This blog started as a collaborative project for the STS/6101 graduate course at York University during the 2009/2010 academic year. The project, broadly described, is one that seeks to investigate the ways in which life and liveliness have been rendered in the natural sciences. Our understanding of a “rendering” is one that attempts to move past a representational definition; rendering is a performative practice, a way of knowing about the impressions left on objects and simultaneously the impressions left by objects. I have since begun using this space as a dump site for academic writings of all sorts.
The name of this blog, “Little tools of knowledge”, is taken from a book by William Clark (see “Informants” section). Clark deploys the term while discussing the analytic framework for his text. Modern science studies are full of material approaches (see Galison, Dumit, Myers, Hacking, etc…) and constitute a turn away from exclusively theoretical or observational accounts of scientific practice. Hidden inside the physical makeup of a science are ways of knowing, ways of representing, and ways of rendering life, the universe, and everything. I will be interested then in the ways that images, sounds, texts, and other renderings can help us understand scientific practice; the way in which these renderings can be put to use as little tools of knowledge.
Under the heading “the Rhizome” (bottom of page) are links to other individuals engaged in things I find interesting. Originally a space to link to my course collaborators (who are still represented), I will be continually expanding this list. The term rhizome is originally found in botanical sciences, describing a plant that has roots and shoots extending from major nodes. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari used the term extensively in their collaborative work to explore a model of thinking that privileges multiplicity, connectivity, heterogeneity and adaptability. “The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states” (A Thousand Plateaus, 23). This is the way in which I understand my place in the academic world and the way in which I will engage this blog. I will use a number of theoretical approaches, developed by various scholars, to engage my actants. My hope, above all, is that through interaction with the rhizome I will be able to broaden my relatively limited experience with authors and ideas that are both new and immensely interesting to me.
Also at the bottom of the page are “Places of Interest”. These are simply a collection of sites that I frequent, or that I find useful in some way. Like myself, some of these pages are under construction, some are thoroughly offensive, and some are informative…I’ll leave the demarcation to the reader.
On the page “Informants” you will find a series of individuals, texts, ideas, and influences that help me understand the world. Some of these are academic in nature, some are not. I put this portion of the blog together in the hope that passers by will be inspired to relate similar or different interests for, I must admit, my own benefit.
