CCIG Forum 26 - Enacting Worlds

Prof AnneMarie Mol

Thursday, 19 April 2012, 10:00 - 17:00

The Open University, Walton Hall, Michael Young Building, Meeting Rooms 1-3, Milton Keynes

'ENACTING WORLDS', hosted by the Enactments Research Programme including keynote lecture by Prof Annemarie Mol.

The Enactments Programme suggests that people, places and things are more appropriately understood as dynamically brought into being through various practices, rather than as pre-given or in a simple way constructed. This forum considers both how practices lead to the valuation, sustenance, abandonment, and/or transformation of multiple worlds and realities, as well as the ways in which knowledge practices are actively enrolled in shaping, making and prolonging worlds. The forum is the programme’s first event and will involve a keynote lecture by, and live interview with, Professor Annemarie Mol, as well as a roundtable with programme members on researching enactments.

Annemarie Mol is a professor of Anthropology of the Body in the department of Sociology & Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice (Duke 2002) and The Logic of Care (Routledge 2008) and a lot of articles on technologies, bodies, topologies, measurement and words. Jointly with a spirited research team she is currently engaged in the project The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory, thanks to an ERC Advanced grant.

Keynote Lecture: Enacting values: on good and bad food

Abstract: Reality is enacted variously in different practices. And so, too, are values: good, bad and their variants. In the case of values, however, it is no surprise that there are many. This fits with a classic Western division, where a single reality may be valued in different ways; or where reality-essences, designated by nouns, may be accorded secondary qualities with the aid of a great many value-adding adjectives. The surprise, then, is not in their multiplicity, but in the ways in which such evaluations and qualifications work. How are they being done or enacted in practice?

In this talk I will not explore this question in general. Instead I will analyse a few cases where particular foods are being enacted as good and/or as bad. With these cases I hope to show that valuing (a) is not necessarily a matter of judgement – it may also involve appreciation; (b) is not necessarily a matter of attribution – it may also involve activities that contribute to making things/situations less bad and/or good; (c) may keep in tension where the value is: in the object, in the subject or in between.

So what you may expect of this talk are mundane stories about coffee, apples, chocolate, tomatoes and other edibles – in combination with some destabilising intrusions into philosophy.

Researching Enactments Roundtable

Abstract: 'Why enactments?' What is the analytic distinctiveness of enactment? While it captures other concepts (performativity? constructivism?), what differences does it make for how and what we know? Is it just another word for describing the interpretive work that we are already doing? How has it or might it be taken up in relation to the themes/objects/subjects that we are investigating? What are the politics of the choices we make?