I’m happy to share that my new article has just been published in Social Epistemology: “Turning a Traffic Light into an Epistemological Device: An ANT Proposal to Disassemble and Stabilize Urban Life into Regions of Usefulness.”
The paper is a methodological experiment built from a deceptively ordinary object: a traffic light at the corner of 7th Avenue and W. 43rd Street in Times Square. By “decomposing” this device—not into parts or abstract concepts, but into regions of usefulness—I propose a way to approach urban life as a set of multiple, simultaneous, material-semiotic practices that temporarily stabilize and destabilize each other.
Brief description
What happens if we treat a traffic light not as background infrastructure, but as a device that helps make urban reality knowable? Drawing on Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and fieldwork in Times Square, this paper turns a single traffic light into an “epistemological device” for disassembling and reassembling city life. By tracking how the light coordinates bodies, timings, rules, expectations, and micro-negotiations, I propose the notion of regions of usefulness: temporary, situated stabilizations through which heterogeneous urban practices become actionable. The article offers a method for studying bounded places without forcing them into coherence, staying with multiplicity, simultaneity, and the practical work of making the city hold together—moment by moment.
What the paper contributes
- A portable method for studying bounded urban sites without treating them as coherent wholes: follow what an element does, and map the shifting relations that make it workable.
- A concept-in-the-making—regions of usefulness—as a qualitative tool to grasp multiplicity, simultaneity, and intensity in everyday infrastructures.
- A defense of multimodal, practice-based concept work, where concepts are treated as crafted devices: partial, situated, and rebuilt in relation to the field.
Why it matters
Urban research often flattens the city into “contexts,” “systems,” or “variables.” This paper argues for something more careful (and more demanding): letting the city teach us how to describe it. By turning an infrastructural object into an epistemological device, I’m trying to open a route toward methods that can stay close to urban effervescence—without reducing heterogeneity to a single story.