A new publication with a long history! Learning in a Landscape: Simulation-building as Reflexive Intervention–the title says it all. After sending in this article to a few possible outlets, it seemed we might never get out of the binary reactions that wouldn’t give room the particular combination of building and reflecting going on in this article. We would receive feedback along the lines of ‘get the long-winded talk about how hard it was and tell what you did’ (generally from simulation-builders) or else we would be taken to task for investing in simulation as a social science tool and for not choosing a role and sticking to it (from STS reviewers).
It was also a pretty difficult article to write, in terms of actually aligning words and finding the right constructions to maintain some coherence in the piece while also doing justice to the different standpoints and phases, and hammering out a ‘voice’ that could do all this. So after more rejections than seemed fair (did you know that your manuscript can be accepted by reviewers but then vetoed by an editor?!!!), we published a version of this piece on Arxiv. ‘We’ being the wonderful Andrea Scharnhorst and Matt Ratto and me.
This combination of doing and thinking was at the very heart of the Virtual Knowledge Studio, so it’s especially meaningful that it has finally been accepted in this great special issue. And this of course brings new hope for further interaction through this piece of writing. Thanks for reading!
