Platypus

Heather Paxson, Winner of the 2013 Forsythe Prize, on Post-Pasteurianism

 Heather Paxson  August 27, 2013

Since my undergraduate days, I’ve both aspired to do feminist anthropology and been fascinated with people’s everyday engagement with mundane (and extraordinary) technologies. I can’t express how thrilled and honored I am to receive the 2013 Diana Forsythe Prize for The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press), my ethnography of American artisanal cheese, cheesemaking and cheesemakers. I do not present a summary of the book here (if interested, the Introduction is available on the UC Press website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270183). Instead, I alight on some of the STS-related themes that run throughout my book (and especially Chapter 6): regulating food safety and promoting public health, artisanal collaboration with microbial agencies, and the mutual constitution of production and consumption. Real Cheese or Real Hazard — or Both? By U.S. law, cheese made from raw (unpasteurized) milk, whether imported or domestically produced, must be aged at least (read more...)

Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology

 Matt Hale  August 20, 2013

It begins with a question. What if? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, if the Hindenburg hadn’t crashed, or if Thomas Edison had never been born? What might the world be like if history had been different? Steampunk is an expressive genre that explores the possibilities of a past that never was, but might have been. Inspired by the steam-powered and mechanistic imagery of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ novels and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of cyberpunk art and literature, steampunk combines the aesthetics and materials of the nineteenth century with the technological developments and sensibilities of the twenty-first. It is a style defined by anachronism and guided by an impulse to explore and interrogate the role of technology in everyday life. Although the genre began as a form of speculative literature in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on new life during the first decade of (read more...)

EPIC 2013 Preview

 Patricia G. Lange  August 12, 2013

The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference is being held 15-18 September in London. EPIC is an important international conference for sharing insight on current and future practices of ethnography in industry. Next month’s conference promises to be very exciting and productive. The program boasts a wide variety of topics, including a number of papers that will quite likely be of interest to CASTAC and STS practitioners and scholars. Many of the themes in the program, such as big data, MOOCs, and energy have been hot topics for The CASTAC Blog in recent months. IS DATA THE NEW OIL? Several papers at EPIC will be discussing “Big Data,” which is a topic that is heating up and is germane for anthropological theory and practice. Big Data, which has been discussed in a prior post by David Hakken, has been designated as a new asset class akin to oil and has consequently (read more...)

Handbook of Science and Technology Studies CFP

 Patricia G. Lange  August 6, 2013

Call for Chapter Proposals – Due Aug. 15, 2013 Editors Clark A. Miller, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouche Reposted from the Society for Social Studies of Science news page. The editors of the next edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies invite proposals for chapters to be included in the new Handbook. This edition of the Handbook is expected to appear in 2016, some nine years after the last edition. Much has happened during that interval: the advancement of STS theories and methods, the development of new ideas and the evolution of long-important themes, the engagement of STS with other disciplines and with the public sphere. We aim to capture an enduring snapshot of the ongoing creative activity of STS in the new Handbook, representing the core theoretical, methodological, and substantive concerns of the field and situating the field in its intellectual and historical contexts. The STS (read more...)

Open Science and the Ambivalence of the Digital Economy

 Alessandro Delfanti  July 30, 2013

What does sharing mean in contemporary science? New practices of open science are questioning assumptions about the evolution of scientific cultures. Often, references to the emergence of new forms of open sharing and cooperation through digital networks point at the restoration of a modern scientific ethos of sharing and communalism to which scientists are somehow naturally socialised. Yet I believe scientific cultures are the subject of a cultural mash-up. This includes cultural elements taken from the modern, Mertonian ethos of science that preceded the late 20th century transformation towards academic capitalism and post-academic science. Elements coming from that tradition are still at scientists’ disposal, since the influence of that culture has survived the social dimension from which it was born, but they need to remix it with new and different cultural elements directly related to computers and information technologies, which are indistricable from today’s scientific enterprise. An old culture that is pre-existing, accepted, (read more...)

What’s Up in the Cloud(s)?

 Casey O'Donnell  July 16, 2013

In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t have to install their bloated software anymore or have Acrobat update every other day.” At the same time, the reality of what that would mean for people who use these products for their jobs, encouraged me to consider it further. It also prompted me to return to a 2008 discussion between Richard Stallman and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian. I should also disaggregate the cloud infrastructure from products that deliver their services via the cloud. These are often conflated in accounts of the trend. The cloud infrastructure is/are computers and the networks that connect them and them to (read more...)

2013 Diana Forsythe Prize Winner: Heather Paxson for The Life of Cheese

 Jennifer Cool  July 8, 2013

From Marcia Inhorn, Chair, 2013 Forsythe Prize Committee The Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC), a committee of the General Anthropology Division (GAD), announce Heather Paxson as the winner of the 2013 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012) Paxson’s book is a true exemplar of an award made “in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science and/or technology, including biomedicine.” The Life of Cheese is a stunning ethnographic foray into the emergence of the artisanal cheese-making movement in America, based on in-depth ethnography in three states (Vermont, Wisconsin, and California). It shows clearly how craft cheese-making has always been a part of Swiss and German immigrant food histories in the US, but how the 1960s emergence of an (read more...)