On Monday, 25/06 (as usual 10:15, room 107a) we will be joined by Sebástian Ureta (Santiago de Chile). He will discuss his draft paper “Ruination Science: Producing knowledge out of the debris of Chilean regulatory dreams” in which he analyses ethnographic fieldwork material collected at CENMA, an environmental chemistry lab located in Santiago, Chile. Through the analysis of practical vignettes, the paper argues that ruination science, such as the one practiced at CENMA, tends to be highly inventive, flexible, messy, warm, and ethically entangled, always on the look for alternative, highly case-specific, methods to answer environmental concerns
Sebastián Ureta is an associate professor at Departamento de Sociología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile) and has been a visiting scholar at the Sociology Department, Lancaster University (UK), the Center for Technology and Society, Technical University of Berlin, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich and, currently, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Based on a science and technology studies approach, since 2012 he has been developing a research project focused on studying ethnographically the first implementations of new environmental policies regarding degraded soils in Chile. He is the author of “Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices and the Dream of a World Class Society” (MIT Press, 2015).
Please note that in case you want to attend the session, write a short e-mail to Patrick (patrick.bieler [at] hu-berlin.de) in order to receive the draft paper for preparation.