Practice-oriented document analysis: A method for investigating democracy

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Presentation

The paper’s point of departure is the hypothesis that democracy is so intimately connected to documents and procedures of writing that if these were to disappear, democracy as we know it would have to be invented anew. But what is it, more precisely, that documents do to democracy? The lecture answers this question by delineating how documents are involved in what is suggested we understand as ‘modes of grounding’ and that these modes of grounding add up to a social epistemology. A key element to this epistemology of grounding is the moveability and modifiability of documents and their issues. Documents are ‘little tools of democracy’, they are ‘document-things’ equipped to act by their combinations of words and things that circulate across spheres and take on board objects, actors and expertise. By doing so they may, in principle, encapsulate society in the same document world and reality. Modes of grounding, the paper aims to show, are procedures of justification through documents that have historically been inscribed and re-inscribed in the manufacturing, upholding and continuous re-invention of democracy.

Biography

Kristin Asdal is professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Centre Director of TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. In this lecture Kristin draws on her studies of politics of nature in democracy with a point of departure in the Norwegian case, her notion “little tools of democracy” (Asdal 2008) and the concept and method for practice-oriented document-analysis developed with Hilde Reinertsen (Asdal 2015, Asdal and Reinertsen 2022) to delineate that and how documents may carry a particular form of social epistemology. 

Organiser

Lisa Flower, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology

Welcome!

Arranged by: Lund Social Science Methods Centre