Toward a slow criminology of sociotechnical orderings: A tale of many youth repellents
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Patrick Savoie,Dominique Robert,Martin Dufresne |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617733723 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617733723
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(1) 78 –95
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617733723
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Toward a slow criminology of
sociotechnical orderings: A tale
of many youth repellents
Patrick Savoie, Martin Dufresne and
Dominique Robert
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
Taking the material turn can contribute to renewing the discipline and sustaining the
development of a slow criminology. Treating objects as mediators and acknowledging
their ontological multiplicities protect us from our reflex to condemn rather than
analyze them. Using the example of the ‘youth repellent’, we document three of its
instantiations: a spatial fluidity device; a pain delivery mechanism; and an environmental
pollution agent. This exploration forces us to expand the borders of the discipline to
embrace others such as audiology and epidemiology. While these detours slow our
analysis, they are the price we must pay for doing justice to the messiness of the human
and non-human associations that constitute the fabric of our world.
Keywords
Actor–network theory, material turn, mediation, performance, technology, youth
repellent
Introduction
Objects ‘are back’:
After poststructuralism and constructivism had melted everything that was solid into air, it was
perhaps time that we noticed once again the sensuous immediacy of the objects we live, work
Corresponding author:
Dominique Robert, Criminology, University of Ottawa, 120 University, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: Dominique.Robert@uottawa.ca
733723TCR0010.1177/1362480617733723Theoretical CriminologySavoie et al.
research-article2017
Article
Savoie et al. 79
and converse with, in which we routinely place our trust, which we love and hate, which bind
us as much as we bind them.
(Pels et al., 2002: 1)
Despite criminologists’ growing interest in technological objects, we believe that we, our
own research included, did not fully take the ‘material turn’ announced by Pels and his
colleagues (2002: 5) at the beginning of the second millennium. This is noticeable on two
accounts: we often treat technology as a thin object and we conceptualize it as a single
entity. In this article, we test our capacity to treat technological objects as thick and mul-
tiple so as to venture into ontological politics.
Some analysts interested in crime control technologies, while not completely
embracing the material turn, have taken materiality seriously. To do so, they have
mobilized varied conceptual tools, including those of science and technology studies
(STS) (see, for example, Aas, 2006; Lyon, 2003; Magnet, 2011; Moreau de Bellaing,
2011; Smith and O’Malley, 2017). Like them, we borrow from STS, more precisely
from actor–network theory (ANT), post-ANT perspectives as well as from new mate-
rialisms (Barad, 1998; Coole and Frost, 2010; Gad and Bruun Jensen, 2010; Haraway,
2000; Mol, 1999, 2003). ANT has been the target of many criticisms, some leveled by
the founders themselves (Latour, 1999; Law and Hassard, 1999). It has been reproached
for endowing objects with agency (Collins and Yearley, 1992), reproducing discrimi-
nations against the powerless (Star, 1990) and, relatedly, neglecting to consider struc-
tural forces at work (Harris, 2005). Many of those criticisms have been partially
answered (Callon and Latour, 1992), or used to clarify further ANT positions (Latour,
2005). Specifically, we learn that agency is not the property of an object or a human
being but rather the effect of an association between humans and objects. Interaction is
all there is. Objects do not act alone, nor do humans. They act in relation, hence the
importance of the concept of the heterogeneous networks for this perspective.
Moreover, ANT focuses on power and structure. However, rather than using these
concepts to explain the state of the world, ANT focuses on the mechanics of power as
its research object (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992). ANT theorists, like ethnomethodolo-
gists, document how structures actually come into being, how fragile they can be and
all the work required for their survival. Like analyzing a body that is continuously
healing itself, ANT is interested in the micro-relations that produce and reproduce the
world around us (Law, 1992). While not complete and faultless, for our purposes the
scientific project that drives ANT is worthwhile: finding a way to describe the collec-
tive ‘in the making’, rather than the social ‘already there’ while considering the work
of objects. Indeed, many critical criminologists and STS scholars make sense of the
part political structures play in the lives of social actors, fewer look at the way social
fabrics are weaved by the interactions of humans… and non-humans. This is what we
are attempting with this contribution, albeit on a small scale. Indeed, we want to
describe the associations being forged between humans and non-humans that stabilize
our world for a moment and create a multiplicity of sociotechnical orderings. By that
term, we refer to the way heterogeneous networks, such as objects, are ‘patterned to
generate effects like organization, inequality and power’ (Law, 1992: 381).1
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