Number as an inventive frontier in knowing and working Australia’s water resources

Verran, Helen

doi:10.1177/1463499610365383

Cited by 111 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Such statistically procured knowledge (see also tactic no. 1) forms a numerical nexus and an infrastructure of relationality, which facilitates the becoming-visible of insufficiencies that manifest in the in-between of healthcare arrangements--that is to say, insufficiencies that are relational in nature and which would not have become publicly visible if not for the act of comparison itself (Verran 2010). …”

Section: Comparison As a Survey Of Possibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tactics as Empirical and Conceptual Objects: Patient Activism and the Politics of Thalassaemia in Cyprus

Kyriakides

2016

Engaging STS

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This article explores tactics as political technologies in the context of health and patient activism. It does so by exploring how the PanCyprian Thalassaemia Association--a thalassaemia patients association situated in Cyprus--opposed a medical rationing scheme imposed by the Cypriot government and managed to overturn the decision. I make the case that "tactics," for patient associations, are practices capable of rendering the political problematics of their illness visible to public and governmental perception, and propose four tactics by which the PTA was able to achieve such task. By putting the given event in conversation with STS and anthropological literature the article attempts to productively entangle tactics in their empirical and conceptual guises. This serves a two-fold purpose: That of putting together a repertoire of practices which patient associations can use to conduct politics, and that of facilitating connection between patient associations through these proposed practices. The article concludes with some more general considerations regarding an empirical-conceptual project on tactics.

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Section: Comparison As a Survey Of Possibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tactics as Empirical and Conceptual Objects: Patient Activism and the Politics of Thalassaemia in Cyprus

Kyriakides

2016

Engaging STS

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“…Accordingly, risk assessment based on these mathematical foundations is commonly depicted as rational, logical, and objective decision-making. STS scholarship on the pursuit of scientific objectivity, however, reminds us that numbers such as those derived from surveillance technologies are never mere representations of nature, but that they are 'materialized relations' (Verran, 2010), powerful devices (Porter, 1995), and socially performative (Bauer, 2013). As such, numbers play a key role in the enactment of risk reasoning: they bridge the gaps between distinct areas of expertise and intervention (such as computer science, population health, or urban governance) and generate powerful new linkages, thereby rendering microbial emergence governable by risk.…”

Section: Translating Infection Into Data: Technological Dimensionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing pandemics

Wolf

2017

S&TS

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How does microbial emergence become a local area of medical, political, and technological intervention in cities such as London or Frankfurt? Through a multi-sited ethnography of urban health authorities, hospitals, blue light services, and epidemiologists, this article examines the achievement of pandemic order in times of crisis. Its specifi c focus is on pandemic infl uenza preparedness. By tracing the complex spatiotemporal, technological, and administrative dimensions required for the articulation of a local pandemic threat, this paper will look at how public health experts know about the arrival of an infl uenza pandemic, how sociotechnical networks are assembled in the decision-making process, and how single cases of illness are drawn into spaces of pandemic potential. Integrating concepts from science and technology studies and critical global health, the article highlights how disease emergence entails hard work and administrative, technological, political, and biomedical skills in order to be made present and tangible. In consequence, it will be argued that local pandemic preparedness does not result from a linear adaption of internationally circulating standards, but from rather precarious modes and modalities of ordering.

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“…However, numbers do not always succeed in becoming magical in making particular narratives seem like the only viable solution (Verran 2010). that to study bureaucratic practice we must follow the governing practices as if they were routes in a map.…”

Section: Bits Of Naturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are recognisable details in the aesthetics, the structure, the paragraphs, the appear- In both the cases I described, numbers created a sense of urgency; the largest connected piece of Norwegian wilderness was disappearing, along with the Atlantic salmon. Assembling wholes and parts through numbers also provides other kinds of agency (Verran 2010(Verran :1771. Annelise Riles talks about the element of competition created by the unending project of revision, demands of accountability, and reporting between projects, ministries, and states (Riles 2001:176).…”

Section: Bits Of Naturementioning

confidence: 99%