Cross Comparison: Comparisons across Architectural Displays of Colonial Power

M AT T E R I N G P R E S S Mattering Press is an academic-led Open Access publisher that operates on a not-for-profit basis as a UK registered charity. It is committed to developing new publishing models that can widen the constituency of academic knowledge and provide authors with significant levels of support and feedback. All books are available to download for free or to purchase as hard copies. More at matteringpress.org. The Press’s work has been supported by: Centre for Invention and Social Process (Goldsmiths, University of London), European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, Hybrid Publishing Lab, infostreams, Institute for Social Futures (Lancaster University), Open Humanities Press, and Tetragon.

Making this book Mattering Press is keen to render more visible the unseen processes that go into the production of books. We would like to thank Joe Deville, who acted as the Press’s coordinating editor for this book, the reviewer Manuel Tironi, Jenn Tomomitsu for the copy-editing, Tetragon for the production and typesetting, Sarah Terry for the proofreading, and Ed Akerboom at infostreams for formatting the html version of this book.

C ov e r Browsing books, on- or offline, entails comparison, of covers amongst other things. Designing covers too entails comparison, of typefaces, for example. Typographic judgments of aesthetic, use, and conceptual value are settled by comparing different typefaces that, to the trained eye, mark particular histories of craft, production, and thought. Books on graphic design, such as Josef MüllerBrockmann’s great Grid Systems, establish ‘good’ typography by reference to a canon of classic, Latin typefaces, some of which you can compare, in practice, on this cover. Another tool of comparison, the Mango Maturity and Ripeness Guide, developed by the mango quality research team at the University of Florida and the University of California-Davis (available at www.mango.org), provides this cover with a colour scheme and its users with a means to establish if a mango is ‘ripe’ for consumption. Mattering Press thanks Łukasz Dziedzic for Lato, our incomparable cover typeface. It remains one of the best free typefaces available and is released by his foundry tyPoland under the free, libre and open source Open Font License. Cover art by Julien McHardy.

PRACTISING COMPARISON Logics, Relations, Collaborations

edited by

joe deville, michael guggenheim, zuzana hrdlicˇ ková

First edition published by Mattering Press, Manchester. Copyright © Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim, and Zuzana Hrdličková, chapters by respective authors, 2016. Cover art © Julien McHardy, 2016. Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London Freely available online at www.matteringpress.org/books/practising-comparison This is an open access book, and the text and cover art are licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the material is not used for commercial purposes and the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

ISBN: 978-0-9931449-4-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-9931449-5-0 (ebk) Mattering Press has made every effort to contact copyright holders and will be glad to rectify, in future editions, any errors or omissions brought to our notice.

C ONTE N TS

List of Figures

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Contributors

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Acknowledgements

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1 · Introduction: The Practices and Infrastructures of Comparison Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana Hrdličková

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Section One: Logics 2 · Comparative Research: Beyond Linear-causal Explanation Monika Krause

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3 · Cross Comparison: Comparisons across Architectural Displays of Colonial Power Alice Santiago Faria

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Section Two: Collaborations 4 · Same, Same but Different: Provoking Relations, Assembling the Comparator Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana Hrdličková

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5 · Pulling Oneself Out of the Traps of Comparison: An Autoethnography of a European Project Madeleine Akrich and Vololona Rabeharisoa

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6 · Frame Against the Grain: Asymmetries, Interference, and the Politics of EU Comparison Tereza Stöckelová

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Section Three: Relations 7 · Lateral Comparisons Christopher Gad and Casper Bruun Jensen

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8 · Comparative Tinkering with Care Moves Peter A. Lutz

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9 · Comparing Comparisons: On Rankings and Accounting in Hospitals and Universities Sarah de Rijcke, Iris Wallenburg, Paul Wouters, Roland Bal

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10 · Steve Jobs, Terrorists, Gentlemen, and Punks: Tracing Strange Comparisons of Biohackers Morgan Meyer

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11 · Afterword: Spaces of Comparison Jennifer Robinson

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L IS T OF F IGURES

I l l u s t r at i o n s Fig. 1.1   Relative frequency of the terms ‘comparative sociology’ or ‘comparative anthropology’ in books scanned by Google 1950–2008 Fig. 3.1   Triumphal Arches (comparing by building type), J.N.L. Durand, 1799 Fig. 3.2   Neolithic gravestone vs. Corbusier’s Ronchamp tower, S. Giedion, 1968 Fig. 3.3   General Post Office, Calcutta, designed by W. Granville, 1864–1868 Fig. 3.4   Central Post Office, Panjim, Goa, designed by PWD, 1893 Fig. 3.5   Synchronised Timeline (establishment period shown in darker grey) Fig. 3.6   Cathedral, Old Goa (sixteenth century) Fig. 3.7   Victoria Terminus, Bombay (nineteenth century) Fig. 4.1   A comparator chip Fig. 4.2   The assembled comparator

19 73 77 82 82 83 85 85 100 108

Ta b l e s Table 5.1  Degree of stabilisation of issues vs. POs’ alignment to the biomedical world 138 7

C ONTR IBUTO RS

Madeleine Akrich is a professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation (Mines ParisTech). After being devoted to the sociology of technology for several years, her work has centred on medicine: firstly, on a comparative study of obstetrical practices between France and the Netherlands, and secondly, on internet discussion groups that focus on health problems. More recently, with Vololona Rabeharisoa, she has coordinated a European project on the engagement of patient organisations with knowledge and the transformative effects it has on their form of activism (see the recent special issue of Biosocieties on ‘Evidence-Based Activism’, 2014). Roland Bal is Professor of Healthcare Governance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include science-policy-practice relations and governance infrastructures in healthcare. More recently, he has researched the creation of public accountabilities in healthcare, studying the ways in which public service organisations ‘organise for transparency’. He currently works with the Netherlands healthcare inspectorate in research projects on regulation and supervision. Roland’s focus is on ethnographic, interventionist research methods. Recent publications have appeared in, amongst other journals, Social Science & Medicine; Science, Technology, & Human Values; International Journal of Medical Informatics; and Public Administration. Joe Deville is a lecturer at Lancaster University, based jointly in the Departments of Organisation, Work & Technology and Sociology, and is a co-director of the Centre for Mobilities Research. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2011 and published his first book, Lived Economies of Default, with Routledge in early 2015. He has written widely on issues of credit, debt, and disaster preparedness in journals including Sociological Review; Journal of Cultural Economy; and 9

practising comparison Consumption Markets and Culture. He is also an editor for Mattering Press and Journal of Cultural Economy. Christopher Gad is Associate Professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen in the research group Technologies in Practice. His former and present research areas and interests include Science and Technology Studies, (post-)ActorNetwork Theory, lateral thinking, ontological multiplicity and complexity, promises, aspirations and challenges related to information technologies, digitalisation and computational thinking in theory and practice, ethnographic, virtual, micro-sociological, mixed, and non-foundationalist approaches, democracy, elections and disability, bureaucracy and organisational theory, fisheries inspection, and surveillance. Michael Guggenheim is a reader at Goldsmiths, University of London and a director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CSISP). He has published widely on social theory, disasters, buildings and inventive methods. Most recently he co-edited Disasters and Politics (Sociological Review Monograph series, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and published ‘The Media of Sociology: Tight and Loose Translations’ in the British Journal of Sociology. He is an editor of the journal Demonstrations: Journal for Experiments in Social Studies of Technology. Alice Santiago Faria is currently a research fellow at CHAM (FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa e Universidade dos Açores), and at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Universidade de Lisboa). She graduated in Architecture from Coimbra University (1997) and holds a PhD in Art History (Université de Paris I, 2011). Her research focuses on colonial public works in the Portuguese Empire during the long nineteenth century. She participated in the volume ‘Asia’ in Portuguese Heritage around the World: Architecture and Urbanism (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2010). Zuzana Hrdlicˇ ková is a social anthropologist interested in gender, conflict, and disaster within and outside academic settings. She completed her 10

Contributors PhD – which analysed the impact of war in Sri Lanka on women – at Charles University in Prague in 2009. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate at Goldsmiths, University of London, looking at disasters and their management in India. She has published numerous academic papers on these topics and she has co-edited special volumes, most recently ‘Living with Disasters: Perspectives on the (Re) Production of Knowledge’ in Nature and Culture. She is interested in bridging the space between academia and applied work. Casper Bruun Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Department of Anthropology, Osaka University. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (Sense, 2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik; MIT, 2013) and the editor with Kjetil Rödje of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology (Berghahn, 2009). His present work focuses on environmental infrastructures in South-east Asia. Monika Krause is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research addresses comparative questions about specialised practices as well as issues in sociological theory. She is the author of The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason (Chicago University Press, 2015), which won the BSA’s 2015 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for a first book in sociology. An edited volume exploring the uses of the concept of field for global analysis (Fielding Transnationalism, with Julian Go) is forthcoming in 2016 as a Sociological Review Monograph (Wiley-Blackwell). Peter Lutz has published on the topics of human-nonhuman relations in home care for older people, as well as user participation for the design of new technologies. He draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies and anthropology. His current interests include the use of participatory research in ‘social sustainability’ initiatives. He is presently based at Uppsala University. Morgan Meyer is a lecturer in sociology at AgroParisTech and a research affiliate at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS). 11

practising comparison He holds a PhD in sociology (University of Sheffield) and has been a postdoc at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech. His current research focuses on two themes: the emergence, governance, and debates on new forms of biology (synthetic biology, do-it-yourself biology), and the spaces and practices of ‘knowledge brokering’ and the boundaries of science. He has recently edited a special issue of Sociological Research Online on ‘epistemic communities’ (with Susan Molyneux-Hodgson) and a special issue of Science and Public Policy on ‘intermediaries’ (with Matthew Kearnes). Vololona Rabeharisoa is a professor of sociology at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines ParisTech. She is interested in the increasing involvement of civil society organisations in scientific and technical activities. She is investigating the engagement of patients’ organisations with biomedical research, the governance of health, and the development of drugs and therapeutic strategies, notably in the area of rare diseases. Beyond the biomedical domain, she explores the emergence of new public issues around genomics. She is currently participating in a research project on forensics, looking at the uses of DNA fingerprints in crime investigations and criminal justice in France. Sarah de Rijcke is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University. De Rijcke leads a research group at CWTS that examines interactions between research assessment and practices of knowledge production. This research programme is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and the sociology and anthropology of science. The group is partner in national and international consortia that study new forms of research governance, policies for scientific excellence, and research integrity. Recent projects have focused on the interactions between performance metrics and epistemic decision-making processes in different disciplines. Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography at University College London. Her book, Ordinary Cities (Routledge, 2006) developed a postcolonial critique of urban studies. She is preparing a new book on Comparative Urbanism, to propose methodological foundations for a more global urban studies. Earlier 12

Contributors empirical research explored the history of apartheid cities and the politics of post-apartheid city-visioning. Current empirical projects focus on transnational aspects of Johannesburg and London’s policymaking processes and the politics of large-scale urban developments. Tereza Stöckelová is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Assistant Professor at the Department of General Anthropology, Charles University, and Editor-in-Chief of the English edition of Sociologický časopis /Czech Sociological Review. Her work is situated in between sociology, social anthropology, and science and technology studies, and draws upon actor network theory and related material semiotic methodologies. She has investigated academic practices in the context of current policy changes, science and society relations, and environmental controversies, and more recently has started an ethnography of the interfaces between biomedical and alternative therapeutic practices in the Czech Republic. She is a regular contributor to Czech public media and believes social sciences have to make sense beyond academia. Iris Wallenburg is Assistant Professor of Healthcare Governance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of work on professionalism, organisations, and institutional theory, using ethnographic research methods. Recent projects have been on task reallocation in healthcare in Europe, performance measurement, professional behaviour, and ‘place-making’ as a way of perceiving healthcare practices. Paul Wouters is Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University and Professor of Scientometrics at Leiden University. He is Chair of the Dutch national graduate school, Science, Technology and Modern Culture. He has published on the history of the Science Citation Index, on scientometrics and on the way the criteria of scientific quality have been changed by citation analysis. With Anne Beaulieu, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Sally Wyatt, he co-edited Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2013).

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