Novel Modes of Inquiry to Achieve Effective HIV Prevention

The increasing emphasis on using antiretrovirals for prevention confronts the HIV field with new challenges and new possibilities. Evidence of the efficacy of TasP (treatment as prevention) and PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) from randomised controlled trials has stimulated debate on questions of acceptability, on risk to existing safe sex practices (condom use), the development of drug resistance, and the need to sustain treatment programs in light of calls to invest in antiretroviral prevention. In addition there is the question of ‘effectiveness’ in post-trial roll-out and scale-up compared to projections from clinical trial data and statistical modelling.

Although these concerns are well founded, it is not clear that there is yet sufficient knowledge about social relations for devising strategies attuned to the prevailing and contrary expectations of antiretrovirals in the context of existing prevention strategies. In this session, participants will be introduced to novel research methods devised within the discipline of design that have already taken up within the social sciences for addressing questions posed by climate change.

Design-led methods do not aim to enable generalisation across a community or epidemiological category, but to seek out the unfamiliar. In doing so they generate a new sort of ‘data,’ potentially able to inform the complex but also dynamic relations that people may experience in dealing with multiple objects including HIV, condoms, diagnostic tests, prevention messages, and sexual partners.

Co-chairs

Dr Dean Murphy, Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations and UNSW, Australia
Professor Marsha Rosengarten, Dept Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Speakers

Professor, Bill Gaver, Interactive Design Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Professor Robert Grant, Gladstone Institute, UCSF, USA.
Ms Susie McLean, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, UK
Dr Kane Race, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia.

Discussants

Dr Judy Auerbach, Science and policy consultant and Adjunct Professor in the School of Medicine at UCSF, USA.
Mr Gus Cairns, NAM aidsmap, UK
Mr Alan Brotherton, AIDS Council of New South Wales, Australia

Techniques of Existence, Knowledge Practices and the Non-West

Islamization of knowledge—a technique of existence?

Wiebke Keim (SAGE – Société, Acteurs, Gouvernement en Europe, Strasbourg University)

The call for “Islamization of knowledge” emerged in the US in the 1970s and was set up as a program, subsequently institutionalized in various sites, at the Mecca Conference on Education in 1977. For scholars interested in internationalization and circulation of social science knowledge, the “Islamization of knowledge”-debate is interesting because it is a highly transnational debate; because it makes a strong universalist claim, challenging the existing social sciences wholesome; and because it emerged as a socially relevant endeavor, aiming at social and political transformation of modern societies. In this paper I will present a work-in-progress of a preliminary qualitative analysis of interviews conducted in two institutions linked to the Islamization of Knowledge-project in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in April 2012. It proves difficult to make sense of the interview material in terms of its contribution to a sociological debate, due to various exclusive and doctrinarian premises put forward by interviewees. I will thus experiment with the argument that framing the debate in terms of a technique of existence provides possibilities to understand differently, and maybe more appropriately, what this debate is about.

Practices of Knowledge and Subjectivity: The Critique of ‘Cramming’ in Colonial India

Sanjay Seth, Professor of Politics (Goldsmiths, University of London).

Contemporary debates have been much concerned to recognise and respect ‘difference’, such as, for instance, through a historicism which is scrupulous about not projecting modern, western categories and presumptions onto other periods and peoples. This paper shares that concern, whilst also seeking to problematise some of the forms it takes. Taking as its archive the debates that came to surround the introduction of western education in colonial India, it documents and discusses the discourse of what I call ‘cramming’ – the observation (usually expressed as a lament), that Indian students used traditional or indigenous techniques of rote learning to acquire the ‘new’ knowledge, and that inasmuch as these traditional practices of knowledge drew upon ‘religious’ traditions, they confused the religious with the secular. The anxiety over cramming should be read, this paper suggests, as registering the fact that a modern form of subjectivity, presumed and posited by modern forms of knowledge, did not exist and had not been created in colonial India. Moreover, that Indian students acquired the new knowledge by drawing upon indigenous traditions testified not just to their failure to become a modern subject, but to the (stubborn) presence of another subjectivity, an indigenous or pre-modern one.

Discussant: Felipe Lagos, PhD Candidate Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Arts of Existence: Artistic Practices, Aesthetics and Techniques 

Art Practice as Fictioning (or, Myth-Science), Simon O’Sullivan (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths

…theres some thing in us it dont have no name…it aint us but yet its in us… (Russell Hoban, Riddly Walker)

This paper will outline a theory of art practice as a ‘technique of existence’, involving the production of alternative narratives and untimely images that might ‘speak back’ to their progenitors as if they came from an elsewhere, but also speak to that part of their audience/participants not subsumed by dominant regimes of subjectivity – or the what-already-is. Also at stake here is the idea of a practice in which motifs and themes are developed and reoccur across time, a practice that nests its own fictions so as to produce a certain complexity and density, and, ultimately, an opacity. In both of these ways art practice as fictioning produces its own worlds or myth-systems. But that other place from where such a practice is pitched is also a world, one whose edges are revealed by this doubling. An art practice maintains a critical function in this respect insofar as it turns away from that other myth-system which it has revealed as such. ‘Myth-science’ names this world-building – and world-breaking – technique of existence.

Art in the diagrammatic becoming-other of the Art-Form , Eric Alliez (Centre for Research in Modern Eurpoean Philosophy, Kingston University)

This paper will outline the importance of Matisse’s contemporary predestination, starting from the fauvist destruction of a formally defined art, following with the American Dance’s diagrammatic assemblage ofpost-pictorial and trans-architectural forces, up until the Paper Cut-Outs which he conceives as a “new departure”, and that we’ll conceive as a non-aesthetic, and a new diagrammatic mode of existence for an art addressed to the future. Matisse, Matisse-Thought, would then signify something else, “elsewhere as well as anywhere”, as Dominique Fourcade — the editor of Matisse’s Écrits et propos sur l’art — regretfully remarks, in response to a question he feels is posed by the gouache cut-outs of a Matisse more “American” than “French”: “Did Matisse not open the door to art’s leaping outside itself, to art’s wrenching itself free from itself so as not to be art anymore?”.

Discussant: Svenja Bromberg PhD candidate (Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Speculation and Speculative Research Workshop

Organisers: Jennifer Gabrys, Marsha Rosengarten, Martin Savransky & Alex Wilkie.

Once exclusively confined to the conjectural practices of armchair philosophers and seers, the notion of ‘speculation’ is now increasingly present as an approach signalling toward uncertain or possible futures. Not only does it characterise some of the practices performed in financial markets that are now thought to be partially culpable for the current contemporary socio-economic crisis, it is also an important operator in the many forecasting techniques that organise the social (e.g. risk analysis and predictive genomics). Furthermore, speculation is also becoming a theoretical preoccupation that is part of developments in disciplines as varied as continental, pragmatist and process approaches to philosophy, art and design, fiction and literary theory, as well as media studies. For the social sciences, the ‘speculative’ is being taken up as a practico-theoretical approach to reconceptualising problems and seeking more imaginative propositions. In other words, speculation acts as a means for asking more inventive questions.

As such, speculation is a notable response, or a set of responses, to dynamic and complex social phenomena that cannot be held, observed and acted upon without either the taking of risks or the experiencing of consequences. While it sometimes connotes an activity of anticipation and even exploitation of expectations, in other cases it denotes an investment in the real possibility of grasping alternate futures. Indeed, one of the threads that runs through the various engagements with the speculative is a renewed interest in the possibility of extracting from the present certain immanent potentialities that may be capable of opening up a transition into otherwise unlikely futures. Relatedly, speculation can also work as a particular way of engaging with the dynamic and transformative nature of ‘things’: to explore their situated and contingent characteristics as well as their capacities to affect and be affected.

Given the growing interest in and proliferating approaches to speculation in social and cultural research, this workshop aims to examine the multiple versions of speculation while attending to their methodological, epistemological, ontological, ethical and political implications. In so doing, the workshop will address the following questions: Can social and cultural research become speculative? What do practices of speculation consist of and what modes of speculation are there? What are the implications of allowing for speculation to ingress into the practices of social research? What might speculative research offer to the re-invention of otherwise seemingly intractable ‘problems’? How can speculation become a productive mode of thinking, feeling and knowing, and not just a practice of conjecturing and managing uncertainties?

Workshop participants

Vikki Bell, On Cosmopolitics: Speculation and/as Objects for Wonder
Rebecca Coleman, Speculation, Futurity, Empiricism
Joe Deville, Retrocasting: Speculating about the origins of money
Rosalyn Diprose, Speculative Research, Temporality, and Politics
Bianca Elzenbaumer, Situated Speculations and Collective Fabulations: Reappropriating our capacities of worldsmaking
Jennifer Gabrys, Pollution Sensing and Fracking: Reworking Environmental Monitoring through Speculative Research and Practice
Michael Guggenheim (co-authors Bernd Kräftner & Judith Kröll), Creating Idiotic Speculators: Disaster Cosmopolitics in the Sandbox
Michael Halewood, Situated (Speculation as a Constraint on Thought
Marsha Rosengarten, Reconstituting the rules of the game: recalcitrance as a lure for speculative reasoning
Martin Savransky, The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism
Michael L. Thomas, Aesthetic Experience, Speculative Thought, and Speculative Life
Alex Wilkie (co-author Mike Michael), Doing Speculation to Curtail Speculation

‘Emergency’ for Militarised Violence: Visual Modes of Inquiry‌

Annie Pfingst in conversation with Samah Saleh and Marsha Rosengarten

Abstract

In this workshop I want to introduce a discussion that will trace and present the visual as both a methodology, part of a dynamic interdisciplinary spatial, visual, archival and theoretical practice of inquiry, as well as a photographic recording of a series of encounters. I do this through my current work on state imposed Emergency practices applied by Israel over Palestine and Palestinians since 1948, and of the British colonial administration over Kenya in the 1950s. The landscapes of Emergency and the geographies of resistance are visual spaces in which the structures (or their remnants) of control and containment are found. The photograph, in this moment, ‘speaks’ as it were, invites contemplation of its meaning, of its moment of capture, of what is inside and outside the frame, of the purpose of its composition. What is the dynamic interplay between the remnants, landscapes and archives of Emergency practices? How might the visual ‘perform’ Emergency as encountered in the ‘migrated’ files from the end of colonial rule recently released into the public domain or in the proceedings of detention and deportation? How might arbitrary arrest, administrative detention, closed areas, collective punishment, confiscation, curfew, demolition, forfeiture, interrogation, passes, removal, screening, or surveillance be apprehended visually?

Bio: Annie Pfingst is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Unit of Play, Sociology, Goldsmiths. She brings an interdisciplinary practice to her current work onEmergency: a genealogy of Emergency Regulations, funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. Her visual practice combines installation, site specific performance and photography and is an integral part of her scholarly research. She was active in the curating of SPACE & GAZE: Jean Mohr & Edward Said in Palestine. She co-authored, with Marsha Rosengarten, ‘Medicine as a tactic of war: Palestinian precarity, Body and Society, 2012. She was awarded a doctorate by the University of Technology, Sydney for Erasure, Enclosure, Excision: Framing Palestinian Returnin which she traces the frames that authorise Israeli practices over Palestine, Palestinians and Palestinian return.

Fieldwork as a Technique of Existence

with Todd Meyers (Wayne State University) and Sophie Day (Goldsmiths)

Techniques of Return

Todd Meyers, Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, USA

The question of return––which isn’t really a question at all but rather an act requiring, and facilitated by, some previous knowledge, condition, or inhabitance––is deceptively simple and conceptually fraught. I recently returned to fieldwork in Baltimore that I began a decade ago. Over the course of four years I followed one woman through clinic visits, hospitalizations, and the care of her grandchildren, adult children, and ailing mother. I hoped to make visible how the management of illness reconstitutes social arrangements and to trace the contours of these transactions as they take shape between biomedical and domestic spheres. I was there and I went away, and after some time, returned. The return of the ethnographer––as well as what João Biehl describes as ‘the return of the ethnographic subject’ herself––demands ethical attention as much as any rupture. If, according to Veena Das, anthropology is indeed a dwelling science, then what is it to take leave only to return, as an instance of repair as much as reappearance? Here, the desire to impose some notion of continuity (therapeutic, narrative, or otherwise) is great, as is the desire to overwrite, to recuperate, and to reinstate rather than to recognize as new––yet the return forces new habits of seeing and can render the texture of relationships once familiar, foreign.

Fieldwork as a Technique of Existence: Proximity

Professor Sophie Day, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths

Proximity tends to be taken for granted as a definitional feature of fieldwork in anthropology, or simply assumed in practice. Given the attention devoted to associated techniques of arrival and departure, being here and being there, the coeval, or in still other formulations, the many explorations of self/other such as being both at home and a stranger in fieldwork, it is striking that so little has been said about proximity. A succinct dictionary definition reads, “nearness in place, time, relation, etc” from Latin,proximatas, nearness, vicinity (Random House, 2005). However, a relation of closeness, which I consider to be the default connotation in fieldwork, differs perhaps in interesting ways from a concept of being ‘next to’. I illustrate by way of two examples from fieldwork in a London NHS cancer service. To put it crudely, the first draws on the ‘spaces’ of neighbourhood, an uncomfortable togetherness in waiting which nonetheless elicits relations of care, often through a mutuality of relations. The second draws on causal relations in ‘times’, such as those associated with biomedical research in modeling proximate relations. What is ‘next to’ something can stand in for it or become a placeholder; in this site, perhaps a surrogate or biomarker, or the patient waiting beside you. This next-to relation serves as a proxy measure of an association, which you can ‘play with’, change or see if it might serve as ‘sufficient’ cause, like PSA for prostate cancer. Both examples ask what goes or moves with what. These and other examples suggest complexities and a variety of connotations to the term. If techniques of fieldwork accommodate proximity through the sense of closeness, whether as observer / witness or participant observer who feels for and with interlocutors, a relation of being ‘next to’ might draw on different vocabularies such as the ‘orthogonal relation of adjacency’ which attends to the contingent singularities of contemporary life. (Rabinow 2008)