AO: Tsing describes a two model binary that distinguishes the kinds of collaborations amongst anthropologists: “big science” model and intimate authorship arrangements. She notes that under “big science” model, collaboration is both a means and a goal. Through collaboration, differences among researchers can be absorbed into the whole; ideally, the research object that emerges should have the multidimen- sionality of the collaborators’ separate forms of expertise without taking up the jarring gaps across them that might interrupt its object status. On the other hand, the other model is of intimate co-authorship which requires a labor of emotional intimacy, entailing close hours and long years of negotiation and great care over procedural matters where no a priori standards set the frame.
AO: Tsing uses the following binaries to describe the Matsutake Group’s work: between humans - non-humans, between making knowledge and social practice, and both within and beyond the academy (383).
AO: Leverages STS discourse about the interplay of situated and traveling forms of knowledge and value.
AO: Editors are responding to binaries of political vs scholarship (academia vs direct advocacy) to argue that such reductions are ill-fitted to the complexities of the world. Editors note that keeping the relationship between scholarship and politics uneasy, under question and in tension can be strategic and productive (143).
Bouka is primarily leveraging works in post-colonial studies to critique the discourse of “‘capacity building’ and the need to bring ‘local’ perspectives to studies of war and peace” (Bouka 2018). In doing so, she argues that “some of these efforts have quickly become sites for structural violence of knowledge production by not only reifying the “local” but by also only accepting said “local” perspectives as knowledge through Western researchers and erasing intellectual input of scholars from the global south” (Bouka 2018).
As noted elsewhere (See Epistemic Cultures), enlightenment logics, colonialism, liberalism, racism, ethnocentrism, modernization dogma, development discourses, and more all come into effect in north-south relations within the knowledge production process.
AO: The analysts draw their conceptual framework around Bateson’s notion of the “double bind”. They ask multiple sets of questions includeing:
construction of social roles for individuals in organizations (what motivates individuals to affiliate with an organization in pursuit of political ends?)
how political organizaitons generate new theories, methods and rehtorics responsive to particular demands of the projects with which they are invovled (154)
how do individuals in organizations locate responsibilities and rewards they incur in their interminably doubly bound positions? (how were conceptions of responsibility articulated?)
AO: The analysts talk about a need to pursue linkages between macro and micro perspectives citing Marcus and Fischer and organizational theorists (“new institutionalists”).
Star and Griesemer are trying to distinguish their approach from the framework of “interresement” developed by Latour-Callon-Law. The primary way that they go about this is by emphasizing an “ecological” approach, with many Obligatory Points of Passage (OPPs), there in avoiding the idea that all scientific actors are “funneled” through one single OPP. See below
At the time of the collaboration being analyzed, the UC System was still in its infancy and was therefore seeking legitimation and prestige. The state was experiencing tremendous population growth and urban development, along with corresponding losses of local animals and habitats. The geopolitical boundary of the state of California was a pivotal “boundary object.” It set clear parameters for the project that all parties could identify with, though from quite different vantage points. The UC bureaucracy served as means of legitimization and preservation of data.
Gorman uses numerous STS concepts including “black boxes” and “Actor-networks” (Gorman Mehalick 2003), “boundary objects” coming out of social worlds theory and symbolic interactionism (Bowker and Star 1999), “expertise” (Collins and Evans 2002), and “trading zones” (Galison 1997).
In this article, Star reflects on how her research was impacted by her training and experiences in the field. Being trained in Sociology at the University of California San Francisco, she describes her approach as being heavily influenced by Symbolic Interactionism.More precisely, when in the field, she attempted to account for all the participants involved in the action, "from the janitor to the Nobel Prize winner" (Star 2010, 605).
Star also admits that the idea of “interpretive flexibility” was fundamental to the constructivist approach to science studies well before it was integrated into the concept of boundary objects. Though, at this point, the two are inextricably intertwined.
AO: The analysts heavily cite a 1994 article by Lopes in the “Annual Review of Psychology” that argued that psychologists and economists view one another with suspicion and distaste to argue that is no longer the trend.
AO: The authors write: “We thus express commitment to an inductive process of research, where the emergence of design problems comes through grounded and participatory inquiry. We would like to move beyond problematizing “participation” when it comes to defining design problems, and to explore how this issue can be resolved.” (49)
AO: Authors cite th emergence of feminist HCI and postcolonial computing (50)
AO: “local communities”
AO: Authors categorize the existing literature about collaboration around economic, cognitive and social factors to explain it. They argue that attention needs to be paid to external factors like communications channels, governmental initiatives, travel money, intergovernmental science programs, and international politics.
AO: Authors are interested in country-to-country differences in co-authorship and note that “we pay particular attention to factors that influence networks of international scientific collaboration between countries, including geopolitical and historical factors and language” but they do not discuss colonialism and structural adjustment policies which were significant in scholarly production.
AO: Authors talk about periphery and core a la dependency theory.
AO: The authors depend a lot on the notion of a country’s “size” (the number of papers in the database they use). They develop a formula and determine that “size” is only a small reason for why a country collaborates with another.