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Handout: King, UCGS higher seminar, 2 December, 2014 -- talk website: http://paradoxdive.blogspot.com/p/seminar.html
Ume Centre for Gender Studies, Ume University, Sweden; UCGS Library, Social Sciences 4th floor.
Diving into the paradox - what happens AFTER the critique? A seminar on making Knowledges caring and careful
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / Email: katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ ; follow on twitter @katkingumd ; pinterest talksite: http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/
Drawing on contemporary work in feminist science and technology research, we are working with an
expanded notion of a learning object to incorporate insights about boundary objects. This
theoretical reframing asserts that the object participates in the creation of meanings: of identity, or
usefulness, of function, of possibilities. The concept of a boundary object was promoted by the late
Susan Leigh Starr (a prominent feminist scholar in science/technology studies) to assert that objects
(material, digital, discursive, conceptual) participate in the co-production of reality. At base, the notion
asserts that objects perform important communication work among people: they are defined enough
to enable people to form common understandings, but weakly determined so that participants can
modify them to express emergent thinking. (Juhasz & Balsamo 2013)

People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted. (Bowker and
Star 1999: 305)
NEPANTLERAS, WIZARDS, ENOUGH WORLDS, GRACE, AND PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATIONS
I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom Ive named
nepantleras. (Anzalda 2002:1)
These are what I refer to as wizards: that is, they are both repositories of local knowledge about the social and technical situations,
and simultaneously, they know enough of more than one layer to perform rare cross-layering coordination. By definition, this work is
interdisciplinary. (Star 1995:107)
I guess Id locate my hope in being part of enough different worlds simultaneously. . . . Ive tried to model a way of being in this
kind of an organization that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me in the ways that its been formed by all these other worlds that
Im part of. (Suchman & Scharmer 1999)
"Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined
structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to
the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance
with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of
power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval 2000:60)
TRANSCONTEXTUAL PRACTICES:
phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome More
Bateson: It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual
confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friendis not
just that and nothing more. (Star & Ruhleder 1996:127 quote Bateson 1972:276; Bateson: 272; Star 2010:610)
BOUNDARY OBJECTS (Bowker & Star 1999: 297-8)
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of
each of them. Boundary objects are thus both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing
them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become strongly
structured in individual site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete.... Such objects have different meanings in different social
worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation
and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities.
The rigor of trancontextual feminist methods comes into play when we welcome peripheral participations (robust across sites) as
well as work for an exquisite sensitivity to each horizon of possible resources and infrastructures, local exigencies, and differential
memberships (plastic and local). Transcontextual feminisms as I have come to understand them, work to remain curious, even about
and in the midst the affects of affiliation and disidentification, scoping extensively and scaling intensively among Ecologies of
Knowledge. (In memory of Susan Leigh Star and her work such as Star 1995)
INTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: closely negotiated among relatively bounded communities of
practice; such as disciplines-in-the-making, local alliances, threatened units, long-lived organizations; emphasis on rigor and
membership
EXTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: speculative connections, practical coalitions, trial and error
learning; such as transdisciplinary projects, transmedia storytelling, alternative practices-in-the-making; emphasis on peripheral
participation and the edges of standardized practices
EXTENSIVE investigations perpendicularly analyze relative and relational shifts across authoritative and alternative knowledges
EXTENSIVE displays can work without displacing INTENSIVE work of specific communities of practice

Boundary objects sometimes mediate among extensive and intensive feminist practices simultaneously. For example, Kathy Davis
(2008) calls intersectionality a buzzword, but thinking of it as a boundary object would more carefully allow us to consider both its
simultaneous intensive and extensive uses, allow us to pay attention to its INTENSIVE local tailorings in the plural as well as its
values as a shared representation across EXTENSIVE gatherings, reconciling divergent critiques and solutions to them.
MATTERING: DOUBLED CONSCIOUSNESS IN PLAY
Bateson taught that as animals and children learn to play they come to know
that there are some ways a play self can and must be separated from an
everyday self, and they learn to perform this separation in interactive
cognitive and social communication forms of not: they amuse themselves
by performing the communication this is not it. The puppy nips, but not
hard enough to injure. (Violence? Not.) The teen kisses in spin the bottle, but
not necessarily the person they like the most. (Sex? Not.) Yet at the same
time there are also other ways in which these selves simply are not separated,
in certain physiological processes and psychological equivalences. The nip
actually hurts a bit, the kissing blush and stammer. A double consciousness
of being in both these states at the same time is possible, as Bateson puts it in
formal terms, because play creates its own commentary in itself about itself
as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism communicatively
social, as well as neurological and hormonal. Such metacommunications
or communications about communication are performed by embodied selves at multiple levels of organic and social system,
some sequentially, some simultaneously. (Bateson 1972, 1979)
ON AUTHORITY AND COMMITMENTS: SIMULTANEOUS FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Star 1995: 22)
"We honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any others. But I do at the same time argue with
and try to overthrow those I don't agree with! Relativism in this sense does not imply neutrality--rather, it implies forswearing claims
to absolute epistemological authority. This is quite different from abandoning moral commitments.
A DOUBLE BIND IS
intense: needing fine discriminations between kinds of messages for urgent appropriate response as survival appears to be at stake
contradictory: and this at two different orders of message, each of which denies the other
unvoiced: not permitting the meta-communicative statements that check ones choice of what kind of message is appropriate for
response, or otherwise making such checks of context impossible, inappropriate or meaningless. (See Bateson 1972)
A FEMINIST TRANSDISCIPLINARY POSTHUMANITIES: Under global academic restructuring
movement among knowledge worlds is mandated -- in terms hardly consistent
interdisciplinarity -- justifies consolidated units and resources
restructuring promotes an easily assessed instrumental practicality, as if the standard for good interdisciplinary methodology was
easy assessment
disciplinary chauvinisms are made urgent, personal and compensatory
quantitative assessments of productivity and authority -- measures for advancement, status or just getting a job done
establishing and maintaining authority in an environment in which many knowledge worlds compete
the empirical, the data-driven, the concrete, and the local are all more manageable, more easily broken up into task, then held
accountable to a very particular set of folks and their properly urgent ethics
Yet diverging knowledge worlds keep making such management problematic, uneven, partial, at times virtually impossible
Some references to think with and about [more online at talksite]: http://paradoxdive.blogspot.com/p/bibliography.html

Anzalda, G. 2002. (Un)natural bridges. In eds. Anzalda, G. & Keating, A. this bridge we call home, pp. 1-5. Routledge.
Bateson, G. 1972. Double Bind, 1969. In Steps, 276, 272.
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler.
Bleecker, J. 2009. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/designfiction-a-short-essay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. 1999. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. MIT.
Davis, K. 2008. Intersectionality as buzzword. Feminist Theory, 9(1), 67-85.
Sandoval, C. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minnesota.
Sandoval, C. 2002. Foreword: AfterBridge: Technologies of Crossing. In G. E. Anzaldua & A. Keating (Eds.), this bridge we call home: radical
visions for transformation (pp. 21-26): Routledge.
Star, S.L. & Ruhleder, K. 1996. Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. Information Systems Research 7(1), 127.
Star, S.L. 2010. This is Not a Boundary Object. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35/5: 601-617.
Star, S.L., ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. SUNY.
Suchman, L. & Scharmer, C.O. 1999. I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions.
http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviews/Suchman.shtml