10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17530
This article provides an overview of the discussion animating the track “Doing research in technoscience as affective engagement” organised at the VIII STS Italia Conference. By acknowledging the inheritance of feminist STS scholars in expanding the theoretical scope of care beyond its traditional sites, this session was devoted to exploring knowledge production as a matter of care as well as a form of affective engagement and entanglement with multiple Others while doing research. Two contributions were presented. The first ethnographically investigates Canadian blood donation practices by drawing on Haraway’s SF figure to develop what the speaker calls “Sanguine Figuration”. The second presentation relies on research of women’s animist practices amongst horses in Swiss Alps through a filmmaking practice influenced by Haraway’s work on the natureculture continuum and situated knowledge. Both studies embody efforts to develop non-representational research practices and experimental approaches showing the affective entanglement between researchers and researched, subject and object. Further, these contributions have highlighted the importance of conceptual creativity and imagination in building an apparatus that enables accounting for affective engagements in doing research in STS.
application/pdf
2038-3460
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Michela Cozza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
post-qualitative
Affective Engagement in Knowledge-making
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Conference Reflections
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
115-123
TS
Michela Cozza
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17530
115
Mälardalen University
2038-3460
2
post-qualitative
en
123
Affective Engagement in Knowledge-making
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17530/16376
12
                                                           Conference Reflections
                                                                                    115




Affective Engagement in Knowledge-
making

     Michela Cozza
       Mälardalen University



     Abstract: This article provides an overview of the discussion animating
     the track “Doing research in technoscience as affective engagement” or-
     ganised at the VIII STS Italia Conference. By acknowledging the inheritance
     of feminist STS scholars in expanding the theoretical scope of care beyond
     its traditional sites, this session was devoted to exploring knowledge pro-
     duction as a matter of care as well as a form of affective engagement and
     entanglement with multiple Others while doing research. Two contribu-
     tions were presented. The first ethnographically investigates Canadian
     blood donation practices by drawing on Haraway’s SF figure to develop
     what the speaker calls ‘Sanguine Figuration’. The second presentation relies
     on research of women’s animist practices amongst horses in Swiss Alps
     through a filmmaking practice influenced by Haraway’s work on the na-
     tureculture continuum and situated knowledge. Both studies embody efforts
     to develop non-representational research practices and experimental ap-
     proaches showing the affective entanglement between researchers and re-
     searched, subject and object. Further, these contributions have highlighted
     the importance of conceptual creativity and imagination in building an ap-
     paratus that enables accounting for affective engagements in doing research
     in STS.

     Keywords: Affect; body; entanglement; posthuman feminism; post-
     qualitative.

     Submitted: November 8, 2021 – Accepted: January 31, 2022

     Corresponding author: Michela Cozza, Mälardalen University,
     Department of Organization and Management, Högskoleplan 2, 721 23
     Västerås, Sweden. Email: michela.cozza@mdh.se




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
12 (2) pp. 115-123 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2021
116                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

1. Introduction

    Affect can be described as a moment of intensity, a reaction in/of the
body at the level of matter, and affectivity can be formulated in terms of ‘to
affect/being affected’, with modes of intensification, movement, and ca-
pacities (Gherardi et al. forthcoming).
    The ‘affective turn’ in Science and Technology Studies (STS) is experi-
encing renewed interest, manifested in research works exploring affective
entanglements and embodied ways of knowing in science. Feminist think-
ers, in particular posthuman feminist scholars (e.g., Alaimo 2010; Braidotti
2013; Niccolini and Ringrose, 2019) have contributed extensively to stud-
ying the transformative potential of affect in research and knowledge crea-
tion. Within STS, we could mention Donna Haraway’s (1991; 1997) foun-
dational work on the situatedness of knowledge, which points at knowing
and thinking as inconceivable without a multitude of relations that also
make possible the worlds we think with. Building on Haraway, Maria Puig
de la Bellacasa (2012; 2017) emphasises, in a non-idealized way, how rela-
tions of thinking and knowing require care, and how such relationality is
not without conflict or dissension. Therefore, we – as researchers – should
be aware that our knowledge practices always entail important conse-
quences (see the concept of ‘cut’ in Karen Barad’s agential realism theory
(2007)), which are not always positive for every-body and every-thing
(Cozza et al. 2021). Echoing Puig de la Bellacasa, and focusing greater at-
tention on affect and care in sociology, and particularly in STS, Latimer
and López (2019) propose the concept of ‘intimate entanglements’ as a ma-
terial-semiotic device to think not beyond, or together with, but alongside
multiple and troubling countless Others, humans and more-than-humans
that are deeply implicated in and contribute to practices of knowledge-
making.
    In STS, laboratory studies (Knorr Cetina 1981; Latour 1979; 1988;
Lynch 1991; Traweek 1988) have widely articulated the role of technosci-
entific assemblages in generating knowledge: scientists, practitioners, par-
ticles, cells, fluids, matter, animals, plants, objects and technologies con-
tribute altogether to doing and redoing science and the world. As for the
affective turn in laboratory studies, Myers (2006) makes visible the roles of
embodiment, affect and performance in scientific knowledge production,
with ethnographic attention to the expressive body-work of molecular
modelling. Aiming at innovating STS analyses of the performativity of sci-
entific knowledge, she usefully reminds of Erving Goffman’s suggestion
that ethnographers – and researchers more generally – “must ‘tune’ their
bodies ‘in’ to the daily activities and practices of those they study. This
would require subjecting one’s own body to the rhythms of another’s
Cozza                                                                      117
practices in order to gain a richer interpretation of the plays of affect, ges-
ture and language among members in particular group” (p. 8).
    More recently, Smolka et al. (2021) have proposed the concepts of ‘dis-
concertment’, ‘affective labor’, and ‘responsivity’ to analyse the role of the
body in interdisciplinary collaborations. That is, they develop a heuristic
meant as “a provisional tool that helps us think of disconcertment as a form
of responsivity. Responsivity emerges among interdisciplinary collabora-
tors who became increasingly sensitive to how researchers from other dis-
ciplines think, talk, and behave. Sensing and responding to differences may
be disconcerting, but engaging with disconcertment becomes easier with
practice, what we refer to as ‘affective labor’” (p. 4).
    Similarly, Hillersdal et al. (2020) contribute to the ongoing discussion
within STS, inspired by the strand of research that has centred on emotions
and affects in the practices of science (on the role of emotions, see, e.g.,
Barbalet 2002; Kerr and Garforth 2016; Parker and Hackett 2012). In par-
ticular, by drawing on Haraway’s (1997) notion of ‘response-ability’ (i.e.,
the capability to work with sensitivity to difference) and Verran’s (2001)
concept of ‘generative critique’ (i.e., the ability to develop other ways of
seeing and doing problems), Hillersdal and colleagues point out how af-
fective tensions can be generative of effects not only on modes of collabo-
ration, but also on the knowledge we – as researchers – contribute, and the
ways we engage the world in our scientific practices. They have the merit
of clarifying the important distinction between affect and emotion. Affect
is “relational and not belonging to particular individuals or representing
private emotions. Instead, affect is understood as the effects of situated
practices of social bodies” (p. 70). Such a remark warns off defining ‘what
affect is’ but rather invites to focus on ‘what affect does’ in knowledge-
making practices (Gherardi et al. forthcoming).
    The track “Doing research in technoscience as affective engagement”,
which I organised together with Silvia Bruzzone and Lucia Crevani (Mä-
lardalen University, Sweden) for the VIII STS Italia Conference, was
grounded on such an understanding of affect as doing, caring and becom-
ing-with multiple Others. In the following, I summarise the purpose of the
track and the main contributions of the two presentations that animated
the discussion.


2. A Conversation Around ‘Bloody-fleshy’ and ‘Wild’ Affec-
tive Engagement

    The track originated from our (convenors’) urgency to understand care
as a commitment with the worlds that we, and our fellow researchers, are
118                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

part of and study. We developed our proposition by acknowledging the
inheritance of feminist STS scholars in expanding the theoretical scope of
care beyond its traditional sites, of health care and domestic labour, to in-
clude knowledge production (Martin at al. 2015). We positioned our invi-
tation into the transdisciplinary post-qualitative debate on affect as “the
capacity to affect and being affected” (Massumi 2002, p. 5) through en-
counters while doing research. From this perspective, the researcher is not
conceived as an external, neutral, detached observer, but rather as an actor
engaged in becoming-with-data (Bispo and Gherardi 2019). This view
urges “finding ways to re-affect an objectified world” (Puig de la Bellacasa
2011, p. 99). Hence, for this track, we invited contributions exploring the
idea of doing research as a form of affective engagement and entanglement
with the humans and more-than-humans to whom we – as researchers –
relate while doing research.
     Six abstracts were accepted for presentation, but only two were finally
presented. In particular, the discussion revolved around Tyler Anderson’s
(Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada) research, titled “Blood lines:
Notes toward investigating affective-discursive entanglements of knowing
and being through Canadian blood donation practices”, and Anna Joos
Lindberg’s (independent videographer and visual anthropologist) study
“Wild Woman: Disrupting the disembodied researcher. The personal es-
say-film as feminist research methodology”. Without any pretension of be-
ing exhaustive of the theoretically rich, (post)methodologically exciting,
and affectively engaging work of Anderson and Joos Lindberg, I summa-
rise their main contributions, as well as what caught my attention and in-
terest as an STS posthuman feminist scholar.
     As the title of his presentation discloses, Anderson is investigating Ca-
nadian blood donation practices. As defined in his conference abstract,
blood is a natural technology of the body and a meaning-making referent,
something that speaks loudly about the entangled natures of knowing and
being. In Anderson’s words, “blood is affective: the intense wave of ‘giving
life’. Blood is discursive; blood quantum that decide racial ‘purity’”. He
continues: “[a]s an object of study in a Feminist STS tradition, blood is a
fierce material and abstract signifier that demonstrates importantly how the
Actual is always more than itself and how complex processes of under-
standing tend to become flattened into discrete Things to be acted upon,
and how these objects of knowledge are made to speak some sort of Truth
to being”. In his presentation, Anderson “put forward how these episte-
mological tensions can be meaningfully addressed by tending to affect”. To
this end, he turns to Haraway’s canonical body of work and the figure of
‘SF’ that she introduces in Staying with the Trouble (2016). SF stands for
“science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative
Cozza                                                                       119
feminism, science fact (…) SF is a method of tracing, of following a thread
in the dark (…) SF is a practice and process; it is becoming-with each other
in surprisingly relays” (pp. 2–3).
     Anderson interprets and transforms SF into his research. Indeed, he
has developed an extremely fascinating sign, called ‘Sanguine Figuration’
to stay with the troubles that come with ‘blood’ as a complex and multiple
object of inquiry. In an unpublished chapter of his doctoral dissertation,
generously shared with me – upon my request to know more about such a
fascinating figure – Anderson says that he coined this term “in a Hara-
wayian sense to capture the current moment and what it means to be a
fleshy, bloody body in an age of extinction. It refers to an analytic – modes
of thought and thinking that figure the body as discursive, affective, and
material; as naturecultural; as biosocial; all the while refusing essentialisms;
refusing naturalizations and concretized markings that condemn the body-
as-fixed-object. Sanguine figures understand the body as dynamic and gen-
erative. As the place where it all happens. And as a lively place to induce
change” (forthcoming, p. 2). He clearly develops a feminist STS approach
to blood through a no-representational material-semiotic technology
which, in Harawayian terminology, corresponds to a practice and art of
fabricating meaning with signs, words, ideas, descriptions and theories to
link meaning and bodies. But he is also developing his own affective meth-
odology to account for how multiple subjectivities – including himself –
are entangled in blood donation practices, as well as their agentic capacities
to affect.
     Joos Lindberg's study shared with Anderson’s an intention to stay with
the troubles. She rejects any toxic ‘objectivity’ by learning, in her own
body, how to generate situated knowledge in encounters between people
and communities (Haraway 1988). In her research on women’s animist
practices among horses in a remote corner of the Swiss Alps, Joos Lindberg
– building on Haraway’s work – disrupts traditional distances between re-
searchers and informants, subject and object, by employing the sensory fac-
ulties (mainly sight) of filmmaking as opposed to a textual and representa-
tional methodology. Wild woman is a feminist essay-film (2020, 19 mins)
that Joos Lindberg shared at the conference track and which she produced
as part of her MA dissertation, completed in October 2019 at the Granada
Centre for Visual Anthropology. It is a provocative film where the repre-
sented natureculture continuum may, at times, be disturbing or appear to
embody an overflowing bond between humans and more-than-humans
(i.e., horses) to which, especially in a Western anthropocentric culture,
people are unaccustomed. Joos Lindberg acknowledges that the fieldwork
also involved interrogating herself as a woman (immersed in a contest of
120                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

‘wild women’), even before her role as a researcher (initially tolerated but
not welcomed).
    In this regard, discussion was led by the fact that – in appropriating
Haraway’s dilemma regarding the importance of how scholars can get into,
rather than out of, the field– Joos Lindberg did not try to buff out of her
research project the discrepancy between her own anthropological per-
spective and Caroline’s (an informant) pagan perspective. Rather, Joos
Lindberg embraced the affective labor (Smolka et al. 2021) performed in
the encounter with forces in a world unknown by secular science (see also
annajoos.com). Joos Lindberg allowed her authorial control to be chal-
lenged by, for example, including scenes showing her incomplete control
of such a multispecies ethnography (for example, when Caroline refused
Anna’s technologically mediated presence). However, as Joos Lindberg
disclosed, precisely this conscious vulnerability eventually enabled a con-
versation between her informant and herself. Joos Lindberg’s stance for an
affective engagement in research embodies the feminist practice of reject-
ing the mythical “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere [because]
this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters” (Haraway 1988, p. 581).
She was not afraid of letting the ethnographic field leak into her epistemo-
logical possibilities as researcher. On the contrary, she was and is interested
in experimenting with such a ‘leak’ between informant, researcher, per-
sonal life and the ethnographic field, and what it does or, rather, how this
‘leak’ affects the overall research assemblage.
    Both presentations generously fostered discussion and, afterwards,
populated my thoughts on affective engagement in technoscientific
knowledge-making practices.


3. Conclusion

    Tyler Anderson’s sanguine figuring and Anna Joos Lindberg’s feminist
filmmaking embody efforts to develop non-representational research prac-
tices and experimental approaches in studying affective entanglements in
technoscience. Their fieldwork speaks about fleshy and bodily multiplicity
and multispecies entanglements that interrogate them on different levels,
leaving traces of affective encounters on their research practices as well as
their being and doing. Their bodies of work not only reminded me of the
scholarly importance of interrogating the adequacy of the onto-epistemo-
logical apparatus which I mobilize when approaching my subject-object of
inquiry, but also invited me to ponder whether I, in my knowledge-making
practice, produce adequate interpretations of real-life conditions in fast-
changing times. To account for such affective material-semiotic
Cozza                                                                       121
complexity, posthuman scholars (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018) remind us
of the importance of conceptual creativity, which means trusting in the
powers of the imagination. Haraway’s figurations are excellent examples.
This is not only for the sake of inventing new terms or concepts, but for a
research apparatus that accounts for the relationships between critique,
creativity, and ethical accountability, rather than applying the form of in-
tellectual laziness which still confines many (STS) researchers to a practice
of ‘following the actors’, as per the mandate of the pragmatist research pro-
gram of the 1920s. What I deem important is questioning the great divide
between subject and object by more ‘objectively’ – in a Harawayian sense
– acknowledging the affective engagements with the sociomaterial assem-
blage that we, as researchers, become with in our fieldwork. In this, I stay
with Susan Leigh Star who, already in 1995, pointed out that “we must
vastly complexify the way we think and talk about matter” (p. 20). This
track was an attempt to further work in that direction.


Post-scriptum

    The two presentations – focused on blood transfusion and entangle-
ment between humans and animals (namely horses) – evoked in me Marion
Laval-Jeantet’s (2011) (artist, transcultural psychiatrist, and Associate Pro-
fessor, University Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne) performance May the
Horse Live in Me, a project questioning scientific methods and tools and
exploring trans-species relationship, in which the artist injected herself
with horse blood plasma.


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