Stanford Humanities Center
This meeting will serve as the final workshop meeting for the academic year. We will review works-in-progress by core members of the Techniques of Mediation group. We will also facilitate a discussion and reflection about this year's guest speakers, as well as discuss future plans and goals. Interested graduate students and faculty are welcome to attend.
The “Techniques of Mediation” research workshop explores how technologies of inscription, mediation, information, and archives create the social world, by examining a wide range of historical and contemporary assemblages of people, machines, and organizations that have shaped complex diagrams of power and of social life. The workshop approaches this question through new theoretical understandings of the concept of mediation. The 20th-century legacy that privileged epistemology confined mediation to the status of an inert and transparent subsidiary of representation and interpretation, and has left mediation’s material presence and its capacity of enactment largely unexplored. From index cards to databases, from the alphabet to ASCII, and from the abacus to the algorithm, the workshop will explore concrete cases of mediation’s effectivity, and by doing so expand our assessment of mediation to the status of technically – and materially – determinate processes of world-making and knowledge production. Faculty sponsors are Thomas Mullaney (History) and Miyako Inoue (Anthropology).
