Para-sites+&+3rd+Spaces+(Jalbert)


 * Overview**

“Para-site” as an ethnographic research method is a term first used by George Marcus to describe the creation of participatory spaces where multiple divergent agents and agencies discursively interact across geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries. The para-site runs as a parallel but less conspicuous narrative to dominant practices that might otherwise be missed by studying institutions alone. Para-sites utilize existing structures to create a kind of double-agency of inputs and outputs that can be studied as the result of tacit knowledge. Para-sites also legitimate explicit form of experimentation and play that facilitates open-ended modes of knowledge production. (Marcus, 2000)

The practice of actively creating para-sites for experimental articulation is a derivative of paraethnography, which studies, “how culture operates within a continuously unfolding contemporary and where everyone, directly or indirectly, is implicated in and constituted by complex technical systems of knowledge.” (Marcus, 2009, pg. 184).

This differs from previous ethnographic work relying on analytical questions established by the ethnographer in participatory observation or deep description that fail to implicate impacts of the researcher. Paraethnography (and the creation of para-sites) instead allows subjects to co-construct articulations of studied knowledge.

Examples of para-sites can be found in the work of paraethnographic filmmakers and photographers such as media anthropologist [|John Jackson Jr]. or more popularly the work of [|Errol Morris], spaces fostering participatory design such as UToronoto's [|Critical Making Lab], and the work of participatory [|action researchers].


 * Origins**

From the perspective of the researcher, Para-sites’ roots can be seen in Hans Jorg Rheinberger’s work in experimental systems: “ The working units a scientist or a group of scientists deal with. They are simultaneously local, social, institutional, technical, instrumental and, above all, epistemic units. [A]n experimental system [is] a unit of research designed to give answers to questions we are not yet able to ask clearly…It is a device that not only generates answers; at the same time, and as a prerequisite, it shapes the questions to be answered. An experimental system is a device to materialize questions.” ( Rheinberger 1998 - quoted from Fischer, 2007a)
 * Rheinberger’s Experimental Systems**

Michael Fischer, in a thesis on the future of anthropology in science studies, describes ethnographic practices based on experimental systems as essential for understanding the complicated nature of how studied subjects interact in the modern world, “and make more realistic the demand for attention to the reconstruction of public spheres, civil society, and politics in the technoscientific worlds we are constructing.” (Fischer 2007b)

If there is a //conceptual framework// for para-site projects, its might be found in experimental systems.

Rheinberger also describes the usefulness of studying scientific (and perhaps by extension, social) objects as "epistemic things" that are both central to the construction of knowledge but always under reconstruction. Karin Knorr Cetina describes these as question-generating objects and processes that are only revealed through an internal study of continual inquiry rather than external tendencies to black-box their significant properties, "The defining characteristic of an epistemic object is this changing, unfolding character—or its lack of ‘object-ivity’ and completeness of being, and its nonidentity with itself. The lack in completeness of being is crucial: objects of knowledge in many fields have material instantiations, but they must simultaneously be conceived of as unfolding structures of absences: as things that continually ‘explode’ and ‘mutate’ into something else." (Cetina, pg.191)
 * Rheinberger’s Epistemic Things**

If there are //artifacts// to be studied in para-site projects, they may exist as epistemic objects.

Relative to the increased importance of acknowledging co-constructed knowledge with subjects, Michel de Certeau’s //The Practice of Everyday Life// describes tactics of the individual in opposition to strategies of the institutions within which they operate. Here, strategies are, “the calculation of power relationships,” where tactic become an action, “determined by the absence of a proper locus…the space of a tactic is the space of the other.” (deCerteau p. 37). The tactic does not obey laws of place, but instead transverse temporal, physical, and actionary boundaries.
 * Michel de Certeau’s strategies and tactics**

If there is an //action// to be studied in para-site projects, it could best be described as the articulations of the tactic.


 * Related Terms**

Michael Fischer introduced a similar idea which Marcus credits as partially inspiring his para-site concept, what Fischer calls //Third Spaces of Articulation//: "Culture is not a variable; culture is relational, it is elsewhere, it is in passage, it is where meaning is woven and renewed, often through gaps and silences, and forces beyond the conscious control of individuals, and yet the space where individual and institutional social responsibility and ethical struggle take place. (Fischer, 2003, pg.7) " Fischer's concept of culture creation here remains very similar to de Certeau's tactics. As an anthropologist engaged in paraethnography, Fischer relates such activities to //deep play// where participants of knowledge articulation, "interact with moral systems of larger societies...as well as how moral systems interrogate one another. The ethical is often an anthropological third space between the individual and society. (Fischer, 2003, pg.11)
 * Fischer's Third Spaces**


 * References**

Cetina, K.K. (2001). //Objectual Practice//. In: Turn, T. P., Schatzki, T. R., & Cetina, K. K. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Sociology The Journal Of The British Sociological Association.

De Certeau, M. (1984). //The Practice of Everyday Life//. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fischer, M. (2003). //Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice//. Duke University Press.

Fischer, M. (2007a). //Four Genealogies For A Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology//. Cultural Anthropology, 22(4), 539-615.

Fischer, M. (2007b). //Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems//. Cultural Anthropology, 22(1), 1-64.

Marcus, G. (2009). //Multi-sited ethnography: notes and Queries//. In: Multi-sited ethnography theory, praxis and locality in Contemporary research, Ed. by Mark-anthony Falzon. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.

Marcus, G. E. (2000). Para-sites: a casebook against cynical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rheinberger, H.J. (1992) //Experiment, Difference, and Writing: Tracing Protein Synthesis//. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23(2), 305–441.

Rheinberger, H.J. 1998. //Experimental Systems, Graphematic Spaces//. In: Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Timothy Lenoir, ed. Pp. 285–303. Stanford: Stanford University Press.