Reading Circles / Empirica

In Empirica, theoretical discussions and experiential knowledge form the two pillars of our research practice. To build a shared understanding of art, design, and craft, we organize open discussions and reading circles.

Empirica Reading List

Books:

• The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action? by Donald Schön (1983)
• The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi (1966)
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (2008)
• The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of human understanding by Mark Johnson (2007)
• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The reinvention of nature by Donna Harraway (1991)
• Art as Experience by John Dewey (1934)

Ongoing reading:

• A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)

Thematic Reading Circles

We also organize thematic circles catered to specific research interests or projects. The Matter reading circle (2018-19), for example, centered on materiality and material engagement theories.

Books:

• How Things Shape the Mind? A theory of material Engagement by Lambros Malafouris (2013)
• Making - Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture by Tim Ingold  (2013)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters by Andrew Pickering:

• Article: The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science (1993)
• Book chapter, Practice and Posthumanism: Social theory and a history of agency (Chapter 11 in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, 2005).
• Book chapter, Material culture and the dance of agency (Chapter 7 in Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010).

Selected Chapters from Material Agency: Towards a non-anthropocentric approach, edited by Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (2008): 

• Introduction: Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris
• Chapter 1: Where Brain, Body and World Collide by Andy Clark
• Chapter 4: The Actor-Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001 by John Law and Annemarie Mol
• Chapter 12: Agency, Networks, Past and Future by Sander E. van der Leeuw