Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-Making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

This paper examines how New Yorkers reshaped the public sphere as they engaged in a series of self-organized, loosely coordinated efforts to collectively make sense of the challenges they faced in responding and recovering from the attack of 9/11. We explore how technologies of deliberation, representation, and demonstration were mobilized to widen the scope and diversify the organizational strategies enabling public participation. Drawing on Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism and the social studies of science, we focus on how disparate socio-technologies of assembly offered different affordances that both enabled and inhibited particular discursive practices and forms of collective inquiry.