Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 6c
Linking micro and macro social worlds
Thursday 9 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'And what if the sociological imagination was symmetrical? On the implications of an actor-network approach to qualitative and material complexities: The case of dairy milk' - Dr Richie Nimmo (University of Manchester)
Milk is a supremely mundane everyday commodity, yet it is also a deeply complex socio-material artefact, the product of an intricate history of interconnections between phenomena as diverse as cows, humans, technologies, diseases, forms of knowledge and expertise, soil and climate, war, economics and politics. This paper explores the implications of actor-network theory as an approach to reckoning with such heterogeneous realities. It shows how tracing the history of the modernisation of dairy milk involves tracing a network of connections between radically heterogeneous entities, rendering absurd any attempt to organise such knowledge in terms of separate categories of 'social' and 'natural', 'human' and 'nonhuman', as though these corresponded to separate ontological domains or 'levels' of reality. Instead, it argues, these domains are continually being brought into being by modern knowledge-practices, in the face of a lived reality in which the kinds of things they purport to classify are constitutively intermixed, and where everything takes place on the same 'level'. In this light, the paper reflects upon the possibilities of a 'sociological imagination' which proceeds by thinking such categories simultaneously, or, better, by imagining a reality which is not so divided.