August | 2013 | Platypus

Heather Paxson, Winner of the 2013 Forsythe Prize, on Post-Pasteurianism

 Heather Paxson  August 27, 2013

Since my undergraduate days, I’ve both aspired to do feminist anthropology and been fascinated with people’s everyday engagement with mundane (and extraordinary) technologies. I can’t express how thrilled and honored I am to receive the 2013 Diana Forsythe Prize for The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press), my ethnography of American artisanal cheese, cheesemaking and cheesemakers. I do not present a summary of the book here (if interested, the Introduction is available on the UC Press website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270183). Instead, I alight on some of the STS-related themes that run throughout my book (and especially Chapter 6): regulating food safety and promoting public health, artisanal collaboration with microbial agencies, and the mutual constitution of production and consumption. Real Cheese or Real Hazard — or Both? By U.S. law, cheese made from raw (unpasteurized) milk, whether imported or domestically produced, must be aged at least (read more...)

Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology

 Matt Hale  August 20, 2013

It begins with a question. What if? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, if the Hindenburg hadn’t crashed, or if Thomas Edison had never been born? What might the world be like if history had been different? Steampunk is an expressive genre that explores the possibilities of a past that never was, but might have been. Inspired by the steam-powered and mechanistic imagery of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ novels and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of cyberpunk art and literature, steampunk combines the aesthetics and materials of the nineteenth century with the technological developments and sensibilities of the twenty-first. It is a style defined by anachronism and guided by an impulse to explore and interrogate the role of technology in everyday life. Although the genre began as a form of speculative literature in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on new life during the first decade of (read more...)

EPIC 2013 Preview

 Patricia G. Lange  August 12, 2013

The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference is being held 15-18 September in London. EPIC is an important international conference for sharing insight on current and future practices of ethnography in industry. Next month’s conference promises to be very exciting and productive. The program boasts a wide variety of topics, including a number of papers that will quite likely be of interest to CASTAC and STS practitioners and scholars. Many of the themes in the program, such as big data, MOOCs, and energy have been hot topics for The CASTAC Blog in recent months. IS DATA THE NEW OIL? Several papers at EPIC will be discussing “Big Data,” which is a topic that is heating up and is germane for anthropological theory and practice. Big Data, which has been discussed in a prior post by David Hakken, has been designated as a new asset class akin to oil and has consequently (read more...)

Handbook of Science and Technology Studies CFP

 Patricia G. Lange  August 6, 2013

Call for Chapter Proposals – Due Aug. 15, 2013 Editors Clark A. Miller, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouche Reposted from the Society for Social Studies of Science news page. The editors of the next edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies invite proposals for chapters to be included in the new Handbook. This edition of the Handbook is expected to appear in 2016, some nine years after the last edition. Much has happened during that interval: the advancement of STS theories and methods, the development of new ideas and the evolution of long-important themes, the engagement of STS with other disciplines and with the public sphere. We aim to capture an enduring snapshot of the ongoing creative activity of STS in the new Handbook, representing the core theoretical, methodological, and substantive concerns of the field and situating the field in its intellectual and historical contexts. The STS (read more...)