CRESC | Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

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John Law

Some information about me

Profile
Publications
Projects
Events

Profile

Biography:
I have been a CRESC Centre Director at the OU since 2010, and I convene the Social Life of Method (SLOM) research theme.

My research approach

Four main points

I’m interdisciplinary. Part sociologist and part STS (science, technology and society), I’ve worked with anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, engineers, medical practitioners, geographers and animal scientists. The world doesn't fit into disciplines, and it demands an interdisciplinary approach.

I assume that the world is materially heterogeneous. It mixes the social, economic, material, human, ‘natural’, and technical. We need rigorous ways of thinking and studying these heterogeneous processes. That’s why I’ve worked with actor-network theory and its successor ‘material-semiotic’ projects.

I assume that the world is discursively heterogeneous. I’m fascinated and horrified by the exclusions of the social. Systems both depend on and Other, the people, collectivities and realities that fail to fit. If there’s an enemy here in addition to injustice then it is hubris. In practice I go looking for gaps, aporias, and subaltern realities and draw on postcolonial sensibilities to imagine alternative knowledge spaces.

I’m concerned with the performativity of method. Methods tend to produce – often in unanticipated and contradictory ways – the worlds they claim to be describing. This is why I’m so excited about the CRESC ‘social life of method’ SLOM theme. This gives a space to debate methods and the social.

Collaborations

Here are some of the people I've recently worked with: Kristin Asdal (Oslo), Geir Afdal (Oslo), Marianne Lien (Oslo), Wen-yuan Lin (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Annemarie Mol (Amsterdam), Ingunn Moser (Oslo), Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths), Mike Savage (LSE), Vicky Singleton (Lancaster) and Karel Williams (CRESC).

Current research interests:
Non-coherent method

If the world is non-coherent, then what are the methods we need to know it, to enact it, and to live well in it?

People, technologies and animals

With anthropologists Marianne Lien and Gro Ween (University of Oslo) I have been working ethnographically on salmon farming on a project called ‘Newcomers to the Farm’. How do animals and people interact? How are human beings and animals being remade? Now is 'nature' done? These are our core questions. For more details click here.

Vulnerabilities and disasters

I have worked on foot and mouth disease, and the UK response to the disease outbreak of 2001. More recently I've been thinking with CRESC colleagues about the vulnerabilities of finance. How can such complex and (in the end) ramshackle systems be understood and controlled? These are my key questions.

Alternative knowledge spaces

Here I work with Wen-yuan Lin (Tsing-hua University, Taiwan) and scholars at UC Davis and Memorial University, Newfoundland. What are the alternatives to systems of hegemonic knowledge? And how can we detect the Othering that goes with hegemony? These are the central questions.

Links

Personal web page

E-mail: j.law@open.ac.uk

Publications

Book Chapters

Refereed Journal Papers

John Law and Vicky Singleton (2013), 'ANT and politics: working in and on the world', Qualitative Sociology, 36, forthcoming.
Vicky Singleton and John Law (2013), 'Devices as Rituals', Journal of Cultural Economy, forthcoming.
Ruppert, E., J. Law and M. Savage (2013), 'Digital Devices: Reassembling Social Science Methods', Theory, Culture & Society. Special Issue on The Social Life of Methods, (Forthcoming).
John Law and Marianne Lien (2013), 'Slippery: Field Notes on Empirical Ontology', Social Studies of Science, 43, forthcoming.
John Law (2012), ''Notes on Fish, Ponds and Theory', Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 23 (3-4), 225-236.
John Law and Ingunn Moser (2012), 'Contexts and Culling', Science, Technology and Human Values, 37, 332-354.
John Law (2012), 'Piaceri macchinici e interpellanze', Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 3 (1), 99-122.
Marianne Lien and John Law (2011), 'Emergent Aliens‘: On Salmon, Nature and Their Enactment', Ethnos, 76 (1), 65-87.
John Law (2011), 'The Explanatory Burden: an Essay on Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia', Cultural Anthropology, 26 (3), 485-510.
John Law and Annemarie Mol (2011), 'Veterinary realities: what is foot and mouth disease?', Sociologia Ruralis, 51 (1), 1-16.
John Law (2009), 'Seeing Like a Survey', Cultural Sociology, 3 (2), 239-256.
John Law (2008), 'Culling, Catastrophe and Collectivity', Distinktion, 16, 61-77.
John Law and Annemarie Mol (2008), 'Globalisation in Practice: On the Politics of Boiling Pigswill', Geoforum, 39 (1), 133-143.
John Law (2008), 'On Sociology and STS', The Sociological Review, 4 (56), 623–649.
John Law (2006), 'Disaster in Agriculture, or Foot and Mouth Mobilities', Environment and Planning, A (38), 227-239.
Michel Callon and John Law (2005), 'On Qualculation, Agency and Otherness', Society and Space (23), 717–733.
Andrew Smith, Catherine Wild and John Law (2005), 'The Barrow-in-Furness legionnaires' outbreak: qualitative study of the hospital response and the role of the major incident plan', Emergency Medicine Journal, 22, 251.
John Law (2004), '‘And if the Global Were Small and Non-Coherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroque’', Society and Space, 22, 13.
Annemarie Mol and John Law (2004), '‘Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies. The Example of Hypoglycaemia’', The Body and Society,, 2-3 (10), 43.
John Law and John Urry (2004), '‘Enacting the Social’', Economy and Society, 3 (33), 390.

Working Paper

John Law, Geir Afdal, Kristin Asdal, Wen-yuan Lin, Ingunn Moser and Vicky Singleton (2013), 'Modes of Syncretism: notes on non-coherence', CRESC Working Paper 119.
Ismail Ertürk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver, Michael Moran and Karel Williams (2012), 'Deep Stall? The euro zone crisis, banking reform and politics', CRESC Working Paper 110.
Andrew Bowman, Ismail Ertürk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver, Mick Moran and Karel Williams (2012), 'The Finance and Point-Value-Complex', CRESC Working Paper 118.
John Law and Marianne Lien (2012), 'Denaturalising Nature', available at Newcomers to the Farm Project Website.
John Law (2011), 'Assembling the Baroque', CRESC Working Paper 109.
Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams (2011), 'Rebalancing the Economy (Or Buyer's Remorse)', CRESC Working Paper 087.
John Law, Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage (2011), 'The Double Social Life of Methods', CRESC Working Paper 095.
Mike Savage, Evelyn Ruppert and John Law (2010), 'Digital Devices: nine theses', CRESC Working Paper 86.

Research Briefings

Book

John Law (2004), 'After Method: Mess in Social Science Research', London: Routledge.

Projects

Social life of methods

The Challenge of the Digital

In ‘the challenge of the digital’ we explore how social science methods and research are being challenged and reconfigured by developments in the collection, storage, networking,...
The Device
In this project we ask
- How have social habits, identities, attitudes, opinions and feelings been historically constructed through devices such as the census, surveys, polls, market...
Method, non-coherence and performativity

If the world is non-coherent, then what are the methods we need to know it, to enact it, and to live well in it? This is a core question in...

Infrastructures of Social Change

Newcomers to the Farm: Atlantic Salmon between the Wild and the Industrial

Intensive aquaculture has revolutionised the husbandry of marine species. In this project we treat aquaculture as the most recent turn in the human history of domestication. We are asking the...

Events

The Baroque as Empirical Sensibility:

Mon, Jun 13th 2011 - Wed, Jun 15th 2011

The baroque may be understood as a set of styles associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth century, or as a complaint about features of that large and diverse body of work. It may also be understood as a set of procedures or sensibilities that refuses representation and seeks to know, appreciate, trouble, and/or redeem the world allegorically. Informed by this last concern, this workshop will use empirical examples and case studies to explore what this might mean for practical research in the social sciences and the humanities.
How Methods Move in Markets

Fri, Mar 30th 2012

How have theories and methods formatted markets? How have they been moved from economics and STS? These questions will be explored by Michel Callon, Adam Leaver, Fabian Muniesa and Karel Wiliams from CRESC and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris.
CRESC 2013 Annual Conference: In/vulnerabilities and Social Change: Precarious Lives and Experimental Knowledge

Wed, Sep 4th 2013 - Fri, Sep 6th 2013

In a world of radical political, economic and ecological uncertainty, lives and life chances are increasingly precarious for many. It is becoming ever more urgent to explore the changing vulnerabilities of the majority. At the same time, understanding the in/vulnerabilities of elites and their sometimes inadequate forms of expertise and knowledge is also crucial. These are the two central themes of the CRESC 2013 Conference, which is co-sponsored by the Journal for Cultural Economy.
Stones, Sand, Plants: a Day on Knowing Materials

Fri, Jun 28th 2013

What is it to know? And to know materially? What is it to know materials that we think of as mute? Or animal? This day seminar will explore these questions, with distinguished speakers including Penny Harvey, James Leach and Hugh Raffles.