Lost

Book Presentation

Fazil Moradi presented the book “Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation”, co-edited with Ralph Buchenhorst and Maria Six-Hohenbalken, at the University of del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia on August 18, 2017.

LOST in Public

Katharina Schramm comments on recent debates on the colonial past of the ethnographic collection of the Humboldt Forum (Tagesspiegel, August 8, 2017) (Picture: Three Power Figures, Democractic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Yombe ©Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Martin Franken; CC NC-BY-SA)

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Measures of Future Health II

( September 28 - October 1, 2017 | New York ) This workshop is the second iteration of “Measure of Future Health.” The first took place in Berlin in October 8-9, 2016.

At One of the LOST Events

Pauline, René, Fazil, Bert and Richard at the Workshop “Practicing Uncertainty” in Amsterdam, July 6, 2017.

Recent Publications

MAKING EVIDENCE, DESIGNING FUTURES

This program inquires into the production of evidence under conditions of uncertainty and how this relates to the enactment of futures. It starts from the assertion that modern public life implicates the quest for ‘matters of fact’ that are institutionally certified as objective. This quest results from the jurido-political pursuit of accountability in ordering practices, which incriminates predictability of future scenarios. As such the program is located in the anthropology of knowledge production and science and technology studies (STS). It focuses on the production of techno-scientific knowledge by investigating how evidence is made and comes to matter. We suggest that examining how certain matters of fact are certified provides crucial insights into the futures people design for the conduct of public life in the face of invincible uncertainty.

ABOUT THE LOST RESEARCH NETWORK

While Anthropology is well-established as a discipline, Organization Studies and STS are vigorous transdisciplinary fields. A growing academic current mingles these three fields and thereby engenders provocative insights. Working at the intersection of these fields and fusing their approaches, we emphasize the legal and ethical dimensions of fact-making in the contemporary. The acronym LOST stands for Law, Organization, Science and Technology. The ambition of our detailed ethnographies is to respond to long-standing questions raised in social theory and philosophy and vice-versa, to render those questions into ethnographic inquiries. We address issues of planetary scope, although several of our empirical projects are situated in Africa. Since its inception in 2002, LOST has expanded – from a small group localized in Halle to a decentralized network of independent scholars.