No abstract

What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting.

Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article explores the tense concern for the animal in political debates at the turn of the twentieth century. The article argues that contexts should not be seen as something external, but rather integral to the relevant text and situation, thus the very issue at stake.

Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality 'out there': Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call 'modifying work'. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to 'materiality' or the 'materialities of objects', a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take 'the environment' into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to 'materiality' or 'materialities' is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together.

The aim o f this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities o f government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way o f a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context o f the microphysics o f power, as techniques o f domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion 'tool o f democracy'. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics o f emissions down to earth, thus enabling the environmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracywas never like we thought it to be. K E Y W O R D S Actor-network-theory; deliberative democrq; environment; governmentality;history ofobjects; politics and administration; the public. In the preface t o his three volume book series Visions of Politics, intellectual historianQuentin Skinner (2002) argues that in the modern West we have inherited two contrasting views about the nature o f our common life: One speaks o f sovereignty as a property o f the people; the other sees i t as the possession o f the state. One gives centrality t o the figure o f the virtuous citizen, the other t o the sovereign as representative o f the state. Thus, Skinner points out, the question o f how t o reconcile these divergent perspectives remains a central problem in contemporary political thought.The aim o f this paper is n o t t o explore visions o f politics understood as political ideas. The title is meant t o signal another, a down-to-earth, approach. The topic is n o t