Embracing entanglements

I am in the process of revising a paper that is in the process of review for publication entitled Embracing entanglements: Problematising the cosmopolitics of mobile communications technologies. I include below the abstract. If you are interested in this research feel free to contact me to discuss it more.

A common thread throughout accounts that seek to both relate and separate ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’ is the tension between our discursive mediation of technologies and our practical technical mediation (through their use) of the world. This paper addresses this politics of mediation, specifically through the role of metaphor, which, I argue, masks the complexity and messiness of the productive relations that make up the world. By critically engaging with the case study of ‘locative media’ I seek to move beyond a bifurcation of people and technologies towards an explicit recognition of their complex intertwining in collectives. Accordingly, this paper presents an argument for ‘cosmopolitical’ accounts of the world, recognising the variety of arrangements of people and things that asks us to perform a reflexive and simultaneous questioning of how phenomena might be explained and how they and we are implicated in such explanations.