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ABSTRACT
This article draws on labor history and science and technology studies to propose a method, and to provide an example, of historical analysis that is responsive to the conceptual categories that arise out of ethnographic accounts of individuals’ lived experiences. Using an ‘ontological tool-box’, this article follows various enactments of consumer appliances and, along with them, ideas of what it is to be a productive worker in a small appliance repair shop and across the practices of certain institutions of disciplinary power. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this article reveals that, rather than being inevitable or essential, all the categories used to organize our world, whether referent to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities, which even historians are implicated in reproducing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
2. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies; Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean; Gray, “Subject(Ed) to Recognition.”
3. Edgerton, Shock Of The Old; Harper, Working Knowledge.
4. Katz, The Undeserving Poor.
5. Tresch, “Technological World‐Pictures”; Law and Lien, “Slippery: Field Notes in Empirical Ontology.”
6. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
7. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142.
8. Bevir, “Historicism and Critique.”
9. Hage, “Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political Imaginary Today.”
10. Slaton, “Introduction”; Trouillot and Pruden, Silencing the Past; Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions.
11. Scranton, Endless Novelty.
12. See note 8 above.
13. See note 9 above.
14. Piketty and Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century; Harvey, The Enigma of Capital.
15. Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay, Science Observed.
16. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 257–58.
17. See above 4.
18. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; Dewey, Experience and Education; Dewey, Experience and Nature; Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope; McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability; Fifield and Letts, “[Re]Considering Queer Theories and Science Education”; Stacey, Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?; Riley et al., “Feminisms in Engineering Education: Transformative Possibilities.” This article weaves together literature from feminist epistemologies, queer theory, and a Deweyan pragmatism in order to critique uses of deservingness and to offer a broader mechanism of characterization in society.
19. Townley, Reframing Human Resource Management, 11.
20. Alder, The Measure of All Things, 2.
21. Schüll, Addiction by Design, 92.
22. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 63.
23. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.
24. See note above 22, 22.
25. Tsing, 22.
26. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason. These arguments share a set of premises included in the formulation of ontological enactment, although none of the concepts or their authors apply these premises in the way I propose here.
27. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World; Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason; Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power. We see throughout these three authors with their concepts of hypostatization, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the ideological circle a similar set of concerns. Namely, that the conceptual categories we deploy in understanding and communicating should not be mistaken with the ‘things out there’ in the world.
28. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 90.
29. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 212.
30. Biesta, “Education, Measurement and the Professions,” 327.
31. Dumit, “Writing the Implosion,” 349; Haraway, Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse, 68.
32. Haraway, Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse, 68.
33. Edgerton, Shock Of The Old.
34. Cowan, More Work For Mother; Haring, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. Ruth Schwartz Cowan provides a striking analysis of technological development and the social relations it reproduces, Haring reveals the complexities of a technical culture surrounding the ham radio ‘hobbyists’, neither, however, devotes time to the marginalized objects and practices found in that thing so easily discarded by historians, trash.
35. Law and Lien, “Slippery: Field Notes in Empirical Ontology.”
36. See note above 5.
37. Tresch, “Technological World‐Pictures.”
38. Weibel and Latour, Making Things Public.
39. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs.
40. Hage, “Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political Imaginary Today,” 289–90.
41. Hage, 289–90.
42. Hage, 290.
43. Rose, The Mind at Work; Harper, Working Knowledge.
44. Scranton, Endless Novelty, 91.
45. Edgerton, Shock of the Old, 340–3.
46. Kanigel, The One Best Way, 91.
47. Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency.
48. See above 11.
49. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.
50. Seder, Voices of Kensington.
51. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
52. See note above 4.
53. Goode and Maskovsky, New Poverty Studies, 435–69.
54. Goode and Maskovsky, 435–69.
55. Ibid., 69.
56. Castells, The Information Age, Volumes 1–3.
57. Katz, “Short Answers to Hard Questions About the Opioid Crisis.”
58. American Community Survey, “Demographic and Housing Estimates.”
59. Goode and Maskovsky, New Poverty Studies, 440.
60. Bourgois, In Search of Respect, 355.
61. Deeney, “Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue.”
62. Deeney.
63. US EPA, “EPA 608 Certification – FAQ”; US EPA, “Frequently Asked Questions about Safe Disposal of Refrigerated Household Appliances.”
64. Harper, Working Knowledge.
65. Deumling, “Public Policies, Private Choices.”
66. US EPA, “Frequently Asked Questions about Safe Disposal of Refrigerated Household Appliances.”
67. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Rose, The Mind at Work.
68. Harper, Working Knowledge; Rose, The Mind at Work; Strasser, Waste and Want.
69. Rose, The Mind at Work, 27.
70. Harper, Working Knowledge, 31.
71. See above 69, 143.
72. Rose, The Mind at Work; Townley, Reframing Human Resource Management.
73. Biesta, “Why ‘What Works’ Won’t Work.”
74. Biesta.
75. Biesta, “Freeing Teaching from Learning.”
76. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management.
77. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time.
78. Townley, Reason’s Neglect, 103.
79. Slaton, All Good People.
80. Boustani et al., “Appliance Remanufacturing and Life Cycle Energy and Economic Savings.”
81. Boustani et al.; Strasser, Waste and Want.
82. Law and Lien, “Slippery: Field Notes in Empirical Ontology”; Fifield and Letts, “[Re]Considering Queer Theories and Science Education.”