Virgin Mary and the Neutrino
MoA Member Maxime Le Calvé Convenes Collective Reading of Isabelle Stengers's Newly Translated Book
On 25 January 2024, the Laboratory Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin hosted a collective reading of the newly translated book »Virgin Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble« by Isabelle Stengers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023). The session will take place on Zoom and is convened by Cluster member Maxime Le Calvé.
The translator Andrew Goffey, Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, gave an introduction to the concept of ecology of practices, contextualized this important book in the landscape of science and technology studies, and shared with us how this book influenced his own work.
The lab members then gave short inputs on each chapter, before diving into the discussion.
In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and here appearing in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an »ecology of practices« into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations. (From the website of Duke)