Moral symmetry and material agency; negotiations on agent-object relations
Two-day workshop, September 24-25, 2009, Helsinki
Research on consumer culture and everyday life practices elaborates on the elemental role of material things in social life. The involved disciplines range from marketing and business studies to science and technology studies, cultural studies and anthropology. As one outcome, this work has accumulated knowledge on how the shared ways of using objects, and categorizing, thinking and speaking of them constitute human action.
The workshop is focused on the notion of moral symmetry. This concept refers to a methodological approach for studying the co-emergence of the consuming subjects and the consumed objects, scenes or places, and, in particular, to such situations where agency is reversed and material objects act back on humans. Accordingly, the workshop will facilitate discussions on the ways objects get singularized, narrated, aestheticized, how they acquire/lose value and rights, how do they stage rituals, and finally how human subject positions arise within such morally loaded object world: bicycles and cars that deserve dedicated riders, scenes that merit spectators, natures that need environmentalists, heritages that call for stewards, and progressive leap-frog technologies that warrant new users.
The moral loading of objects results in both private and public hierarchies of focal and peripheral objects, tools and toys, and in such distinguished categories such as national heritage and strategic business clusters. These hierarchies both reflect and reify social phenomena such as gendering and other forms of social ordering. Equally, we propose that they underlie human conditions such as dedication, obsession, stewardship and love as well as dismissal, distaste, neglect and hate.
Many interesting questions arise. What are the ways that objects, technologies and natures address, position, summon and pace and order us? How is value and worthiness established in the object world? What skills and competences are used to constitute value and actively perform categories such as novelties, antiques or waste within the object world? How do these categories intertwine with power and economic interests? How do objects enter, exit and move about in these categories? Potential contributions may empirically address processes of moral loading within, for example,
* Leisure time, hobbies, pets, significant or focal moments in everyday life
* Body, tools and other body extensions
* Toys
* Brand communities
* Cultural heritage management, nature protection, and tourism industry
* Public ceremonies, festivals, carnivals and other sites of cultural reproduction
* Waste, obsolescence and acts of ridding and throw-away
The workshop is organized jointly by the Finnish Association of Consumer Research and The Finnish Anthropological Society. International participants include Orvar Löfgren, Lund University. We seek to create a stimulating workspace for an international audience and are thus limited in scope and scale accepting papers based on previously sent abstracts. The aim is also to produce an edited volume based on the workshop papers.
Key dates: abstracts by May 31, papers by beginning of September 2009
More information: Mikko Jalas, HSE Organizations and management, mikko.jalas@hse.fi and at www.hse.fi/lumet