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  1.  20
    Stitching together the heterogeneous party: A complementary social data science experiment.Morten A. Pedersen, Snorre Ralund, Mette M. Madsen, Tobias B. Jørgensen, Hjalmar B. Carlsen & Anders Blok - 2017 - Big Data and Society 4 (2).
    The era of ‘big data’ studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats – digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. – rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to combine ‘big’ transactional and ‘small’ ethnographic data formats. Our collaboration is (...)
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  2.  22
    Complementary social science? Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world.Morten Axel Pedersen & Anders Blok - 2014 - Big Data and Society 1 (2).
    The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal questions by way of a experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, physicists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists is setting up a large-scale data infrastructure, meant to continually (...)
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  3. Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-human Agencies.Casper Bruun Jensen & Anders Blok - 2013 - Theory, Culture and Society 30 (2):84-115.
    In a wide range of contemporary debates on Japanese cultures of technological practice, brief reference is often made to distinct Shinto legacies, as forming an animist substratum of indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmological imaginations. Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’: exhibiting a ‘polymorphous perversity’ that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings. In this article, we deploy instances of Japanese techno-animism as sites of theoretical experimentation on what Bruno Latour calls a symmetrical anthropology (...)
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  4.  25
    Pragmatic sociology as political ecology: On the many worths of nature(s).Anders Blok - 2013 - European Journal of Social Theory 16 (4):492-510.
    This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in (...)
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  5.  10
    War of the Whales: Post-Sovereign Science and Agonistic Cosmopolitics in Japanese-Global Whaling Assemblages.Anders Blok - 2011 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 36 (1):55-81.
    This article examines some of the difficulties of universalistic science in situations of deep conflict over global nature, using empirical material pertaining to ongoing controversies in the context of Japanese whaling practices. Within global-scale whaling assemblages since the 1970s, science has become a ‘‘post-sovereign’’ authority, unable to impose any stable definition of nature on all actors. Instead, across spaces of deep antagonistic differences, anti- and pro-whalers now ontologically enact a multiplicity of mutually irreconcilable versions of whales. Empirically, the article attempts (...)
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  6.  21
    The Anthropologist, the Moralist, and the Diplomat.Anders Blok - 2020 - Common Knowledge 26 (2):212-229.
    This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his progress—from the anthropologist, charged with unraveling techno-scientific networks, to the moralist, participating in the parliament of nature, to the diplomat, negotiating the moderns’ many modes of existence. Rather than a neat blueprint for carving up (...)
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  7.  33
    Inheriting Rorty.Anders Blok & Casper Bruun Jensen - 2023 - Common Knowledge 29 (1):41-58.
    This contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” argues that the field of science studies should be understood as a way of inheriting, rather than fundamentally breaking with, Rorty's antifoundationalism and postepistemology. Taken together, the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway has been less about rebalancing the relative and the objective, and more about redrawing the checkerboard of knowledge into “in-disciplinary” styles of empirical philosophy. These styles rely on doubly (...)
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  8.  22
    Urban Climate Risk Communities: East Asian World Cities as Cosmopolitan Spaces of Collective Action?Anders Blok - 2016 - Theory, Culture and Society 33 (7-8):271-279.
    Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology affords a much-needed rethinking of the transnational politics of climate change, not least in pointing to an emerging inter-urban geography of world cities as a potential new source of community, change and solidarity. This short essay, written in honour of Beck’s forward-looking agenda for a post-Euro-centric social science, outlines the contours of such an urban-cosmopolitan ‘realpolitik’ of climate risks, as this is presently unfolding across East Asian world cities. Much more than a theory-building endeavour, the essay (...)
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  9.  14
    Grøn Genstart: A quali-quantitative micro-history of a political idea in real-time.Morten A. Pedersen, Anders Blok, Thyge R. Enggaard & Annika S. H. Isfeldt - 2022 - Big Data and Society 9 (1).
    In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart across Twitter and other public–political domains. Specifically, we achieve our micro-history through an iterative and mutual attuning between (...)
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