The authors' commentary on Bruno Latour's "Technology is society made durable" provides the reader with an opportunity to become acquainted with actor-network theory.

This study looks at the interactions between health workers, physical space, surgical tools, and the “patient-body” in an operating theater. My aim is to explore the approaches of Katz, Rawlings, and Collins and to show that when rituals, restrictive entrance procedures, and clothing requirements are not in place, when rules are not observed for reasons that this article addresses, the boundary between the operating theater and its surroundings blurs. It becomes a trivialized space. Data were collected in the regional hospital (...) of one major town of the Extrême Nord of Cameroon. I describe a context of crisis and a lack of equipment and personnel that narrow the boundaries of the operating room but do not erase them. Restrictive entrance procedures, clothing requirements, rituals, and rules that are supposed to separate the operating theater from its surroundings, as Katz has shown, are not observed. Instead, the theater is connected to its surroundings through an “intriguing combination of practices” consistent with the analyses of Rawling and Collins. Thus, the operating theater is not a closed and limited area inside the hospital that can be completely isolated from its surroundings. There is continuity between the interior and the exterior. (shrink)

It has been convincingly argued that computer simulation modeling differs from traditional science. If we understand simulation modeling as a new way of doing science, the manner in which scientists learn about the world through models must also be considered differently. This article examines how researchers learn about environmental processes through computer simulation modeling. Suggesting a conceptual framework anchored in a performative philosophical approach, we examine two modeling projects undertaken by research teams in England, both aiming to inform flood risk (...) management. One of the modeling teams operated in the research wing of a consultancy firm, the other were university scientists taking part in an interdisciplinary project experimenting with public engagement. We found that in the first context the use of standardized software was critical to the process of improvisation, the obstacles emerging in the process concerned data and were resolved through exploiting affordances for generating, organizing, and combining scientific information in new ways. In the second context, an environmental competency group, obstacles were related to the computer program and affordances emerged in the combination of experience-based knowledge with the scientists’ skill enabling a reconfiguration of the mathematical structure of the model, allowing the group to learn about local flooding. (shrink)

Examining a fragment of interaction that occurred during a surgery at a teaching hospital, we explore how particular instructed experiences are produced for two trainees, a surgeon in the residency program and a medical student in a surgical clerkship. We are concerned with what is produced as learnable in each case. Stated slightly differently, we are interested in the ways in which the attending surgeon uses demonstrations as instruction and the ways in which recipients of that instruction, in this case (...) the resident and the clerk, respond with enactments of those demonstrated actions. The recipients of this kind of instruction participate in a form of experiential learning in which they enact their own versions of the instructor’s demonstrated actions to be observed and assessed by the instructor. These enactments provide learners with experiential access to the instructor’s demonstrated actions. They are designed to be experiences that learners may draw upon to make experientially warranted claims at some later time. (shrink)