•  16
    Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (edited book)
    Duke University Press. 2002.
    Although much recent social science and humanities work has been a revolt against simplification, this volume explores the contrast between simplicity and complexity to reveal that this dichotomy, itself, is too simplistic. John Law and Annemarie Mol have gathered a distinguished panel of contributors to offer—particularly within the field of science studies—approaches to a theory of complexity, and at the same time a theoretical introduction to the topic. Indeed, they examine not only ways of r…Read more
  •  15
    Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: the Example of Hypoglycaemia
    Body and Society 10 (2-3): 43-62. 2004.
    We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated wit…Read more
  •  33
    Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices
    with Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage
    Theory, Culture and Society 30 (4): 22-46. 2013.
    The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations.…Read more
  • The practice of fishy sentience
    with Marianne Lien
    In Kristin Asdal & Tone Druglitrø (eds.), Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More-Than-Human Condition, Routledge. 2016.
  •  5
    Contexts and Culling (review)
    with Ingunn Moser
    Science, Technology, and Human Values 37 (4): 332-354. 2012.
    This article asks how contexts are made in science as well as in social science, and how the making of contexts relates to political agency and intervention. To explore these issues, it traces contexting for foot-and-mouth disease and the strategies used to control the epidemic in the United Kingdom in 2001. It argues that to depict the world is to assemble contexts and to hold them together in a mode that may be descriptive, explanatory, or predictive. In developing this argument, it explores h…Read more
  •  32
    Objects and Spaces
    Theory, Culture and Society 19 (5-6): 91-105. 2002.
    Law's article begins by restating the classical ANT position that objects do not exist `in themselves' but are the effect of a performative stabilization of relational networks. In addition, these material enactments inevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatial conditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not be reified as a natural, pre-existing container of the social and the material, but is itself a performance. Moreover, there are m…Read more
  •  45
    "What is a military aircraft? John Law shows in his beautiful analysis that it is a constant oscillation between multiplicity and singularity.
  •  29
    Modes of Syncretism
    with Vicky Singleton, Geir Afdal, Kristin Asdal, and Wen-Yuan Lin
    Common Knowledge 20 (1): 172-192. 2014.
    In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” the authors, all of whom work in the field of science, technology, and society, begin from the assumption that, as Bruno Latour has put it, “we have never been modern.” They accept the STS thesis that, while modern practices purport to be entirely rational and coherent, on closer inspection they turn out to be as much noncoherent as coherent. This article poses the question of what forms “noncoherences” take and how they are…Read more