The next AHRA Event
Close

STS Sensibilities in the Pedagogies for the Built Environment

EASST-4S 2024 Conference

Tue 16 Jul—Fri 19 Jul 2024

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Add to Calendar Visit Website

We invite you to check out, share, and submit to our EASST-4S 2024 Amsterdam panel “STS Sensibilities in the Pedagogies for the Built Environment ” (P384). This is a Combined Format Open Panel, open to academics, researchers, and practitioners whose pedagogical work addresses the proposed/built/ruined environment. You can find information about visas, travel, and accommodation at https://www.easst4s2024.net/. We are very much looking forward to receiving your proposals.


Convenors: Dr Fadi Shayya (University of Salford) and Dr Demetra Kourri (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Discussant: Professor Albena Yaneva (University of Manchester)


Extended Abstract

In the late aughts, Bruno Latour co-authored with Albena Yaneva what would become a key text for architecture: “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture”1 (2008). Parodying Archimedes again2 (see Latour, 1983), Latour and Yaneva’s brief text critiqued “internalist visions” of architecture and questioned the fields’ extensive network of human and nonhuman agencies. Since then, Yaneva has been crafting STS and ANT-informed research on architectural design and pedagogy and translating Latour’s STS sensibility from studying the making of science to exploring the making of the built environment. Her work looked at processes of making (Yaneva, 2009a, 2009b, 2020), mapping controversies (Yaneva, 2012), relational politics (Yaneva, 2017; Yaneva & Zaera-Polo, 2015), programming (Novoselov & Yaneva, 2020; Yaneva, 2022), and “site-ing” (Yaneva & Mommersteeg, 2019).

This dynamic school of thought offered new worldviews on how to teach architecture with a renewed “sociology of associations” (Latour, 2005; Yaneva, 2010, 2022). Architectural educators engaged with methodologies drawing from the sociology of science and ethnography of design, and they expanded the subfields of architectural humanities and the social studies of architecture (Shayya, 2021; Kourri, 2023). Students of architecture engaged with tracing heterogeneous relationships between human and nonhuman actors, where a renewed critique of sociotechnical and ecological relationships looked “…not away but toward the gathering, the Thing” (Latour, 2004, p. 246).

An STS sensibility allows architectures – although not necessarily architects – to break away from their modernist dualisms, grand promises, master architects, and iconic starchitects. It decentres the pedagogy and practice of architecture from the figure of providence and panopticon vision to the distributed network and oligopticon insights. It endows architecture and the built environment disciplines with realist attitudes to reconnect with their ground as collaborative practices of disturbing, reassembling, and constructing. It is the kind of sensibility central to addressing the complex ethical, ecological, and sociotechnical entanglements of contemporary and legacy construction and urbanisation.

An STS sensibility introduces a concern for the sociotechnical (see Akrich, 1992; Latour, 2005; Murphy, 2006) – not the technocentric, an eye for associations (see Callon, 1986a, 1986b; Akrich et al., 2002a, 2002b; Latour, 2005)– not the anthropocentric, and a recognition of the multiple (see Law, 1987, 2002; Mol, 2002)– not the absolute.

However, the built environment is a native contributor to generating STS sensibilities. It foregrounds the situatedness of scientific knowledge production within excavation, construction, and destruction processes. It platforms site-specific and environment-oriented practices while envisioning future worlds (Moore & Karvonen, 2008). It endows materialities and agencies to objects actively participating in the making of spaces of inhabitation and infrastructural landscapes (Kärrholm, 2016; Jensen, 2018). It situates the study and understanding of innovation in atmospheric envelopes and material circularity within networks of knowledge exchange, laboratories, and “circulating references” (after Latour, 1999).

The field of STS is uniquely positioned to enable inter- and trans-disciplinary pedagogies that build on its deep engagement with the ecological and societal dimensions of science, technology, and innovation. It fosters a deeper understanding of the multidimensional processes that make up the built environment, unlike the proponents of Architecture – with a capital A – who “go to the mattresses” prioritizing structures that shape the built environment from the outside or romanticizing formal and cognitive aesthetics that create an essence of the built environment from the inside.

We invite academics, researchers, and practitioners who teach future professionals of the built environment (arch, urban, landscape) to theoretically and empirically reflect on how they engage STS sensibilities and integrate STS methodologies in their pedagogies. In the hope of organizing a Combined Format Open Panel, we encourage the submission of academic paper presentations and welcome experimental formats of knowledge expression such as written reflections on an STS-inspired studio brief, visual reflections on student design work, and cataloguing STS engagements during professional design practice.

Abstracts can respond (but are not limited) to the following themes:

  • What does an STS approach offer to pedagogies of the proposed/built/ruined environments?
  • What can an STS sensibility offer to decentre the increasing professionalisation of industry-oriented education?
  • How does an STS methodology contribute to a better understanding of buildings and cities in the making for architecture and design students?
  • What kind of STS insights can be mobilised in design thinking? Equally, how does an interdisciplinary pedagogy of the built environment further knowledge in science, technology, and innovation?
  • How can STS inform studies of the proposed/built/ruined environments as a hybrid of a retrospective tracing method (the sociology dimension) and a projective prototyping method (the design dimension)?
  • How does STS help academics and students of the built environment disciplines expand the figurations (or topologies) of inhabitation beyond the conventional figures of the building and the city?
  • How can an STS sensibility help the built environment disciplines reframe their problem space and positionality?

1 The text was published as a chapter in the book Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research (Birkhäuser, 2008).

2 In 1983, Latour wrote a text titled “Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World.”

Bibliography

Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press.

Akrich, M., Callon, M., Latour, B., & Monaghan, A. (2002a). The Key to Success in Innovation Part I: The Art of Interessement. International Journal of Innovation Management, 06(02), 187–206. https://doi.org/10.1142/S1363919602000550

Akrich, M., Callon, M., Latour, B., & Monaghan, A. (2002b). The Key to Success in Innovation Part II: The Art of Choosing Good Spokespersons. International Journal of Innovation Management, 06(02), 207–225. https://doi.org/10.1142/S1363919602000562

Callon, M. (1986a). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 196–233). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Callon, M. (1986b). The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle. In M. Callon, J. Law, & A. Rip (Eds.), Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World (pp. 19–34). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07408-2_2

Jensen, O. B. (2018). Urban Design for Mobilities – Towards Material Pragmatism. Urban Development Issues, 56(4), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.2478/udi-2018-0012

Kärrholm, M. (2016). In Search of Building Types: On Visitor Centers, Thresholds and the Territorialisation of Entrances. The Journal of Space Syntax, 7(1), 55–70.

Kourri, D. (2023). A Tunnel of Many Worlds: Unfolding the Blanka Controversy [PhD Thesis, University of Manchester]. https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/demetra.kourri/studentTheses/

Latour, B. (1983). Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World. In K. D. Knorr-Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science Observed (pp. 141–170). Sage. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/387

Latour, B. (1999). Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (pp. 24–79). Harvard University Press. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674653368

Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.

Latour, B., & Yaneva, A. (2008). “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In R. Geiser (Ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research (pp. 80–89). Birkhäuser.

Law, J. (1987). Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (pp. 111–134). MIT Press.

Law, J. (2002). Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (1st edition). Duke University Press.

Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple. Duke University Press.

Moore, S. A., & Karvonen, A. (2008). Sustainable Architecture in Context: STS and Design Thinking. Science & Technology Studies, 21(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.55232

Murphy, M. (2006). Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/sick-building-syndrome-and-the-problem-of-uncertainty

Novoselov, K. S., & Yaneva, A. (2020). The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene. World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/11840

Shayya, F. (2021). Politics of Survivability: How Military Technology Scripts Urban Relations [PhD Thesis]. University of Manchester.

Yaneva, A. (2009a). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (1st edition). 010 Uitgeverij.

Yaneva, A. (2009b). The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Verlag Peter Lang.

Yaneva, A. (2010). The “Architectural” as a Type of Connector: A Realist Approach to Architecture. Perspecta, 42, 141–145.

Yaneva, A. (2012). Mapping Controversies in Architecture (1st edition). Routledge.

Yaneva, A. (2017). Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. Bloomsbury Academic.

Yaneva, A. (2020). Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy. Cornell University Press.

Yaneva, A. (2022). Latour for Architects (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429328510

Yaneva, A., & Mommersteeg, B. (2019). How Does an ANT Approach Help Us Rethink the Notion of Site? In The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory. Routledge.

Yaneva, A., & Zaera-Polo, A. (2015). What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment (1st edition). Routledge.