Happy Hispanic Heritage Month!
Today, in celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15), we bring you a compilation of some of our favorite past posts from the Spanish-speaking world. Happy reading! (read more...)
Search Results for: CASTAC
The Sargassum Question
Sitting in her office, I could smell the sharp scent of hydrogen sulfide coming from the beach. She turned to me, paused for a second and proceeded to say with a seriousness in her tone that I hadn’t anticipated: The ecosystem that I have been studying all my life is now disappearing in a matter of weeks. Sargasso was once confined to the limits of the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean. As an ecological system, the Sargasso Sea has no land boundaries and its biological containment relies entirely on a delicate balance of ocean currents. Unlike other ecosystems, it lends itself to an almost poetic reimagination of what an ecosystem is. On the West, the sea bounded by Gulf Stream; on the North, by the North Atlantic Current; on East by the Canary Current; and on the South by the North Equatorial Current. It was first described by Cristopher Columbus in 1492 during his journey to the Americas. Ever since, its origins and movements across the Atlantic Ocean have been a source of debate and wonder. It wasn’t until 1834 that the German botanist Meyen F. J. F. proposed the idea that sargassum was an ecosystem entirely independent of any land, a floating ecosystem. He was also the first person who suggested that sargassum reproduces itself in the middle of the ocean instead of coming from any given territory (Deacon, 1942). (read more...)
“India’s Gig-work Economy” Roundtable
This roundtable discussion marks the end of our series on India’s Gig-work Economy. In this discussion, we reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the topic. Here are some highlights from the discussion. Listen to the audio track below or read the transcript for the full discussion Anushree (researcher, taxi-driving in Mumbai): “Something that came out during field work was the flow of workers from traditional services to app-based services which kind of happened in phases and all these platforms have played a different function in the history of this. While the radio taxis were more important in teaching workers to become professionals in the service economy the new platforms have given them a larger customer base and hired access to audience.” (read more...)
Negotiating Ethical Technology Use: Trust and Care in End-of-Life Conversations
The headline on the local news station’s website was sensational: “Bereaved Family Upset Kaiser Used Robot to Tell Father He Would Die”. Evoking some sort of post-modern dystopia, the article explains that the family “was taken by surprise when a robot rolled into the room” to deliver the news that an elder family member’s illness had progressed past the physician’s ability to treat it. While the robot actually was a remote physician using teleconferencing software to communicate with the patient and his family, the monitor projecting an image of the physician’s head and shoulders sat atop a tall, narrow metal unit reminiscent of a body. The “robot doctor” story was picked up by national news outlets, like the New York Times, and medical ethicists weighed in on the ethics of communicating “sensitive” topics remotely. The news stories problematized the impersonal, almost routinized, care as it was perceived by the family. In one, a representative from the American Medical Association commented, “We should all remember the power of touch – simple human contact – can communicate caring better than words.” (read more...)
Hetero-Comfortable Avatars
Content warning from author: This post will have instances of sexism, transphobia, and sexual violence. I noticed a masculine voice near me say: “wow Wow WOW!” I turned my body to see a couple of masculine avatars looking at me, or rather looking at my breasts. I said nothing, afraid I might be “found out” — that my voice wouldn’t quite match what the body of my avatar “should” have. As my avatar stood there, blinking in silence, one of the masculine avatars got closer and began to rub my body, taking particular interest in my breasts. I looked down and shared eye contact with him, and he said “Don’t worry. It’s ok, it’s VRChat. This is what happens. You won’t really feel anything anyway.” The others did the same. (read more...)
Espacios Vacíos: Índices Arquitectónicos de Barrancos en la Ciudad de Guatemala
Nota de traducción: En la versión en inglés de este post, la autora usa la palabra “void” para separar el vacío (the void) de su definición comúnmente entendida como espacios vacíos. Sin embargo, la palabra “vacío” en español se usa doblemente para denotar un espacio geográfico y físico sin masa. La autora reconoce esta lingüística conflictiva y continúa utilizando la noción de vacío para demonstrar cómo vinculan el lenguaje y la percepción especial. Profundos barrancos en forma de cañón fracturan el cuarenta y dos por ciento de la ciudad de Guatemala. Cubiertos de espeso, húmedo y denso follaje, estos barrancos son sitios ecológicos de polémica para los residentes a la Ciudad de Guatemala, quienes a menudo han descrito los barrancos como límites físicos que desconectan a su ciudad. Son oportunidades para vertederos de basura que están fuera de la vista, fuera de la mente; viviendas informales para pandillas, violencia y los más pobres de la ciudad ; así como lugares precarios donde más se sienten los daños causados por terremotos, inundaciones y deslizamientos de tierra. Sin embargo, en el 2006, la municipalidad de la ciudad reclasificó estos barrancos como un “Cinturón Ecológico Metropolitano,” identificándolos como sitios que necesitan atención ecológica y de desarrollo. Arquitectos en particular se han interesando especialmente en estos barrancos, abogando por diseños con una mentalidad sostenible que puedan desarrollar y conectar estos barrancos con el paisaje más amplio de la ciudad. Argumentan que los barrancos son espacios subutilizados y contaminados que trabajan en contra, en lugar de a favor, del ambiente construido. Interesada en la clasificación y producción de espacio, a continuación yo describo las condiciones que llevaron a los arquitectos a reconocer los barrancos como sitios con potencial de desarrollo en la Ciudad de Guatemala. Para ser designados como espacios para el desarrollo, sostengo que los barrancos primero necesitan ser redefinidos volumétricamente y epistémicamente, revelando nuevos parámetros para pensar sobre dónde puede residir el ambiento construido. (read more...)
Battery Life: Charging Culture at the End of Energy
Vodka-tonic. Take my picture. Charge my phone. Vodka-tonic. Take my picture. Charge my phone. This (or a similar sequence) is an irritatingly common refrain heard by many waitstaff at lower-tier upper-class Instagram-approved destination restaurants in New York City—presumably other variations proliferate throughout the world’s urban centers. While vodka and digital reproduction make fruitful grist for social critique, the focus of the following is on the request to infuse one’s portable appendage with fresh electricity. There are a number of intriguing aspects of this “charging culture,” from its role in the resource consumption chain (Parikka 2015), to infrastructural adaptations appearing in charging societies (Larkin 2013), to the implications of portable appliances on mobility studies (Schiller 2011), to the novel linguistic interactions engendered by electronic communications (Squires 2010). In concert with these developments, the following discusses the metabolism of charging culture—that is, the processes that are necessary for the maintenance of life. (read more...)
Power Chronography of Food-Delivery Work
*A note from Co-PI Noopur Raval: The arrival and rise of gig-work globally has ushered in a new wave of conversations around the casualization of labor and the precarious nature of digitally-mediated “gigs,” ranging from online crowdwork gigs to digitally-mediated physical work such as Ubering. Gradually, scholarship has extended beyond North America and Europe to map the landscape of digital labor in the global south. These posts that make up “India’s Gig-Work Economy” are the result of one such project titled ‘Mapping Digital Labour in India,’ where four research fellows and a program manager, me, have been studying the dynamics of app-based ridehailing and food-delivery work in two Indian cities (Mumbai and New Delhi). This project is supported by the Azim Premji University’s Research Grants program. In this series of posts, the research fellows and I offer reflections on pleasure, surveillance, morality and other aspects woven into the sociality of gig-work and consumption in India. Each post also has an accompanying audio piece in an Indian language, in a bid to reach out to non-academic and non-English speaking audiences. The series ends with a roundtable discussion post on the challenges, gender and class dynamics, and ethics of researching gig-work(ers) in India.* **A note from the editor: This post was co-written with Rajendra Jadhav. Download a transcript of the audio in Devanagari. This post presents the observations around the design of temporality within app-based food-delivery platforms in India. It draws on semi-structured interviews by field-researcher Rajendra and his time spent “hanging out” with food-delivery workers who are also often referred to as “hunger saviors” and “partners” in the platform ecosystem in India. Like in the earlier post by Simiran on food-delivery workers in Mumbai, we also observed that app-based work was structured and monitored along similar lines. However, in this post, we go into a detailed description of how work-time and temporality of work are configured in order to fulfill the promises that app companies make to customers in urban India. (read more...)