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urn:uuid:ef825a4b-82f7-4fe9-8906-ce6146985d21 03 15 9780993144943 00 EB E101 10 01 01 Practising Comparison Logics, Relations, Collaborations 1 A01 Joe Deville Joe Deville is a lecturer at Lancaster University, based jointly in the Departments of Organisation, Work & Technology and Sociology, and is a co-director of the Centre for Mobilities Research. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2011 and published his first book, Lived Economies of Default, with Routledge in early 2015. He has written widely on issues of credit, debt, and disaster preparedness in journals including Sociological Review; Journal of Cultural Economy; and Consumption Markets and Culture. He is also an editor for Mattering Press and Journal of Cultural Economy. 2 B01 Michael Guggenheim Michael Guggenheim is a reader at Goldsmiths, University of London and a director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CSISP). He has published widely on social theory, disasters, buildings and inventive methods. Most recently he co-edited Disasters and Politics (Sociological Review Monograph series, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and published ‘The Media of Sociology: Tight and Loose Translations’ in the British Journal of Sociology. He is an editor of the journal Demonstrations: Journal for Experiments in Social Studies of Technology. 3 B01 Zuzana Hrdličková Zuzana Hrdlicˇ ková is a social anthropologist interested in gender, conflict, and disaster within and outside academic settings. She completed her PhD – which analysed the impact of war in Sri Lanka on women – at Charles University in Prague in 2009. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate at Goldsmiths, University of London, looking at disasters and their management in India. She has published numerous academic papers on these topics and she has co-edited special volumes, most recently ‘Living with Disasters: Perspectives on the (Re) Production of Knowledge’ in Nature and Culture. She is interested in bridging the space between academia and applied work. 01 eng 00 324 03 10 SOC019000 10 SOC026040 01 06 03 00 This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity.Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparing like this is an everyday practice. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it.How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves.This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison. 04 00 List of Figures 7 Contributors 9 Acknowledgements 15 ____ 1 · Introduction: The Practices and Infrastructures of Comparison. Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zuzana Hrdličková, 17 SECTION ONE: LOGICS 2 · Comparative Research: Beyond Linear-causal Explanation. Monika Krause, 45 3 · Cross Comparison: Comparisons across Architectural Displays of Colonial Power. Alice Santiago Faria, 68 SECTION TWO: COLLABORATIONS 4 · Same, Same but Different: Provoking Relations, Assembling the Comparator. Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zuzana Hrdličková, 99 5 · Pulling Oneself Out of the Traps of Comparison: An Auto-ethnography of a European Project. Madeleine Akrich and Vololona Rabeharisoa, 130 6 · Frame Against the Grain: Asymmetries, Interference, and the Politics of EU Comparison. Tereza Stöckelová, 166 SECTION THREE: RELATIONS 7 · Lateral Comparisons. Christopher Gad and Casper Bruun Jensen, 189 8 · Comparative Tinkering with Care Moves. Peter A. Lutz, 220 9 · Comparing Comparisons: On Rankings and Accounting in Hospitals and Universities. Sarah de Rijcke, Iris Wallenburg, Paul Wouters and Roland Ball, 251 10 · Steve Jobs, Terrorists, Gentlemen, and Punks: Tracing Strange Comparisons of Biohackers. Morgan Meyer, 281 11 · Afterword: Spaces of Comparison. Jennifer Robinson, 306 Mattering Press 01 Mattering Press 04 01 20160725 02 WORLD 06 15 9780993144943 06 15 9780993144950 WORLD 09 Mattering Press 20 01