Anders Blok

Ignacio Farias

Celia Roberts

"This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of 'second generation' ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS"--

A Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

Rosi Braidotti

Sonja Erikainen

Andrea Ford

Roslyn Malcolm

Lisa Raeder

From angiotensin to cortisol, testosterone to xenoestrogens, and dopamine to endocrine disruptors, hormones are everywhere. These chemical entities are foundational to biological life and shape social, cultural, and political forces, while simultaneously being shaped by them. Hormones are increasingly central not only to medical and other body-shaping practices and contemporary science, but also environmentally-oriented conversations. Throughout Hormonal Theory, authors trace how biomedical, social, political, and experiential forces entangle to produce hormones as we know them today. It illuminates how hormones emerge and exist as complex entities that permeate every sphere of our lives. Each glossary entry takes a particular hormonal compound as its starting point, yet works to elaborate and complicate understandings of hormones as distinct biological or chemical entities. The entries collectively show how hormones never operate in isolation from other hormones, nor bodies in isolation from other human and non-human bodies and their socio-ecological surroundings. Indeed, they “cascade” into one another. This volume, then, is not simply a qualitatively-rich companion to medical knowledge about hormones, but a challenge to the conceptual underpinnings of current dominant understandings of disease, wellness, and normalcy.

A Rebellious Glossary

Hormonal Theory

Sarah Franklin

'Born and Made' examines the case of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the procedure used to prevent serious genetic disease by embryo selection, and the so-called 'designer baby' method. It shows that far from being a runaway technology, the regulation of PGD provides an example of precaution and restraint.

An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis

Born and Made

Evelyn Davies

Tom Jupp

Langauge and Discrimination provides a unique and authoritative study of the linguistic dimension of racial discrimination. Based upon extensive work carried out over many years by the Industrial Language Training Service in the U.K, this illuminating analysis argues that a real understanding of how language functions as a means of indirect racial discrimination must be founded on an expanded view of language which recognises the inseparability of language, culture and meaning. After initially introducing the subject matter of the book and providing an overview of discrimination and language learning, the authors examine the relationship between theory and practice in four main areas: theories of interaction and their application; ethnographic and linguistic analysis of workplace settings; training in communication for white professionals; and language training for adult bilingual workers and job-seekers. Detailed case studies illustrate how theory can be turned into practice if appropriate information, research, development and training and co-ordinated in an integrated response to issues of multi-ethnic communication, discrimination and social justice.

Language and Discrimination

Are new reproductive and genetic technologies racing ahead of a society that is unable to establish limits to their use? Have the "new genetics" outpaced our ability to control their future applications? This book examines the case of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the procedure used to prevent serious genetic disease by embryo selection, and the so-called "designer baby" method. Using detailed empirical evidence, the authors show that far from being a runaway technology, the regulation of PGD over the past fifteen years provides an example of precaution and restraint, as well as continual adaptation to changing social circumstances. Through interviews, media and policy analysis, and participant observation at two PGD centers in the United Kingdom, Born and Made provides an in-depth sociological examination of the competing moral obligations that define the experience of PGD. Among the many novel findings of this pathbreaking ethnography of reproductive biomedicine is the prominence of uncertainty and ambivalence among PGD patients and professionals--a finding characteristic of the emerging "biosociety," in which scientific progress is inherently paradoxical and contradictory. In contrast to much of the speculative futurology that defines this field, Born and Made provides a timely and revealing case study of the on-the-ground decision-making that shapes technological assistance to human heredity.

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume. The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.

Celia Roberts

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