Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in producing a politics for urban wilds. In order to do this we learn how to sense urban wildlife. In learning new engagements we also learn new things and in particular come to see urban wilds as matters of controversy. For this reason we have borrowed and adapted Latour's language to talk of wild things. Wild things become more rather than less real as people learn to engage with them. At the same time, wild things are too disputed, sociable, and uncertain to become constant objects upon which a stable urban politics can be constructed. So a parliament of wild things might be rather different from the house of representatives that we commonly imagine. It may be closer to what Stengers (1997, Power and Invention University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) has characterised as cosmopolitics, a politics that is worked out without recourse to old binaries of nature and society. Using empirical work with urban wildlife-trust members we muddy the clean lines of representational politics, and start to grapple with issues that a reconvened wild politics might involve.

The focus of this paper is Tasmanian Atlantic salmon, and the ways in which this object has served historically to enact, to produce, and to challenge key boundaries and continuities in the construction of Tasmania as a distinct place in the world. Tracing the object and its trajectories in time and space, I shall argue that the making of place involves practices, images, and experiences that connect and disconnect a place to significant places elsewhere. It is argued that both species and the spaces they inhabit are sustained by hybrid networks which stretch across time and space and thus escape the timeless boundedness and genealogical purity inherent in contemporary visions of nature.

In this paper we document current research into new forms of public engagement presently taking place in UK biodiversity policy. This involves locating the main participants in such patterns of engagement; namely nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. Two interwoven and mutually interdependent perspectives or ‘imaginaries’—the ‘cartographic’ and the ‘ethnographic’—are presented in the paper to explore the shaping and interpretation of such new forms of engagement. However, in this context the interest lies in the ways in which either perspective is foregrounded or backgrounded by the different parties involved. The described shifts and movements of a range of actors and processes being studied demonstrate the fluidity and instability of networks of ‘knowing nature well’, whose stability is often assumed. The tracing of two constants— expertise and exchange—within networks inhabited by nature and by amateur and professional naturalists allows for an exploration of ways in which social/natural inclusions and exclusions occur in new participatory practices designed as part of biodiversity action planning.

Neonatal intensive care work may be understood as a network in which doctors, babies, parents, technology, and medical care are associated together in a complex social topology. The boundaries of what counts as the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are always shifting. The regular appearance of new members, new patients, and new technologies means that much effort must be expended to hold the unit together as a functional entity. We examine how the baby (the neonate receiving care) acts the ‘object’ around which the unit is continuously ordered. The identity of the baby—what it is, what attributes are considered important, what effects it generates—is changeable. We present an argument, drawing variously on debates in the sociology of translation (that is, John Law, Bruno Latour, Kevin Hetherington and Nick Lee, Annamarie Mol, and Marilyn Strathern), the monism of Henri Bergson, and the ‘objectivity’ of Michel Serres, which identifies two ‘functionally blank’ actors in the NICU—a bilirubin machine and the baby itself. Both act to slow down and to stabilise networked relations. However, the ‘hybrid agency’ of the baby also acts as a resource that enables the network to turn back on itself or to be ‘cut’. We outline how this process appears to operate and the way in which it serves to resolve issues of accountability.

In this paper we explore the boundary between calculative and noncalculative action by arguing that these are separate but mutually constitutive. By using the notion of qualculation, a neologism coined by Cochoy, we redefine the notion of calculation to include judgment. We then argue that making qualculability is not trivial: that it takes effort to create calculation and judgment. But it also takes effort to consider nonqualculability. Two strategies for achieving nonqualculability are identified, those of rarefaction and proliferation. Rarefaction, illustrated by the cases of Quaker worship and selfless love or agapè, works by withdrawing all qualculative resources. Conversely, proliferation, illustrated by the attribution of cause and responsibility after railway accidents, and by a major television fund-raiser, the ‘Téléthon’, works to impede calculation by an overload of qualculative resources.

The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade—conceptually, socially, and materially—have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper—the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years—constitutes, we contend, a case study of such processes taken to extremes. This, in turn, makes Yucca Mountain an interesting vantage point from which to (re)view the traditional ontological and epistemological preoccupations characteristic of social science, not so much in terms of abstract theory but rather in terms of concrete practical problems of spatial and temporal organisation.

This is a story about the boundaried nature of stories and the storied nature of boundaries. It concerns a modern ‘scientific’ boundary: the West Australian border. In the process of trying to locate Aboriginal boundaries in a native title claim, this border is revealed as problematic and bent, and as rooted in the colonial history of the last 500 years. The tensions between Western and Aboriginal conceptions of boundaries open up a space for the exploration of the hidden social and narratological dimensions of land and knowledge, ownership, and authority.

In this paper I explore the relationship between the UK New Public Health Policy and one of its enactments. I outline a crucial policy document, Saving Lives (Department of Health, 1999, HMSO, London), and consider the practices that constitute a localised initiative called The Heart of the Shire. This initiative aims to train all members of a rural community in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation in order to prevent deaths from cardiac arrest. I argue that Saving Lives promises a new approach to public health that transgresses traditional boundaries and collapses conventional dualisms. Yet, at the same time it privileges biomedical interventions and conventional modes of care. I argue that the policy is full of incompatibilities but that these incompatibilities are not destructive. Rather, they create a series of tensions that, in turn, expose the fluidity of boundaries and work against the stability of categories and in doing so afford the promise of the policy. I go on to describe the key practices of The Heart of the Shire, focusing on how the tensions of the policy are played out in practice. It seems that the promise of the New Public Health Policy does not survive its practices. The practices are creative and varied and are deeply embedded within the community in ways that make them ‘new’, yet they also enact ‘old’ boundaries and conventional dualisms. They smooth out the incompatibilities that characterise the policy and thereby solidify boundaries and stabilise categories. Hence, my argument is that it is the making of consistencies that leads to the (re)construction of conventional categories and boundaries. I conclude by suggesting that Saving Lives offers us a glimpse of the conditions of possibility for a promising approach to public health but that the practices that constitute The Heart of the Shire suggest the tremendous amount of work that would be required to enact it. Drawing upon Helen Verran's insight about ‘hardening of the categories’ I suggest that the practices of The Heart of the Shire are lazy in their refusal of the vulnerability (and the promise) of tensions and that consequently the approach to public health that is enacted is characterised by stabilised categories and impermeable boundaries.

In this paper I explore some limits of the generalized symmetry of actor-network theory. The paper is based on a study on cows, farming technology, and farming science, and is empirically based on an anthropological fieldwork in modern, computerized cowsheds. By exploring differences in interactions between human beings and cows, on the one hand, and between human beings and computers, on the other, I argue that the partly common natural history of human beings and cows, and the lack of such a history in human–computer interactions, makes it impossible to be agnostic about where to find subjectivity in such a place as a cowshed. Animal bodies (including human beings) demand certain kinds of interactions, and thus produce certain distributions of subjectivities. The boundary of animality is not a purely ‘cultural’ distinction, and cannot be deconstructed as such.