Inflections is a collaborative, critical reading effort shared amongst multidisciplinary graduate students and faculty. It is a thinking through doing, a gathering centered on conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing texts which engage an annual theme.
Extensive Praxis, Reflexive Praxis: On Method
The theme of this year’s Technoscience Salon is Extensive Processes and Praxis. With regard to praxis the Salon states, “our aim is to examine what is at stake in the work of extending things in the interdigitating realms of technoscience, art, economics, and politics. Simultaneously we want to hold our own praxis in focus, by examining the labours of historians, anthropologists, geographers and others who track the extension of objects into worlds and worlds into objects. How do our theories conceal extensive relations? What theoretical and methodological shifts can we employ to illuminate otherwise invisible distributions? What are our habits for tracking extensions, and what do our habits take for granted?”
To extend the theme of extensive praxis, this year’s reading group will explore the self-reflexive work of holding our own practices in focus. Reflecting on praxis with both an awareness of disciplinary boundaries and established theoretical frameworks and the concern to extend beyond their limits will allow us to create a space in which our practices can undergo critical analysis and creative exploration. How are we reflecting upon the relation between ideas and action? What assumptions remain inconspicuous and unquestioned in our most mundane practices? Must a philosophy of praxis accompany all action? Is praxis necessarily political? How are emerging forms of practice (re)shaping our perception? What are they concealing? Does the notion of praxis itself require articulation? rehabilitation? retirement? These discussions are meant to be extensive practices in themselves, an extension of the inquirer into new dimensions of practice and new domains of knowledge, to articulate and become articulated within an extensive methodology.
Inflections 