Search Results for: scale

Tracing the Legacy of Human Resilience in the Debris of Ancient Campfires

Aylar Abdolahzadeh June 8, 2026
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In the summer of 2015, I was a first-year graduate student when I joined a field project at La Ferrassie, a Neandertal’ site tucked into the Périgord region of southwest France. We camped in the backyard of the late Harold Dibble’s dig house in the small town of Carsac-Aillac, where the morning air smelled of walnuts and apple trees, and the sunset turned the golden bales of hay into glowing embers each evening (Fig 1). (read more...)

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Food (In)Security Under the Microscope

Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota, Rosângela Pezza Cintrão June 2, 2026
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In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar (in)SAM — “Food (in)Security Under the Microscope: Rethinking the Relationship Between Food Systems, Microorganisms, and Sanitary Norms” — brought together researchers from different countries and professionals from various fields of knowledge for two days, with the aim of contributing to the development of inclusive sanitary norms for non-industrial food production. The panel discussions, which featured social science researchers and leaders from traditional peoples and communities, addressed topics such as: challenges for multispecies planetary health and for promoting food and nutritional sovereignty and security; food, microorganisms, and sanitary regulations; biopolitics in global food systems, agribusiness, and the production of large-scale (in)securities; and methodological and interdisciplinary challenges for research and regulations involving microorganisms. (read more...)

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(In)Segurança Alimentar sob o Microscópio

Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota, Rosângela Pezza Cintrão June 2, 2026
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Em novembro de 2025, no Rio de Janeiro, o seminário (in)SAM – “(in)Segurança Alimentar sob o Microscópio: Repensando a relação entre sistemas alimentares, microrganismos e normas sanitárias” reuniu por dois dias pesquisadores de diferentes países e profissionais de diferentes áreas do conhecimento com o objetivo de colaborar com a construção de normas sanitárias inclusivas para produções não industriais de alimentos. As mesas de debate, que contaram com pesquisadores de ciências sociais e lideranças de povos e comunidades tradicionais, passaram por temas como: desafios para uma saúde planetária multiespécie e para a promoção da soberania e segurança alimentar e nutricional; alimentação, microrganismos e regulações sanitárias; biopolíticas nos sistemas alimentares globais, agronegócio e a produção de (in)seguranças em grande escala; e desafios metodológicos e interdisciplinares para pesquisas e normativas envolvendo microrganismos. (read more...)

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Making for the Feed: Creativity, Platforms, and Visibility in China

Christina Kefala May 4, 2026
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Creativity is often imagined as a deeply human capacity: a moment of inspiration, a flash of originality, or an individual act of expression. Yet in contemporary digital environments, creativity rarely unfolds in isolation from technological systems. Across creative industries, from fashion and design to visual media, branding, and online content production, creative work increasingly takes shape within infrastructures of platforms, software tools, and algorithmic systems. These technologies do not simply enable creativity; they actively shape how creative ideas are imagined, produced, circulated, and evaluated. (read more...)

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Blood Circulation: Opening Up a Closed System

Awa Diagne April 29, 2026
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On any given day, at any given moment, blood flows through bodies, flesh and viscera, shaping our world from the inside out. The process is rather simple, I have been told: in the human body, blood is propelled by the heart, repetitively flowing from the right atrium and right ventricle, through the pulmonary system, into the left atrium, left ventricle, and aorta. It then unfurls into the rest of the body and back to our starting point, the right heart. (read more...)

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What the Map Conceals: Sovereignty and the Sea in the Strait of Gibraltar

Adam Matthew Mikhail April 22, 2026
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An aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar shows something that resembles order. Container ships move in two disciplined lanes, their wakes parallel lines across the surface. Between them, a single patrol vessel sits like a traffic cop at an intersection. Smaller ships move differently: ferries on fixed schedules, fishing boats angling across the grain, following lines invisible from above. The Strait, fourteen kilometers at its narrowest, appears split down the middle, dividing Morocco from Spain, Africa from Europe. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described the sea as the exemplary smooth space—fluid, directionless, resistant to the grid—but also as the first place to be striated, ruled into navigable geometry by technologies of longitude and open-water navigation. From above, the striae of the strait are clear. The question is what that striation conceals. (read more...)

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Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?

Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri April 9, 2026
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This article is the fourth article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, and the third post here. In January 2024, hundreds of women workers associated with the on-demand home services app Urban Company (henceforth UC) gathered in protest outside the platform’s regional office in Hyderabad, India. The workers, many of whom were working as beauticians on the app, were protesting a slew of platform policies that had steadily eroded their working conditions over time (Figure 1). Most notable of these was the introduction of a new feature called ‘auto-assign’, which requires workers to mark the time slots that they are available to work on the app, following which they are assigned gigs automatically by the platform. The new ‘auto-assign’ policy marked a significant shift away from a previously more flexible system, where women could choose their gigs and hours. The promise of flexibility has been a prime reason that attracted women workers to platforms like UC, as it enables them to access paid work while also attending to their housework and care work responsibilities. It is this very erosion of flexibility that women were holding UC to account for. (read more...)

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From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection

Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley April 2, 2026
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This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (read more...)

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