Alberto Corsin Jimenez – författare

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

The concept of well-being has emerged as a key category of social and political thought, especially in the fields of moral and political philosophy, development studies and economics. This book takes a critical look at the notion of well-being by examining what well-being means, or could mean, to people living in a number of different regions including Sudan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, India, Sierra Leone and the UK. The contributors take issue with some of the assumptions behind Western concepts of well-being. They explore what characterises a 'good life' and how this idea has been affected by globalisation and neoliberalism. The book makes a major contribution to social theory by presenting new analytical models that make sense of the changing shapes of people's life and ethical values.

The Anthropology of Organisations offers a critical overview of the work that for over sixty years anthropologists have been carrying out in and on organisations and of the contribution that this work has made to social theory at large. Moving beyond earlier preoccupations with ’culture’ and ’relationality’, the volume brings together a selection of classic and contemporary articles that cast new light on the relevance of ethnography for organisational and social theory. It offers an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in the politics behind the institutionalisation of social life.

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Free Culture and the City examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and "free culture" in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, Free Culture and the City shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers, intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural collectives, and Occupy assemblies.