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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies

Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser Jan 2024

Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper presents the performative analysis of agency within and surrounding documents as a path towards uniting the otherwise incompatible insights of both meaningcentric and materialcentric approaches. I contrast the terms agentical, providing agency, and agentic, possessing agency, to help clarify the apparent incompatibilities of prior approaches. I argue that a relational conception of agency, wherein the agentical/agentic distinction is blurred, preserves important virtues of both meaning and materialcentric approaches to documents. This paves the way for a unified materialdiscursive account of documents and a cure for document studies’ inherited duality malady. Extending prior work on capta (Drucker, 2011) and …


From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin May 2020

From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Privacy is increasingly important in an age of facial recognition technologies, mass data collection, and algorithmic decision-making. Yet it persists as a contested term, a behavioural paradox, and often fails users in practice. This article critiques current methods of thinking privacy in protectionist terms, building on Deleuze's conception of the society of control, through its problematic relation to freedom, property and power. Instead, a new mode of understanding privacy in terms of performativity is provided, drawing on Butler and Sedgwick as well as Cohen and Nissenbaum. This new form of privacy is based on identity, consent and collective action, a …