Mike Pearson

Mike Pearson died last week. He was a performance artist, theatre director, theorist and philosopher, scholar and teacher. And, as composer John Hardy said, Mike collaborated and connected – visual design, architectural stagecraft, poets, playwrights, composers, experimental jazz musicians, dancers, disability & gender specialists, comics, community art conveners, museum curators, traditional Japanese theatre performers, Patagonian farmers,…

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

Michael Shanks writes. Welcome to a new, and long overdue, website sharing the work of our studio/lab at Stanford. In this contemporary condition of global stasis I offer some orientation on the lab’s projects, past and ongoing. [Link – a talk for SAP Moscow on global crisis April 2020] Current projects – [Link] Research Creation…

Review of: The Archaeology of Science: Studying the creation of useful knowledge by Michael Brian Schiffer

Twenty years ago, perhaps due to the very “intellectual faddism” that the author laments (5), a book similarly titled would likely be a metaphorical appropriation of the discipline’s popularized method in the manner of Foucault. Yet on page six alone, in the clear and succinct writing style that characterizes the volume, the author reclaims the…

Symmetry, STS, Archaeology (Part 2)

. . .continued from Part 1 of 2. Temporality The ethnographic examination of archaeological practice has become an established sub-domain (Edgeworth 2006, 2010; Yarrow 2003), although this reflexive platform has not developed in explicit contact with STS ethnographies of science (Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1985). The characterization of scientific activity…

Symmetry, STS, Archaeology (Part 1 of 2)

Territorial wrangling is a good indicator that there is something emergent which is coveted amongst disciplines. The principle of symmetry, while a topic no longer generating any sustained discussion in its home setting of Science and Technology Studies (STS), is a case in point. Given recent disciplinary exchange involving symmetry, it seems appropriate to post…