Article ID: CBB574207161

Materializations through political work (April 2020)

unapi

Jenni Brichzin (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 50
Issue: 2
Pages: 271-291


Publication Date: April 2020
Edition Details: Special section: The insides and outsides of parliamentary politics
Language: English

This article investigates the opposition between politics and work in common political understandings by engaging with the materiality of politics in parliaments. It demonstrates the need for current research on politics to deal with problems similar to those faced by early laboratory studies investigating scientific practice. At the same time, the paper highlights a crucial difference between research on science and research on politics: The common understanding of politics appears to face an influential double bind, with truthful rationality on one side and democratic legitimacy on the other. In an effort to overcome this double bind, political work is introduced as a form of work that deals with transitions between matters of fact and matters of concern by materializing forceful ideas. Ethnographic research on four parliamentary levels in Germany retraces how political actors struggle to produce these forceful ideas, which have the ability to assemble groups and move people. By dealing with the plethora of vastly diverse matters of concern populating parliaments, parliamentary actors resort to rapid shifts between different work modes, namely the political game, the settling of issues, and political composition. Each of these modes engages differently with the main resources – the law, the positions of political opponents, scientific facts and narrations – to materialize political ideas and thus aims to shift the composition of reality.

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Authors & Contributors
Dányi, Endre
Thomas Scheffer
Juan Francisco Salazar
Greenhough, Beth
Olga Povoroznyuk
Weinkle, Jessica
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Politics and government
Materiality
Parliamentary practice
Democracy
Ethnography
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Cameroon (Country)
Romania
Colombia
Greece
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