Actor-Network Theory as I image it. Brief essay on traffic lights

Abstract

Three years ago I came to Barcelona with a firm intention that I had to change after about two months from my arrival. I wanted to study people crossing the street in this city and then compare their actions with those of the people in my hometown -  Caracas. Since carrying out a comparison between two cities was time consuming, I decided to do my research in Barcelona only. Later on, for studying people crossing the street, I decided to consider traffic lights as a starting point. Then I undertook the task of preparing a field diary based on some of the notions of Actor-Network Theory as Bruno Latour puts them. I did not use his approach as a systematic set of concepts, but as a device for imagination, i.e., as a number of ways that promote and facilitate the re-creation of worldly events. In this essay, I briefly present a part of my research experience, and I focus on the following idea: we can compose a common world, a cosmos, from a seemingly discrete entity, in my case, a traffic light.