Search Results for: CASTAC

Knowledge Production, Toxic Corporate Capital, and the Anthropologist’s Entangled Ethics

Saudi Garcia June 29, 2021

The dominant disciplinary literature on cultures and practices of extractivism relies on a separation of “the field,” and the insights gained there, from our professional lives as anthropologists in an academy culturally and socially situated in the “Global North.” Increasingly, such distinctions fail to hold as the consequences of extractivism and the conflicts that it produces arrive at the doorstep of the anthropologist’s place of work. I wrote this piece as I grappled with how to frame the effects of toxicity from gold mining in ways that fully accounted for its vast reach beyond “the field” and beyond the material forms (gaseous, liquid, sludgy, in blood levels, as illness symptoms) that I expected it to take. In grappling with the extensive nature of mining toxicity, events occurred to shift my attention to the transnational webs of capital, and the forms of life such toxicity generates. I began to ask: Beyond (read more...)

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Spotlight! “Global STS: Transnational Network Building – Asia, Oceania, and Beyond” hosted by the STS Futures Initiative

Tim Quinn June 24, 2021

This week as part of our “ReAssembling Asias through Science” series, we would like to highlight an event held by the STS Futures Initiative last month. This panel (whose second part is forthcoming this fall) brought together a range of academics and graduate students to engage substantively with what might be termed a ‘global turn’ in STS scholarship, characterized by a greater attention to knowledge production and scientific practices outside of Europe and North America. Interested in both the theoretical possibilities of, as well as the practical aspects and skills necessary for transnational network building, the panel raised a range of questions around the possibilities for and challenges inherent to collaborative research and forms of decolonial practice and knowledge production across institutional and national contexts. As moderator Dr. Kathleen Gutierrez put it in her opening remarks, “Who is doing the work? And more importantly, who is building the networks with other STS inclined scholars in the world areas in which we work?” . (read more...)

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Claves para Pensar y Hacer Interdisciplina y Transdisciplina: Aportes desde América Latina

Maria Goñi Mazzitelli June 22, 2021
This content is also available in English.

El pasado mes de abril se llevó a cabo el I Congreso ESOCITE- LALICS. Este fue el primer congreso virtual organizado por ambas asociaciones- Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y Tecnología y la Red Latinoamericana para el estudio de los Sistemas de Aprendizaje, Innovación y Construcción de Competencias. LALICS tiene como objetivo profundizar la vinculación entre los procesos de innovación y el desarrollo nacional/regional, los sistemas de innovación, los procesos de aprendizaje y la construcción de capacidades en los países de la región. Por su parte, ESOCITE apunta a fortalecer los vínculos entre los miembros de la comunidad de los estudios sociales de la ciencia y tecnología en Latinoamérica, basados en un pensamiento latinoamericano original y crítico. (read more...)

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Key Insights for Thinking and Doing Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Work: Contributions from Latin America

Maria Goñi Mazzitelli June 22, 2021
Este contenido también está disponible en Español

In April 2021, the First ESOCITE-LALICS Conference took place, albeit virtually. This was the first virtual Conference organized with the collaboration of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y Tecnología (ESOCITE) and Red Latinoamericana para el Estudio de los Sistemas de Aprendizaje, Innovación y Construcción de Competencias (LALICS). Importantly, the two organizations have different profiles: if LALICS aims to deepen the links between innovation processes, national/regional development, innovation systems, learning processes, and capacity building in the region, ESOCITE’s goal is to strengthen linkages across members of the community of social studies of science and technology in Latin America. (read more...)

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Days of Their Lives: The Limits, Possibilities, and Parallels of Media-Ted Research during a Pandemic

Sreenidhi Krishnan June 17, 2021

On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume artists, lighting technicians, assistant directors, creatives, and spot boys.  Their collective efforts ensure that audiences have new episodes to look forward to daily. Come rain, hail, or shine, through collaborations and conflicts, together they build melodramatic worlds that entertain millions of households in India. But what happens when the meaning of “regular” is redefined? What happens when even two become a crowd? When the first wave of COVID-19 hit Mumbai in March 2020, it brought, among other things, the Hindi soap opera industry to a halt. Daily production activities of soap operas across channels were abruptly paused. Sets had to be abandoned in haste when a citywide lockdown was announced. The absence of film work meant that workers would go without payments (read more...)

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Entrepreneurship and Emergent Technologies: From Predicting to Creating the Future

Lorenzo Skade June 15, 2021
Dieser Text ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.

What is the motivator, what inspires us?” Stephen discusses with his teammate. “The reason is contribution, contribution to the world and to the future. It is about the new. We want to make a strong impact in the world and we want to create happiness with our app. So, let’s use our technology for something that is new. I believe in it and I know we can create a better world in the future with it. Tech entrepreneurs like Stephen start from nothing but an idea in a pitch deck, which over time then is supposed to materialize into a business. Developing their digital businesses, they attempt to create a successful venture in the future. In this process, the future is a reoccurring issue since they ongoingly discuss what the future might look like and how they can influence it. While conducting ethnographic research for the last two years in a startup accelerator, my team and I became interested in understanding issues of time and temporality such as the phenomenon of “acceleration” (Skade et al., 2020). (read more...)

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Entrepreneurship und neue Technologien: Von der Vorhersage der Zukunft hin zur Gestaltung der Zukunft.

Lorenzo Skade June 15, 2021
This content is also available in English.

“Was ist unsere Motivation, was inspiriert uns?”, diskutiert Stephen mit seinem Teamkollegen. “Der Grund ist der Beitrag, den wir leisten wollen. Unser Beitrag zur Welt und zur Zukunft. Es geht um was Neues. Wir wollen die Welt beeinflussen und wir wollen mit unserer App Glück schaffen. Also, lasst uns unsere Technologie für etwas Neues nutzen. Ich glaube daran, und ich weiss, dass wir damit in Zukunft eine bessere Welt schaffen können.” Tech-Entrepreneur:innen wie Stephen beginnen mit nichts als einer Idee in einem Pitch Deck, die sich im Laufe der Zeit zu einem Unternehmen entwickeln soll. Indem sie ihre digitalen Geschäftsmodelle dann weiterentwickeln, versuchen sie, ein erfolgreiches Unternehmen in der Zukunft zu erschaffen. In diesem Prozess ist die Zukunft ein immer wiederkehrendes Thema, da sie ständig darüber diskutieren, wie die Zukunft aussehen könnte und wie sie sie beeinflussen könnten. Während unserer ethnographischen Forschung in einem Startup-Accelerator in den letzten zwei Jahren haben mein Team und ich uns mit den Themen Zeit und Zeitlichkeit beschäftigt, wie zum Beispiel das Phänomen der “Akzeleration” (Skade et al., 2020). (read more...)

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Codificando a sífilis: sobre a realidade dos dados

Eduardo Zanella June 8, 2021
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(Nota do editor: Este post no blogue faz parte do Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) A sífilis, uma infecção causada pela bactéria treponema pallidum, é uma importante doença. Começa como uma lesão na pele e se desenvolve até deformar os ossos, comprometer o sistema nervoso central e, em última instância, causar a morte. Durante a gravidez a doença também pode ser transmitida de mãe para filho. A sífilis acompanha nossa espécie desde ao menos a renascença e gerou várias inovações na ciência moderna ao longo de sua história. Ajudou a dar início à serologia por meio da Reação de Wasserman (Fleck, 2010), o primeiro teste de detecção, e foi crucial para a consolidação de perspectivas somatológicas de doenças mentais na psiquiatria (Carrara and Carvalho 2010). Devido à transmissão sexual da doença, nos séculos dezoito e dezenove a sífilis encarnou o mal venéreo por excelência em regimes sexuais restritivos (Fleck 2010; Quetel 1986). Desde essa época, a sífilis ajuda a estabelecer as bases para os códigos de conduta social e até mesmo para as ideias de “eu” em sociedades ocidentais, como por exemplo na criminalização da prostituição (Carrara 1996; Bastos 2007) e na conformação de teorias de contágio e suas relações de sujeito-corpo (Echeverría 2010). (read more...)

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