Diego Cerna Aragon

Whatever happened to the Bielefeld School of STS? An expanded repost from Twitter/X

Finally managed to turn this into a real blog post: Whatever happened to the Bielefeld School of STS?

Where did Karin Knorr Cetina come from? Why did she go to Bielefeld of all places? And where did Bielefeld disappear to?

wondrousmachine.substack.com/p/whatever-h...

The Center for the sociology of innovation learned with great sadness that Michel Callon has passed away.

A graduate of the École des Mines, Michel joined the center in the late 1960s and was its director from 1982 to 1994.

photo of Michel Callon

Together with his family, his cherished colleagues, many friends, admiring readers, and grateful students, we mourn the loss of Michel Callon, who passed away on July 28th. He was one of the intellectual giants of our era. See this insightful interview sociologica.unibo.it/article/view...

Do Artifacts Have Political Economy? - Kean Birch, 2025 Harking back to Langdon Winner's now classic essay “Do artifacts have politics?,” my aim in this article is to ask a very similar question—namely, do artif...

I have a new article out: "Do artifacts have political economy?" It's a riff on an old argument by Langdon Winner about the embedding of politics in technology

#STS #sociology #technoscience #technology #innovation

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Great to see these ideas now in an article. Congrats, Kean!

New #Postdoctoral Job! I'm recruiting for multi-country project on research #metadata & evaluation - UK, Germany, France, and Canada. Funded by SSHRC under Open Research Area 8 initiative. More info: www.yorku.ca/research/wp-...

#research #metascience #researchevaluation #universities #metrics

Environment and History 31.2 is available online now! This is a special issue entitled 'Sensing the World: Exploring Sensory Histories of the Environment,' edited by @gpetrick.bsky.social & @gfitz.bsky.social liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/whpeh/31/2 #envhist @eseh.bsky.social

Derisking as worldmaking: climate finance and the politics of uncertainty The derisking state has by now emerged as the key aspirational agent of the energy transition. But what is the concept of risk involved in derisking? This article places debates about derisking wit...

📚✨ New paper alert: Derisking as Worldmaking

→ Why finance is a worldmaking force
→ Why derisking undermines itself
→ Why we need a Smart Green State instead

Full article: "Derisking as Worldmaking: Climate Finance and the Politics of Uncertainty" (in RIPE)
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thanks!

This is a screenshot of the article mentioned in the post. The title of the article is "Making the eyes of the state: algorithmic alienation and mundane creativity in Peruvian street-level bureaucrats."

I enjoyed reading this @policysciences.bsky.social article by @dc-a.bsky.social & García. It identifies challenges for Peru's street-level bureaucrats in poverty policy implementation, such as unclear eligibility & poverty definitions inconsistent with reality. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Muchas gracias, Andrea!

The article advocates for a study of data production that accounts for contexts where the dominant feature is institutional and material precarity. In our case, we found actors attempting to maintain a delicate balance between inadequate legal rules, scarce resources, and sociopolitical demands. 4/4

2) Mundane creativity: given the rigidity of the system, bureaucrats had to use rule-bending tactics and find workarounds in their quotidian tasks to keep producing data. In other words, paradoxically, they had to routinely subvert the rules of the system to make it work for their local reality. 3/4

We found 2 dynamics among bureaucrats. 1) Algorithmic alienation: when they did not see a correlation between their perception of local poverty and the system's economic classifications, they felt a sense of powerlessness and meaninglessness in relation to working for an opaque automated system. 2/4

Making the eyes of the state: algorithmic alienation and mundane creativity in Peruvian street-level bureaucrats - Policy Sciences The production of state legibility has been a prolific subject of study. However, most works have not paid much attention to the quotidian labor of the street-level bureaucrats that implement legibili...

🚨New publication (w/ L. Garcia): Our article explores the daily labor of Peruvian street-level bureaucrats in charge of translating people's sociomaterial conditions into data for a system that provides automated economic classifications to access social welfare services. doi.org/10.1007/s110... 1/4

Call for papers: @4sweb.bsky.social 4S Open Panel on "Assetization through time and space" organized by myself, Jane Bjørn Vedel, Susi Geiger, & Jacob Hellman

#STS #sociology #anthropology #politicaleconomy #assetization

www.4sonline.org/call_for_sub...

Money, Value, and the State Cambridge Core - African Studies - Money, Value, and the State

"In this innovative book, historian and anthropologist Kevin Donovan analyses the contradictions of economic sovereignty and citizenship in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, placing money, credit, and smuggling at the center of the region's shifting fortunes." doi.org/10.1017/9781...

"How discounted cash flow became the natural way of responding to our collective problems" - José Ossandón interviews Liliana Doganova @delaeconomia.bsky.social estudiosdelaeconomia.wordpress.com/2025/01/08/h...

Sitting above this is that Sam Altman has hundreds of millions of dollars of credit lines that he pulls on from JP Morgan that he then puts into companies that do business with OpenAI. Yet another mark in the "everything with this is completely sane" column.

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

OpenAl says it needs 'more capital than we'd imagined' as it lays out for-profit plan

Yeah I need way more money than anyone ever got before. I need it because my shit is difficult right now. But it's important in ways even I haven't been able to work out. OpenAI is a serious business. Help me. Please help me please my serious company is so good. Help me
www.cnbc.com/2024/12/27/o...

Chartbook 342 Are we all dead in the long run? John Maynard Keynes and the politics of time Guest essay by Stefan Eich

I adapted some work I’ve been doing on Keynes & time into a long-form essay for @adamtooze.bsky.social Chartbook!

“Are We All Dead in the Long Run?”

Why we have misunderstood Keynes’s quip about the long run and what it opens up instead

adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

The oil spillover: prospecting for oil in innovation studies and the history of technology Innovation studies scholars use the concept of ‘spillovers’ to explain how ideas and people move among firms and industries and how regions form industrial clusters. Historians of technology use di...

the oil spillover - read all about it!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New Latin American Perspectives on the History of Neoliberalism — History & Political Economy Project A roundtable discussion with César Castillo-García, Matilde Ciolli, and José Antonio Galindo Domínguez

You probably know the story of the Chicago Boys in Chile under Pinochet. But neoliberalism has a longer history in Latin America. We invited HPE Project grantees César Castillo-García, Matilde Ciolli, and @antonio-galindo.bsky.social to a roundtable to discuss: www.hpeproject.org/blog/new-lat...

Revolution by other memes: on the playful subcultures of r/PoliticalCompassMemes Based on an analysis of 300k opening posts to the popular image-based discussion forum r/PoliticalCompassMemes, in this paper we offer an empirical analysis of how the ‘political compass’ meme temp...

Have to finish setting this up later but for now: new publication! Using the Birmingham School's subcultural theory to look at political compass memes, we attempt to theorize how "digital political subcultures" are refashioning political subjectivity www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

boundary2 just published a forum on the gordian knot of finance, where @stefeich.bsky.social, @aminsamman.bsky.social, @thisblue.bsky.social, Janet Roitman, Dick Bryan, and myself reflect on the infuriating hold of finance on economic policy (and how to break it)

www.boundary2.org/the-gordian-...

Capitalization and the Startup Economy: Critical Perspectives on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Venture Capitalism June 20-21 2024. University of LausanneWorkshop Report The author would like to thank Tanja Schneider and Loïc Riom for their assistance in producing this report. What do a secret music concert ...

What do a secret music concert and a vertical farm have in common?

Thank you to Anna Lytvynova for this wonderful conference report on the event that @taschn.bsky.social and I organized last June in Lausanne.

easst.net/easst-review...

Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)

✨New special issue✨ coedited with @aballes2.bsky.social and @krether.bsky.social. The special issue published by @tapuya.org is tied to a multiyear interdisciplinary working group on the "Future of Facts in Latin America" funded by @ssrc.org. #latinamerica #sts

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

'Paranoid Finance' now out also in the U.S. of A. @politybooks.bsky.social www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

What's coming for F&S?!?

Find out here: cup.org/3YNQROk

Maybe one of the reasons there are so many unhinged academics is that in order to keep your job, you’re constantly required to tout yourself as a Scholar of World-Historical Significance, even as your office’s ceiling tiles slowly dislodge themselves to fall on your head.