Annemarie Mol Research Articles

Enacting the border multiple in the post-welfare state: Registration of foreign-born persons in Finland

This article analyses border practices that are enacted through an array of migrants’ residence registration procedures in Finland. These practices extend to the country of departure and also take place upon arrival and settlement within a municipality, and they are intimately tied with the person’s access to social rights in the country. Building on critical border studies and Annemarie Mol’s idea of multiple ontologies we examine migrant stories, collected via multi-sited ethnography, that simultaneously testify to being targeted by diverse border practices and of being compelled to take part in doing the border. We address regulatory practices that modify and, indeed, reinforce inequalities between migrants. We argue that residence registration as a scattered border practice not only enacts different statuses for migrants but orders them hierarchically depending, for example, on the person’s migration status and nationality (EU/TCN). Furthermore, multiple regimes of knowledge production such as statistics on migrant population draw on the data recorded in the population register during the municipal registration process, which further extends the impact of this data. We show how the welfare state system, claimed to be universal, is highly conjunctural depending on the information the person receives from different interlocutors, and on the presumably apolitical “policy on the fly” enacted at the registration desk.

Building A Fire: The Geographies Of Community Geography

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to scholarly conversations about how to (not) define community in community geography (CG). We draw on Annemarie Mol and John Law’s formulation of a fire topology to reflect on CG research spearheaded by a community-based environmental organization concerned with industrial contamination in northeastern Oklahoma. To explore how, where, and why we came together around a multimedia storytelling initiative aligned with the geohumanities, we trace the events and encounters leading to our collaboration. We then closely examine one of the first digital products to emerge out of our relationships and research: a StoryMap detailing the history and environmental impacts of a BF Goodrich tire factory that operated between 1946 and 1986 in Miami, the county seat of Ottawa County, Oklahoma, while also commemorating the labor and lives of people associated with the plant. Our overview of the StoryMap and its creation also commemorates the geographies of the embodied work experiences in building community around the research informing the StoryMap. Our discussion considers the dynamic and sporadic dimensions of our ongoing CG research, celebrating accomplishments and potential for future endeavors without failing to recognize how the quotidian friction of distance, as well as professional commitments, have stymied or slowed—but not stopped—our collaboration. Keywords: collaboration, StoryMap, Superfund site, environmental activism, geohumanities.

Navigating artificial intelligence in care homes: Competing stakeholder views of trust and logics of care

The COVID-19 pandemic shed light on systemic issues plaguing care (nursing) homes, from staff shortages to substandard healthcare. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, including robots and chatbots, have been proposed as solutions to such issues. Yet, socio-ethical concerns about the implications of AI for health and care practices have also been growing among researchers and practitioners. At a time of AI promise and concern, it is critical to understand how those who develop and implement these technologies perceive their use and impact in care homes. Combining a sociological approach to trust with Annemarie Mol's logic of care and Jeanette Pol's concept of fitting, we draw on 18 semi-structured interviews with care staff, advocates, and AI developers to explore notions of human-AI care. Our findings show positive perceptions and experiences of AI in care homes, but also ambivalence. While integrative care incorporating humans and technology was salient across interviewees, we also identified experiential, contextual, and knowledge divides between AI developers and care staff. For example, developers lacked experiential knowledge of care homes' daily functioning and constraints, influencing how they designed AI. Care staff demonstrated limited experiential knowledge of AI or more critical views about contexts of use, affecting their trust in these technologies. Different understandings of ‘good care’ were evident, too: ‘warm’ care was sometimes linked to human care and ‘cold’ care to technology. In conclusion, understandings and experiences of AI are marked by different logics of sociotechnical care and related levels of trust in these sensitive settings.

Pluriversal bodies: Researching care through embodied ethnography

AbstractIn this research note, I outline an approach to embodied experiences of care and caregiving in ethnographic scholarship on care. I describe how ethnographers of care and caregiving can use embodied methodologies, particularly through attending also to the cross‐cultural differences in embodied experiences. In this research note, I bring together care research and cross‐cultural embodied ethnography with my own work in Asia Pacific to outline an approach to researching care in the pluriverse – the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture and experience that underpin all our lives. I draw on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of the body multiple (2002), Anna Tsing's understanding of awkward engagement (2005), Gibson‐Graham's reading for difference (2020) and Sean Hsiang‐lin Lei's research on hygiene (2014) to consider how researcher bodies might be useful in detecting pluriversal encounters in caregiving.

Body awareness, activity trackers, and the cognitive unconscious

This paper investigates the role activity trackers play for their users, focusing on the transformative role of wearable technology in shaping our perceptions of our bodies and health. Drawing on autophenomenography, in-depth interviews and online content analysis, it questions the neutrality of tracking data and interpretation, by drawing on Annemarie Mol’s concept of ontonorms and highlighting the built-in normativity of the assemblage that makes it constantly prone to enacting a certain kind of optimal performance. Using Katherine Hayles’ concept of cognitive assemblages, it defines trackers as being specific types of cognizers, entering alongside humans in assemblages in which their role sometimes ends up dethroning the body’s own perceptual systems and changing the way we are aware of our own bodies. Throughout the research, three different types of users are identified and described, for whom the cognitive assemblage takes a different shape: regular users, users with medical issues and power users.

A logic of care in / of / for voice: tuning-in, enacting and assembling in student voice practices and education

ABSTRACT The present moment is beset by many complex challenges. Young people face living with the consequences of decisions being made largely without their consent or involvement. Centering youth voices may be part of the solution. But we need to go beyond liberal, individualist and rights-based models that pay insufficient attention to the enabling conditions of meaningful voice, to temporalities, or to schooling as institution and process. Seeking alternative conceptualizations of voice, this paper draws on Annemarie Mol’s work on the ‘logic of care’ in relation to health services. She describes this as a ceaseless, ongoing, mutual process of attunement to the unpredictable nature of human existence, implicating a range of actors, technologies, resources, materials, meanings, and affects. This description better captures aspects of good – responsive – educational practice. It also resonates with recent feminist scholarship on the posthuman, new materialist and affective dimensions of everyday life and education. This can support innovative work related to youth voice, as exemplified by a research project aiming to ‘attune, animate and amplify’ what matters to young people in learning about sexuality. Such reconceptualizations may help us meet the challenges we face, not only in schools but those of life on a finite planet.

The logic of choice and the logic of care: conceptualising ethics within everyday food consumption practices

The choosing consumer has been a prominent figure within consumption research, alternatively celebrated as enabling the expression of lifestyles and tastes or criticised for overlooking consumers as embedded in interconnected mundane practices. While sociologically oriented consumption research has explored the multiplicity of consumer roles beyond ‘chooser’, the figure of the choosing consumer persists in many research streams and in our shared cultural imagination. This article joins previous research on the ethics of consumption that has explored tensions between choosing and relational consumers. It does so by introducing the logic of choice and the logic of care to consumption research. Developed by Annemarie Mol (2008), these logics can be seen as ideal types representing contrasting styles of navigating decision-making, ethics, and questions of the good life. The logic of care emphasises attentive doings that aim to improve conditions in specific situations, seeking moderation rather than control, whereas the logic of choice starts out from sovereign individuals making clear-cut decisions. Using examples from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices, we develop a conceptualisation of the central dimensions of these logics within food consumption. The logics of choice and care enact particular worlds and ways of being in them, bringing forth the ontological politics of consumption. Consequently, we advocate for cultivating care in the world of consumption currently dominated by choice, since it enacts a more merciful framing of ethical consumption, emphasising our shared responsibility for ‘as well as possible’ relations without tipping over into guilt.

From prescribing dilemma to knowledge in practice: The ontological politics of benzodiazepines and Z-drugs

The discrepancy between official guidelines and clinical practice is hardly more pronounced than in the case of benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, also known as benzodiazepine receptor agonists (BZRA). Using social-constructionist positioning theory, we unravel how health care professionals deal with the dilemma of prescribing this medication. Our results reveal a prescribing spectrum that is discursively organised around four different storylines used by professionals. The storylines are organised along three axes that are related to a) prescribers' opinions on prescribing and the negotiation of the related risks, b) the power dynamics between provider and patient in the prescribing process and c) the rhetorical use of arguments. The discerned storylines allow us to explore the emotional and moral side of prescribing and demarcate clinical mindlines -internalised tacit guidelines-that professionals adhere to when they prescribe. By relying on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of ontological politics, we explain how these storylines enact multiple versions of this class of medication and justify seemingly contradictory prescribing practices.

Thinking Participatory Design work-shops in the presence of cosmopolitics

This paper is a written version of a presentation held at DASTS 2022 as part of a panel session organized by Mike Michael, Alex Wilkie, Michael Guggenheim and the author. The idea behind the panel, inspired by laboratory studies in STS, was to propose a focus on workshops as ‘worldbuilding’ events, which implies a close scrutiny of how workshops are constructed and carried out and to what effect. Along the lines of Annemarie Mol’s ontological politics and Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics, workshops are not just spaces in which we explore and experiment with ideas and concepts that may or may not be realized at some point: they shape reality from the get-go. In the paper, I thus discuss Participatory Design (PD) workshops by way of Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical and constructivist thinking. My discussion is based on a few but key publications from the field of PD such as the Handbook of Participatory Design (Simonsen & Robertson, 2012).

Competing realities, uncertain diagnoses of infectious disease: Mass self-testing for COVID-19 and liminal bio-citizenship.

Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over 'gold-standard' polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus antigen, uncertainty surrounds their deployment and ultimate effectiveness in stemming infections. This article applies the analytic lens of biological citizenship (or bio-citizenship) to explore Australia's experience of implementing a RAT-based mass self-testing strategy to manage COVID-19. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's (1999, The Sociological Review, 47(1), 74-89) concept of ontological politics and analysing government statements, scientific articles and news media reporting published during a critical juncture of the strategy's implementation, we explore the kind of bio-citizenship implied by this strategy. Our analysis suggests the emergence of what we call liminal bio-citizenship, whereby citizens are made responsible for self-managing infection risk without the diagnostic certitude this demands. We discuss how the different realities of mass self-testing interact to reinforce this liminal citizenship and consider the implications for the sociology of diagnosis.

Training the ageing bodies: New knowledge paradigms and professional practices in elderly care.

In the Scandinavian countries, reablement has become a principle permeating all parts of elderly care, hence potentially transforming care and care work. This article explores the advent of new knowledge paradigms and practices of physiotherapists and occupational therapists transforming reabling care in particular ways, leading to what we term a logic of training emerging in the field. These professional groups have obtained a dominant position as reablement specialists in Norway and Denmark, where our extensive fieldwork was performed as part of a 3-year research project. Taking inspiration from Annemarie Mol's concept of logic, we study how professional practices are organised and infused with specific values, meanings and ideals in situated contexts. We hence explore the logic of training, its abstracted image of the body and rational goal-oriented model for progress measurement and its ramifications when addressing ageing bodies in a complex field marked by the unpredictabilities of the social and lived bodies, administrative rules and temporalities and the quest for empowering and involving clients. The paper concludes by pointing at new contradictions arising when practicing reabling care and particularly points out the tensions arising in care relations, where ambitions on empowering and disciplining the client and the elderly body may collide.

Chapitre 1. Considérations bioéthiques sur le corps multiple : Point de vue des philosophes européens et russes

The article attempts to critically apprehend the profound problems of medical ethics, posed by the Dutch philosopher Annemarie Mol in her book “The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice” [4]. The logical and mathematical concept of transitivity and intransitivity, chosen by the philosopher, makes us approach the traditional problems of bioethics from a new angle: through the models of physician-patient relationship, the status of a person vs. human being, organ transplantation, as well as the conflict between the individual and the collective in epidemic conditions. The key points on which the philosopher relies are the concepts of intransitivity of the patient and his organs, the status of the human body, the relationship between the whole body and its parts, as well as the concept of inclusion as a relationship of integration of a multiple body. Trying to analyze these concepts, the author of the article refers to the works of Russian and French philosophers, and also addresses modern problems of bioethics through the prism of the questions posed by A. Mol from an unusual angle.

Unbracketing the multiplicity of trauma in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo

As international health organizations have increasingly acknowledged the global burden of psychological trauma, global health experts have sought to appraise and organize the treatment of trauma through objective, neutral forms of classification and calculation. Rather than see trauma as a singular thing whose biological, social and psychological formation is bracketed by expert perspectives, this paper focuses on how psychological trauma is enacted—that is, brought into being and sustained—in particular contexts and practices. If trauma can be made and unmade in practices, rather than assumed to be a stable thing, then these practices become a matter of concern rather than fact for geographers. We take as our empirical focus the province of North Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where trauma has become a matter of growing local, national and international concern. Working with and beyond the conceptual work of Annemarie Mol, we demonstrate how different ‘versions’ of trauma uneasily co‐exist in the region. Interrogating these versions, we explore the tensions that arise from attempting to explain and summate the incidence of trauma that is not singular or stable but is, instead, emergent and enacted in a variety of practices.

Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol

Reviewed by: Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol Jessica Hardin Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 208 pp. Towards the end of the book, Mol offers an example taken from her fieldwork at a food conference for healthcare professionals. In it, a researcher presents a paper that argues that humans, even those in affluent places like Europe, should eat more protein. When asked about the earthly repercussions of such a diet, the researcher responds that this is outside of his domain; that is, the effect of increased protein on the earth and the future of humanity is a political issue (131). As a quick, direct example, this interaction speaks to the heart of this book: how do we live on an earth as it is existentially threatened by human action? This broader frame animates Mol’s feminist critique of human exceptionalism. In the first chapter, Mol situates the reader within philosophical anthropology and empirical philosophy. This chapter would be an excellent addition to anthropological theory seminars because of the ways it denaturalizes the centrality of “the human” (and its particularly hierarchical terms) in Western philosophical and epistemological traditions. The intervention space she carves out is noting that beyond “rising above other creatures,” the human is also situated as rising above the body itself to achieve transcendence (2). Mol asks, what kind of human, in contrast, emerges when we center eating, feeding, nourishment, and sustenance in our theories? By theorizing eating, Mol attends to socio-material conditions by way of rethinking what she calls being (Chapter 2), knowing (Chapter 3), doing (Chapter 4), and relating (Chapter 5). In the final chapter, Mol lays out the political stakes for theorizing eating through “specific [End Page 193] stories about situated people, dependent on each other, on other creatures, and on a forgiving, but frightfully fragile earth” (126). Mol is clear to state that while this is a book of theory, she is not offering a Theory of eating or even the human—as in, she doesn’t offer an “over-arching explanatory scheme” (1). Her approach is to re-consider these through “eating inflected intellectual terms and tools” (6). Each chapter takes aim at canonical philosophical texts that anthropologists engage, most notably Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Each chapter builds from the core recognition that eating is transformative—socially and materially––and that by carefully attending to eating, the fiction of transcendence derived from overcoming the flesh is laid bare. The subtext here is that this hierarchical notion of the human is ultimately a dangerous one, a model that is existentially threatening. There are several cross-cutting themes that thread together Mol’s concerns with rethinking being, knowing, doing, and relating. Here I focus on her ethnographic analyses, the issue of temporality, and the model of care that she develops throughout the text. Based on fieldwork in the Netherlands in diverse places from elderly homes, rehabilitation centers, food conferences and nutritional laboratories, Mol hones in on mundane examples with theoretical explorations that truly match. Examples in the “Being” chapter range from her observations of a speech therapist talking through the process of swallowing with her patient to a dietician diagramming how the body processes sugar as she teaches people living with diabetes how to eat. In both of these examples, Mol’s purpose is draw attention to the absence of eating in philosophical anthropology and demonstrate its significance for what it means to be human. Mol demonstrates that bodies transform through the process of eating making them “externally entangled and internally differentiated” (40). From eating to being, Mol uses instances of situated eating to explore a model of being where “inside depends on the outside, while continuity depends on change” (49). Bridging examples from therapeutic contexts to her own table to a friend’s garden, Mol does what anthropology does best—building ways of thinking about and laboring in the world inspired from “the specificity and situatedness of each and every eater” (25). The second cross-cutting theme that is not articulated as such but runs throughout the book is the issue of temporality. In presenting eating as transformative, Mol encourages the reader to see the ways that...

Empirical Philosophy and Eating in Theory

This interview, conducted over email, is an exchange between Annemarie Mol, a philosopher and Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam, and Ada Jaarsma, associate editor of Symposium. While the questions reflect Jaarsma’s interests in Mol’s account of “empirical philosophy” and its import for contemporary Continental philosophy, Mol’s responses raise questions, in turn, about how phrases like “Continental philosophy” betray geographical and canonical presumptions. Reflecting on the import of wonder, of reading, of intervening in philosophy’s set tropes, and of decentring the subject, Mol draws readers into an array of ways to reconsider the cultural repertoires and social realities by which philosophical activities take place.

Towards an ethical multiplicity in low back pain care: Practising beyond the biopsychosocial model.

The biopsychosocial model is currently considered by most researchers and clinicians to be the best approach to low back pain (LBP) care. The model was popularised in LBP care in response to some clear deficiencies in earlier biomedical approaches and is now widely recommended in clinical guidelines and policy statements. Yet the biopsychosocial approach has also been critiqued for its narrow conceptualisation and application. In this article, we explore how attending to the multidimensionality of LBP in practice goes beyond a biopsychosocial approach. We engaged with 90 ethnographic observations of clinical practices, 22 collaborative dialogues with clinicians, and eight consultatory meetings with people with experience of LBP to consider the sociomaterialities of clinical practices in two settings: a private physiotherapy practice and a public multidisciplinary pain clinic. Drawing on the work of Annemarie Mol and Rosi Braidotti, our analyses suggest that sociomaterial practices, involving human and non-human actors, produced multiple objects of clinical attention and ethical concerns about how to attend to this multiplicity well. We argue that the multiplicity of LBP is attended well by reimagining: (1) clinical settings as 'becoming more-than-sterile environments' where objects, furniture and elements such as tears and laughter help to provide a relational, welcoming and comfortable space to all bodies with LBP; (2) differences through 'becoming minoritarian' where considering power relations allows actions towards connectiveness and belonging; and (3) disciplinary boundaries through 'becoming interdisciplinary within' where actions expand traditional scopes of practice. The flux of these multiple becomings moves clinical practice and conceptualisations beyond the biopsychosocial approach to consider a new ethico-onto-epistemological approach to LBP care. They invite clinical practices that engage with an ethical multiplicity of LBP care, providing a better understanding of how places, objects, emotions, power, bodies and professions are interconnected and come together in everyday practice.

Reflections on the genre of philosophical art installations

We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance of art for making technologies—around the following five themes. (1) The experience of artworks and whether such experiences can be described in terms of the affordances of artworks. (2) The possibility that engagement with artworks offers for the transformation of ourselves and the sociomaterial practices we take part in. (3) The claim that artworks can serve as what Annemarie Mol describes as “material propositions” that can be used to engage philosophical reflection. (4) The temporality of making practices and how art installations can be thought of as places in which past, present, and future meet. (5) How art could potentially enable a better embedding of technologies in society.

Chronotopic Expertise: Enacting Water Ontologies in a Wind Energy Debate in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at stake. Yet nearly every dispute over water involves not just contested meanings but contested ontologies. This essay examines water ontologies in a controversy over water wells in Ontario, Canada, which residents claim were affected by pile driving for wind turbine installation. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontologies and the Bakhtinian term, chronotope, I show how different water ontologies emerge from spatiotemporal orientations and shift how expertise is enacted. Common water ontologies, water-as-resource and water-as-chemical-entity, enshrine white settlers as experts, despite their different stances on the issue in question. Municipal leaders, corporate representatives, and community members enacted water as an entity knowable to technoscience and exploitable by humans. An alternative ontology introduced by First Nations leaders, water-as-lifeblood, emphasizes water as a sacred, life-giving force. Speakers authorize themselves as experts by enacting water differently.

The day program multiple: Noncoherence and ontological politics.

Globally, day programs are increasingly proposed in policy as one way to address the support needs of people living at home with dementia and their families. Day programs represent a kind of space that can meet multiple interests and ideologies concerned with sustaining care at home for people living with dementia. In this paper, we draw on findings from an ethnographic study of how day programs work as care in the community for people living with dementia to argue that day programs' ontological status in research as a "simple location" of care contributes to the ambiguous outcomes and limited evidence available for improving their design and delivery. Using one program as an illustrative case, we demonstrate the multiplicity of a day program and the ontological politics through which the potentialities for care emerge. Robert Cooper's proximal analysis of organizing's and Annemarie Mol's work on ontological politics inform this analysis. Of note in this analysis are the different enactments of a day program and their modes of coordination. We show when these enactments hang together well and when they do not and consider the effects of these politics for care. Of particular concern is how some versions of a day program are easily displaced by the interests of administrative versions and managerial logics. We argue for approaches to research and planning that acknowledge the "day program multiple" and precarious nature of care.

Calibrating logics: How adolescents and young adults calibrate often-competing logics in their daily self-management of type 1 diabetes.

Adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes must manage a demanding chronic condition in their daily lives, but adequate self-management remains a major challenge. In this article, we explore the logics invoked in shaping daily type 1 diabetes self-management among adolescents and young adults and propose an analytical view of self-management as a matter of 'calibrating logics'. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's concept of logic, our analysis of in-depth interviews with 21 adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes suggested that three main logics collectively shaped their self-management: biomedical, embodied and social. Biomedical logics appeared in the form of routinised insulin therapy, frequent blood glucose testing, and carbohydrate counting, all of which emphasise controlling blood glucose levels. Embodied logics emerged as refined practices such as 'thinking insulin units' and 'listening' to blood glucose fluctuations. Finally, social logics were at play when discreet or postponed self-management practices were used to adjust to social situations. While these logics may complement each other, study participants invoked how these logics often competed in daily life, generating tensions. We therefore propose viewing self-management as a matter of calibrating logics in which often-competing logics are at play. This can provide nuanced insights into the effort and challenges related to the daily self-management of type 1 diabetes for adolescents and young adults, in contrast to the prevailing dichotomy of adherence versus nonadherence to prescribed treatment regimens.