the Swiss national cartographic survey in the 19th century.A third monograph followed on the history of the ETH Zurich. All these projects centred on the interface between technical expertise and social transformation. His current research project focuses on the emergence of the global "development machine" (James Ferguson). One of the leading questions is, how economic knowledge about social change deployed homogenizing effects within this multifaceted endeavour.
14 May: Dr Gísli Pálsson (Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland)
Biosocial Relations of Production
The products of a long process of evolution spanning at least two hundred thousand years, humans now reinvent themselves in a new sense and on a fundamentally new scale, deliberately altering their bodily constitution and development partly by exchanging genes, tissues, and organs with both conspecifics and other organisms. Often associated with "biosociality", this turn of events not only suggests revised division of academic labor, across the now suspect nature-society divide, also, I argue, it demands new kinds of concepts and politics. I suggest that in order to capture the biosocialities of modern bioindustries and technoscience it may be useful to speak of biosocial relations of production; this should facilitate sensitivity to differences and similarities in hierarchies involving the reproduction of human body parts, their exchange both between humans and across the species divide, and the co-constitution of humans and other animals. Understanding the biosocial relations involved is essential for meaningful understanding of ongoing developments in the bioindustries and for informed biopolitics and governance.
28 May: Professor Charles Stafford (Department of Anthropology, LSE)
Anthropological and macroeconomic perspectives on learning & economy in Taiwan
This paper focuses on the experience of one rural Taiwanese family, asking questions about the relationship between their economic circumstances and learning processes of various kinds. More generally, a comparison is made between the approaches of anthropologists and economists to such topics.
Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology at the LSE, and also holds an honorary professorship at Nanjing University. He has conducted field research in rural Taiwan and China since in the mid 1980s, focusing on questions related to kinship, religion, learning, schooling and cognitive development. He is the author of "Separation and Reunion in Modern China" (Cambridge, 2000) and the co-editor of "Questions of Anthropology" (Berg, 2008).
11 June: Professor Martina Merz (University of Luzern)
Facts Revealed and Packaged: Image Travels in Nanoscience
The practice of imaging in the emerging field of nanoscience relies on different forms of microscopy, such as scanning tunnelling microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Both operate at the level of atoms and attain atomic resolution. As revealing techniques, they make accessible atomic structures for investigation and manipulation. This technology simultaneously produces facts of different kind. At this early stage in the development of the nanosciences, the revealing process is typically interpreted as a proof of existence: the fact being that the specific visualized atomic structure exists and is the result of a certain experimental proceeding. These facts appear as packaged in a certain form - visual images - that makes them ready to travel. Thus, like modern manufacturing technologies, the revealed atomic structures leave the production process boxed and ready to ship to users. Users are of different kind: Above all, they consist of the fellow scientists who have an interest to open up the packaged fact for further exploration. But nano-images also reach other communities by way of popular media. Within and across the scientific field, the visual images do not travel easily on their own; they need good company. To travel well, they require chaperones: labels and instructions for use, an accompanying explanatory or contextual text. But perhaps most unusually, they are hardly to be found travelling without the companionship of related images. The travelling companions are not just there for the ride, but are essential epistemic elements in the way that the scientific culture of nanoscience produces facts in such a way as to ensure that they will travel well. In contrast, image travels from science into other spheres follow their own rules and guidelines. Images may be stripped of their companions, become iconized or recontextualized in novel ways. How well facts travel by unaccompanied images is judged according to different standards of evaluation in other communities.
Mini Symposium: Bio-Security: When 'Facts' Should Not Travel?
Wednesday 18 June, 3:00 - 5:30 pm (venue tbc)
Dr Nick Wright, University of Nottingham
Biosecurity and the UK Poultry Industry
There are significant efforts to improve biosecurity on poultry farms, but these efforts have received relatively little attention in the growing literature on the sociology of knowledge. In this paper, data from interviews in the poultry industry is used to adapt Horton's explanatory model developed to account for common features and discontinuities between "traditional and scientific thinking". I attempt to account for the different theories of disease control invoked by farmers and others in poultry production. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of practices identified which effect the flow of material and knowledge around the industry, and the implications for the promotion of cleanliness in educational material targeted at farmers.
Attention is drawn to the reality that biosecurity in the form of cleanliness alone has only been partially effective in reducing incidences of disease connected to Salmonella, Campylobacter and Avian Influenza.
Dr Brian Rappert, University of Exeter
Getting Facts to Travel by Making them Secret; Or Concealment as a Strategy for Revelation
Conditions of secrecy - those in which information is deliberately concealed - are commonly thought of as antithetic to the production, uptake and circulation of knowledge. This paper though considers how the partial and constrained release of information can be productive for getting (certain) facts to travel. The argument is based on ethnographic-related engagement over five years about one topic of contemporary national security policy: how to prevent the application of life science research from facilitating the development of biological weapons. I want to consider the representational implications of the disclosure rules, security clearances, informal arrangements, etc. associated with security controls; in particular their implications for how individual factual claims are circulated and reproduction. I also want to go further though and ask how social researchers immersed in conditions of concealment can offer accounts of the relations and facts they study without reproducing the knowledge dynamics of those conditions.
Lent Term
During Lent Term 2008, the "How Well Do 'Facts' Travel?" project will be staging a series of seminars. These will be held on Wednesdays from 3pm to 5pm, in Room. V108 (Tower Two):
9 January 2008:
Dr. Oliver Volckart, Economic History Department, LSE: Information costs and financial market integration in 14th to 16th century Northern Europe?
In this paper, the influence of information costs on the integration of the northern European gold market between ca. 1350 and 1560 is explored. The approach is based on measuring the costs of transmitting information between localities, and on estimating their correlation with spreads between local gold-silver-ratios that are interpreted as prices paid on financial markets. The analysis has two main results: First, under pre-industrial conditions, when transmitting information was extremely labour intensive and very little capital intensive, transmission costs can be largely identified with labour costs, and were subject to the same influences as these. Next, the integration of financial markets depended on the level of transmission costs, high costs being strongly and significantly correlated with weak integration, while lower costs favoured price convergence.
23 January 2008:
Dr Jim Tomlinson, Department of History, University of Dundee: Re-inventing the "moral economy" in post-war Britain
In seeking to effectively manage the economy , post-war British governments had also to try and 'manage the people'; to shape the economic beliefs and expectations of the population in order to achieve behavioural changes which make that economic management sustainable. In pursuit of this aim, governments sought to translate their assumptions about the economy into a language congenial to the intended audience, and, it is argued here, this meant a moral/ethical language which sought to present economic issues in a framework of moral beliefs. This paper examines the assumptions behind this project, its mechanisms, and its implications.
6 February 2008:
Dr Sabina Leonelli, Economic History Department, LSE: Labels, Vehicles and Packages: Making Facts Travel in Model Organism Biology
Bio-informatics is devoted to creating tools and strategies to collect, order and disseminate facts about model organisms. This paper examines the labels, vehicles and packages created by bioinformaticians to make these facts travel across research communities. The very idea of focusing biological research on a small set of model organisms stems from the desire to gather as many facts about them as possible, in the hope to achieve an integrated understand of their biology which would serve as a model for the study of other species. Fulfilling this goal is complicated by the diversity of methods, assumptions and techniques characterising the life sciences. Each research group tends to develop its own epistemic culture, encompassing specific skills, terminology, conceptual and tacit knowledge, interests, instruments and materials. This fragmentation makes it difficult for data and claims to travel to contexts other than the one in which they have been produced. I focus on bio-ontologies as labels that allow to classify and retrieve existing data according to their potential evidential scope. I then discuss the role of biological databases as vehicles that make use of such labels to transport data outside of the context in which they have been produced. Finally, I illustrate some strategies used by the curators of these databases in order to package data for travel. This analysis illuminates the complex types of agency required to make facts travel across diverse social contexts, as well as the importance of vehicles and labels in facilitating this process.
20 February 2008:
Dr. Ruth McNally, Senior Research Fellow, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University:
From Boa Vista to Dunstable: On the circulation of facts in science and forensic science - Case study on DNA profiling
Bruno Latour has written a lot about facts and mobility. This paper uses one of his papers as a framework to compare the mobilities of facts in science with those in forensic science. It is a case study of DNA profile evidence in a criminal case based on research undertaken with Professor Mike Lynch.
The title of Latour's paper is: 'Circulating reference'. According to Latour, one of the things that science studies does is to follow the ways in which facts circulate. He argues that how well facts travel (or, to use his terminology, how well references circulate) is inseparable from how well they have been constructed. A well-travelled fact is one that is well-fabricated. This brings the quality of the movements that go before the fact into the frame when one analyses how well facts do (and don't) travel.
In his paper Latour leaves the laboratory to follow the 'circulation of reference' from a forest in Boa Vista to a scientific publication. In this presentation, I compare this with the journey of forensic evidence as it travels from a crime in Dunstable to the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) in London, via various forensic science laboratories which claim to reunite the evidence with the bodies of victim and the accused.
One of the points that Latour makes is that the process of assembling a fact for circulation in a scientific publication must be reversible; it must be possible to retrace one's footsteps and reconstitute its history. The case analysed finds that in forensic science, as in the natural sciences, this is achieved through adherence to protocols for isolating, recording, coding and labelling the evidence in ways which testify to its provenance by leaving behind paper trails. However, in forensic science the journey of evidence from crime scene or suspect to court is also validated by signatures which act as virtual witnesses who guarantee the integrity of the paper trail.
In the case studied, R v Smith, at the trial itself, through the adversarial system, the chain of translocations and transformations through which a particular piece of evidence travelled to the court was broken, thus threatening its potential to participate in the trial. However, also at the trial itself, the chain was repaired but via a different route.
5 March 2008: Minisymposium: Travelling 'Facts' in Economics
Dr Peter Rodenburg, University of Amsterdam
The construction of representations of the European Economy
This presentation is work in process on the tension that arises in the establishment, use and harmonization of representations of a European economy by EU-members states which all have their own idiosyncratic representations of their national economy. Over time economist and statisticians have developed various representations of the national economy, such as barometers, input-out models, circular flow diagrams, economic models and computer simulations. The process of an ever-closer economic integration in Europe also requires coordination and harmonization of economic representations, for example by Eurostat, in order to construct representations of a European economy. Though representations often have an intuitive power of persuasion and suggest a sense of objectivity past experience of how representations come about will teach us that social-constructivist and political motives play an important role as well.
Prof Mary Morgan, LSE and University of Amsterdam
On a Mission: Mutable Mobiles and The Fact/Fiction Relation
The Case:
It is not obvious how to create a new economy. And when a new state emerges out of an old colony there is no necessary parallel economic transformation, yet the desire for such a new world is strong. What kind of an economy could be made? What degree of choice could there be in such an ambitious undertaking? How could such a future be fashioned? And, Who would make it happen? These were the questions that drove economic planning in the new nation of Nigeria in the early 1960s. It proved to be a problem in which the future was not so much a prisoner of past colonial practices as of the limits of economics: of its theories of, and recipes for, development; of its possibilities of measurement; of its modes of observation; and of differences of experience and understandings of political economy. These dimensions of the problem facing the future of Nigeria at that time are revealed through the detailed diaries of Wolfgang Stolper - one of those "on a mission" to make the economy anew. Politicians and civil servants from different regions and tribes and an array of imported international experts: each and all were on their own mission to make the new economy. None of these were utopian dreamers, yet even their pragmatic realism proved unequal to the mission of using economic science to secure a bright future for the Nigerian economy.
The Morals:
* Contra Latour's story about science facts, here we have a story about mutable mobiles. The economic plan is a mobile document that cycles around a changing circle of civil servants and politicians and only gathers powerful allies amongst them (powerful enough to get the plan adopted by the government) because of its mutability as a document. The link between mutability and mobility suggests that economic planning facts carry the hallmark of technology rather than science.
* Planning facts are facts about the future - and so might be considered as fictions. To make an economic plan, those fictions have to be made consistent with the facts of today: they must be placed into the same description of the economy and lined up with each other. This consistency of fictions - future facts - with current facts makes both good companions for each other in their joint travels around the community.