About ARC
What is ARC?
ARC is a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.
Constitution
The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences. Its aspiration is to create models for new infrastructures, tools of collaboration, and practices of inquiry appropriate to the human sciences in the 21st century. The core of the ARC collaboratory is ongoing reflection and communication in a now broadening network of scholars about concept formation and collaboratory work in the human sciences. It also includes a variety of specific collaborations.
What is a Collaboratory?
ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. The term “collaboratory” gained currency in the early 1990s, particularly in areas such as the natural sciences and computing. There is a narrow meaning of collaboratory, namely “a distributed research network articulated by means of information technology.” We prefer to think of our collaboratory as a network concerned with more than information: it is a dynamic and emergent form for inquiry and exchange that seeks to re-imagine and remediate many of the things that, in the social sciences, might normally be included within a discipline, such as the norms, standards, and mechanisms of critical rectification that make it possible to conduct inquiry and contribute to the production of knowledge, tools for thought, and modes of collaborative work and care.
DIRECTORS
Paul Rabinow
rabinow at berkeley dot edu
Stephen Collier
colliers at newschool dot edu
Andrew Lakoff
alakoff at ucsd dot edu
Christopher Kelty
ckelty at rice dot edu
James Faubion
jdf at rice dot edu
