Week 12: Among many others

ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2, 2025)
October 31, 2025

Main reading: Pickering (2024)

Other reading: Pickering (2025)

Notes

This week is reserved for a topic to be determined. It is an opportunity to take stock of where we’ve been and to pursue any remaining loose ends.

Keywords

subjectivity, agency, life

Learning outcomes

Be able to state one’s own position on the network paradigm in anthropology, and to identify its continuity with other approaches as well as its contrast

Procedures for the feedback activity

15:00–15:05. Ryan will set up a table for students to drop off drafts. Students enter, go to the table, drop off their draft, and collect two worksheets.
15:05–15:10. Ryan gives a card to each student and writes that student’s number on the draft. Cards are numbered 1..26.
15:05–15:10. Students collect a worksheet for giving feedback and a worksheet for reflecting on the process.
15:11. When all drafts are handed in:

Ryan arrays the numbered drafts on the first row of desks (or on other free tables).
Ryan calculates the midpoint (M). The next card is N + 1 for N = total number of drafts. Find N. If N is odd, M = (N - 1)/2. If N is even, M = N/2.

Ryan announces N and M to the class, and how to find partners:

“The total number of papers is N. M is the dividing line.”
- [If N is odd] “Person #1 reviews Draft #M+1 and Person #M+1 reviews Draft #N, and Person #N reviews Draft #1”
“If your number is higher than M, then subtract M from your number and collect that draft.”
“If your number is less than or equal to M, then add M to your number and collect that draft.”
“Come up and collect your partner’s draft.”

15:12–15:32. Students read their assigned drafts, marking them up if needed, and then writing feedback on the worksheet. This should take no more than 20 minutes.
15:32–15:52. Students meet up with their partners (or as a trio) and take turns providing feedback verbally. This should take no more than 20 minutes.
15:52–15:55. Students write a reflection using the second worksheet on the experience of giving and receiving feedback. At the end of class, they turn in the reflection worksheet to Ryan.

AI acknowledgement

I developed these procedures in the context of a chat with Google Gemini, which clearly does not have a lot of seminar teaching experience. See https://gemini.google.com/share/58a00b53ff31.

Agenda for the second hour

Observations on the feedback activity
Opener presentation: Evie H.
Presenter’s item(s)

How can human actors interact with nonhuman actors without bias toward other kinds of actors, or by imposing human-centered ontology on other modes or kinds of action?
Does a homeostat need to be an “agent”? Why do we have to attribute agency to agents? What’s the alternative?
“They model agency as emergent” (19)

References

Pickering, Andrew. 2024. “What Is Agency? A View from Science Studies and Cybernetics.” Biological Theory 19 (1): 16–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-023-00437-1.

———. 2025. Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.