10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17485
application/pdf
2038-3460
17485
2
en
Giacomo Poderi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Christopher M. Kelty, The Participant. A Century of Participation in Four Stories, University of Chicago Press, 2020
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Book Reviews
2021-03-09
2023-06-27
2021-03-09
2023-10-16
146-150
TS
Giacomo Poderi
2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17485
146
IT University of Copenhagen
2038-3460
2
en
150
Christopher M. Kelty, The Participant. A Century of Participation in Four Stories, University of Chicago Press, 2020
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17485/16332
11
146                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

a feminist reclamation project. Jungnickel wants to render the inventors
and their stories visible, arguing that “Learning about past lives invites us
to reflect on our own” (p. 9). Because what women wear while cycling, still
matters.

References
Bijker, W.E. (1995) Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs. Toward a Theory of Soci-
        otechnical Change, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.
van der Velden, M. and Mörtberg, C. (2012) Between Need and Desire: Exploring
       Strategies for Gendering Design, in “Science, Technology, and Human
       Vaues”, 37(6), pp. 663-683.
van Oost, Ellen (2003) Materialized Gender: How Shavers Configure the Users’
      Femininity and Masculinity. In N. Oudshoorn and T. Pinch (eds.), How
      Users Matter. The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, Cambridge
      MA, MIT Press, pp. 193-208.



                                     ***
   Christopher M. Kelty
The Participant -- A Century of Participation in Four Stories, Chicago and
London, University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 344

Giacomo Poderi IT University of Copenhagen

    Christopher Kelty is an anthropologist and historian who has dedicated
the last couple of decades of his scholarly work to study, discuss, and un-
derstand participation. The Participant stands apart from his previous
works as it shifts the focus away from grassroots or domain specific forms
of participation with their localized practices, cultures, politics, and infra-
structures. Indeed, the book encompasses a far-reaching aim. Its starting
point is that participation has increasingly become associated to decision-
making and political processes. The aim of the book is to investigate the
genealogy of participation pertaining to the last century of US and EU so-
cieties, and therefore to identify both the particularities and “the singular-
ity of participation, not just its variations.” (p. 6). The book goes beyond
the usual questions about “participation in what?” or “why do we partici-
pate?” and it focuses on the thought-provoking one about whether it is
possible to participate in participation. As such, the contribution of the
book is ambitious and, admittedly, unique in its scope, finding its place
along those few that try to question participation in fields such as, for in-
stance, media and cultural studies (Barney et al. 2016) and participatory
Book Review                                                                147
design (Andersen et al. 2015).
    The Participant is ambitious also for its unconventional and, in some
ways, performative nature. Kelty admits a “mischievous pleasure in an ab-
surd experiment” (p. 6): to write an ethnography of participation based on
experiences of participation, which he did not have. As a matter of fact,
“the participant” is not that much of a real object (or subject) of study for
the book, but rather a fictional character, yet realistic and plausible. The
vignettes of “the participant” open and close each of the central chapters
and they allow Kelty to bring into focus four assemblages of participation.
These are understood in the book as “practical, material arrangements of
people and things” (p. 37) and they characterize a specific way of format-
ting participation – a central concept in The Participant. Each assemblage
supports a specific inquiry angle of the three constitutive elements of par-
ticipation: contributory autonomy, the experience of participation, and
forms of life. In each chapter, such analysis is done through the thorough
and meticulous inspection of the historical artefacts and documents of par-
ticipation, as well as through the meta-analysis of how scholars, practition-
ers, and institutions interpreted and talked about participation.
    Contributory autonomy highlights the form of personhood that stands
at the basis of participation. Under late liberalism this form of personhood
has become increasingly individualized, and participation is currently un-
derstood first and foremost as an individual contribution, which is gov-
erned by procedural rationality, to a collective. With the experience of par-
ticipation Kelty brings back at the center of the discourse the affective,
emotional, and subjective dimensions of participation. The experience of
participation, he argues, corresponds to the “soft part of the social fossil”
(of participation) (p. 78). This is the part that has been increasingly lost in
our contemporary understanding of participation, because of its elusive,
ephemeral, and difficult-to-grasp nature, and because it has been continu-
ously neglected in our understanding and framing of the phenomenon. Fi-
nally, by building directly on Wittgenstein’s concept of forms of life, Kelty
points to the importance of the “rules of the game” or, as he defines it, the
grammar of participation. When equally and commonly understood and
judged, such grammar of participation allows for a full experience of par-
ticipation. Individual and collective become one. However, when the
grammar is not understood or valued in the same way by all parties at play,
suspicions, perplexity, and puzzlement characterize the experience of par-
ticipation.
    Chapter 1 (Participation, Experienced) focuses on the work of Lèvy-
Bruhl and on an older meaning of participation that paved the way to to-
day’s understanding of participation as political concept. Indeed, is Lèvy-
Bruhl understanding of participation mystique that explicitly connected
participation with ethical personhood. Central to Lèvy-Bruhl’s work was
the emotional and affective dimension of direct, unmediated encounters
148                                                        Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

with unknown (primitive, in his vocabulary) forms of life. With the mysti-
cal nature of participation, Lèvy-Bruhl highlights the fact that perplexity,
the symptom of experiencing participation in this case, foreruns any ra-
tionalization of that experience. Chapter 2 (Participation, Employed) fo-
cuses on the early experiments of social psychologists in work setting to
promote an early form of participatory management. In particular, the
chapter reflects on the influence that Kurt Lewin’s scholarship had on the
implementations of such experiments and starts by analyzing Harwood Pa-
jama factory pioneering work in this area. The chapter uncovers the stark
difference between the early experiences of workers’ involvement in deci-
sion making as a group and the subsequent formalization of such involve-
ment into a routinized, individualized process of workers’ motivation and
satisfaction management. The former was oriented to improve working
conditions and workers routines, while the latter to spur productivity or to
overcome resistance to change. Chapter 3 (Participation, Administered)
looks at participation in the domain of public administration. It reflects on
the events surrounding the transformations of the Model City program of
Philadelphia and how these were tightly connected to the engagement of a
black neighborhood. At the center of this chapter is also the concept of
expertise, which entered the discourse about citizen participation as a way
of circumscribing the scope and power of citizens involvement by means
of intermediation and the transformation of participation into a form of
consultation. In chapter 4 (Participation, Developed), the enthusiasm for
and the expectations over the Community Development project – evolved
later into the Popular Participation Programme (PPP) – of the United Na-
tions and the World Bank come at the center of the analysis. The chapter
shows how Paulo Freire’s scholarship of the pedagogy of oppressed has
been appropriated into the foundations and the many interpretations of
Participatory Action Research and, more importantly, embedded into the
design and use of “participatory tool kits”, which for over two decades
became the magic box of wonders of the professionals in and outside of
the PPP. Participation, Concluded is the fifth and last chapter. Here Kelty
tries to suggest possible ways to format participation to move past merely
cooptative frames that maximize individualized forms of contribution.
These suggestions come in form of statement of principles (e.g. “creating
the possibility of disagreement, not the guarantee of consensus”) which
take stock of the lessons examined in the previous chapters and are read in
contrast to the technologically and digitally mediated forms of participa-
tion of the twenty-first century.
    One regret I have about the book concerns this last chapter and the
lack of a reflexive gaze on the suggestions made here. They remain in the
form of general principles that (should) apply to assemblages of participa-
tion of twenty-first century media and technology. However, an explicit
argument, even speculative or provocative, is lacking about how these sug-
gestions could be materialized to support a re-enchanted and full form of
Book Review                                                                 149
participation rather than, e.g. a more coopted one. In my opinion, there is
a missing story that is the one of a last participant or the participant of the
future: one who could have enlivened the visible, diarchic, inert, and rife
with disagreements form of participation, which Kelty suggests.
     I believe that The Participant is of great interest to an STS audience
whether already familiar and engaged with the theme of participation or
not. First, Kelty assumes insights from STS scholars to support the episte-
mological and methodological foundations of his work: Donna Haraway’s
emphasis on stories that animate the world; Bruno Latour’s credo in prior-
itizing method over domain; and, in particular, Noortje Marres and Javier
Lezaun’s works on the material and public dimensions of participation
(Marres 2012; Lezaun et al. 2016). Their influence shows through the key
arguments, the organization of the book material, and the characterization
of the four assemblages of participation. Second, Kelty is skillful in avoid-
ing remaining stuck in a one-dimensional and static understanding of
agency when analyzing such assemblages. Through these assemblages, par-
ticipation is shown to be triggered, supported, mediated, and performed
equally by humans and non-humans and it is meticulously discussed by
trying to account for all these facets. For instance, particularly effective are
the considerations on Queen Victoria’s portrait and the Participatory De-
velopment Tool kit, which are at the bases of the first and fourth chapters,
respectively. The distinction between when and how these artefacts partic-
ipate versus when and how they mediate participation is clear and convinc-
ing. Third, at the center of chapter three it stands a relevant consideration
on the role that STS as a field has played in advancing our contemporary
understanding of expertise as being always, and at the same time, deeply
political and technical. While taking only a few pages of that chapter, the
argument for STS is profound, because it provides STS scholars with a
mirror for looking at how the field participated in the story of participa-
tion. I argue that for any scholar engaged in the “third-wave”, or the “par-
ticipatory turn”, of STS (Lengwiler 2008) The Participant would prove in-
credibly inspiring.
     To conclude, of The Participant I greatly appreciated the richness and
thoroughness of arguments. Never shallow or hasty, neither when address-
ing the minute details of a participatory experience – e.g. the first chapter
basically revolves around the unpacking of a footnote belonging to one of
Lèvy-Bruhl’s works – nor when talking more broadly about how the expe-
rience of participation crosscuts the four assemblages. Moreover, what I
found particularly convincing in Kelty’s work is the analytical frame of the
three constitutive elements of participation. As the author rightly puts it,
many engage with participation nowadays either to study, implement, or
perform it, but we rarely find an explicit explanation of what participation
is meant or thought to be at its core. In my opinion, Kelty has shown con-
vincingly throughout the book that the contributory autonomy, the expe-
rience of participation, and the forms of life can scaffold a rich and not
150                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

taken for granted understanding of participation.

References
Andersen, L.B., Danholt, P., Halskov, K., Hansen, N.B. and Lauritsen, P. (2015)
      Participation as a Matter of Concern in Participatory Design, in
      “CoDesign”, 11(3-4), pp. 250-261.
Barney, D., Coleman, G., Ross, C., Sterne, J. and Tembeck, T. (2016) The Partici-
       patory Condition in the Digital Age, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
       Press.
Lengwiler, M. (2008) Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: His-
      torical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective, in “Science,
      Technology, & Human Values”, 33(2), pp. 186-200.
Lezaun, J., Marres, N. and Tironi, M. (2016) Experiments in Participation, in C.A.
       Miller, E. Smith-Doerr, U. Felt and F. Rayvon (eds.), The Handbook of
       Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, pp. 195-222.
Marres, N. (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Eve-
       ryday Publics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.



                                      ***
   Paolo Landri
Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and
Europeanization of Education, London, Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 192

Michael Schlauch Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

    Since the upsurge of remote schooling due to the current COVID-19
pandemic, research about the digitalization and the digital governance of
education systems has gained significant importance. In this context, Paolo
Landri’s monography Digital Governance of Education – Technology,
Standards and Europeanization of Education appears both as a valuable
guide and as a precursor for methodological concerns that researchers in-
creasingly have to respond to. This is especially the case if one shares
Landri’s intent to not produce a static rendering of education policy and
practice as “matters of fact”, but rather to retrace the shifting power rela-
tions and risks regarding digital governance. What makes this book unique
is that it provides a sophisticated account of the state of affairs regarding
the digital governance and digitalization within the European and Italian
educational landscape shortly before the acceleration towards digital
schooling we are witnessing during the ongoing pandemic. The research
