af Lis Højgaard & Dorte Marie Søndergaard
 
Paper in Workshop: Material Feminism(s) – Analysis/theorizing of social science data/ Hillevi Lenz Taguchi. Feminist Research Methods – An international conference Stockholm University, 4.-6. February 2009.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a set of methodological tools which may prove helpful in relation to empirical studies that aims to use the theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies, Actor Network Theory and Poststructuralist Theory.

These theoretical positions do – in spite of all their differences – share an overall ambition: namely to open analytic understandings concerning how 'reality' becomes reality, how matter and discourse come to matter, how dualistic constituents like nature/culture, human/non-human, and matter/discourse work, how they are produced and reproduced, with what effects and by what means.

Emphasis has been put differently among the varying traditions and scholars – some giving priority to discourse, others to matter and technology, some are including subjectivity etc.

The ambition in this paper is to consider potential enacting forces among all these possibilities: matter, discourse, technology, and subjectivity, and – next – to discuss what kinds of methodological demands this kind of analytic take brings to the fore. What empirical material would one have to access? What kinds of approaches to that kind of material might be productive? What forms might pre-analyses take? What kinds of analytic approaches, analytic questions and readings would do justice to the theoretical outset?

The paper takes up promising philosophical heritage from Donna Haraway and Judith Butler and follow these tracks through the conceptualisation of Karen Barad's agential realism and into empirical methodologies as developed by Stine Adrian, Cussins/Thomson, both studying reproductive technologies – Dorte Marie Søndergaard, studying children and real/virtual intra-activity around video games and bullying practices – and Lis Højgaard studying  the constitutive discursive and material forces operating in loci of knowledge production within the humanities and the natural sciences.