We will have the great pleasure of welcoming Siri Lamoureaux. Siri is a new Associate Professor at emlyon. She’ll be giving a talk entitled:
“Toggling and tendering: how systems engineering mediates technoscientific aspirations with embodied well-being, in practice”
Thursday, November 20th | 14h-16h
In South Africa, space science is proposed as a stimulator of economic progress holistically, a catalyst for growth across industries. In this paper, I focus on one highly mediatized event, the use of astronomy resources in the innovation of Covid-19 ventilators at the height of the pandemic. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), known for research on pulsars and collapsing supernovas, worked with system engineers to design continent-spanning radio telescope infrastructures. In the humanitarian crisis, these same engineers mobilized to design ventilators that could work in the material and political ecology of South Africa. In this paper, I am interested in how the material-semiotic forms of systems engineering mediate between the design of covid ventilators and that of radio telescopes, a reflection which leads me to question the role of ‘systems theory’ and ‘systems thinking’ as organizational models. Systems theory and/or systems thinking in various incarnations (engineering, organization, biology) have been the object of intense praise and criticism at the heart of which seems to be a conflation of form for practice. Using the example of the National Ventilator Project engineers, I illustrate a more situated, embodied, experiential approach to designing and operationalizing systems, one which need not sacrifice the holism nor the cartesian design if considered as practices rather than endpoints.
Short Bio:
Her research takes sociocultural, linguistic anthropological and gendered approaches to study the way language and semiotic technologies are imagined, developed and used by collectives and communities of practice. Her case studies include various mobilizations within data science, artificial intelligence and digital labor in radio astronomy and language and heritage projects in Africa and elsewhere.
The event takes place in emlyon business school, at Lyon and on Teams.
Here is the link to register you :
https://forms.office.com/e/5pmsV9L6kP