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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Reclaiming the Future of Work: Series Introduction

Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes, Rosemary Steup September 7, 2026
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Debates about the future of work often center around adapting the workforce to fit capitalist proposals of what work should look like. Pre-digital examples include scientific management, just-in-time production, and de-skilling of industrial labor in favor of more mechanized and automated processes. Recently, capitalist proposals of arrangements of work have centered on digital platforms, algorithmic management, pervasive surveillance, and the deskilling of white-collar work through aggressive adoption of large language models (generative AI). In the face of these changes, workers are expected to accept their new, typically more controlled, unstable, exploitative work arrangements, re-train and re-skill to find employment in different or new types of work or face un- and under-employment with whatever safety net might be available. Underlying these changes to work arrangements is a drive for efficiency and profit. (read more...)

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A Horse in the Archive: Notes on Incompleteness in Biometric Infrastructures

kayah August 31, 2026
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.
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A few months ago, I underwent four surgeries to remove two wisdom teeth. Long and painful, they took from me solid parts with strange shapes — a friend, on seeing one of the pieces, said it looked like a shark’s tooth! It was a slow, drawn-out experience: after each surgery, I had to recover before starting the next stage of the same process. During each one, I heard the dentist and her assistants discussing how stubbornly that tooth was attached to my skull. (read more...)

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Dispatch from Seoul: Reflections on the Science, Technology & Human Values Science and Technology Studies School, June 2026

Lachlan Hensey August 24, 2026
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It is the third of our four days at the 2026 ST&HV Science and Technology Studies (STS) School. We file past laboratories populated by white-coated researchers and take our seats in a classroom in Seoul National University’s (SNU) College of Natural Sciences. “Look – real scientists!” someone jokes as we sit down. (read more...)

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From Candle to Dilator: Treating Vaginismus in Turkey

Neslihan Sen August 18, 2026
Bu içeriğe türkçe’de de erişilebilir.
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Aysel brought out her candles wrapped in stretch wrap and put them on the coffee table in the middle of our interview. She was very proud of showing her progress to me through these home-made candle dildos. When she brought them out to the living room, I was still sipping my tea and my half-eaten piece of cake she baked for me was now sitting next to her candles on the coffee table. She made these dildos herself with the help of her sister-in-law, her elti,  in her kitchen by shaping them, melting them thinner, and combining them together for different sizes so she could use them as apparatuses to treat her vaginismus, the inability to engage in penile-vaginal intercourse. (read more...)

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Mumdan Dildoya: Türkiye’de Vajinismusu Tedavi Etmek

Neslihan Sen August 18, 2026
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Röportajımızın ortasında, ben daha çayımı yudumlarken Aysel, streç filme sarılmış mumlarını getirip sehpanın üzerine bıraktı. Tedavi sürecindeki ilerlemesini bana göstermek için o kadar heyecanlanmıştı ki, benim için pişirdiği keki bitirmemi bile bekleyememişti. Şimdi yarım kalmış kek dilimim ve çayım, mumlarının yanında sehpanın üzerinde duruyordu. Aysel bu mumları eltisiyle birlikte yapmıştı. Mutfağında, elindeki mutfak araç gereçlerini kullanarak her bir mumu farklı kalınlıklarda inceltmiş, şekil vermiş ve birbirine ekleyerek vajinismus tedavisinde kullanacağı aparatlar haline getirmişti. Aysel dört aydır evliydi ve kocasıyla henüz cinsel ilişkiye girememişti. Kendisine vajinismus, yani vajinal kasların istemsiz kasılması nedeniyle cinsel birleşmenin gerçekleşememesi durumu, teşhisi konulmuştu. (read more...)

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