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Title: Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis
This article offers the device as a methodological tool and concrete space for feminist praxis that can challenge the order of a world that is patriarchal, racist, and organized around capital extraction. Material or immaterial in form, a device is a tool through which different actors ground, produce, and concretize technological, legal, scientific, and political work. Many objects can become devices when pragmatically activated toward a particular effect; the challenge is to grasp them as such in the field and assess them for their political power and potential to bring forth possible worlds. Through examples from anthropology and adjacent literatures, we show how people accomplish three kinds of political work through their devices. Devices are sometimes used to solidify a domain of social life, such as the economy, the population, or race. Devices can constellate and produce a patterned effect, such as anti‐Blackness. Moreover, devices can be used to clear space for new and maybe unexpected possibilities. We end by articulating how the device, by way of its artificiality, offers potential pathways for furthering ethnographic and analytic practices and performing feminist political work.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2044020
PAR ID:
10533585
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Wiley Periodicals LLC
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Feminist Anthropology
Volume:
3
Issue:
2
ISSN:
2643-7961
Page Range / eLocation ID:
227 to 233
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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