Search Results for: CASTAC

Is Uncertainty a Useful Concept? Tracking Environmental Damage in the Lao Hydropower Industry

Jerome Whitington July 30, 2018

The collapse last week of a major hydropower dam in southern Laos, the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy, as a tropical storm dumped an unknown, but massive, volume of water into its reservoir, seems to have prompted at least a little soul-searching for a country that considers itself ‘the Battery of Southeast Asia.’ It’s not very often that large dams collapse, but it’s the second time it’s happened this year in Laos (the prior one was much smaller), and some readers may have been affected by the near-collapse of the Oroville Dam—the tallest dam in the United States—in central California in 2017, prompting the evacuation of 180,000 people. Laos has far lower population density—about 10,000 people have been affected by the still under-construction dam—and as of the time of writing there are perhaps a dozen dead and several hundred missing. But a dam doesn’t have to collapse for it to be a disaster. Even when dams work well, in the best case scenarios they produce a tremendous degree of uncertainty for the people they affect about what might happen and what comes next.  (read more...)

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A Ludicrous Relationship? A Conversation between Anthropology and Game Studies

Spencer Ruelos July 17, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is a co-authored piece written by Spencer Ruelos and Amanda Cullen, both PhD students in the Informatics department at UC Irvine. Most work at the intersection of games and anthropology is centered around how ethnographic methods can be applied to video games, especially those based in virtual worlds. Boellstorff’s (2006) essay in the inaugural issue of Games and Culture was central in articulating the possibilities of ethnographic fieldwork in game studies research. While game studies continues to draw on anthropological traditions of ethnography, this seems to be where the conversation between the two disciplines ends. Many of us who work in both game studies and anthropology find ourselves lacking a sense of academic belonging in either field; this post is, in part, an attempt to build deeper connections between these two disciplines. (read more...)

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Modern Lives and Stone Age Minds: The Ambiguous Rhetoric of Evolutionary Mismatch

David Gerstle July 10, 2018

Over the last three decades, popular science authors have used evolutionary mismatch theory to shed light on a vast number of modern social problems, pointing to differences between contemporary environments and those of humanity’s distant ancestors. These authors argue that the majority of Homo sapiens’ existence took place in the Pleistocene (approximately 2 million to 10,000 years BCE), and so this epoch presented the greatest adaptive challenges to the species’ survival and reproduction. These were the contexts that shaped modern human physiology and sociality through natural selection. Large-scale civilizations, they argue, no longer resemble this so-called “environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” even though the humans that inhabit them retain the genetic and psychological makeup of their Pleistocene precursors. Many contemporary problems of Western social life, the story goes, can thus be attributed to this mismatch between the evolved human-animal and the novel problems of the present. As evolutionary psychologists John Tooby (read more...)

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El papel del discurso científico en el movimiento trans chileno

Baird Campbell June 26, 2018
This content is also available in English.

El 18 de junio de 2018, la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) anunció que sacaría la “transexualidad” (un término que nació en la psiquiatría, y por ende que es patologizante según muchos activistas trans) de la sección de “trastornos mentales” de la Clasificación Internacional de Enfermedades (CIE). Después de décadas de activismo, esta acción fue aplaudida por activistas trans en todo el mundo. Sin embargo, la medicalización de las identidades trans y la comercialización de la salud en muchos países del mundo hicieron que la OMS —en vez de sacar las identidades trans del todo— las incluyera en su lista de “condiciones de salud sexual”. Esto porque, aunque las personas trans ya no se clasificarán como “enfermos” o “trastornados mentales” en base a sus identidades de género, el proceso de transición física (terapias hormonales, cirugías, apoyo de salud mental) hace fundamental el acceso al sistema de salud. En países (read more...)

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The Role of Scientific Discourse in Chile’s Trans Rights Movement

Baird Campbell June 26, 2018
También disponible en español aquí.

On June 18, 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the removal of “transsexuality” (a term based on psychiatric diagnosis and maligned by many trans activists as pathologizing) from the “mental disorders” section of its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). After decades of activism, this move was applauded by trans activists around the world. Nonetheless, activists insist that the WHO—rather than removing trans identities entirely—should included them instead in its list of “sexual health conditions.” The commercialization of healthcare in much of the world means that, while trans people have no desire to be classified as “sick” or “mentally ill,” an official medical diagnosis remains crucial for accessing affordable medical care during the process of physical transition (to cover things like hormone therapies, surgeries, mental health support costs, etc.). In countries such as the US, where even private insurance companies are famously reticent to cover any expense not deemed “medically (read more...)

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The Sounds of STS: In conversation with Prof. Stefan Helmreich

Aadita Chaudhury June 21, 2018

I was first introduced to the work Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist of science at MIT, as a first year PhD student. As an STS student, I’ve always been intrigued by different methodologies used within the field, and I was compelled by Prof. Helmreich’s ethnography of microbial oceanographers Alien Ocean and its affective, narrative quality and engagements with various traditions of thought. Our conversation below covers Professor Helmreich’s  research, its relevance to the contemporary sociopolitical landscape, and the future of STS and anthropology of science, with a particular focus on the study of race, sound, biology and the arts. AC: You’re a prolific anthropologist of the life sciences/biology, but you are also a sound studies scholar. How do those two domains of interest interact for you in your research, or have they always been intertwined for you? Do they influence your methodological choices? SH: I arrived into conversations on the social (read more...)

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Politics in environmental research infrastructure formation: When top-down policy-making meets bottom-up fragmentation

Elena Parmiggiani June 13, 2018

By: Elena Parmiggiani, Helena Karasti, Karen Baker, and Andrea Botero The environmental sciences have been a fertile ground for the development of scientific infrastructures (a.k.a. cyberinfrastructure in the USA and research infrastructure in Europe). Their promises of addressing grand challenges such as climate change require increasing collaboration as well as new forms of research based on data sharing. However, infrastructure policy work in this domain has proven arduous. The environmental sciences are intrinsically heterogeneous with variations in data that must be navigated across local and global scales, ecological variety, societal concerns, and funding structures. (read more...)

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The Power of Small Things: Trustmarkers and Designing for Mental Health

Stefan Johansson June 7, 2018

At my office we put tennis balls on the legs of the chairs to reduce the noise of the scraping chairs against the parquet floors. They are hard to miss, but they fulfill their purpose. For this reason, I never reflected on what kind of feelings these bright fluorescent yellow balls might evoke when visitors see them attached to the bottom of the meeting room’s chair legs. (read more...)

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