Search Results for: scale

Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself

Allie E.S. Wist April 3, 2025
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The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins. In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. (read more...)

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Rethinking Scale in Social Media: An Ethnographic Perspective

Jordan Kraemer July 23, 2013

Scale has been a recent buzzword in discussions of social and digital media, as our editor Patricia G. Lange traced out in her January retrospective post. From MOOCs to Big Data, emerging communication technologies are making possible (and visible) large-scale interactions that have been attracting attention from many quarters, including anthropology. I want to revisit this conversation by discussing further what scale means in the context of networked media, especially social and mobile technologies. Is scale the new global? On the cusp of the new millennium in the late 1990s, there was a lot of buzz over the global reach of the Internet, linked to broader interest in how new communication technologies were entwined with globalizing processes. The World Wide Web itself was envisioned as spanning the globe, while globalism infected the popular imagination. Nearly twenty years on, the Internet has yet to bring about global equality or democracy, though (read more...)

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Looking Ahead to 2013: A Question of Scale

Patricia G. Lange January 10, 2013

The CASTAC community joined together in 2012 to launch this blog and begin dialogue on contemporary issues and research approaches. Even though the blog is just getting off the ground, certain powerful themes are already emerging across different projects and areas of study. Key themes for the coming year include dealing with large data sets, connecting individual choices to larger economic forces, and translating the meaning of actions from different realms of experience. Perhaps the most visible trend on our minds right now involves dealing with scale. How can anthropologists, ethnographers, and other STS scholars address large data sets and approaches in research and pedagogy, while also retaining an appropriate relationship to the theories and methods that have made our disciplines strong? As we look ahead to 2013, it would seem that a big question for the CASTAC community involves finding creative and ethical ways to deal with phenomena that (read more...)

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Collaborating Bodies: Community Gardens and Food Forests in Central Texas

Nadia Luis September 11, 2025
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Almost every aspect of life on earth interacts with soil. Soils are old. Soils take time to develop from their parent material. Soils embody life itself. Yet, the concept of soil varies depending on the epistemic culture applied to define what soil is. Often soils exist in states of naturalness or unnaturalness. For example, Minami (2009) describes the Chinese compound character for agricultural soil 土壤 (tǔ rǎng), the first character (tǔ) represents soil in its natural state, and the second character (rǎng) represents soil once it has been broken up for agricultural purposes. Here, an interesting dichotomy presents itself: soil as it is and soil as it is once altered by human intervention. This dichotomous classificatory system describes changes that result from soil processes interacting; however, curiously, soil in only one category is the product of perceived human interaction. (read more...)

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The Politics of Translation Across Policy, Grant Proposal, and Agricultural Landscapes

Cydney Seigerman August 26, 2025
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On Monday, April 14th, my stomach sank as I read an e-mail from the principal investigators of a large-scale, multi-institutional project funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that supported half of my livelihood as a postdoctoral research associate. Following that day’s press release from the USDA—“USDA Cancels Biden Era Climate Slush Fund, Reprioritizes Existing Funding to Farmers”—the email transformed the cloud of uncertainty that loomed over all federally funded scientific inquiry into concrete dejection. (read more...)

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Patch-“working” the Field: Methodological Reorientations During a Global Pandemic

Anushree Gupta July 29, 2025
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I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged tech startup and innovation ecosystem in a rapidly digitizing India. I wanted to examine how top-down imaginaries rooted in technocratic governance regimes were shaping emerging communities of practice and cultures of technology-based entrepreneurship. Deeply inspired by Ho’s (2009), Irani’s (2019), and Gupta’s (2024) ethnographies, I hoped to develop my research similarly through an in-depth investigation of techno-entrepreneurial cultures from within and examine their capture of the public imagination for charting pathways to economic growth and social mobility. The idea was to try and uncover the finer threads that were weaving the tapestry of neoliberal development in what would later be deemed as “pre-pandemic” India. Enter the pandemic and the paralyzing lockdown in March 2020 that brought “normal” life to a screeching halt. A sudden and totalizing isolation was mandated by the social distancing rules meant to keep the virus out. However, it didn’t keep the feeling of disaster at bay. The scenes that unfolded during the lockdown–on national television and social media screens, both closer to home as well as globally–demanded loudly and aggressively a reconsideration of everything important and urgent, and hence, worth studying. (read more...)

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Technics in the Dust

Spencer Kaplan July 22, 2025
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One early morning in August 2024, I boarded a coach bus in downtown San Francisco. We drove over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, past Reno, and through the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation. After six hours, the bus entered the Black Rock Desert and arrived at Burning Man: an annual, week-long event where 63,000 “Burners” create a temporary city dedicated to art, self-expression, decommodification, and self-reliance. (read more...)

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STS Academic Publishing As a Work of Service and Hope: A Conversation with Vivette García-Deister

Vivette García-Deister June 19, 2025
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Thinking, writing, and publishing from Latin America pose significant challenges, especially for younger researchers. Academic work is affected by various kinds of asymmetries, but when we add to this the centrality of the English language and the predominance of theoretical perspectives from the Global North, the landscape becomes even more challenging. In response to this situation, several projects have emerged that view publishing as an intervention in the politics of knowledge. One such project that aims to undo these asymmetries and contribute to more horizontal practices is Tapuya: Latin American Science Technology and Society, an international journal that fosters conversations between the global North and South and helps its authors navigate the complexities of diverse languages and traditions of critical thinking. On this occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Vivette García-Deister, the editor-in-chief of this journal. In this interview, she talks about why she considers academic publishing a service, how some editorial processes —such as reading, reviewing, and providing feedback— can theoretically and methodologically support young authors’ texts, and why publishing can be a form of hope. (read more...)

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