How do citizenship function in a technically and scientificaly mediated politics? How do public communication of S&T function? What do people do with information?

1. Audiences are agents, not patients:
technoscientific citizenship today
Yurij Castelfranchi
Dep. of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais(UFMG)
ycastelfranchi@gmail.com

2. Michel de Certau
L'invention du quotidien (1980)
 In “The Practice of Everyday Life”, de Certeau studies the
layman, a “common hero”.
 People modulate and modify utilitarian objects and street plans,
rituals and laws, language and technology, in order to make them
their own and to cope with problems and conflicts

3.  Distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau
links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are
the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in
environments defined by strategies by using "tactics".
 Certeau's argument: everyday life works by processes of poaching
on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already
exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly
determined, by those rules and products.
 Strategies are deployed to institute a set of relations. Tactics are
employed by those who are subjugated, and are by their very
nature defensive and opportunistic
 At InCiTe we call this recombination… and hacker politics

4. “Kluge” to solve practical
problems...
Either using a body as part of
your assemblage...
...or changing the function of
an object in relationship to
your body...
Artist: Cao Guimarães
Source: “Essay on gambiarra”,
by Helena S. Assunção (UFMG)

5. “Kluge” may “resist”
programmed
obsolescence and
consumerism
Artist: Cao Guimarães
Source: “Essay on gambiarra”,
by Helena S. Assunção (UFMG)

6. “Kluge” in-sist (exist
inside) design
making what you can
not buy
Artist: Cao Guimarães
Source: “Essay on gambiarra”,
by Helena S. Assunção (UFMG)

7. Context means
 Of course different people living in different place, with
different problems and goals, have diverse “lay knowledge”.
 But there’s much more than this: culture means also
entire different epistemologies, values, and even
physiological perceptions. Culture (and context) mean
different ways to give order both to social and natural world
(natures-cultures)
 …Cultural diversity also means power relationships and
social inequalities.

8. Context means
Thinking about “audiences”, “engagement” and “inclusion”
means thinking culture, power and citizenship.
And this means (for example, in Brazil):
 Urban peripheral areas, its places (morros, favelas) and
its peoples (imigrantes: nordestinos, bolivianos, peruanos,
haitianos…)
 Rural areas, rivers, rainforests areas and its peoples
(ribeirinhos, quilombolas, caiçaras....)
 Large land-owners and small-farmers
 Urbam middle classe
 Indigenous people
 Etc. Etc.

9.  Solidarity and cultural
production and diffusion in
favelas… music, art, resistance,
sports, leisure, parties…. and
fight for rights

10.  Solidarity in favelas… parties… culture production…
sport, leisure, music, art, resistance and fight for rights
 …but also violence, drugs, corruption, paramilitary
groups….

11. “Low literacy”? Or a different
cosmology, and different ontology?

13.  “Lay” knowledge?
… Or a different kind of complex expertise?
 …Or a different cosmology, sacred values and
prohane practices, mixing
informations+knowledge+values (a “wisdom”)?

15. People who know how to live here and
give meaning to this world…

16.  How do we treat as “audiences” what is, in fact, our agents?
 How to manage as “a public” something that is actually
embedded with “private” life and entangled with politics.
 Hot to call “lay” people who are, in facts, such diverse social
collectives with ontologies, epistemologies “cultures” and
“natures” so different from our one?
“Cultural difference” means taking into account social
inequalities. Power relationships.

17. TACTICS AND RESISTANCE
By solving problems, deciding the goods they buy, the
politicians they vote for, downloading music, enjoying their
leisure time or figuring out how to cope with goals they
need to achieve within the moral, legal or technological
constraints they live in, consumers and users can act as
producers or inventors (“ProduSers”).
Environmental or patient groups may produce new scientific
data, or pose new constraints or challenges both to
methods and organization of science. Indigenous
knowledges also act as complex factors.
Empirical evidence is great that tactics and micropolitics can
have effects and contribute for recombination in
technology and policies (Epstein , 1995; Wynne, 1996;
Callon et al., 2009).

18. What is “Citizenship”
 NOT ONLY a set of practices or attributes of the individual
 NOT ONLY a list of rights and duties
 Being a capacity to act in a framework of constraints, we
can treat citizenship as a particular kind of power: not simply
something one can have, conquer or lose, not a substance or
attribute “inside” the individual, but also a dynamic relationship
modulated by subjects that are constrained by strategies,
norms, environmental limitations or possibilities.

19. What is “Citizenship”
 If a citizen is not simply equipped with rights and duty, if he/she
performs and practices citizenship through tactics and
interactions, than citizenship is not merely about guaranteeing or
conquering rights. It is also a conflictive field of invention of rights:
a territory in which rights that did not exist are invented or
redefined within contested boundaries.
In this sense, duties and rights are the consequence of agency
and citizenship, not only its conditions of possibility.

20. Is technical citizenship possible?
 People may contribute, by figuring out what to do, by
buying, using, voting, desiring different things, to transform
technology and modulate markets or policies.
 They can re-signify or reinvent technical objects or
processes

21. Insistence
“Insistence”: a hacker politics, in which we do not see technology,
capitalism and domination as above us, or external. We live
inside the political and technological blackboxes we try to open.
If we live inside them, conceptual and epistemological hacking
(and recoding) as well as political hacking (and recombination)
can be seen as concrete possibilities for political action.

22. How do we do this?
How to take all this into account?
 Children magazine, children radio, children
television… made (in part) by and with children
 Challenge people, but not only toward OUR goals…
find local goals for real challenges
 Museum: who is the guide?
 Textbook: novel codes
 Emergence, self-organization, complexity: still under
developed and badly explored, both in museums and
in PCST…

23. How do we do this?
How to take all this into account?
 Museums BY the indians. Favela’S museum: not only
ABOUT, or FOR, or WITH indigenous and favela…
 Reception studies: ethnographical, too
 Identities
 Ontologies and epistemologies at play
 A labyrinth which shape is made by the trajectories of
visitors
 Exhibit that not only interact with people, but in which
the interaction IS the interaction between visitors (not
between visitors and exhibit)

24. What do children see (and
draw) in our museum?
Not everything is
“interactive”...

25. What happens when we do not
search for what children DO NOT
know?

26. What to people actually do with the news?
What they CONSTRUCT
with information?
“Scientific American” Facebook Page

27. Friendship relationships
In a Facebook
community on “science
popularization”
Point= user
Link = friendship
Colour = community
(modularity)
Diverse, distant
communities:
people coming
from different
realities, “using”
information

28. “Superinteressante” popular
science magazine
Colors = “communities”
(network modularity)

29. “Body modification
extreme” Facebook
page
Body modification extreme

30. This is nice!
Most shared: want to
show it to you, guys
“outside”

31. Body modification extreme
More Commented posts
(photo) beauty non beauty…
2nd most commented: is
this beautiful? Debate,
politics, normative
emergence

32. Body modification extreme
More Commented posts
(photo) professional, non
professional
Most commented:
bad practice?
Norm emergence
and regulations...

33. Fibromialgy help group
Red = user
Blue = post by page
Green = post by user
Link = either “likes”, “shares” or
“comments”
Size = “engagement”

34. Help group
User
Post by page
Post by user
Link = either “likes”, “shares” or
“comments”
Size = “authority”

35. “An interesting study reveals that sleep
measures predict next-day symptoms in
women with irritable bowel syndrome. […]
Self-reported sleep disturbance predicted
exacerbation of next-day symptoms in
women with IBS.
Chron and colon disease help group
User
Post by page
Post by user
Link = either “likes”, “shares” or
“comments”
Size = “lkes”

36. Chron and colon disease help group
User
Post by page
Post by user
Link = either “likes”, “shares” or
“comments”
Size = “shares”

37. “ […] The current definitions about IBS don't
really address this. Can you relate? What
treatment options have you tried in this
situation?”
Chron and colon disease help group
User
Post by page
Post by user
Link = either “likes”, “shares” or
“comments”
Size = “comments”

39. NatGeo

41. “SuperInteressante” Facebook Page

43. Science communication between peers
in a mutual-help community

44. Science communication between peers in a mutual-help community
Most popular posts

45. Science communication between peers in a mutual-help community
Most active users

46. Science communication between peers in a mutual-help community
Size = number of comments (by users or in a post)
“Decided to stop
today!”
Photo album
against smoke

47. Science communication between peers in a mutual-help community
Size = number of “like”
Links to pages:
infos
Photos and
infographics
People asking for
help, mutual aid
and support...

48. Conclusive remarks
 People do not either “accept” science and technology, or
“resist”. People actually INSIST: they exist inside, and in-between
S&T. They perform and embody knowledge, the circulate,
appropriate, mutate information and they transform it in
knowledge or wisdom, as well as practical action
 If we want to make “inclusive”, “dialogic” communication and
“engagement” we have to understand how do people INSIST, with
their own knowledge and values, on science communication
processes and how to catalyze empowerment and real exchange.

49. Marching in Noel Kempff Mercado
National Park
with the help of a guarayo indian

50. Walking with an guarayo man
in Noel Kempff Mercado National Park

51. An amazonic Venus at midday
(not my real photo: I could´t see it, nor take a picture...)

52. Obrigado!
AKNOWLEDGMENTS: FAPEMIG
GRANT – EDITAL UNIVERSAL
Yurij Castelfranchi
Dep. de Sociologia
Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
(UFMG)
ycastelfranchi@gmail.com

53. Public studies: how to study it
 Just some few examples
 Children’s drawings in and of the museum
 “Narrative illustrated focus groups”
 Appropriation processes

54. Desenhos do museu
50%
Planetário Mesa Multitoques Crânio Aleph
Evolução Humana Observatório Fases Geológicas
8%
27%
Exhibit ou seções desenhadas
6%
4%
3% 2%

55. Desenhos do museu
Quantidade de vezes em que foi retratada
19%
81%
presença humana
Sim Não

56. Desenhos do museu
Indicadores de interação humana
7%
93%
Sim Não

57. O que as crianças
retratam?
Impacto do objeto em si

58. O que as crianças
retratam?
Impacto do objeto em si

59. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
 Para “fazer sentido”...
 O que se sabe, mais
do que se vê
 Dissonância cognitiva
(impactos do exhibit)

60. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Processos, fluxos,
narrativas

61. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Processos, fluxos,
narrativas

62. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Pessoas,
interações,emoções
Pessoas,
interações,emoções

63. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Pessoas,
interações,emoções

64. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Pessoas,
interações,emoções
Pessoas,
interações,emoções

65. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Pessoas,
interações,emoções

66. O que as crianças
acrescentam?

67. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Mensagens, histórias,
vivências

68. O que as crianças
acrescentam?
Pessoas,
interações,emoções
Pessoas,
interações,emoções

70. Exemplo:crianças
e ciência
• Homem
• Branco/ocidental
• De jaleco (“Como posso desenhá-lo?”
“Fácil: bota nele um jaleco
branco!”)
• De óculos (“tem que observar
muito/estudar muito”)
e/ou roupa “maluca”
• Tem um laboratório
• “Alienígena”, “maluco”...
• “Muitas mãos”

71. Cientista é...
• “De cabelos malucos” (“Tem todos cabelos explodidos
porque quando faz experimentos ele queima e fica
assustado”)

72. Cientista é...
Mulher?
“Ela tem pai/tio cientista...”
“Ele é homem e mulher,
não tem sexo...”

73. Cientista é...
Transformador:
•“Ela tem gaiola com
passarinho... Quer transformá-lo
em algo diferente”
•“Ele pega um bicho, talvez um
rato... Transforma em um
hamster”

74. Transforma o skateboard
quebrado em um novinho

75. Neo Cortex apanha ratos
no esgoto e transforma-los
em exércitos

76. a cientista Genny
faz as poçoes

77. Cientista é...
Quase um bruxo:
•“Ele faz poções”
•“Tem um raio mágico”
•“Tem que confiar nele, porque ele é tipo mágico”
Inventor:
“Inventa umas rodas/óculos/pistolas...”

78.  “O cientista é mágico. Aliás, não”....

79. Resultados
 Diferente da Itália. Pouca familiaridade com cientista e ciência,
mesmo crianças mais velhas.
 Imaginário midiático, estereotipado.
 Cientistas “buscam”, “estudam muito” e “conhecem”.

80. Resultados
 Uma diferença marcada no acesso à informação científica
e tecnológica
 Grande diferença escola privada

81. Resultados
 Conotação predominantemente positiva
 Grande curiosidade
 A visão positiva da ciência é anterior, e em parte
desacoplada, do acesso à informação e conhecimento.

82. Resultados
1.Imagens e ícones da ciência e do cientista
Em todas as narrações orais, e em uma fração consistente de
desenhos, as crianças recorreram a elementos icônicos clássicos para
representar o cientista: bancada de laboratório, lupa, microscópio ou
outras ferramentas de observação, jaleco, óculos, tubo de teste (muitas
vezes fumegante e frequentemente chamado de “poção”, veja
parágrafos posteriores sobre elementos mágicos e conotações de
perigo).
-

83. Resultados
-

84. Resultados
-

85. Resultados
-