Socioplastics 11804 An Ecology That Holds Its Differences
Transdisciplinary work brings different practices into contact, where translation can alter the claims each practice makes. KnowledgeFriction names the resistance and new understanding produced by that encounter. A neighbourhood heat study might combine municipal temperature indicators, residents’ accounts, botanical observations and artistic mapping. These sources describe related conditions while using different scales, times and standards of evidence. Félix Guattari’s three ecologies connect social, mental and environmental relations. Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges attend to the location of observation. Isabelle Stengers’s ecology of practices asks how each practice can retain its own requirements within a shared inquiry. Bruno Latour traces associations among human and nonhuman actors. Their approaches give researchers ways to map relations while preserving differences in authority and method. A field study could identify who contributes each form of evidence, which translation medium carries it and what changes during that passage. The team might compare a heat map with residents’ accounts of when buildings retain heat and with observations of tree cover. It would record who bears the cost of translating experience into policy categories and whether the final interpretation changes the original claims. A shared map could display the sources in relation, alongside their methods and limits. KnowledgeFriction offers a practical account of transdisciplinary work through the transformations that occur at points of contact. The aim is to make collaboration answerable to the evidence, labour and disagreements it gathers. The result can support joint action while keeping the conditions of each contribution visible.
REFERENCES
Guattari, F. (2000) The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone Press.
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stengers, I. (2005) ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) Making Things Public. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 994–1003.
Stengers, I. (2010) Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html