Assembling and Governing Habits

Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley, Gay Hawkins, Greg Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367607944
• eBook ISBN: 9781000402209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The increasing significance of managing or changing habits is evident across a range of pressing contemporary issues: climate change, waste management, travel practices, and crowd control. Assembling and Governing Habits engages with the diverse ways in which habits are governed through the knowledge practices and technologies that have been brought to bear on them.

The volume addresses three main concerns. The first focuses on how the habit discourses proposed by a range of disciplines have informed the ways in which different forms of expertise have shaped the ways in which habits have been managed or changed to bring about specific social objectives. The second concerns the ways in which habits are acted on as aspects of infrastructures which constitute the interfaces through which technical systems, human conducts and environments are acted on simultaneously. The third concerns the specific ways in which habit discourses and habit infrastructures are brought together in the regulation of 'city habits': that is, habits which have specific qualities arising out of the specific conditions – the rhythms and densities – of urban life and ones which, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been profoundly disrupted.

Written in a clear and direct style, the book will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in cultural studies, sociology, cultural geography, history of the sciences, and posthuman studies.

Index

ABC framework of social change 124

action at a distance 224, 225, 226

active habits 19, 20

actor-network theory 3, 93

adaptation 7, 97, 152

Adey, Peter 151, 152, 159, 160, 163–164

affect 62; affective atmospheres 92–95, 122–123; and crowds 220; feminist theories of 187; and social distancing 225; and walking habits 184, 187–188; and water consumption 7, 122–124; see also walking habits

Agamben, Giorgio 84, 230

age, and water habits 127

agency 46, 94, 197; and design 97; distributed agency via habit 68; distributive 90; in planetary cognitive ecology 73; and walking habits 194–196

Ahmed, Sara 14–15, 16, 196–197

air-conditioning (AC) 98, 99, 101–103

airport terminals 159

Alexander, Christopher 104, 105

algebraic systems 134

algorithms 6, 64, 68, 69–72, 75n4, 76n10; algorithmic thought 62, 66, 71; definition of 64, 75n4; machine learning 75–76n8; surgical robotics 76n10; surveillance 201, 202, 207; see also computational media

Amazon 8, 136, 137, 143; Amazon Mechanical Turk 136, 137, 141; Amazon Prime 137, 143; Amazon Robotics 139; Amazon Web Services (AWS) 137, 138, 140; data operations 140; e-commerce 137–138; exploitative labour practices 139; flexibility 141–142; Kindle 137; two-pizza team rule 138

Amin, Ash 168, 178–179

Amoore, Louise 69, 70, 75n4, 76n10

Anderson, Benedict 41n2

Anderson, Chris 143

Anderson, Craig 99

Andrejevic, Mark 208, 231–232

anticipatory governance 140

Aquinas, Thomas 16

assemblage(s) 3, 6, 72, 73, 90, 154; body-objec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Engaging Habits: Theory and Practice
• Habit Discourses
• Habit Infrastructures
• City Habits
• Index