Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces

Alexander, Catherine

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.13899

Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces

Alexander, Catherine

Authors

Professor Catherine Alexander catherine.alexander@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This volume follows failures out into the world exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted—unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode of uncontainable excess that refuses the boundedness of knowledge objects, temporalities and spaces. This volume offer three main interventions. The first concerns knowledge production: how objects of failure are crafted through selective ways of knowing that occludes both other modes of apprehension at different scales plus failure’s many affective valences. The second thinks through the knotted temporalities—whether pasts, futures, suspended presents or repetition and sedimentation—that make and are made by failure. Finally, writing about unfurling failures requires careful attention to the non-linear reverberations, traces, open-endedness, and mobile narratives that produce different social and material effects.

Citation

Alexander, C. (2023). Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29, 8-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13899

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 6, 2022
Online Publication Date	Feb 24, 2023
Publication Date	2023
Deposit Date	Dec 7, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Mar 28, 2023
Journal	Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Print ISSN	1359-0987
Electronic ISSN	1467-9655
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	29
Pages	8-30
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13899

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© 2023 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.

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