Recent years have seen increasing attention to questions of materiality in the development and use of digital technologies, and attempts to recover a sense of the material foundations for the rhetorically ineffable stuff of the digital world. However, empirical accounts of the way that sociomaterial entanglements arise in and shape social practice remain relatively scarce.

I'll draw on materials from a multi-year ethnographic investigation of robotic deep space exploration. We have been working with an international team of scientists and engineers who have devoted decades to planning, developing, and flying a robotic spacecraft currently exploring the outer solar system. In particular, I'll use these to argue for a reconsideration of the topics of sociomateriality, shifting from a conventional focus on locating agency to an alternative account that starts from an account of figuration, configuration, and reconfiguration.',NULL,NULL,'',NULL,'W-1Tk8OeoYY