The materiality of knowledge production
2012 Journal of comparative research in anthropology and sociology
The following paper is based upon fifteen months of participatory ethnographic fieldwork within an NGO in Rajasthan, India. Based within a solar photovoltaic workshop for the production of lanterns and the training of ‘solar engineers’, the author reflects upon the different kinds of knowledges generated in the workshop and how they are constituted through particular kinds of material artefacts and approaches to learning. Drawing upon an ‘after actor-network’ approach to knowledge production the author explores the emergent and contingent character of knowledge performed. When knowledge is imagined as fluid like, as something that flows and transmutes with more or less viscosity (Mol and Law 1994), we are perhaps in a better position to conceive of its transformative and generative potential.
