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Hands-on activities of shaping and maintaining urban public green spaces, in short, “stewardship,” have become a flourishing field of civic engagement. It is the aim of this article to find out how citizenship is enacted in the everyday practice of stewardship, and how such an analysis can benefit from theories of “material participation” and “practice.” It explores this theme through a case study of the greening of tree-pits in Berlin. The article asks: (1) how people, through their doing of stewardship, engage with the tangible places that they take care of, and (2) how connections between stewardship, its focal places, and other practices shape and sustain wider public concerns. Thereby, it identifies three intersecting and materially grounded “civic nexuses of practices,” which each imply specific constructions of citizenship: civic neighboring, managed volunteering, and political mobilization. It explores how each of these nexuses emerges from the convergence of practices around the tree-pit, and probes the tensions and conflicts that they entail. In contrast to authors who have either cherished stewardship as a form of citizen empowerment, or, in line with Foucauldian governmentality studies, as the formation of governable citizen-subjects, the article emphasizes the politically ambiguous dynamics through which stewards practice their citizenship.

To die in a medical ward is to die in a context aimed at saving lives and ensuring an efficient patient turnover. At the centre of securing treatment and care for patients is the electronic patient record (EPR). In this study, we will argue that the EPR is not only a container of relevant information about a patient and a record of past events but that it also performs how to go about dying, thereby also actively contributing to orderings of dying. Based on excerpts from 42 EPRs from the last 24 hours of life, we distinguish and analyse three hegemonic modes of ordering - numbering, timing and classifying. These modes primarily perform a 'master narrative' loyal to a heroic curative medicine wherein dying is cloaked, in the sense of being sequestered, and is made invisible. But zooming in on the gaps and cracks of the EPR notes, we argue that here we find traces of a different kind of cloaking attentive to palliative care of the dying process.

In January 2019, the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris presented the conference Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies.1 A spectacular video announces the event: a heavy-metal band screams about the conference’s themes and cries out each speaker’s name, which is in turn spelt out on screen in gothic-bloody font. The band’s song lyrics note that the focus of sound studies is on topics such as soundscape, noise, silence, recording techniques and listening. Most critically, the band shouts: ‘These are issues that musicology has been dealing with for a long time. What is then the place of musicology in the wake of sound studies?’

In this chapter, we will focus on research in the inter-and transdisciplinary collaboration between an orchestra, a higher arts education institute, and a university situated in the South of the Netherlands. Starting from the shared problem of how symphonic orchestras can shape new futures through innovating their practices, one project focused on studying and experimenting with artistically relevant forms of audience participation. It involved the design and organization of experimental concerts. Drawing on the work by Richard Sennett (Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Allen Lane, 2012) on cooperation, and his distinction between dialectic and dialogic conversations, we present fieldwork on one of these concerts. We show how the practical work to make an event happen can be traced through the many conversations that shaped the collaborative process. We conclude that cooperation is a skill that needs care, imagination, but also the open-endedness of continued learning from each other.

This chapter shows how Sanjib Datta Chowdhury’s anthropological work on spatial rituals in a Dutch residential home for the elderly changed my historical narrative on postwar policies concerning such homes. My initial argument revolved around policymakers’ reports and their notions of good care and independency. Chowdhury’s approach, however, made me revisit both my sources and analysis. First, I started studying the architectural plans and photography in the policy reports in more detail. Second, the ways in which these visualizations marked spaces as private, public, or semi-public, enabled me to explore how middle-class conceptions of what belongs to which type of space-at home, in villages, and in cities-co-inspired the layout of the residential homes. This warranted, in turn, a contribution to Chowdhury’s interpretations of spatial rituals. A more performative reading of the homes’ architectural representation as ritualized space, however, would have enriched the analysis and deepened interdisciplinary integration.

This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting.

To unpack healthcare practices, I frequently use video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). This visual methodology asks clinicians to become co-researchers. Studying practices in this way brings interdisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic alliances. This chapter describes situations in which different epistemic cultures meet each other and that may generate risks for researchers’ epistemic credibility, as well as opportunities for on-the-ground problem-solving. The first case study is about an Australian Emergency Department and demonstrates how a solid preparation of research includes potential risks for one’s professional reputation. The second case study draws on a Midwifery Science project in the Netherlands. It describes how real or imagined threats to professional credibility can affect both the experience of interdisciplinary collaboration and the relationship with one’s own academic community. By reflecting on these situations, I aim to explicate the learning potential of such encounters. Such new experiences in doing research in traditions other than one’s own make one humble and can prevent dogmatism.

This chapter shows how Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical sociology, especially his work on self-organizing social systems, helped refine my examination of educational debates about the modernization of higher education in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. What the application of a discursive analytical approach based on systems theory allowed me to do in particular was to reconsider the presumed influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational philosophy in the Netherlands. One of the study’s surprising outcomes was that Humboldt’s world-famous ideas on university education as Bildung hardly played a role in nineteenth-century educational debates in the Netherlands. Recent contributions to the historiography of universities in Germany corroborate this finding by situating the relevance of Humboldt’s ideas in the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. This outcome, however, would not have been possible without the engagement of various stakeholders in the articulation of the research question and intense interactions with scholars from various disciplines.

The introductory chapter explains the purpose of the book. It discusses the relevance of examples from the interdisciplinary research practice across the scholarly life cycle in contrast to short-term projects. It describes the book’s ambition to illustrate how such prolonged engagement with interdisciplinarity affects the way in which scholars work and the type of insights it may generate over time. This chapter also explicates the book’s structure, with sections on theory, methods, and collaboration. Finally, in dialogue with existing literature on interdisciplinarity, it shows three take-away lessons: the significance of the redefinition of subjects, concepts, hierarchies, and even entire fields; the importance of curated curiosity; and the need for sustained collaboration in making interdisciplinarity research a valuable undertaking.

This article reconstructs the historical transformation of mobility in the city of Maastricht in the period 1950–1980, from cycling as the most popular mode of traveling in the 1950s to car driving by the end of the 1970s. Based on an analysis of written sources and oral history interviews with Maastricht travelers and other practitioners who experienced this shift themselves, this article sheds light on this historical transformation, its key actors, and its main drivers. Combining insights from studies of social practice-based perspectives on mobility, historical sociotechnical transitions, and the model of urban obduracy, this study seeks to contribute to understanding why and how cities may transform toward being unsustainable places. Furthermore, it aims to show how social practice approaches can give more context-sensitive insights into processes of transformation and transition compared to established MLP-based transition approaches, by giving more attention to local meanings.

Responsibility is a concept increasingly used to refer to the ethical aspect of doing research and innovation. In this Manifesto, responsibility is elaborated as a concept broader in scope and impact, i.e., as a concept to guide institutional practices for better managing current transformations in science and science-society relationships. These transformations are, at the same time, promising and risky. Responsibility, as presented in this Manifesto, allows for better balancing between sustainability and profitability, between goal-focused and curiosity-driven research, and between open science and market-driven science. Academic research and industrial research are now intimately intertwined, and one depends on the other now. Thus, responsibility does not only concern research institutions or universities but also involves a myriad of actors turning around research and innovation, including private companies. Though this Manifesto is relevant for all scientific and scholarly research, it primarily draws on experiences in the biosciences. This Manifesto is one of the end products of the ResBios project, which was aimed at further developing and embedding practices of responsible research and innovation (RRI) in bioscience organisations.

Within the last two decades, it has been commonly agreed that patient safety and error management in healthcare organizations can best be attained by adopting a systems approach via re-engineering efforts and the introduction of industrial safety technologies and methodologies. This strategy has not delivered the expected result. Based on John Dewey’s pragmatism, we propose another vocabulary for understanding, inquiring into and learning from safety situations in healthcare. Drawing especially on Dewey’s understanding of transaction as the inseparability between human and environment, we develop an analytical approach to patient safety understood as a transactional accomplishment thoroughly dependent on the quality of situated and shared habits and collaborative practices in healthcare. We furtherillustrate methodologically how a transactional attitude can be situationally practised through videoreflexive ethnography, a method that allows for inquiry into mundane safety practices by letting interprofessional teams see, reflect upon and possibly modify their shared practices and safety habits.

It is well known that the Ministry of State Security in the former German Democratic Republic was deeply involved in wiretapping and eavesdropping on both foreigners and its citizens. It is less widely known that, against this background, the Stasi developed a keen interest in technologies and techniques of speaker identification, such as the visualization of recorded sound and aural analysis. How exactly did Stasi employees analyze the sound of voices? How did listening become a legitimate way of knowing in this context? And why did speaker identification not become as powerful as the Stasi had hoped? Empirically, this essay draws on documents from the Stasi’s former archives. Theoretically, it builds on “sonic skills” in the sciences to clarify the identification practices and distinguishes between the “logic of forensics” and the “logic of surveillance” to understand why the Stasi ran ashore in its sound analysis endeavor. Finally, it aims to contribute to understanding the information paradox in the Stasi historiography and its implications for the history of science.

Building on our experiences in the NWO-funded research project “Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies” (2012–2016), this chapter reflects upon the heuristic potential of the concept of dispositif for both studying and valorizing the history of home movie making and screening as 20th-century family memory practices. Our experiences with a wide variety of valorization activities – such as the making of two museum exhibitions, a historical re-enactment, and an online best practice guide – support an understanding of valorization as a highly reciprocal process between all stakeholders involved. Rather than involving a one-way dissemination of findings, embedded and embodied valorization practices, we argue, can facilitate engaged humanities research and raise the societal relevancy of historical investigations.

Symphony orchestras today acknowledge the need to make their art relevant again in today's societies and innovate their practices. When these innovations regard audience participation, they challenge the ritualised formats of classical music performance and disrupt normative, social, and artistic traditions. The orchestra therefore presents an interesting case to develop a better understanding of the value-laden dynamics of innovation in public participation. Implicit notions of an 'ideal public' and its desirable behaviour often structure the design, set-up, and assessment of participatory innovations. Fieldwork during the Empty Minds concerts, that the South Netherlands Philharmonic organised in 2018 to innovate participation, supports this claim.The organisers aimed to assign new participatory roles to the audience. Throughout the organisational process, three forms of frictions developed. The hierarchical pattern of symphonic concerts conflicted with the plan for new audience participation, material routines were challenged, and during the actual concerts, audience members did not participate in new ways. The observed frictions show that what matters artistically cannot be separated from how the performance is organised: artistic qualities emerge in and through socio-material practice. What comes to count as desirable public participation is thus not a given, but needs to be continuously articulated, negotiated and constructed.

Background: Research on maternity care often focuses on factors that prevent good communication and collaboration and rarely includes important stakeholders – parents – as co-researchers. To understand how professionals and parents in Dutch maternity care accomplish constructive communication and collaboration, we examined their interactions in the clinic, looking for “good practice”.Methods: We used the video-reflexive ethnographic method in 9 midwifery practices and 2 obstetric units.Findings: We conducted 16 meetings where participants reflected on video recordings of their clinical interactions. We found that informal strategies facilitate communication and collaboration: “talk work” – small talk and humour – and “work beyond words” – familiarity, use of sight, touch, sound, and non-verbal gestures. When using these strategies, participants noted that it is important to be sensitive to context, to the values and feelings of others, and to the timing of care. Our analysis of their ways of being sensitive shows that good communication and collaboration involves “paradoxical care”, e.g., concurrent acts of “regulated spontaneity” and “informal formalities”.Discussion: Acknowledging and reinforcing paradoxical care skills will help caregivers develop the competencies needed to address the changing demands of health care. The video-reflexive ethnographic method offers an innovative approach to studying everyday work, focusing on informal and implicit aspects of practice and providing a bottom up approach, integrating researchers, professionals and parents.Conclusion: Good communication and collaboration in maternity care involves “paradoxical care” requiring social sensitivity and self-reflection, skills that should be included as part of professional training.

Second-generation (2G) biofuels are promoted worldwide as remedy to sustainable-energy challenges in the transport sector and as response to the criticism of first-generation biofuels. By utilizing agriculture and forest residues, 2G biofuels claim to support agricultural livelihoods and boost rural economies. Quantitative estimates exist of the availability of "waste" or "unused" or "surplus" biomass that could be fed into producing bioenergy. Most of current discourse on 2G bioethanol is about developing efficient technologies and supportive policies for biomass utilization and energy distribution, while availability and supply of that biomass are often taken for granted. This paper challenges these presumptions of biomass availability and technological feasibility. Following a social-constructivist analysis of technology and focusing on how political actors, scientists, industry, green-revolution and organic farmers envision biomass, this paper argues that the innovation for 2G is hybrid and complex, rather than merely logistical and economic. Biomass as feedstock is not an off-the-shelf commodity, but a dynamic and fluid entity, the availability of which is dependent on a number of cultural, social, technological and economic factors. Policies are needed that recognize the multiplicity of agricultural practices if a sustainable biofuel system is to be developed.

Children were central to Dutch and Belgian colonial projects. Children and youth were the objects of colonial interventions issued by missionaries and officials. However, children could also become actors who produced change in a colonial context. Crucial in colonial policies towards children was the separation of children from their parents, communities and/or culture (‘child separation’) in all kinds of forms – temporary or permanent, far from home or close by, in contact with their own community or cut off from it – and to various degrees of coercion (voluntary, from a situation of dependence, enforced with punishment or violence). Child separation projects could involve adoption, foster parenting, ‘apprenticeships’ serving a household, boarding schools or day schools. It could concern children from the local elite, but also children who ended up on the margins of their own communities or were even bought out of slavery. Child separation was never about education only, but always imposed specific morals and life styles on its subjects as well. It caused profound fault lines in colonised families and communities. For colonial politics, it was key to controlling, influencing and disciplining the colonised population (‘governmentality’). In the case of children of ethnically mixed descent, child separation often involved policing hierarchical racialised boundaries in the colony; in the case of indigenous children, it aimed at transforming the colonised population. Christian missions were pivotal in child separation projects. This special issue, therefore, pleads for a more central place of Catholic and Protestant missions in the analysis of Dutch colonial history, comparable to Belgian historiography. Finally, it is precisely these (missionary) colonial projects, often labeled as ‘soft’ or ‘civilising’, that have passed unnoticed into post-colonial discourses, organisations and practices, such as transnational adoption or surrogacy, and countless development projects in which children, detached from their own family and context, must be ‘saved’. Without proper scholarly attention for Christian missions in colonial history, these traces of the colonial past in the postcolonial present will not be recognised as such. Kinderen stonden centraal in Nederlandse en Belgische koloniale projecten. Kinderen en jongeren waren daarbij het object van koloniaal handelen van missionarissen, zendelingen en ambtenaren, maar zij konden ook zelf actoren worden die in een koloniale context veranderingen veroorzaakten. Cruciaal in deze koloniale projecten was het scheiden van kinderen van hun ouders, van hun gemeenschappen en van hun cultuur (child separation) in allerlei vormen – tijdelijk of voorgoed, ver van huis of dichtbij, in contact met de eigen gemeenschap of volledig daarvan afgesneden – en in diverse gradaties van dwang (vrijwillig, vanuit een situatie van afhankelijkheid, afgedwongen met straffen of geweld). Concreet kon het gaan om adoptie, pleegouderschap, het in huis nemen van werkende ‘leerjongens en -meisjes’, kostscholen of dagscholen. De kinderen zelf waren afkomstig uit de lokale elite, of het waren juist kinderen die in de marge van hun eigen gemeenschappen terecht waren gekomen, of zelfs door missionarissen uit slavernij werden gekocht. De doelstellingen van deze praktijken betroffen nooit alleen onderricht, maar altijd ook het aanleren van een bepaalde levenswijze en moraal. Niet alleen veroorzaakten de scheiding en heropvoeding ingrijpende breuklijnen in gekoloniseerde families en gemeenschappen; voor de koloniale politiek waren deze kinderen de sleutel tot het controleren, beinvloeden en disciplineren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking (governmentality). In het geval van kinderen van etnisch gemengde komaf ging het vaak om het bewaken van de hierarchische geracialiseerde grenzen in de kolonie; in het geval van lokale kinderen meer om het transformeren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking. Van veel instellingen voor opvoeding en onderwijs van deze kinderen vormden christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties de spil. In en met dit themanummer wordt daarom ook een lans gebroken voor de integratie van missie en zending in het analyseren van de Nederlandse koloniale geschiedenis, in navolging van de Belgische historiografie. Tot slot zijn het juist deze vaak als ‘zacht’ of ‘civiliserend’ aangemerkte koloniale projecten die ongemerkt zijn overgegaan in postkoloniale discoursen, organisaties en praktijken, zoals transnationale adoptie of draagmoederschap, en talloze ontwikkelingsprojecten waarin kinderen, losgezongen van hun eigen familie en context, ‘gered’ moeten worden. Zonder gedegen wetenschappelijke aandacht voor de rol van christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties in de koloniale geschiedenis zullen deze sporen van het koloniale verleden in het postkoloniale heden niet als dusdanig worden herkend.

This commentary outlines some of the key contributions of this special issue to the field of STS and the city. It highlights the following three issues: (1) the special issue adds to an empirical and theoretical enrichment of the notion of urban techno-politics and (2) it contributes to a broadening of the notion of urban obduracy as a form of resistance to change, by including attention to power dynamics and imaginaries and (3) it includes an interesting plea for studying cities as sites where the local, national and global level intersect or clash. This commentary argues that, by opening up 'the urban' to STS concepts applied in other contexts and fields of research, new innovative research directions come within reach.

ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences.

Professional musicians who perform in hospitals, retirement homes and prisons, creatively stimulated by the residents; babies crawling over exercise mats, enjoying classical music together with their parents; concert-goers who take their seats between the musicians in order to experience music up close with all their senses - the opportunities to make and experience music are almost unlimited. Various actors in the field of classical music have taken this as a chance to develop a wide range of new artistic and educational practices over the last two decades, aiming to facilitate in-depth aesthetic experiences, to diversify and bond with audiences and to encourage active cultural participation. The contributors focus on the innovative potential of Musikvermittlung as a social bridge-builder for concert life, (higher) music education, research and social life.

Book review of: Lies Van de Vijver, Guy Dupont and Roel Vande Winkel, Gent Filmstad: Cinema’s en filmaffiches, 1938–1961 (Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Houtekiet, 2021), 278 pp., ISBN 978-90-8924-994-4 and Gyz La Rivière, Home Video: Videotheken & Video in Groot-Rotterdam (Rotterdam: nai010 uitgevers, 2021), 432 pp., ISBN 978-94-6208-663-0.

This chapter explores the long-lasting western fascination with the legendary mermaid character, focusing on the disney animation of hans christian andersen’s fairy tale the little mermaid (1837). The enduring appeal of the mermaid trope derives from the cultural ambivalences it evokes. On the one hand, it is a subversive trope, destabilising foundational western binaries such as reason vs. Nature/ mind vs. Body/ reason vs. Matter/ rationality vs. Animality/ reason vs. Emotion/ man vs. Woman, etc. On the other hand, the plot structures in which the mermaid has become implicated in western narratives effectively neutralise the subversive potential of the mermaid trope. I explore how this tension between subversion and repression plays out in disney’s animation of andersen’s tale.keywordsmermaids in western culturetomboy storiesadaptationdisney animationdisneyfication.

This article reconstructs the history of underground parking in the Dutch city of Maastricht by connecting the model of obduracy (i.e., “resistance to change”) with the concept of upscaling, which offers new insights in historic urban transitions. We discuss how the decision-making process about the building of the first underground parking garage (Vrijthof) in the late 1960s was a starting point of a growing obduracy of the urban practice of car use and parking in the inner city of Maastricht. We argue that this obduracy can be explained by the growing interconnections between the cultural meanings of historic squares and urban car use, expertise of urban planners, traffic experts and parking operators, parking and traffic policies and regulations, and underground parking infrastructures. Ironically, the expansion of underground parking in Maastricht can be seen as a pivotal part of the successful upscaling and increasing obduracy of car mobility in this town, but at the same time significantly affects the upscaling of local sustainable mobility innovations forty years later and beyond.

During a search of photographs and documentation on the Belgian photographer Benjamin Couprie, who took the well-known pictures of the Solvay Conferences during the first half of the twentieth century, Santiago Alvarez [1] came across an image in “La Digithèque des Bibliothèques de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles” with the title “Réception de l’Union Internationale de Chimie Pure et Appliquée, photographie de groupe” (Figure 1) [2]. It is a high-resolution copy of a very sharp photograph of a group of 86 people. On the frame of that photo one can read two inscriptions noted in pencil above and below the photograph, respectively: “Union Internationale de la Chimie pure et appliquée,” and “Reception au chateau de La Hulpe le 29 Juin 1921.” Moreover, just under the photograph there are two inscriptions in smaller letters: “Bruxelles 1913,“ on the left, and the signature of “Benj. Couprie” on the right, both in the same handwriting. Two questions arise: (1) Which is the correct date for that photograph? (2) Who are the persons that appear in the photo?

Western audiences have long been fascinated with music automata. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that art and music curators display historical examples of such mechanical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic sound art? And do visitors understand the connections between the objects on display in the ways intended by the curators? To examine the curators’ ambitions, this article analyses three exhibitions: Für Augen und Ohren (West Berlin 1980), Ballet Mécanique (Maastricht 2002) and Art or Sound (Venice 2014). To unravel visitors’ responses, we focus on the Berlin exhibition, the best documented case. We argue that the curators staged the automated kinetic as a key historical link between mechanical musical instruments and contemporary sound art, and that they tried to tap into specific dimensions of public fascination with musical automata – the magical invisible, mechanical wonder and blurring of boundaries – to open their audiences’ senses to sound art. As we will show with the help of the notion of ‘listening habitus’, visitors’ responses indeed drew on these dimensions, but more often than not displayed a preference for the historical automata rather than contemporary kinetic art.