Research | Platypus

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...)

Sinkholes without Borders: Geology, Hydrology, and Conflict Around the Dead Sea

 Simone Popperl  February 24, 2016

In a heavily air-conditioned room in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israeli, I spent two days drinking instant coffee and taking notes at a “transboundary” water conference on the Jordan River Watershed. Israeli, American, and Western European scholars and development consultants had come together to seek solutions for a variety of environmental crises plaguing the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, sinkholes chief among them. A single Jordanian policymaker attended, opening the event with an introductory speech, but heading immediately for the door when he finished his presentation. In the hours that followed, workshop participants argued about the trustworthiness of Palestinian water consumers (none of whom were present), the merits of international river commissions, and game theory-based water conservation strategies. One common perspective prevailed: as an American hydrologist put it, “we water people think at the level of the watershed, not the nation.” But what happens when contested national borders create barriers to the production of scientific knowledge about hydrologic and geologic phenomena? In the context of ongoing struggles for self-determination and national recognition, the Dead Sea sinkhole problem—and the different approaches to it—highlight fraught political complexities of the conflict over land in Palestine and Israel. (read more...)

The Anti-Politics of Women in Tech

 Samantha Breslin  December 17, 2015

Almost daily are news articles about women in tech. Among these on the day I wrote this post, for example, were an article in Marie Claire, the women’s magazine, called “How Much Have Things Really Changed for Women in Technology?” and another in India’s business newspaper Mint titled “Two kinds of pay gap in the IT industry: NetApp’s Mark Bregman.” Both articles touch on several issues about women in tech, and STEM fields more generally; the cornerstone in each, however, is simply the number of women in the tech world—or the lack thereof, compared with men. This is a problem that has been explored since at least the mid-1970s in computer science (e.g., Montanelli Jr. and Mamrak 1976), longer for some other STEM fields. More recently this issue was highlighted last year, particularly in the media and public attention, when large tech companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook released “diversity data” showing the dismal number of women and minorities among their employees. The articles also point to several issues seen as contributing to the disparities, including pay and hiring gaps for women, so-called “brogrammer” culture (involving frat-house-like sociality and performances of technical heroism, generally among men), and implicit biases shaping how women (and men) are perceived and judged. As a former woman in tech—I pursued an undergraduate degree in computer science—I appreciate how this surge in public awareness and interest is helpful to many, particularly in relation to discussions about sexism and tech cultures. Through social media, blogs, and news articles people are sharing and discussing personal experiences and working to further raise awareness of, and gain support for, challenges women as a group face in tech. Tech companies and governments have also pledged a great deal of money towards “fixing” this problem. (read more...)

What Can Twitter Do to/for the Field?

 Ethnography Studio  November 24, 2015

By Andrea Ballestero, Baird Campbell, and Eliot Storer* Between June 15 and 22, 2015, a group of anthropologists and graduate students convened by the Ethnography Studio linked our fieldsites via Twitter. The experiment, entitled “Ethnography Studio in the Field: #ESIFRice,” was designed to open conversations about how being in the “field” might shape the ways in which we conceptualize our problems of inquiry. How are the problems that mobilize us imagined once we are “in situ”? So we set up a structure for a parallel co-inhabitation of different sites. Each participant tweeted from her own location and with her own research interests in mind. The idea was not to establish a single multisited space or a joint research project but to keep the separation between sites alive, while linking them as an attempt to think together. If there was any purpose to the experiment, we could say that it was to craft an experimental system (Rheinberger 1997), that is, to set up a “system of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask” (28). The experiment was related tangentially to ongoing conversations in anthropology about the uses of social media in fieldwork (Juris 2012; Horst 2015; Kraemer 2015; Sanjek and Tratner 2015), or what Kozinets has called “netnography” (2009). Yet, the purpose was not to explicitly discuss social media, but to create a space of structured play where we could see what Twitter might do to shape our analytic fields in real time. And so it was that a group of us, in different stages of our training, enmeshed in different geographic sites, and from different professional locations, got together to think about the field. The experiment generated a set of familiar and unfamiliar impressions. This post is an initial reflection on the effects of the experiment, not a report on results. The Ethnography Studio wrote up #ESIFRice! Field / Experiments http://t.co/083FJktbeV cc @aballes2 @ethosITU @BairdCampbell #fieldwork #yes — Rachel Douglas-Jones (@kaisirlin) September 22, 2015 (read more...)

Forsythe Prize Author Sharon Kaufman on Ordinary Medicine

 Sharon Kaufman  November 17, 2015

I am delighted to be the recipient of the honorable mention, Diane Forsythe Prize for Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line (Duke University Press 2015). The book is an ethnography of the invisible social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that have made once extraordinary therapies seem ordinary and necessary. Medicine’s ability to prolong wanted life through both low-tech and high-tech interventions is a positive development in many respects. Yet the socio-medical imperative to employ death-defying techniques now exists in an ever-aging society in which private industry churns out greater numbers of interventions than ever before; in which no age or cost limits exist for insurance reimbursement of those procedures; in which many older persons, their families and their health providers must consider whether additional treatment will bring with it pain and suffering; and in which saying ‘no’ to new technologies seems somehow suspect or ethically wrong. These features of American society and health care organization have spurred our lively national conversation about whether staving off death is always the best thing to do. And, those features have created the quandary, experienced by millions, of where to draw the line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ treatment. (read more...)