The Introduction to the work outlines the history of the study of Western Zhou royal ritual, describing its role in early Chinese and early imperial governance and noting how it came to dominate the historical memory of the Western Zhou period. It then explains the book’s commitment to describe Western Zhou royal ritual from a historically embedded perspective, relying on sources contemporary to the rituals themselves. It explains the advantages and pitfalls of working with bronze inscriptions – the bulk of these sources – and presents a methodological framework for understanding inscriptions through the modern frames of actor-network theory and ritual studies.

This chapter asks how social networks form institutions, and whether this process means that institutions are only networks by another name. Its method is to trace networks of scientific lecturing in the long eighteenth century that eventually culminated in establishing new scientific and literary lecturing institutions in Glasgow and London around 1800. For the most part not studied since the 1960s, itinerant scientific lecturers formed pathways across northern and southern England that can be called decentered networks linking various provincial cultures before they crystallized in new institutional experiments like Anderson’s Institution at Glasgow in 1796 and the Royal Institution in London in 1800. The chapter focuses most closely on the forming of the Royal Institution out of disparate networks, from 1796 to 1802, and the process by which the gathering of those networks also created conditions for their mutation into the Royal Institution that Romantic audiences and lecturers knew in the early nineteenth century. More broadly it asks what kind of institutional values or mission statements make an institution more accountable to social and political critique than networks themselves would be capable of sustaining.

Translation is embedded in the globalization of literature from the inception of print circulation. From fifteenth-century Western Europe to a world increasingly networked by imperialism in the early nineteenth century, printed translations are not simply reproductions or transferals of original literary texts, but dynamic assemblies of agents. In addition to the author, translator, editor, and publisher, numerous non-human agents including print and book design, but also the intellectual abstractions of world literature and the history of the idea of translation itself are actors in the process. Paradigmatic examples from diverse spatio-temporal zones including Renaissance multilingual translation, colonial translations in North India, and Arabic translations of European literature in the nineteenth century demonstrate that putting a work into a new language is beset with the Eurocentric aesthetics of world literature and reinforced by colonial regulation. At the same time, it challenges a controlled world system with indeterminacy and decentralization. As literary linguistic contacts grow and evolve across the globe in this period, the praxis of translating is not restricted by prescription. More importantly, the ontology of translation is unbound. Rather than belated second acts of literature translations are co-creations with the source.

Part II looks at the position of fixers within the larger field of journalism. The newsmaking process can be understood as a series of mediations between successive contributors along a chain that stretches from local sources all the way to foreign audiences. “Fixers,” “translators,” “producers,” and others engage in similar journalistic activities along that chain, but news contributors nonetheless draw – and police – important distinctions among these various labels. To rise in status above “translators” and perhaps be recognized as “producers,” fixers try to present themselves as objective professionals and avoid the appearance of local allegiances. Yet local connections are, paradoxically, also their greatest asset for serving client reporters’ needs. Through accounts of reporting on events from the 2014 Soma mine disaster to the Syrian and Afghan refugee crises in Turkey, these chapters illustrate fixers’ ambiguous place in journalism’s hierarchical division and their efforts to claim high-status roles and labels.

Actor-network theory has always been an inspiring theoretical and methodological source for Routine Dynamics research. Seeing routines as networks of actants and as a consequence rather than a cause of collective action enabled scholars to move away from a priori assumptions about the world and shift their attention to situated performances, multiplicity, and connections-in action. In this chapter, I provide a brief historical account of actor-network theory highlighting some of its central authors and their work before unravelling how Routine Dynamics scholars have appropriated it—ironically, often as an undercover actor that remains invisible at first sight—and conclude by reflecting on how actor-network theory can continue to be of use for and shape Routine Dynamics research.

The ascendancy of new materialist theory in the humanities since the turn of the century parallels the rise of anthropogenic climate change as a central political concern. This is not a coincidence: climate change exposes the limitations of both social constructivism and scientific realism. This essay examines the new materialist approaches to climate change proposed by Bruno Latour, Astrid Neimanis, and Rachel Walker Loewen. In Latour’s account, the categorical distinction between nature and culture has prevented climate science from openly embracing the political task of assembling a new polity encompassing both human and nonhuman entities. Neimanis and Walker Loewen, on the other hand, argue that the abstract quality of climate science is the principal reason for society’s failure to respond to anthropogenic climate change, and suggest that it must be reconceived in terms of concrete entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. In placing their emphasis on embodied experience, however, both approaches fail to account for the rhetorical frames and the larger dynamics of communication that shape how climate change becomes socially relevant.

This chapter outlines “more-than-human” approaches being used in the social sciences, and explores their implication and use in environmental sociology. Considering how non-human elements influence human society is one way that we can center ecological life in our sociological work. Moreover, it provides theoretical tools to do so without being deterministic; that is, without assuming that the effects of particular ecological elements in society are inevitable, essential, or one-dimensional. Nor does it assume that those effects are entirely social, discursive, or immaterial. We discuss concepts in actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and new materialism, in the context of environmental sociology and sociological thought more generally. We use the case of apples in agriculture to further elaborate the use and implications of a more-than-human approach to the social life of plants.

Chapter 2 focuses on the assemblage work of UN1267 ISIL and Al-Qaida Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team – a small group of security experts supporting the Sanctions Committee to administer the list. It engages with the practical problem of how to target ‘global terrorism’, which has not yet been defined in international law. Drawing primarily from actor-network theory and governmentality scholarship, the chapter shows how the technology of the list itself plays a crucial role in rendering this problem governable. The practice of UN listing experts is analysed at two specific sites - in ‘consultation meetings’ with national security and intelligence officials directed at populating the list with potential targets and in collaboration with experts from other international organisations to make the list interoperable with global policing data (Interpol) and the passenger data held by the global aviation industry (ICAO and IATA). Such seemingly mundane technical practices usually escape academic attention. But this chapter shows how analysing expert knowledge practices, data infrastructures and governance devices (like the list) can reveal important insights into how global security law is being made into something powerful, durable and global.

Chapter 1 introduces The Law of the List and the ISIL and Al-Qaida listing regime, sets out the key research questions it addresses and highlights the relevant literatures that are engaged with. It introduces the three key analytical moves of this book – (i) studying global law as a legal assemblage, (ii) examining risk and preemption as practices of governmentality, and (iii) rethinking the problem of exceptional governance. The introductory chapter also positions this book as a methodological experiment in situated knowledge production. The author’s own role within the listing assemblage as a practising lawyer representing listed individuals is discussed. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship, it is argued that methods are performative. They enact and interfere with the worlds they describe and so are intensely political. Three distinct methodological moves of this book are also highlighted - studying the ISIL and Al-Qaida list as a multisited research object by focusing on local global ‘structure-making sites’; empirically examining the role of practices in global security law and governance; and using leaked documents to study global security law that would otherwise be secret. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the structure of the book.

Introduces the argument that technological change draws on existing social and economic structures in order to succeed, even while destroying or transforming them. Those institutions and expectations, however, are themselves changing in order to make new machines work. A literature review guides readers through the methods and approaches developed in the history of technology and deployed in the text. These include the divide between internalist and contextual analysis, between the causation claims inherent in technological determinism and social constructivism, and the effort to reconcile the two in actor-network theory and in maintenance studies. This historiographical overview also briefly addresses the approaches found in economic history, national and global history, and social and labor and environmental history, and shifts the Big Question in the history of Industrial Revolution historiography from “Why did England industrialize?” to “Why did these specific machines work then and there?”

The Introduction outlines the geographical scope of Maurice E. Bandmann’s theatrical circuit and the theoretical and methodological approach of the book. The first section provides a detailed discussion of two approaches to network theory: historical network analysis and actor-network theory (ANT), which is associated with Bruno Latour. A second section discusses the term ‘first age of globalization’, meaning here the period of 1870 to 1914 and how it is relevant to theatre history, in particular the study of itinerant theatre.

Over the twenty-five years of his activities, Bandmann transported approximately 2,000 performers around the world on his circuit. This chapter examines what it meant to be a performer on the Bandmann Circuit. In addition to the material questions such as working conditions, pay and social interaction (love and marriage), it also looks at the function of the performers and other employees (advance and venue managers, musical directors) as parts of the theatrical network. In this chapter, the main approach is actor-network theory. The analysis examined how the travelling actor ‘connected’ with the different cultures and countries. These connections took many forms, the most important being economical (labour and income), physical (mainly health) and affective (marriage).

The introduction explores the reasons why eighteenth-century authors decided to revise their novels and examines the trope of revision alongside advances in digital humanities, manuscript culture, novel studies, and actor-network theory. It opens with a discussion of Frances Burney’s Cecilia manuscript and the revelatory possibilities of revision, leading to a discussion of the novel genre during the eighteenth century as it was conceived by novelists themselves and the novel’s indebtedness to the dramatic and scholarly prose genres. The final section of the introduction applies Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to delineate a model of eighteenth-century novel authorship that I term “networked authorship,” in which novelists, members of their literary and familial circles, reviewers, and their previous selves participate in the creation of a text.