Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Prof. Dr. Cornelius Schubert (Augsburg/Siegen)

Mediation practices, and the de- and re-materializations that go along with them, build social, political, economic, and religious institutions. They structure mechanisms of cooperation and are processed in “centers of calculation”. Institutions draw things, signs, and persons together over vast distances and provide the means for (social) control. In contrast to classical understandings of institutions as mere cognitive and normative frames, institutions are increasingly regarded as socio-material arrangements. Also, institutions are not seen as fixed and powerful structures, but as locally accomplished and inherently unstable entities. The input paper and the following discussion will address the socio-material unfolding and displacement of institutions and relate them to the study of technical infrastructures. This will lead to methodological questions concerning the possibility of analyzing institutions ethnographically. First and foremost, institutions are conceptual constructs which cannot be observed directly, they can only be inferred upon through empirical instances. This poses the challenge of how to relate empirical and conceptual categories in the study of socio-material institutions.

Cornelius Schubert currently works as visiting professor for the Sociology of Health at the University of Augsburg. He also is a post-doc researcher in the DFG postgraduate program Locating Media at the University of Siegen. He specializes in science and technology studies, medical and organizational sociology and innovation studies. His interests lie in micro-analytical studies of technologies-in-use and how uncertainties are coped with.

cornelius.schubert@uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications

2013: “The Means of Managing Momentum. Bridging Technological Paths and Organisational Fields” (with Jörg Sydow and Arnold Windeler), in: Research Policy
http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.respol.2013.04.004

2012: “Distributed Sleeping and Breathing. On the Agency of Means in Medical Work,” in: Jan-Hendrik Passoth (ed.), Agency Without Actors?, London: Routledge, 113–129.

2009: “Videographic Elicitation Interviews. Exploring Technologies, Practices and Narratives in Organisations,” in: Ulrike Kissmann (ed.), Video Interaction Analysis, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 199–222.