Other Terms, Other Conditions

Edited by Endre Dányi, Clément Dréano and Gergely Mohácsi

In the past years, there have been considerable efforts to break the hegemony of the English language in STS. Classical works have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, German, French, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese to name just some of the more commonly used languages, while regional networks from Scandinavia to South East Asia have been busy developing research agendas relevant to settings where English is not the first—often not even the second—language. At the same time, there have only been a few occasions when non-English terms managed to disrupt established modes of theorising. What would happen to STS, and to ‘theory,’ if we collected and foregrounded such terms? What could we learn if we attended to them both as ethnographic finds and as analytical tools at the same time? What other terms would they make visible, audible and, indeed, thinkable across different linguistic, theoretical and methodological conditions?

This series builds on a handful of non-English terms collected by Annemarie Mol and John Law, published in an edited volume titled On Other Terms: Interfering in Social Science English. It brings together contributions that either directly address terms already on offer or introduce new ones, adding to the discussion on the political and theoretical effects of traversing between English and other languages. Most of the contributions are of the authors’ native language (rather than a local term of ethnographic interest—although these may overlap at times) that bring up issues and raise questions that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to articulate in English. Our aim is to re-connect these terms to established relations, doings and modes of analysis in STS—and more broadly the social sciences—and explore the conceptual possibilities that open up in the process.

Table of Contents

  1. Other Terms, Other Conditions (Introduction) by Endre Dányi, Clément Dréano and Gergely Mohácsi
  2. Ok! Ok! Number One!  by Jakkrit Sangkhamanee and Casper Bruun Jensen
  3. Performative Liveness in Doing Yolŋu Aboriginal Language by Waymamba Gaykamaŋu, Yasunori Hayashi, and Michaela Spencer
  4. Language Ferments by Tereza Stöckelová
  5. Invisible Mediators: Conversation with an English Language Editor by Tereza Stöckelová
  6. Exploring Languaging Through an Ontological Register by Laura Gurney and Eugenia Demuro
  7. Affidarsi by Alvise Mattozzi
  8. The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions by Jeannette Pols and Endre Dányi
  9. Roaming-With Quiltros by Sebastian Ureta