Research | Platypus

Does e-Waste Die? Peter Little on Lifecycles and Makerspaces in an “Electronics Graveyard”

 Emily Brooks  May 3, 2016

Peter Little is an anthropologist and assistant professor at Rhode Island College, and author of Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks (NYU Press 2014). I asked him a few questions about his new project on electronic waste recycling in Ghana. His answers touch on the politics of electronics waste and pollution, surprising links between first and second projects, and the challenge of doing fieldwork in a place that everyone’s talking about. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. Emily Brooks: What was the genesis of your second project? How did you move from Endicott to Ghana? Peter Little: The original project was on a high tech production site, a birthplace of electronics. That led me in to thinking more about the lifecycle of electronics, from production to discard. When we think of electronic waste, China pops up, of course, but more and more, I started to notice West Africa and Ghana. I came across a circus of journalists and other social scientists focusing in on this Agbogbloshie scrap yard in Ghana in Accra, which had been branded by one journalist as “a mass electronics graveyard.” The site was the focus of a major international Greenpeace report in the 2000s, around the time when electronic waste really started to be reported on, to become a much more targeted dimension of waste distribution. When I recognized it as a problem related to my original research, I thought, why not try to do something there? (read more...)

Another Architecture is Possible: Politics, Value, and Architecture in Argentina

 Nicholas D'Avella  April 26, 2016

Entering the architecture school at the University of Buenos Aires, students pass under a large banner bearing names and photographs of students and faculty disappeared by the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Together with texts like Arquitectos Que No Fueron (Novillo 2008)—literally “architects that weren’t”—the banner provokes reflection about an unrealized future for architecture that was imagined and then pressed to within an inch of its life over forty years ago. It asks students to consider their inheritance of that moment: to rethink the present through a past substantially shaped by violence, and to hold open the possibility that another architecture is possible. The technical aspects of architectural design—the mainstay of architects’ day-to-day training—were taught in an environment suffused with political inheritance. I arrived at the architecture school to conduct fieldwork for an ethnographic study of a construction boom that followed Argentina’s 2001 economic and political crisis. My current book project, Concrete Dreams, is based on two years of fieldwork with architects, real estate investors, and neighborhood residents, and describes how buildings were incorporated into post-crisis practices of economic investment (see D’Avella 2014), and how other forms of value were made to endure in the face of buildings’ increasingly central place in Argentine economic life. (read more...)

Populist Outsiders in the U.S Presidential Election

 Maria Vidart-Delgado  April 22, 2016

Editor’s note: This post was written prior to the New York state primary on Tuesday, April 19, in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both won majorities. Against all pundits’ bets, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders each stand a chance of winning their parties’ nominations. Writing in disbelief, media analysts and scholars have attempted to explain the allure of both candidates to the disenchanted masses. Some write about the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor, and the increasing disconnect between party elites and their constituents to explain the rise of political outsiders; others write about racial backlash against President Obama. And still others write about how years of merciless and cynical political manipulation within the parties has polarized political discourse in the U.S. “Populism!” analysts decry, Peron-style banana republic populism, has taken over U.S. electoral politics. But where should we draw the line between populism and campaigning for a presidential election more generally? Many scholars in anthropology and media studies (especially those from the so-called “banana republics”) have pointed out that populism is a slippery analytical category that can mean many things, and that lends itself to many ideological projects (Mazzoleni, Stewart, and Horsfield 2003). For example, Ernesto Laclau (2005) sharply observes that populism is a rationale, a way of crafting public discourse based on a “us versus them” logic built upon a “chain of equivalences.” What Laclau means is that populist discourse ties together disparate social claims under a single message, and through this, the populist leader crafts a public identity that resonates with many types of social and political groups that have very different kinds of grievances. In this process, the leader embodies an aggregate version of “the people” based on the lowest common denominator, like national belonging. (read more...)

Negotiating Expertise: The Case of Operations Research

 William Thomas  April 8, 2016

Among the most important and common questions that historians of science and STS scholars address is how technical cultures interact with various “lay” communities, such as policymakers, executive decision makers, juries, and public stakeholders. Within STS broadly, scholars have usually thought about these relations within an analytical framework of boundary negotiations. In this framework, technical experts do political work to stake out an epistemic terrain in which their claims will carry an unchallengeable authority. The idea of “science” is important in this framework, because it supposedly signifies (to historical and contemporary actors) knowledge that is uniquely authoritative and stands outside the influence of society and culture. My research on the history of “operational” or “operations research” (OR) has led me to question how well this model describes actual cultures of expertise. One of the prototypical sciences of decision making, OR originated in World War II in scientists’ scrutiny of military tactics and procedures. In the postwar period, a civilianized version of OR, directed at industrial problems, arose, accompanied by a body of formalized (i.e., mathematized) OR theory. Prior scholars have supposed that formalization constituted a move to consolidate OR’s scientific authority. I believe that to understand the development, we require an entirely different understanding not only of OR’s history but of how cultures of expertise operate. (read more...)

Interview: Corinna Kruse on the Social Life of Forensic Evidence

 Ilana Gershon  March 30, 2016

In The Social Life of Forensic Evidence (UC Press, 2015), Corinna Kruse traces how Swedish forensic scientists remove objects and traces from a crime scene, transforming them into evidence in labs and through interactions with court officials. This is a story of how evidence is made in anticipation of court procedures, and how in the process, different actors deal with the vulnerabilities inherent to this making. Interview by Ilana Gershon. Ilana Gershon: How did you get the idea to study forensic evidence and how it circulates from crime scene to court? Corinna Kruse: It was from a curiosity that grew over several years, first sparked off by a rather off-hand remark from one of my interlocutors in a previous project. Then, I was studying genetic research practices and was intrigued by how painstakingly and carefully the laboratory staff managed uncertainty—uncertainty being inevitable when dealing with biological material. She said if I thought they were being careful, I should see how the people at the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science worked; there, someone was always sitting next to the person doing an analysis to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes. That image stuck with me and gradually turned into the idea of looking at practices of dealing with the (inevitable) uncertainty in a context where consequences, and in particular the consequences of making mistakes, are immediate and tangible. Of course, mistakes are undesirable in a research laboratory, as well, but mistakes in a forensic laboratory also affect people’s lives as well as trust in the criminal justice system. This applies particularly when, like in Sweden, there is only one forensic laboratory and that laboratory, in addition, is run by the state. From there, it wasn’t far to wanting to look at how the criminal justice system as a whole provided the forensic evidence with legitimacy and credibility throughout its journey from crime scene to courtroom. That brought in turn with it an interest for whether and how forensic evidence is kept from losing its meaning when moving through the criminal justice system’s different epistemic cultures. So, this project has gradually grown away from its seed—but I’m still grateful for that remark. (read more...)

The Poetics of Soil Health

 Kristina Lyons  March 16, 2016

Optical mineralogy is a gaze turned deeply earthward into seeming dark, still, and silent depths. Indeed, when I first peered into a petrographic microscope in the Soil Science Laboratory of Colombia’s National Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi (IGAC), I was slightly disappointed to find myself staring at what appeared to be an unassuming slice of magnified dirt. As soon as the polarizer filter was slipped into place, however, uniform darkness exploded into a kaleidoscope of fuchsias, yellows, violets, and blues. Odd shapes took form, mutated, and then disappeared as though enveloped back into a slowly churning color wheel. Hues shifted in intensity from shades of light to dark, more radiant and increasingly dull as the light diffracted mineral particles and the voids between them at different angles. The IGAC mineralogist who invited me to his workbench that morning registered my surprise, and reminded me that this was only the color spectrum detectable to the human eye. He went on to measure miniscule quartz grains and the size of clay minerals, and to note plant fragments and channels that indicate good oxygen flow and porosity. For me, this moment was akin to what renowned geographer and soil scientist, Francis D. Hole, described as the aesthetic “pleasures of soil watching.” For the mineralogist, his observations were important because they could alert to early signs of soil degradation or other ongoing structural damage caused by climatic forces that are increasingly difficult to disentangle from histories of human use and abuse. (read more...)

Unpredictable Technologies: The need for thick description in regulatory decision-making

 Jasmine McNealy  March 8, 2016

I call myself a scholar of information, communication, and technology with a view toward influencing law and policy. To that end, my motto over that last few years has been “Social Science matters!” And by that, I really mean that qualitative research, or research aimed at understanding how people and organizations actually use technology, is important for creating good law. To this end, ethnographic study, the kind that produces thick descriptions of people and culture, should be MO of any body tasked with writing regulations. Recently I was asked to participate in training a group of telecommunications regulators who want to conduct a regulatory impact assessment (RIA). A RIA is a thorough investigation of the possible impacts of a proposed or revised regulation. In the most basic sense, the investigation is used to forecast whether the new rule will achieve what it’s supposed to, and what else could happen. Countries around the world use RIAs to evaluate regulatory needs and possible interventions. US federal agencies have been required to conduct and submit RIAs since the early 1980s, and President Bill Clinton codified this requirement in 1993 with Executive Order 12866. A second executive order, 13563, requires that agencies use “the best available techniques to quantify anticipated present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible.” (read more...)

Pragmatism and the Magic Book for Nuclear Power

 Vincent Ialenti  March 3, 2016

Today’s post by Vincent Ialenti, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Cornell, is in partnership with the experimental publication Allegra Lab, and links reflections on the theme of #pragmatism to anthropological research on nuclear energy and environmentalism. Pragmatism, according to Merriam-Webster, refers to both “a practical approach to problems and affairs,” and an American philosophical tradition, founded by C. S. Peirce and William James, that evaluates conceptions and thought through their practical consequences in guiding action. — Editor’s note. This is a picture of a brightly colored South Korean pro-nuclear children’s book adorned with friendly animals dancing around a light bulb in front of a nuclear power plant. The title translates to The Magic Book for Nuclear Power with WINK (Women In Nuclear-Korea). I first encountered this artifact in London at a 2013 World Nuclear Association symposium. There, it was a tool nuclear energy industry insiders used to counter what they saw as anti-nuclear misinformation to which Korean children might be exposed through television, from their parents, or at school. At the time, I associated the book with rising “climate pragmatist” pro-nuclear environmentalisms like those in Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise documentary, those of Breakthrough Institute thinkers, those of the Hartwell Group, or—more recently—those in the Ecomodernist Manifesto. These pragmatisms were underlain by hopes for technology, innovation, human agency, open futures, incremental progress, and possibilities for achieving common ground across political divides. I continue to reflect on these pragmatisms as I develop an ethnography of Finland’s deep time auguring Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository safety case experts. (read more...)