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“The Day I Discovered I Was Collaborating on a Eugenics Project”: On Imponderables in Collaborative Research

 Sandra Avila, Marisol Marini  September 26, 2023

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português

The title that opens this reflection is a statement by computer scientist Sandra Avila, who is also a co-author of the lines that will flow here. Her account took place during the recording of a podcast on science and feminism. In that situation, Avila recounted a non-trivial research experience. She may never have been able to talk about it with her colleagues in computer science, let alone with collaborators in dermatology who offered their “expertise advice.” It was in informal conversations with feminist researchers that Avila found a safe place to talk about a situation that had made her cry with anger because she felt cheated. (read more...)

Making Companion Species at a Robotics Lab

 Patrick Kho  September 21, 2023

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I spent many a warm summer day holed up inside a robotics laboratory, analyzing various datasets for my Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research project. The room was often dark and the windows were small. My desk, located in the left corner furthest from the entrance, rarely received any sunlight. On several days, the lab would be empty. I’d be left with nothing but the company of browning tube lights, dangling cables and wires, and robots used in the lab’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experiments. (read more...)

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

 Maggie Mang  September 12, 2023

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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...)

Between Pain and Relief: Morphine’s Ambiguities in India

 Nick Surawy Stepney, Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji  August 17, 2023

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The root of the word morphine is Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Yet, dreams can come in all hues from the ecstatic pleasure driven, to the grief struck and the nightmarish kind. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that in the modern world this character’s namesake, morphine, the gold standard of medically prescribed painkillers (Ruiz-Garcia and Lopez-Briz 2008), offers a similarly troubling medical story, evoking in equal measure the contingent histories of pleasure and war, relief and addiction, commerce and regulation. In few places is this more apparent than in India. Legal opium is grown throughout certain regions of the country for the sole purpose of pharmaceutical production, yet irrespective of this robust industrial production, very little morphine is used within the country’s own hospitals (Rajagopal and Joranson 2007). This is a story that involves both the everyday impacts of restrictive regulation, and a local palliative care movement intent on widening access to the drug. (read more...)

Fake, Real, Real, Fake: Salvarsan on the US Medical Market

 Colin Garon  August 8, 2023

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1913, Chicago: A reporter, assuming the name Edward Donlin, enters a downtown medical establishment that has advertised widely in Midwestern newspapers offering Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s new miraculous cure for ‘blood poison’—syphilis—for a price. ‘Donlin’ pays $2 in fees, then the consultation begins. He feigns concern about recent hair loss, and the doctor (who, matching the picture in advertisements, wears a Van Dyke beard) laughs strangely then turns grave: it is certainly syphilis. He recommends a Wassermann test, a recently-invented syphilis diagnostic, for $20 and Ehrlich’s Salvarsan for $30. Pleading financial difficulty, the reporter holds him off with a $2 down-payment and departs. (read more...)

Drawing More-than-Human Kinship

 Maythe Han  August 3, 2023

In my work as an anthropological ethnographer and illustrator, I have been working to connect seemingly disparate disciplines together—at times, even as a messy and rough bricolage. Thinking broadly about kinship—both intra- and inter-species—as a fundamental and foundational practice toward a mutually thriving future, I experiment with different formats and genres to reimagine what it means to produce ethnographic work. This reimagined work is not only informative but also beautiful, like the kinship I experience with my dog, Frank, who is depicted in the illustrations below. My investment in beauty is also an intentional form of resistance against neoliberal capitalist systems that prioritise profit, results, and efficiency over beauty, process, and patience. It matters that the illustrations in this series are digital. Using a software called Procreate on the 11” iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, I actualise my imaginations on the screen. That is, this specific combination of technologies (read more...)