Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis

Abstract

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.

Reimagining the governance of water from the ground up: On the ‘worlding-practices’ of grassroots movements building alternative ‘water worlds’

“…A good place to start, following Ballestero (2019a), is to follow the devices, language, and ideas actors mobilise to rework the frameworks we use to apprehend life. As concrete instruments onto which people anchor their political work (Ballestero and Oyarzun, 2022) mundane devices provide an unusual entry point into how people within movements generate new care in the world by making visible previously unseen objects and relations (Lindén and Singleton, 2021).…”

“…In a similar light, I read the proposed tryptic of tools as the Network's way to advance a careful mode of theorising (Fernando, 2019), one that by revealing the invisibilities and exclusions crystalised within everyday objects of governance, redefines these objects to bring attention towards previously unseen things and relation (Lindén and Singleton, 2021; Martin et al, 2015). Such careful way of producing knowledge refuses universalist explanation, leading to the burgeoning of categories, concepts, and ideas that, by creating new connections and relations, expand the present and open possibilities for different futures (Ballestero and Oyarzun, 2022). Situating their world-making tactics within the crafting of alternative technologies of enumeration and visualisation, the group's mobilisation thus rests on what Puig De La Bellacasa (2017, 11) describes as everyday ‘politics of reclaiming’, an effort to work within the horizon of the existing condition without accepting it as a given.…”

“…To unpack how this ontological reformulation might be taking place, the work of Mitchell (2008) is informative as he describes how worlds are supported by specific metrologies – codified systems of measurements that define and therefore also circumscribe the field of possibility. Being subject to re-inscription but also open to contestation, metrological tools therefore provide concrete sites from where actors can foreclose but also transform and reimagine the present (Ballestero and Oyarzun, 2022). To challenge the invisibilities enacted by the current paradigm of irrigation, I show how the Network sets-up a rival metrological system (Mitchell, 2008), crafting alternative tools that recentre water governance from the perspective of the rainfall.…”