Anders Blok - The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of second generation ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities.

The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANTs dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANTs involvement in real world endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume.

The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.

Anders Blok is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He is the co-author (with Torben E. Jensen) of Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World (Routledge 2011) and the co-editor (with Ignacio Faras) of Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres (Routledge 2016).

Ignacio Faras is a Professor of Urban Anthropology at the Humboldt University Berlin. He is the co-editor of Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Routledge 2009, with Thomas Bender), Technical Democracy as a Challenge for Urban Studies (2016, with Anders Blok) and Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements (Routledge 2015, with Alex Wilkie).

Celia Roberts is a Professor in the School of Sociology, Australian National University. She is the co-author, with Adrian Mackenzie and Maggie Mort, of Living Data: Making Sense of Health Biosensors (2019) and the author of Puberty in Crisis: The Sociology of Early Sexual Development (2016).

Edited by Anders Blok, Ignacio Faras and Celia Roberts

First published 2020

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2020 selection and editorial matter, Anders Blok, Ignacio Faras and Celia Roberts; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Anders Blok, Ignacio Faras and Celia Roberts to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-08472-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-11166-7 (ebk)

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Ignacio Faras, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts

Ignacio Faras, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts

Daniel Lpez-Gmez

Adrian Mackenzie

Brit Ross Winthereik

Atsuro Morita

Jos Ossandn

Fabian Muniesa

Michael Guggenheim

Anders Blok, Ignacio Faras and Celia Roberts

Casper Bruun Jensen

Alvise Mattozzi

Jrme D. Pontille

Noortje Marres

Ericka Johnson

Michael Schillmeier

Martin Savransky

Ignacio Faras, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts

Nigel Clark

Kane Race

Derek P. McCormack

Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent

Francis Halsall

Marcelo C. Rosa

Wen-Yuan Lin

Celia Roberts, Anders Blok and Ignacio Faras

Amade Mcharek and Irene van Oorschot

Uli Beisel

Liliana Doganova

Alexa Frber

Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira

David J. Denis

Anders Blok, Ignacio Faras and Celia Roberts

Endre Dnyi

Albena Yaneva and Brett Mommersteeg

Robert Oppenheim

Kregg Hetherington

Kristin Asdal

Carolin Gerlitz and Esther Weltevrede

Celia Roberts, Anders Blok and Ignacio Faras

Toms Snchez Criado and Israel Rodrguez-Giralt

Shuhei Kimura and Kohei Inose

Emma Cardwell and Claire Waterton

Alex Wilkie

Yuri Carvajal Baados

Kristin Asdal is a Professor at TIK Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. She has published widely across science and technology studies (STS), environmental studies and political and social theory. A key concern in her work is method issues in STS and beyond and she has co-edited several books and special issues on the subject. Her recent publications include Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More than Human Condition (co-edited with Tone Druglitr and Steve Hinchliffe; Routledge 2017).

Yuri Carvajal Baados was born in Valparaso, Chile, in 1961. He studied at the University of Chile, Valparaso. He was relegated in 1981, as a student opposed to the dictatorship, but then gained his MD in 1986. He was the Medical Chief in La Feria public primary attention in La Victoria (a lower-class township), Santiago during 19871993. He did a Masters in Public Health 1998 and worked as a Physician of Occupational and Environmental Health during 19972003. He became the Chief of the Llanchipal Health Service in 20032006 and then the Doctor of Public Health in 2011. He was the Editor of the Chilean Journal of Public Health 20112015 and the Director of Puerto Montt Hospital in 20162018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Chile and an Editor at Cuadernos Mdico-Sociales.

Uli Beisel is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Technology at Bayreuth University (Germany) and holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Open University (UK). She has worked on human-mosquito-parasite entanglements in malaria control in Ghana and Sierra Leone and the translation of new health technologies in Uganda and Rwanda. Her new research is looking at trust in biomedicine and healthcare infrastructures after the Ebola epidemic in a comparative project in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Uganda. Ulis work has been published by