Ontological overflows and the politics of absence: Zika, disease surveillance, and mosquitos

This paper suggests that STS needs to start attending to what I dub ontological overflows. My argument is that the focus on construction and enactment stories in STS has led to us taking over the matters of concern of our interlocutors. Our informants' concerns and objects, becoming our concerns and objects. I argue that we have taken for granted which objects should be attended to, cared for, and analyzed. Thus, our theories and methods have constituted a particular blindness to those objects that our informants do not care for—the objects at the edges of the network, the smooth rhizomatic spaces, the blank figures, the neglected things, the undiscovered continents, the plasma. The paper thus joins in the ongoing discussion about the ontological politics of invisibility, partial knowledge, and fractionality, and asks how STS can attend to the making of the absent, weak, and invisible. What would happen if we start paying attention to these ontological overflows in practice? By tracing how multiple absences are produced, the paper shows the usefulness of caring for the othered objects, of following the making of alterity and otherness. The argument is that the tracing of ontological overflows opens up for understanding how tangential objects are dis-assembled, and consequently for tracing how absence, alterity, and otherness are made in practice.

read the pdf doi: 10.1080/09505431.2023.2291046

Lee, Francis. 2024. "Ontological overflows and the politics of absence: Zika, disease surveillance, and mosquitos." Science as Culture 33(3): 417-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2023.2291046