Speculative Research

Alex Wilkie is a sociologist and a senior lecturer at the Department of Design Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests combine aspects of social theory, science and technology studies with design research that bears on theoretical, methodological and substantive areas including, but not limited to: energy-demand reduction, design practice and design studios, healthcare and information technologies, human-computer interaction design, inventive and creative practices, user involvement and participation in design, practice-based design research, process theory and speculative thought. Alex is a director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), alongside Michael Guggenheim and Marsha Rosengarten, and convenes the Ph.D. programme in Design at Goldsmiths. He has recently co-edited Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies and Displacements with Ignacio Farias (Routledge, 2015) and he is preparing the edited collection Inventing the Social with Michael Guggenheim and Noortje Marres (Mattering Press). Alex is also a founding editor of Demonstrations, the journal for experiments in social studies of technology. Martin Savransky is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches philosophy, social theory and methodology of social science. He works at the intersection of process philosophy, the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, and the politics of knowledge. He has published widely on the ethics and politics of social inquiry, postcolonial ontologies, and social theory. He is the author of The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Marsha Rosengarten is Professor in Sociology, Director of the Unit of Play and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic in Information and Flesh and co-author with Mike Michael of Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV. Recent articles focus on biomedical research within the field of HIV, Ebola and Tuberculosis drawing from feminist and process oriented approaches. Her work offers alternative ways of conceiving intervention, bioethics, randomized controlled trials and, hence, the nature of scientific evidence. In 2009 she co-founded the international Association for the Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV (ASSHH). Although mostly known for her empirically oriented work on HIV and direct engagement with the biomedical field, in 2013 as Director of the Unit of Play in collaboration with Martin Savransky, Jennifer Gabrys and Alex Wilkie she initiated an intellectual project on speculation. The project has since involved various seminars and workshops and public presentations which, to date, have resulted in the manuscript Speculative Research.

Introduction 1. The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research Part 1: Speculative Propositions
Section Introduction 2. The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism 3. Speculative Research, Temporality and Politics 4. Situated Speculation as a Constraint on Thought Part 2: Speculative Lures Section Introduction 5. Pluralities of Action, a Lure for Speculative Thought 6. Doing Speculation to Curtail Speculation 7. Retrocasting: Speculating about the Origins of Money Part 3: Speculative Techniques
Section Introduction 8. Sociology’s Archive: Mass-Observation as a Site of Speculative Research 9. Developing Speculative Methods to Explore Speculative Shipping: Mail Art, Futurity and Empiricism 10. Creating Idiotic Speculators: Disaster Cosmopolitics in the Sandbox 11.'Too Sweet to Kill' – A Contribution to the Art of Cosmopolitics Part 4: Speculative Implications Section Introduction 12. On Isabelle Stengers’ ‘Cosmopolitics’: A Speculative Adventure 13. Aesthetic Experience, Speculative Thought, and Civilized Life 14. The Lure of the Possible: On the Function of Speculative Afterword 15. Postscript