Tag: industrial technology

“Blooming Biomes Mean Blooming Profits”: ‘Nature-based’ Industrial Farming and the Politics of the Industrial Animal Microbiome

Maggie Mang September 12, 2023
Listen to a reading of this post.

Industrial trade shows are curious places. Potential customers milling around more than 500,000 square feet of exhibit space; technoscientific exuberance and hype; snappy names and enticing displays; hungry and nondiscriminatory grabs for whatever is free; networking spaces facilitated by their offerings of food and drink; and extravagant product demonstrations all collide in the fervor of selling, or at least showing off, the most innovative piece of technology. Here are other details that make industrial trade shows political places of assemblage: the racialized, gendered nature of maintenance and service work that help make an event as large as this run; the uneven representations of corporate power through the different sizes of trade floor allotment and who runs them; the ways in which some companies use gendered labor and performance (high heels, tight and low-cut shirts, and bright red lipstick) to attract onlookers to their booth; and the juxtaposition between these efforts against a company’s tagline behind them that says, as one example, “Leading the world to the future.” This blog post draws on participant observation at industrial agribusiness trade shows, specifically the International Production and Processing Expo (IPPE). The IPPE is the largest trade show displaying domains (technology, service, innovation, supplies) related to the entire gamut of processing, feed manufacture, and the production of eggs, meat, poultry. Given the enormity of all there is to study, my efforts are mainly focused on the marketing materials around and promises of future feed that industry trade shows enroll. As such, this blog post focuses on a few developments in the arenas of ‘nature-based’ methods of industrial farming that target the industrial animal microbiome. (read more...)

share

“Emeryville is Weird”

Annie Hammang May 24, 2022

When I would tell people I worked in the small San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Emeryville, they would almost always say, “Emeryville is weird.” And then the conversation would usually stop there, they couldn’t put their finger on quite what they meant. But there’s a strangeness that hangs over the city that everyone feels, and no one can quite describe. Emeryville is mostly made up of tech campuses – the occasion for my fieldwork – and new condos, big box stores and biotech and software companies, along with some bars and restaurants for people on their breaks, and that’s nearly it, because the whole city is one square mile. Emeryville is busy during the day with professionals, who never stay more than a drink or two after work, and the place is mostly cleared out by night. It has a too new kind of feeling where all the buildings (read more...)

share

The Hastings Mill as Ecological Machine: Vancouver’s Origin Story

Derek Woods May 19, 2015

In Vancouver’s settler origin story, the city begins with a saw mill located in “primeval nature.” Living in the city as a student, I became interested in theories of the relation between economy and ecology, first studying forestry and working in the logging industry, then moving to graduate work in literature and science studies. The origin story of Vancouver stands out as a case study. The city combines an aesthetic regime (in architecture, tourism branding, and so on) focused on proximity to nature with an origin story that goes back to a single sawmill. For centuries, mills have been technologies at the threshold of ecologic and economic systems, transforming resources into commodities with exchange value. But much research into mills and other sites of industrial processing considers them only as production machines—not as mediators, in Bruno Latour’s sense, that affect how we conceive the nature/economy difference in the first place. In Capital I, Marx writes that “technology reveals the active relation of man to nature.” Is he right? Do what we call humanity and what we call nature exist prior to technologies such as mills, which we define based on their ability to transform nonhuman things into human things? Is communication about nature and society—currently in flux in debates over the Anthropocene and climate change—determined by such technological infrastructure, or does communication move machines into place? These are some of the questions that my case study grounds in Vancouver’s colonial origin story. (read more...)

share