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- Title
Materiality: juggling sameness and difference.
- Authors
Dugdale, Antti
- Abstract
Many studies of controversy tell stories of convergence, of movement from difference to sameness, of a narrowing from many competing versions to a single stabilised 'reality'. This paper explores a case of science policymaking about IUDs in Australia. What begins in controversy ends with a single view of the IUD -- a view presented in a consumer information leaflet. But surprisingly, what is found is that this stabilisation of a singularity depends on multiplicity. The negotiation of a compromise involves the making of a centred knowing position, an object -- the IUD, and a consumer choice. But this is only made possible by the proliferation of difference: the decentring of the knowing subject, the 'doing' of many different IUDs, and the dispersion of choice from the head of the consumer across time and space. Closure then becomes a very different story, a story of oscillation between sameness and difference, of doing singularity and multiplicity together.
- Subjects
MATERIALITY (Accounting); JUGGLING; POLICY sciences; CONSUMER education; INTRAUTERINE contraceptives
- Publication
Sociological Review, 1999, Vol 47, Issue 1, p113
- ISSN
0038-0261
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03485.x