C B Jensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 5722 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C B Jensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | C B |
| FAMILY NAME | Jensen |
| SIGNATURE | JENSEN C B |
| AFFILIATIONS | IT University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3216-9762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 631 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The Challenge of Southeast Asian Cosmopolitics
This introduction sets the scene for a special issue that explores what we call the challenge of Southeast Asian cosmopolitics. Multi-species and decolonial perspectives are increasingly common in Southeast Asian anthropology, however, few studies have so far engaged cosmopolitics, the specific questions it raises, and the challenges it might pose. Cosmopolitics refers to the decentri of politics originally proposed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno…
Undoing Cambodia’s Cosmopolitical Fix
The Cambodian regime depends on large-scale extraction of natural resources. However, the regime also acknowledges that Cambodian territories are potent landscapes protected by extra-human beings. Hence, it must accomplish seemingly contradictory objectives: pleasing the land-protectors while ruining the lands they protect. We characterise this effort as Cambodia’s cosmopolitical fix. To elucidate the cosmopolitical fix and speculate about ways o…
What Next for Actor Network Theory? Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress
This is a reflection piece on the theme ‘what will happen to actor-network theory (ANT) after Latour?’ We distinguish three scenarios but focus on the one we see as the least probable but most interesting for sociology and related disciplines. With inspiration from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, we think of this third scenario as a way of “inventing around” Latour. In this scenario, classical ANT tenets are prolonged and refracted through …
In the mode of metamorphosis
This short piece responds to five commentaries to our own suggestions on ‘What Next for Actor Network Theory?’ after Latour's passing. Charting a path through very heterogenous ideas, we attempt to re-scenarise what we consider the wheat of fruitful theoretical questioning and extensions from the chaff of worn-out adversarial gestures around actor-network theory (ANT) in sociology and beyond. Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress, we af…
Entangled Areas
Since the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene has heralded a series of wide-ranging transformations in the social sciences. Today, environmental humanities, new materialism actor-network theory, multi-species and more-than-human anthropologies, and critical zones all share interest earthly entanglements. In Southeast Asia, many of the prominent entanglements are disastrous—ecological degradation, mega pollution, accelerating precarity, sinki…
The Devil’s Interval
New kinds of transdisciplinary thinking have been promoted as a way of addressing the ‘Grand Challenges’ and ‘perma-crises’ associated with the Anthropocene. Often, however, they (inadvertently) maintain the social sciences and humanities in a subservient position. The ‘elemental turn’ and other forms of planetary thought show renewed interest in, and engagement with, the sciences – but they also reinforce problematic assumptions about the relati…
Data Wormholes and Speculative Rice Fields
The 2015 Paris declaration obligated international development organizations to assess the climate compatibility of their projects. For irrigation projects, like those negotiated between the Agence Française de Développement , and the Cambodian government in the early 2020s, calculations of estimated greenhouse gas emissions have become important requirements. But how to estimate emissions from future rice fields and the effects of irrigation inf…
Rewilding Bangkok
Bangkok is a tropical metropolis subject to many human and nonhuman transformations. While Covid‐19 raged, the city's mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics‐as‐usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aimed at undoing environmental damage quietly was unfolding in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. We draw on science and technology studies (…
Exercises in irreduction
Inheriting Rorty
This contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" argues that the field of science studies should be understood as a way of inheriting, rather than fundamentally breaking with, Rorty's antifoundationalism and postepistemology. Taken together, the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway has been less about rebalancing the relative and the objective, and more about…
Circulating Objects, Changing Scales
Across the planet, the circular economy has grown into a complex governance agenda. This is also the case in Cambodia, where various formal and informal circular activities have recently coalesced into new arrangements. However, much more is at stake than questions of economic governance. By tracing the circulation of diverse objects between practices guided by different worths and correspondingly variable enactments of circularity, the present t…
Emerging Potentials
Drawing on STS, anthropological, and geographical studies of infrastructure and extended forms of media theory, this paper examines events and processes unfolding around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia as an ontological experiment. The initiate is elicited as a massively distributed arrangement for making futures the contours of which no one can foresee with much precision. After sketching some conflicting diagnoses of the BRI, I t…
Mosaic glimpses
This paper uses a series of serious games – a form of participatory modelling designed and played in Kandal, Cambodia - as an entry point for reexamining relations between development projects, participatory formats, landscape transformations, and sustainable futures. Critics of development and participation have shown that participatory formats simplify real-world complexities by rendering them technical. This is also the case for serious games.…
How to Deal with Cosmoecological Perplexities
In this review essay, I discuss the relations between Clarissa Lee's (2021) Artscience: A Curious Education, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel's (2020) edition Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, and Arturo Escobar's (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible from the point of view of their contribution to cosmoecology and the need to think and inhabit the earth differently
A multiplicity ofprek(s)
In Khmer, the word prek designates a connection between things. In Kandal province in Cambodia, preks crisscross the landscape, connecting rivers with floodplains, supporting rich ecologies and a variety of livelihoods. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and critical water research, this paper explores prek(s) as a multiplicity. Rather than taking the prek as a passive object around which various practices occur, we examine how prek(…
Cosmopolitical Perplexities
Over the last decade, the Anthropocene has overrun the discourses of the humanities and social sciences. Remarkably, two of the most astute commentators, the cross-disciplinary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith and the unorthodox philosopher Isabelle Stengers, find inspiration for grappling with these issues in the same apparently odd place: the work of the Polish microbiologist and comparative epistemologist Ludwik Fleck. The first part of this …
Say Why You Say It
This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical effects. I suggest that writing entails keeping the research imagination alive to two simultaneous processes of scaling—of the empirical within the text, and of diverse sets of literature in mutual relation—always…
Material Itineraries
On 27 August 2019, Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo announced that the country’s capital will move from huge, sprawling Jakarta in Java to East Kalimantan. While Widodo emphasized that the reason
Phnom Penh Kaleidoscope
Cambodia’s urban environments have changed rapidly over the last decades, and perhaps especially over the last few years. After the 2018 election, democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change created a new context for real-estate investment, which appeared more stable than ever. As investments exploded, the already fast-paced construction business accelerated. Combining an STS focus on distributed agency with an anthropological interest…
Experimenting with Ethnography
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Cli-Fi, Education, and Speculative Futures
Disciplinary Translations
Early in his career, Bruno Latour's limited readership consisted mainly of the research community in science and technology studies (STS) that he helped to inaugurate. Today the situation could hardly be more different. Latour is now subject to the "translations"-the processes by which ideas travel-that he has provided such powerful tools for analyzing. He has become a "mutable mobile"-eminently transportable but always changing as he goes-that i…
Here Comes the Sun
Sparks and Fizzles
Starting from a development pilot project that aimed to introduce new water accounting procedures to Cambodia, this article examines interactions between technical experts from abroad and government officials. Drawing on STS, performativity theory, and the anthropology of development, the article shows that the dynamics at the project interface are characterized by parallel and incongruent performances. Visiting technical experts work on the assu…
A Disparate Multiplicity
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal - Volume 13, Number 1, March 2019
Introduction
Infrastructures have conventionally been viewed as material substrates underlying social action. On this basis, cultural anthropology has engaged infrastructure as vehicles through which political values and symbols are made manifest. In contrast, this introduction, and the contributions that follow, specifies an orientation to infrastructures as ontological experiments. At issue is a view of infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate…
On the Consequences of Post-ANT
Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ''genres''. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ''do ANT,'' an…
Techno-animism in Japan
In a wide range of contemporary debates on Japanese cultures of technological practice, brief reference is often made to distinct Shinto legacies, as forming an animist substratum of indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmological imaginations. Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused 'techno-animism': exhibiting a 'polymorphous perversity' that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings. In thi…
Brexit Referendum
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
A Nonhumanist Disposition
Experimenting with political materials
Wide-ranging research, in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, environmental and infrastructural studies, and elsewhere, can currently be seen to work out the implications of Latour's evocative but enigmatic call for a parliament of things. What are the political materials that would inhabit such a parliament? What are their demands? And how are social scientists capable of getting them into view? Asking these questions, the paper …
The Anthropocene event in social theory
Signalling that 'humanity' has radically changed the Earth's environmental parameters, the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. In this context, neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches stand out for the way they oblige social theory to catch up with new material realities. We share the conviction that the Anthropocene might constitute a genuine event for social theory and practice. However, we argue that …
The Promises of Practice
Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. 'Practice' can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be 'in practice', to 'have a practice' or to be 'constituted by practice'. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical - in the form of various …
Anthropology and STS
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
Pipe Dreams
Focusing on the efforts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve Phnom Penh's run-down sewage infrastructure, this paper offers an example of what a decentred anthropology of infrastructure might look like. The sewage infrastructure brings together a very diverse set of features, including pipes, road networks, economic considerations, demographic change, geography, climate change, flows of sludge and the lives of people in the ci…
Attuning to the webs ofen
An experiment in ethnographic theory, this article aims to finds new ways of getting Japanese spirit worlds into view. In the attempt to find ways of repopulating spirit worlds with more than beliefs, socioeconomic realities, and politics, the broader "ontographic" issue is how to facilitate engagement with spirits in a way that is not overdetermined by the assumption that such entities do not really exist. After examining how Japanese folklore s…
An Experiment in Performative History
The aim of this paper is to describe parts of the history and development in Denmark of the interdisciplinary field of study known as medical informatics, which has been crucially involved in the current high-profile development of a national Danish electronic care record. This turn of events has enabled an increasing naturalization of the history of the discipline, but in this paper I suggest that this understanding is highly selective and limit…
Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness
In this article, an anthropologist examines the question, asked today in diverse forms by an increasing variety of actors: what is the aim or telos of the social sciences? From within the disciplinary communities of the social sciences themselves, the answers given are inseparable from questions of theory and method. This essay engages some recent experimental, postcritical responses as formulated by scholars in the fields of anthropology and STS…
Infrastructural Fractals
The relationship between the supposedly small-the micro-and the supposedly large-the macro-has been a long-standing concern in social theory. However, although many attempts have been made to link these two seemingly disjoint dimensions, in the present paper I argue against such an endeavour. Instead, I outline a fractal approach to the study of space, society, and infrastructure. A fractal orientation requires a number of related conceptual reor…
Two forms of the outside
In recent years, anthropology has taken a renewed interest in alterity and otherness. Rather than using ethnography to determine the ways in which, cultural differences aside, we all share a common humanity, this body of work uses ethnography to figure out how humanity and sociality are produced in radically divergent ways, giving rise to different forms of "the social" and different forms of cosmology. We have thus left behind the realm of many …
Anthropology as critique of reality
The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku (Anthropology as critique of reality) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the "the ontological turn" in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in "ontological…
Qualitative research as partial connection
Qualitative research and methods are often imagined as relating to a problematic, which we here term the power-knowledge nexus. We argue that the dichotomy between power and knowledge, instantiated, for example, by recent postmodern contributions to the field, is theoretically and empirically problematic and suggest that they are organized around a 'bad problem' (Deleuze, 1991). This characterization points us towards an exploration of theoretica…
Citizen Projects and Consensus-Building at the Danish Board of Technology
The Danish Board of Technology is famous for its work with citizen participation and consensus conferences. This article is based on an empirical investigation of a citizen project on electronic patient records. It investigates the concrete, situated interactions through which the production of a consensus took place. According to the Board of Technology, the democratic relevance of this citizen perspective is validated by their consensus-creatin…
The task of anthropology is to invent relations
Sorting Attachments
What emerges is a concern with the machinery of a concept, or rather the processual manner in which a concept enables a number of elements to be ordered in time and space. From this it follows that
Mekong Scales
Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's fractal analyses, this article develops the notions of domain and scale making as a way of conceiving the Mekong uncommons. Juxtaposing the perspectives and activities of community forestry and ecotourism in Kratie Province with policy controversies concerning dam development on the Laos-Cambodia border, I depict each domain as an ontological test site that scales reality in its own distinctive way. Despite their i…
Continuous Variations
The dichotomy between the conceptual and the empirical is part of common sense, yet its organizing force also extends to intellectual life more generally, including the disciplinary life of science and technology studies (STS). This article problematizes this dichotomy as it operates in contemporary STS discussions, arguing instead that the conceptual and the empirical form unstable hybrids. Beginning with a discussion of the “discontents” with w…
Asymmetries of Knowledge
Over the last few decades the Internet, World Wide Web, cyberspace and so forth have emerged as crucial cultural and political arenas, and thus of increasing relevance as objects and areas of ethnographic inquiry. The paper argues that the ethnographical entry-point for studying such technologically mediated arenas creates specific effects of ‘path-dependence ‘and attendant asymmetries of knowledge. Globally distributed networks of organizations,…
Experimenting with Ethnography
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Mekong Scales
Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's fractal analyses, this article develops the notions of domain and scale making as a way of conceiving the Mekong uncommons. Juxtaposing the perspectives and activities of community forestry and ecotourism in Kratie Province with policy controversies concerning dam development on the Laos-Cambodia border, I depict each domain as an ontological test site that scales reality in its own distinctive way. Despite their i…
CSCW design reconceptualised through science studies
Mårup Church and the Politics of Hybridization
Mårup Church, on the northwest coast of Jutland in Denmark, is facing a predicament. Every year, the sea eats further into the dune on top of which it stands, and soon the church will tumble into the sea. This has generated a heated debate on whether or not the church should be saved. In this paper we explore the arguments various actors bring to bear on this controversy. How are the complexities of change in nature and culture articulated in the…
A Nonhumanist Disposition
An Experiment in Performative History
The aim of this paper is to describe parts of the history and development in Denmark of the interdisciplinary field of study known as medical informatics, which has been crucially involved in the current high-profile development of a national Danish electronic care record. This turn of events has enabled an increasing naturalization of the history of the discipline, but in this paper I suggest that this understanding is highly selective and limit…
Reading Digital Denmark
During the past decade, several governmental reports have discussed how information technology can transform Danish society. Most important among these reports is Digital Denmark from 1999.In this article, the authors examine how to analyze Digital Denmark by considering two strategies for engaging reports. The first aims at uncovering and making explicit hidden assumptions or ideologies in the text. This approach is called "reading against the t…
Qualitative research as partial connection
Qualitative research and methods are often imagined as relating to a problematic, which we here term the power-knowledge nexus. We argue that the dichotomy between power and knowledge, instantiated, for example, by recent postmodern contributions to the field, is theoretically and empirically problematic and suggest that they are organized around a 'bad problem' (Deleuze, 1991). This characterization points us towards an exploration of theoretica…
Citizen Projects and Consensus-Building at the Danish Board of Technology
The Danish Board of Technology is famous for its work with citizen participation and consensus conferences. This article is based on an empirical investigation of a citizen project on electronic patient records. It investigates the concrete, situated interactions through which the production of a consensus took place. According to the Board of Technology, the democratic relevance of this citizen perspective is validated by their consensus-creatin…
Videnskabelighed i et cyborg-perspektiv - TV-programmet Big Brother som videnskabeligt eksperiment
Scientificity in a cyborg-approach By what criteria can it be decided whether a statement is scientific or not? Some scholars stress the objectivity of the statement, whereas subjective dimensions of the scientific activity are viewed as bias ideally to be removed. Others abandon the notion of objectivity as the ideal of research, and view scientific authority as an instrument of power. The purpose of this article is to establish a perspective on…
Politics of Nature
Established Sentiments, Alternative Agendas, and Politics of Concretization
Established Sentiments, Alternative Agendas, and Politics of Concretization Casper Bruun Jensen (bio) This essay discusses some of the political and practical efficacies, which constructivist science and technology studies (STS) is imagined, intended, or presented as having. I refer to the ways in which authors make arguments and claims about such efficacies as the politics of concretization: the concretization of why, how, and in which circumsta…
The Wireless Nursing Call System
Sorting Attachments
What emerges is a concern with the machinery of a concept, or rather the processual manner in which a concept enables a number of elements to be ordered in time and space. From this it follows that
Infrastructural Fractals
The relationship between the supposedly small-the micro-and the supposedly large-the macro-has been a long-standing concern in social theory. However, although many attempts have been made to link these two seemingly disjoint dimensions, in the present paper I argue against such an endeavour. Instead, I outline a fractal approach to the study of space, society, and infrastructure. A fractal orientation requires a number of related conceptual reor…
Mårup Church and the Politics of Hybridization
Asymmetries of Knowledge
Over the last few decades the Internet, World Wide Web, cyberspace and so forth have emerged as crucial cultural and political arenas, and thus of increasing relevance as objects and areas of ethnographic inquiry. The paper argues that the ethnographical entry-point for studying such technologically mediated arenas creates specific effects of ‘path-dependence ‘and attendant asymmetries of knowledge. Globally distributed networks of organizations,…
On the Consequences of Post-ANT
Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ''genres''. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ''do ANT,'' an…
Making Lists, Enlisting Scientists
The question of how to measure research quality recently gained prominence in the context of Danish research policy, as part of implementing a new model for the allocating of funds to universities. The measurement device took the form of a bibliometric indicator. Analyzing the making of the indicator, the paper engages the literature on social studies of quantification and classification. The analysis proceeds from the inside out, through descrip…
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
An interview with Naoki Kasuga
Professor Naoki Kasuga is the editor of the Anthropology as critique of reality. He has worked at Hitotsubashi University since 2010, when he moved from a position at Osaka University. In many ways Kasuga is a unique figure in Japanese anthropology. He is the author of a series of experimental and highly divergent works, and he was one of the translators of Writing culture into Japanese. This interview weaves together a discussion of Kasuga's own…
Anthropology as critique of reality
The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku (Anthropology as critique of reality) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the "the ontological turn" in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in "ontological…
Proposing the motion
The task of anthropology is to invent relations
Monitoring Movements in Development Aid
An examination of emerging information infrastructures that are intended to increase accountability and effectiveness in partnerships for development aid. In Monitoring Movements in Development Aid, Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik consider the processes, social practices, and infrastructures that are emerging to monitor development aid, discussing both empirical phenomena and their methodological and analytical challenges. Jensen and Winthereik…
Travelling Frictions
Contemporary disease self-management programs aim to renegotiate the terms on which patients participate in their own health care. Though the notion of ‘patient 2.0’ has mainly been used to speak to patient empowerment through IT, we therefore propose to view self-management as eliciting “the patient” in a different shape. In this paper, we explore the embedded assumptions, imagined potentials and concrete practices of the Stanford Chronic Diseas…
Sociology (52 works) · Epistemology (36 works) · Political science (34 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Computer Science (29 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Social science (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (17 works)