Ethnography of Socio-technical Associations

  Workshop 2, "Ethnography of Socio-technical Associations" (coordinators Franck Cochoy and Anne Mayère) focuses on methods integrating technical objects into analyses of social phenomena.
Two approaches are privileged: the first, archaeology of the present time, means working like archaeologists without written sources, analyzing innovative sources of information to bring to light the contribution of socio-technical objects to action (photographic and video documentation, the sociobiographies of objects...).

The second approach, quantitative ethnography, means using observation checklists that ask questions about the  elements observed, whether human or non-human, and based on the data collected, developing specific statistical processing to account for the dynamics of human-object associations.

One-day seminars are organized that privilege in-depth papers, enabling participants to dive deep into the process of making research material and analysing it, and to discuss the approach with participants. Several of these seminars were organized in various formats as well as an International Workshop in May 2015. In addition, a book publishing project in English is in progress on the workshop’s subjects. Another aspect of the workshop involves developing a set of online resources that bring together the most significant publications, methods, and tools of contemporary research on human-object associations.