Search Results for: scale

Optics and Fluidity: Evading Surveillance in Hong Kong

Jessica L. Olivares, Tim Quinn October 2, 2019
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 At the Hong Kong airport, thousands of protesters line the arrivals hall. Creating a corridor for passengers to walk through, they stand silently, using their right hand to cover their right eye. The silence is occasionally perforated by calls of “Hāng Góng Gā Yáu!” and “Xiāng Gang Jīa Yóu 香港加油 – “Hong Kong Add Oil”— expressions of solidarity and encouragement that have become fuel for protests that have been ongoing and lively since March. Jingcha Huan Yan 警察還眼 – or, “police: return the eye” – has become a rallying cry of the movement following a police shooting of a young woman in the eye in Tsim Sha Tsui 尖沙嘴. Protesters ritually cover their right eyes or patch them shut with bloodied bandages. Others change their social media profile picture to an artistic rendering of a woman with an eyepatch. Twitter hashtag campaigns such as #Eye4HK have gained international traction, with (read more...)

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Content Moderation: Mediating Public Speech Privately

Mehtab Khan September 24, 2019

Social media constitutes a universe of more images, text and videos than can be humanly experienced, read, and heard. However, disinformation, terrorist content, harassment, and other kinds of negative content have made ‘content moderation’ one of the most pressing demands from large online communication platforms (“intermediaries”), such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Every single day, major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube receive thousands of requests to review or take down content that violates their internal policies or an external law. Sometimes they receive requests, both from the US government and foreign governments, for information on users, or to censor specific people and accounts. Content moderation can be defined as “the organized practice of screening user-generated content (UGC) posted to Internet sites, social media, and other online outlets, in order to determine the appropriateness of the content for a given site, locality, or jurisdiction” (Roberts 2017). The rules for content (read more...)

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The Sargassum Question

Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo September 10, 2019

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...)

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Espacios Vacíos: Índices Arquitectónicos de Barrancos en la Ciudad de Guatemala

Melanie Ford Lemus August 22, 2019
This content is also available in English.

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...)

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Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

Sarah Zia July 18, 2019

*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.* Download a transcript of the audio in Devanagari. Ride-hailing platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system? (read more...)

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Hearing the Unknown: Case Studies in Cuba and Taiwan

Jennifer Hsieh June 25, 2019

The saga of mysterious sounds afflicting US diplomats in Cuba—and more recently China–has appeared in the US news cycle intermittently over the last couple of years. Since 2017, news organizations have reported that officials working at the US Embassy in Havana were experiencing hearing loss, dizziness, and possibly brain injury as a result of exposure to high-pitched, grating sounds. The State Department described the phenomenon as a sonic attack, believing that officials were purposefully targeted by an “acoustic element.” Cuban officials have denied the allegations by citing the failure of US officials to identify the source of the sound. Other details surrounding the incident have added to the mystery, including the fact that not all individuals who exhibited symptoms reportedly heard the sound, and those who did may not have been hearing the same sound. (read more...)

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Happy Pride Month!

Baird Campbell June 18, 2019

In support and solidarity with LGBTQIA+/Queer people around the world, we’re celebrating Pride Month with a collection of some of our most popular queer content from the blog. We take this moment to recognize the valuable contributions LGBTQIA+/Queer people make to our fields, our society, and our lives. Check out six of our favorites below! (read more...)

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Listening to/with Technology: Meditation Apps as the New Voice of Mental Health

Rebecca Jablonsky June 4, 2019

Shortly after giving birth to her son, Jessica began to experience a health problem that she describes simply as “pain everywhere.” About one month after we initially met at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California, she elaborated on her symptoms: “Joint pain, muscle pain, stabbing pain, stinging pain, burning pain, tingling, numbness…chest pains, palpitations, dizzy spells, headaches. I feel like I’m going to have a seizure, or brain fog, fatigue.” (read more...)

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