How Institutions Think (HIT) workshop

On May 15th and 16th InSIS Director Steve Rayner, InSIS Postdoctoral Research Fellow Chris Goldsworthy and Keble College Research and Teaching Fellow Lambros Malafouris organised and co-convened the InSIS and Keble Creativity Cluster HIT workshop. This workshop sought to develop a theoretical framework which combines insight from Mary Douglas' work in How Institutions Think with contemporary theories of extended and distributed cognition. In addition to the aim of theoretical development, this workshop also served to develop a broad body of empirical research to investigate the concept of radically distributed cognition at the institutional level. The workshop brought together experts from a wide variety of perspectives, including cultural theory, phenomenology, philosophy of science, geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies. As well as a strong constituency of InSIS members contributing to discussion other noted participants included Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis), Alexander Bird (University of Bristol), Michael Thompson (IIASA), Perri 6 (QMUL), Marco Verweij (Jacobs University), Chris Gosden (Oxford), Constantine Sandis (Univesity of Hertfordshire) and Beth Greenhough (Oxford).