Social construction for the twenty-first century : a co-evolutionary makeover

The 1970s version of social construction was inspirational for its de-naturalising of gendered representations and identities based on ideologies of ‘anatomy is destiny'. In the updated social construction proposed here, anatomy still isn't destiny—though the body is more agentic, mutable and adaptive (even more so for Barad). ‘Society' is a heterogeneous collectivity where humans socialise and are socialised by natural elements, technologies and infrastructures that establish certain basic habits and expectations of levels of convenience and resources available for accomplishing diverse tasks. ‘Construction' is a ‘co-construction', a multilateral configuration involving distributed agency and co-evolutionary interactions that help stabilise and maintain—or alternatively, potentially destabilise, mutate or extinguish—networks and their heterogeneous actors. Whereas the earlier version of social construction called attention to the structuring forces of social institutions as products of history not nature, this twenty-first century sociotechnical update draws our attention to the inconspicuous and backgrounded technologies and infrastructures that support daily social and bodily life. Making those infrastructures and our habitual relations to them more visible and accountable is an important step towards co-evolving more sustainable infrastructures, cultures and identities. The new systems, infrastructures and technologies that emerge will demand and facilitate new kinds of practices, different sets of relations (e.g. among and between humans and infrastructures) and in turn co-construct different kinds of people.