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

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...)

Rethinking Scale in Social Media: An Ethnographic Perspective

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...)

Looking Ahead to 2013: A Question of Scale

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...)

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

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...)

Peasant Reserve Zones as Techno-socio-environmental Assemblages

Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Designed as part of agrarian reform efforts, these zones are intended to promote environmental conservation and socioeconomic sustainability in rural areas. The ZRCs provide peasant organizations with a set of tools to structure their social, economic, political, and environmental governance. However, their effectiveness in achieving social and environmental objectives remains a subject of ongoing research across disciplines such as ecology, sociology, and economics. Existing studies yield inconclusive results, instead highlighting the complexity of the dynamics surrounding this institutional mechanism.   (read more...)

The Porosity of Promise: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and the New Science of Technofixation

Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2 and an expanding array of technoscientific actors and interests. (read more...)

L’Écosystème Multiple: Naviguer le Destin Transatlantique de la Biosphère 1 ½

C’est la fin du mois de mars 2022 et, comme toujours, le temps est radieux à Tucson, en Arizona. Mais une grande réunion rassemble un groupe binational à l’intérieur d’un bâtiment climatisé du campus. Pour la première fois depuis le début de la pandémie de Covid-19, des scientifiques français du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) ont pu venir rencontrer leurs homologues de l’Université d’Arizona (UA), pour célébrer le lancement d’un partenariat entre les deux institutions, qui a débuté officiellement en 2021. Grâce à ce partenariat, les deux parties souhaitent favoriser des recherches collaboratives et complémentaires, notamment sur le thème de l’environnement. L’un des points forts de cette collaboration est la perspective de projets conjoints faisant usage d’un laboratoire appelé « Biosphère 2 ». (read more...)