ASC Speakers Series Season #5 - Acting with the World: The Choreography of Agency

[Mateus vanStralen]

ASC Speakers Series Season #5: Fresh Eyes / New Voices

presents:

Acting with the World: The Choreography of Agency

Conversation to explore an unfamiliar but important pattern of environmental action attuned to the agency of nature and wicked problems

Sunday, Mar 16, 2025 12:00 PM EDT 9:00 PDT, 12:00 EDT, 17:00 CEST

FREE REGISTRATION

In the Anthropocene our actions are coming home to roost. Global warming, species extinctions, and environmental disasters are the dark side of our mastery of nature. In his forthcoming book, Acting with the World, Andrew Pickering identifies a different pattern of being and doing that can evade this dark side, a pattern that he calls acting-with the world. In contrast to our usual practice of acting on the world, acting-with foregrounds nonhuman agency and aims to attune our practices to the propensities of nature. The book explores examples of acting-with from around the globe, including flood control on the Mississippi River, ecosystem restoration on the Colorado River, the Room for the River project and rewilding in the Netherlands, natural farming in Japan, Aboriginal fire techniques in Australia, and Amazonian shamanism. Pickering argues that acting-with intimately and gracefully plugs us into nature, undercuts the Anthropocene from below, and offers a constructive approach to addressing otherwise intractable wicked problems.

Branching from these detailed examples with explicit histories and outcomes, our conversation will explore the relationships between wicked problems and Cybernetics, with its unique epistemology and consequent practices. What principles are inherent in acting-with that may be collected into a methodology or meta-methodology with value for scholars and practitioners focused on wicked problems? We invite the audience to join the recursion from examples through principles for acting-with in a range of wicked problems facing our 21st-century lives.

Participants Bios:

Andrew Pickering is professor emeritus of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. Before that he was for many years professor of sociology and director of the STS Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading figure in science and technology studies, writing on topics running from the history of particle physics to cybernetics. He has PhDs in particle physics and science studies and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and at Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. His books include Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, and Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene (forthcoming 1 April 2025).

Paul Pangaro is President of the American Society for Cybernetics; Director, Laboratory for Cybernetics, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU); and Visiting Scholar in School of Architecture and School of Design, CMU. His professional career has spanned software startups, consulting, and academia. He has prototyped systems and designed services for applying Cybernetics to “conversations with content” (software), creating new language for innovation (consulting), and advancing “design for conversation” and “design as conversation” (academia). He is co-lead of the #NewMacy Initiative where his personal focus is responding to the pandemic of today’s AI algorithms. He was awarded a B.S. in Humanities/Computer Science at MIT and a Ph.D. in Cybernetics with Gordon Pask at Brunel University (UK). His work can be found at pangaro.com.

Papers / Links:

Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene: https://www.dukeupress.edu/acting-with-the-world. This page includes a link to the text of the preface and introductory chapter of the book.

 

‘Poiesis in Action: Doing without Knowledge’ in Moritz Epple et al (eds), Weak Knowledge: Forms, Functions, and Dynamics (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2019), pp.61-84.

‘Acting With the World: Doing Without Science’ in A. Carvalho and M. Riquito (eds), Beyond the Anthropocene: Climate Crisis, New Ontologies and Alternatives to the Anthropocentric Modernity, e-cadernos CES, 38 (2022), 155-65. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8jBelaM-VI&t=718s

'Cybernetics in Britain,' in Yuk Hui (ed.), Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Vol. 1 Epistemological Reconstruction,' (Hong Kong: Hanart Press, 2024), pp. 111-27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oWm7JS2pNA

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Mateus van Stralen

ASC Speaker Series Team

American Society for Cybernetics

http://asc-cybernetics.org/