Annemarie Mol Research Articles

Potentiality made workable – exploring logics of care in reablement for older people

ABSTRACTIn the face of population ageing, Western health-care systems are currently demonstrating an immense interest in mobilising older people's potentials. With this agenda in mind, several countries have introduced reablement: a type of home care aimed at mobilising older people's potentials for independence by means of short-term training programmes. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Denmark's home care sector, this paper explores how elder-care professionals translate the abstract notion of ‘potentiality’ into practice. Theoretically, the paper draws on Annemarie Mol's term ‘logic of care’. I demonstrate that professionals draw on two co-existing logics of care: a logic of reablement encapsulating ideals of successful ageing and life-long development; and a logic of retirement, which in contrast allows people at the end of life to retreat and engage in enjoyable activities. Professionals manage to balance these logics in order to live up to policy obligations while at the same time complying with moral standards of good care. However, very little is achieved in terms of increased independence. I argue that by narrowly focusing on bodily and quantifiable potentials, the ‘potentiality paradigm’ holds the risk of deeming older people to lack potential. In conclusion, I therefore encourage a more inclusive approach to elder-care and ageing that recognises the complexities of ageing, including older people's potentials for retreat and leisure.

Complex care and contradictions of choice in the safety net.

This article explores the complicated and often-contradictory notions of choice at play in complex care management (CCM) programmes in the US healthcare safety net. Drawing from longitudinal data collected over two years of ethnographic fieldwork at urban safety-net clinics, our study examines the CCM goal of transforming frequent emergency department (ED) utilisers into 'active' patients who will reduce their service utilisation and thereby contribute to a more rational, cost-effective healthcare system. By considering our data alongside philosopher Annemarie Mol's (2008) conceptualisation of the competing logics of choice and care, we argue that these premises often undermine CCM teams' efforts to support patients and provide the care they need - not only to prevent medical crises, but to overcome socio-economic barriers as well. We assert that while safety-net CCM programmes are held accountable for the degree to which their patients successfully transform into self-managing, cost-effective actors, much of the care CCM staff provide in fact involves attempts to intervene on structural obstacles that impinge on patient choice. CCM programmes thus struggle between an economic imperative to get patients to make better health choices and a moral imperative to provide care in the face of systemic societal neglect. (A virtual abstract of this paper can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA).

Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations

ABSTRACT More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction, where the operations of singularization explored by Mol are more easily carried out, and as divergence, where singularization is not necessarily an option. The exploration is part of a larger project to rework the notion of cosmopolitics first proposed by Isabelle Stengers and later taken by Bruno Latour. Elsewhere I have argued that their conception of cosmopolitics as a project oriented towards the composition of a common world is predominantly informed by the figuration of multiplicity as diffraction, and thus it very much resembles a process of singularization writ large. In this context, foregrounding multiplicity as divergence opens a path to probe the limits of this conception of cosmopolitics, inquire into the different ways in which multiplicity holds together, and envision alternative forms of cosmopolitics. I organize my exploration around two entities caribou and atîku that, so to speak, occupy the same space at the same time in terms of bodily presence, albeit dominant common sense would have it that atîku and caribou are two words for the same entity.

Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems

This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term “algorithm.” Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as “multiples”—unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practices of “outsider” researchers. This approach builds on the work of Laura Devendorf, Elizabeth Goodman, and Annemarie Mol. Different ways of enacting algorithms foreground certain issues while occluding others: computer scientists enact algorithms as conceptual objects indifferent to implementation details, while calls for accountability enact algorithms as closed boxes to be opened. I propose that critical researchers might seek to enact algorithms ethnographically, seeing them as heterogeneous and diffuse sociotechnical systems, rather than rigidly constrained and procedural formulas. To do so, I suggest thinking of algorithms not “in” culture, as the event occasioning this essay was titled, but “as” culture: part of broad patterns of meaning and practice that can be engaged with empirically. I offer a set of practical tactics for the ethnographic enactment of algorithmic systems, which do not depend on pinning down a singular “algorithm” or achieving “access,” but which rather work from the partial and mobile position of an outsider.

What is a ‘Good’ Copy of Edvard Munch’s Painting? Painting Reproductions on Display

Paintings in museums might occasionally be replaced by a photoprint mimicking the original. This article is an investigation of what constitutes a good reproduction of an artwork (oil painting) that is meant to be displayed. The article discusses what the usefulness of reproductions depends on, applying the Valuation Studies approach, which means the primary concern is with the practice of valuing itself. In other words, the study focuses on how museum experts evaluate reproduc-tions of oil paintings. The article analyses three cases of displaying digitally prin-ted copies of Edvard Munch’s oil paintings between 2013 and 2015 in the Munch Museum and in the National Gallery in Oslo. The study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the experts, working at and for the museums, that were involved in producing and exhibiting of the photoprints: curators, con-servators, museum educators, and external manufacturers. The interviews were grouped into five clusters, which I have chosen to call registers of valuing following Frank Heuts and Annemarie Mol (2013). The described valuation practices have to do with delivering experiences to the public, obtaining mimetic resemblance, solving ethical aspects, exhibitions’ budget, and last but not least, with the time perspective.

Connectivity as a multiple: In, with and as "nature".

Connectivity is a central concept in contemporary geographies of nature, but the concept is often understood and utilised in plural ways. This is problematic because of the separation, rather than the confusion, of these different approaches. While the various understandings of connectivity are rarely considered as working together, the connections between them have significant implications. This paper thus proposes re‐thinking connectivity as a “multiple”. It develops a taxonomy of existing connectivity concepts from the fields of biogeography and landscape ecology, conservation biology, socio‐economic systems theory, political ecology and more‐than‐human geography. It then considers how these various understandings might be re‐thought not as separate concerns, but (following Annemarie Mol) as “more than one, but less than many”. The implications of using the connectivity multiple as an analytic for understanding conservation practices are demonstrated through considering the creation of wildlife corridors in conservation practice. The multiple does not just serve to highlight the practical and theoretical linkages between ecological theories, social inequities and affectual relationships in more‐than‐human worlds. It is also suggestive of a normative approach to environmental management that does not give temporal priority to biological theories, but considers these as always already situated in these social, often unequal, always more‐than‐human ecologies.

Remains of care: opioid substitution treatment in the post-welfare state.

This article examines how the amplified role of pharmaceutical substances in addiction treatment affects the everyday realisation of care, particularly the relationship between workers and patients, in so called austere environments. Theoretically the article draws firstly on the literature that links pharmaceuticalisation to the neoliberal undoing of central public structures and institutions of care, and secondly on Anne-Marie Mol's concept of the logic of care. Based on an ethnographic analysis of the everyday life at a Finnish opioid substitution treatment clinic we show the mechanisms through which the realisation of pharmacotherapy can, in the current political climate, result in a very narrow understanding of drug problems and minimal human contact between patients and professionals. Our analysis manifests an important shift in the logic of addiction treatment and health-care policy more broadly; namely, a growing tendency to emphasise the need for patients to care for themselves and make good choices with limited help from formal care institutions and professionals. We call this new ethos the logic of austerity.

(Re)making sex: A praxiography of the gender clinic

This article traces the multiple enactments of sex in clinical practices of transgender medicine to argue against the presumed singularity of ‘transexuality’. Using autoethnography to analyse my own experience as a trans patient, I describe my clinical encounters with doctors, psychiatrists and surgeons in order to theorise sex as multiple. Following recent developments in science and technology studies (STS) that advance the work of Judith Butler on sex as performatively reproduced, I use a praxiographic approach to argue that treatment practices produce particular iterations of what sex (and transexuality) ‘is’ and how these processes limit and foreclose other trans possibilities. I consider the ethical, political and material-discursive implications of treatment practices and offer a series of reflections about the effects and effectiveness of current clinical practices and the possibilities for intervening in such processes in order that, following Annemarie Mol, we might (re)make sex (and transexuality) differently.

Academic Excellence and Gender Bias in the Practices and Perceptions of Scientists in Leadership and Decision-making Positions

How to assess quality has become one of the central concerns for contemporary research, not least because of the proliferation of research assessment systems around the globe. Concomitant with this has been the growing attention to factors that compromise the credibility of assessment, especially gender, ethnic, racial and geopolitical bias. In this paper I analyse how lab leaders and research managers in the natural sciences specifically construct excellence and relatedly the demands of the research profession, and how gender bias plays out in these imaginaries. The material for the study comes primarily from two highly successful public research institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences and specifically from individual and group interviews with lab leaders and research managers on topics of research governance, assessment, and quality. The focus is on the natural sciences because the discipline has driven the introduction of research assessment in the country as well as research and innovation reforms more broadly since the new millennium. Building on the distinction between the logic of choice and the logic of care developed by Annemarie Mol (2008), I explore the limits of individual choice for conceiving excellence and the gendered outcomes it produces.

Objecting: Multiplicity and the practice of physiotherapy.

Drawing from Annemarie Mol's conceptulisation of multiplicity, we explore how health care practices enact their object(s), using physiotherapy as our example. Our concern is particularly to mobilise ways of practicing or doing physiotherapy that are largely under-theorised, unexamined or marginalised. This approach explores those actions that reside in the interstitial spaces around, beneath and beyond the limits of established practices. Using Mol's understanding of multiplicity as a theoretical and methodological driver, we argue that physiotherapy in practice often subverts the ubiquitous reductive discourses of biomedicine. Physiotherapy thus enacts multiple objects that it then works to suppress. We argue that highlighting multiplicities opens up physiotherapy as a space which can broaden the objects of practice and resist the kinds of closure that have become emblematic of contemporary physiotherapy practice. Using an exemplar from a rehabilitation setting, we explore how physiotherapists construct their object(s) and consider how multiplicity informs an otherwise physiotherapy that has broader implications for health care and rehabilitation.

Auld lang syne

Auld lang syne

REDES EM CONEXÃO COM A TEORIA ATOR-REDE NA PSICOLOGIA NO BRASIL

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar alguns usos da Teoria Ator-Rede (TAR) por psicólogos no Brasil. Para tanto, elegemos como foco analítico artigos indexados no Qualis Capes da Psicologia, observando os seguintes aspectos: temas afins; materialidades envolvidas; metodologias; estratégias de análises. Concluímos que a TAR é utilizada desde 1997 em publicações na área da Psicologia e em especial na subárea Psicologia Social, com questionamentos às bases epistemológicas advindas da tradição científica experimentalista moderna e, principalmente, problematizando a centralidade do ser humano como foco e origem do conhecimento. Bruno Latour, John Law e Annemarie Mol foram os principais autores utilizados nos artigos analisados. A introdução da teoria se deu por meio de duas redes de pesquisa: Rio de Janeiro associada à parceria UFF, UERJ e UFRJ e, em São Paulo, parceria PUC/SP e UAB/Barcelona.

Disability and Bureaucratic Forms of Life

This paper employs a hybrid actor-network theory/phenomenological approach to a frequent bother in the lives of disabled persons: bureaucratic forms. I argue that these forms are key sites where disabled personhood emerges, something I examine through the lens of what philosopher Annemarie Mol calls ‘ontological politics’. To be disabled is to be entered into the bureaucratic form of life. These forms translate human existence into a categorize-able, transportable and combinable object, to be administered through ‘centers of calculation’. Combining Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with Latour’s theory of paperwork, I suggest that these forms represent disability in terms of ‘objective presence’, as a mere pre-existing thing, rather than a human way of being. I conclude with suggestions for further phenomenological research that takes embodied difference as its point of departure.

On difference and doubt as tools for critical engagement with public health

This paper argues that critical public health should reengage with public health as practice by drawing on versions of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that ‘de-centre the human’ and by seeking alternative forms of critique to work inspired by Foucault. Based on close reading of work by Annemarie Mol, John Law, Vicky Singleton and others, I demonstrate that these authors pursue a conversation with Foucault but suggest new approaches to studying contemporary public health work in different settings. Proposing that we ‘doubt’ both the unity of public health and its effects, I argue that this version of STS opens up a space to recognise multiplicity; to avoid idealising what is being criticised; and to celebrate or care for public health practices as part of critique. Finally I oppose the view that considering technologies, materials and microbes leads to micro-level analysis or political neutrality, and suggest that it allows us to reframe studies of public health to account for inequalities and to draw attention to weak or retreating states, active markets and the entangled relations of humans and non-humans across the world.

Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment

Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment

Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds by Marisol de la Cadena (review)

Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 315 pp.South American indigenous peoples and their relationships with the environment have become increasingly salient to regional politics and anthropological theory. While several states in the region have recently recognized indigenous concepts of the natural world like Pachamama (the Earth Mother) in their constitutions, anthropological theorists including Marisol de la Cadena (2010) have argued these nods only skim the surface of a deeper, and ontological, difference. To truly understand indigenous-environmental relations, she argued in this earlier work, requires abandoning closely held modern notions and acknowledging a different kind of world altogether. Does understanding indigenous peoples and their politics require a fundamental rethinking of reality? Such a question is difficult to approach a clear illustration of what such an ontological interpretation might contribute to a tangible situation.In the high-altitude community of Pacchanta, de la Cadena has found a place where conventional power politics and unconventional environmental entities alike influence history, from the mid-century struggle for agrarian reform to the contemporary multicultural remaking of Peru. In recounting these events, the author argues we must acknowledge the fundamental alterity of the indigenous world. In the process, she produces an ethnography and a rich theoretical intervention that fundamentally revises earlier accounts of peasant politics and indigenous religion among Quechua-speaking Andeans in the Cuzco region of Peru. The text is nonlinear and multilayered, arranged into a Preface, seven Stories, two Interludes, and an Epilogue. While theoretically sophisticated, the book's concrete language and brief introductory asides make it suitable for advanced undergraduates unfamiliar with its core concepts.The carefully considered portrait offered by Marisol de la Cadena invites us to see another layer of existence, as known and practiced by the runakuna (Quechua people who take part in rural collectivities). The titular earth-beings the tirakuna, which willful, ceremonially accessible entities embodied in natural features. Locally principal among these is Ausangate, an entity that is at once a mountain and its more-than-natural (that is, animate but still material) self. While the ontological turn envisions multiple worlds, de la Cadena foregrounds just two: the ayllu (community) of runakuna engaged with earth-beings, and the world of the modern Peruvian state that privileges landlords' economic power and the nonindigenous, modern experience of reality.As a Peruvian and a historical anthropologist, de la Cadena is also reencountering her own political history, joining modern public stories to others that had remained outside conceptual reach: My world cannot fathom that what it deems to be its 'other' already inhabits, participates, and influences the nation-state that we all share (62). The strange and the familiar interpenetrate because Peruvian and indigenous worlds are circuited together in symbiotic connection, interchanging practices and ideas without consuming the difference between them (4). Her informants used to living within this duality, from so-called syncretic religion to political ceremonies marked by indigenous folkloric performance. Peru's dominant culture, however, often fails to see the alterity of indigenous experience. Drawing on theories of plural but interconnected realities by Donna Haraway (1991), Marilyn Strathern (1991), and Annemarie Mol (2002), de la Cadena leads us to understand the indigenous world and its links with her own.Two biographical Interludes introduce us to Mariano and Nazario Turpo, each of them a yachaq, literally a knower, a practitioner who implores local earth-beings for knowledge and support. Mariano was also the key mover in his community's mid-century struggle to end the control of the local hacendado, or landlord. …

Gender, reputation and regret: the ontological politics of Australian drug education

ABSTRACTThis study explores the role of gender in the constitution youth alcohol and other drug consumption in Australian drug education curriculum. Drawn from an analysis of contemporary classroom drug education documents, it is argued that current drug education reproduces unethical and harmful accounts of femininity and masculinity. These enactments of gender primarily arise in three ways. First, drug education currently positions young women's consumption practices as intrinsically more problematic than those of young men. Second, drug education works to position young women's consumption practices as a problem of spoiled reputation and regret. Third, drug education works to responsibilise young women for potential danger and harm they experience while intoxicated without any consideration of the illegal actions of young men. Working with Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics, this article argues that Australian drug education enacts gendered realities of youth consumption that work to reproduce, rather than reduce, a range of social harms, ‘drug-related’ or otherwise.

Digital companion species and eating data: Implications for theorising digital data–human assemblages

This commentary is an attempt to begin to identify and think through some of the ways in which sociocultural theory may contribute to understandings of the relationship between humans and digital data. I develop an argument that rests largely on the work of two scholars in the field of science and technology studies: Donna Haraway and Annemarie Mol. Both authors emphasised materiality and multiple ontologies in their writing. I argue that these concepts have much to offer critical data studies. I employ the tropes of companion species, drawn from Haraway, and eating data, from Mol, and demonstrate how these may be employed to theorise digital data–human assemblages.

Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw and microworlds of humanitarian design.

Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol's classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump's principle of technical minimalism, as well as its ethical desire to improve the lives of communities. Unlike the pump, however, the straw defines itself through rather than against market logic, accepting the premise that one can 'do well while doing good'. Moreover, it does not share the assumed framework of de Laet and Mol's Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape: a postcolonial state happily en route to national self-definition. Nonetheless, it clearly embodies moral affect, if in the idiom of humanitarian concern rather than development. My aim is to open up three interrelated lines of inquiry for discussion. First, I consider aspects of a postcolonial condition at the micro-level of immediate needs, including assumptions about nation-state politics and markets. Second, I emphasize science and technology in the form of infrastructure, the material frontline of norms. Third, I return reflexively to love, and the complicated allure of engagement in academic work.

A reinvenção da deficiência: novas metáforas na natureza dos corpos

Resumo O conceito de deficiência tem sido profundamente contestado nas últimas décadas, tanto política como epistemologicamente. Por um lado, está em causa o reconhecimento de que a filiação de determinadas diferenças sob a noção de deficiência constitui uma recente “invenção” da modernidade ocidental. Por outro, trata-se de pulsar as consequências dessa construção para as pessoas marcadas pelo estigma da deficiência. Estabelecendo um diálogo com importantes contribuições da teoria crítica, recrutando noções como “páticas de separação” (Michel Foucault), “materialização” (Judith Butler), “corpo múltiplo” (Annemarie Mol) e “sociologia das ausências” (Boaventura de Santos), o presente artigo procura entender como a noção de deficiência pode ser desmobilizada por leituras insurgentes das hierarquias da modernidade.