Search Results for: scale

Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making

Cody Skahan September 24, 2024
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I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a networking lunch for youth working in environmentalism. My Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of Iceland focused on Ungir Umhverfissinnar (English translation: the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association), which I (from the United States) had joined the board of both as a climate activist and engaged anthropologist. During my interviews and participant observation with the organization, geoengineering had never come up until my colleague from Ungir Umhverfissinnar and I were approached by representatives from Operaatio Arktis (OA). Intent on “ the polar ice caps and preventing global tipping points,” OA has followed prominent research advocates in fostering discussion around an SRM technique called Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). (read more...)

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From Foraging to Keeping Bees in Northeast Brazil

Cydney Seigerman August 27, 2024
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.
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“This,” explained Chico Filho, gesturing to the lush, flowering Caatinga shrubland surrounding us, “is the bees’ pasture.” Chico Filho, a state extension officer and avid beekeeper, was reflecting on the changes in small farmers’ perception and actions toward the Caatinga, the biodiverse ecoregion unique to Northeast Brazil characterized by shrubs, thorn trees, and ongoing deforestation. The faint buzzing of bees accompanied our conversation as Chico Filho led a farmhand (and fellow beekeeper) and me along a path through the Caatinga to one of the apiaries (bee yards) on Fazenda Normal. (read more...)

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Commodifying Disability as an Experience

Mine Egbatan August 20, 2024
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Since February 2023, I have been conducting fieldwork on disabled women’s access to and experience of infrastructure under the current populist authoritarian government in Turkey. My research has taken me, among other places, extensively throughout Istanbul, the city with the largest disabled population in the country. I have traveled primarily by public transportation to meet with my interlocutors, most of whom are blind, allowing me to experience urban infrastructures alongside them. While passing through Gayrettepe Station, one of the busiest subway stations in Istanbul due to its location in a business district and near an upscale shopping mall, I observed a sentence written on a black background with white neon points: “Learning is possible through encounters” (Öğrenmenin yolu karşılaşmaktan geçer). This area is home to a museum called “Dialogue in the Dark” and “Dialogue in the Silence,” which provides a multisensory corporeal experience of blindness and deafness targeting non-disabled people as an audience. The museum draws inspiration from other “Dialogue in the Dark” museums located in Europe, and was established by a civil society organization. These museums are significant initiatives aimed at helping non-disabled people understand how “others” experience the built environment, thereby raising awareness about the inequalities and injustices that disabled people may encounter in their daily lives. Disability activism is relatively new in Turkey and values any effort that contributes to the recognition of disability as an identity, which has not been widely acknowledged. Indeed, creating a space for encounter is crucial for cultivating a culture of pluralism, understanding, and care for one another, all of which are crucial for a democracy. In some countries, populist movements are explicitly hostile to disabled folks, and/or ridicule them (e.g. Trump in the US), however, this is not the case in Turkey (disabled women face other challenges, as we will see). So, such initiatives regarding disabled people are quite welcome, as they may contribute to Turkey’s democratization and the inclusion of non-normative bodies and existences. (read more...)

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Medicine Disoriented

Amanda Quan August 15, 2024
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Once a week, I get to play doctor. Setting aside the endless anki cards and slide decks familiar to all medical students in their preclinical training, I turn instead to my patient interview skills and exam maneuvers as I enter the Kanbar Center. Located on the lower floor of the UCSF campus library behind an unassuming door, the Kanbar Center opens into a large simulation center where we hone our clinical skills with the help of standardized patients. Inside, the quiet, carpet-lined hallways of our library give way to a busy assemblage of medical cabinets, recliners, assorted supplies, and sterile rooms outlined by equipment-adorned walls. This signals our official entry into The Clinic. Against this backdrop, my peers and I don our white coats and adjust our stethoscopes before stepping into the simulation. (read more...)

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The Cloud is Too Loud: Spotlighting the Voices of Community Activists from the Data Center Capital of the World

Madelyn Zander August 13, 2024
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What does it mean to speak about the cloud? While the term tends to conjure images of fluffy white objects, the cloud in technological terms is a complex physical infrastructure that comprises hundreds of thousands of servers distributed around the globe that provide on-demand access to data storage and computing resources over the internet. The problem with describing this physical infrastructure as the cloud is that it abstracts away the data centers, subsea fiber optic cables, copper lines, and networked devices that enable our digital interactions, as well as the consequences that the expansion of this infrastructure poses to people and to the environment. Scholars of infrastructure have written about the cloud’s incredible energy and water consumption to power and cool servers, as well as its massive carbon footprint (Carruth 2014; Edwards et al. 2024; Hogan 2018; Johnson 2023). However, less attention has been given to the cloud’s auditory presence, a problem of growing concern for people who live alongside cloud infrastructure. In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud’s emerging sound pollution problem into focus. (read more...)

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Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico

Mariel Garcia-Montes August 6, 2024
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
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In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a private conversation is at risk of being intentionally overheard. Birds on the wire can mean anything from one’s auntie overhearing a conversation from the other room, to a phone being wiretapped at long range by a state agency. In everyday parlance, this phrase does a lot of work to signal a broader awareness and cultural acceptance of surveillance. If, in conversation, someone is reminded of the birds on the wire, they are expected to beware—not for the birds to go away. Perhaps the statement produces a chilling effect of sorts, rather than an expectation of privacy. (read more...)

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Between the Bitterness of Anonymity and Ethics is Racism: Reflections for Anthropological Research on Science in the ‘Backyard’

João Paulo Siqueira June 20, 2024
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This essay is one of the results of a roda de conversa (a conversation circle) that took place at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, in December 2023. Professor Soraya Fleischer had the idea and invited her advisees: two men and three women. Since all of us were, in different ways, doing research with researchers that were also working at the University of Brasilia, the roda de conversa had as a guiding theme the following question: what is it like to conduct research with interlocutors who share the same “institutional house”—who work in the same “backyard”? (read more...)

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Sobre el Acto de Observar: Reflexiones sobre las Negociaciones de la ONU sobre Política Climática desde París hasta Hoy

Katie Foster June 10, 2024
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Observar (verbo) Notar o percibir (algo) y registrarlo como importante. Ver (a alguien o algo) cuidosa y atentamente. Notar o detectar (algo) durante un estudio científico. Hacer comentarios. Cumplir o acatar (una obligación social, legal, ética o religiosa) Guardar (silencio) en cumplimiento de una norma o costumbre o temporariamente en señal de respeto Cumplir o participar en (un rito o ceremonia) Celebrar o reconocer (un aniversario). Fuente: Oxford Languages (Consultado: 3 marzo 2024) www.google.com Casi todos los años desde 1994, representantes de 198 países se han reunidos en la reunión anual de la Convención Marco de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Cambio Climático (CMNUCC), conocida como la Conferencia de las Partes (COP), para debatir cómo abordar el inmenso y insoluble desafío del cambio climático. Junto a estes representativos nacionales, miles de participantes de organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG) ambientales y sociales, empresas, gobiernos locales, naciones indígenas, instituciones de investigación y organizaciones comerciales siguen atentamente el curso de las negociones. A estos asistentes se les conoce oficialmente como “Observadores.” La primera vez que participé en estas reuniones como una Observadora fue en la COP 20 celebrada en Lima (Perú). El año siguiente en París (Francia), participé en las extensas negociones de la COP 21, en las que los países participantes adoptaron el Acuerdo de París. Ocho años más tarde, volví para la COP 28 en Dubai (Emiratos Árabes Unidos). Dado este lapso de tiempo, pude considerar: ¿Qué cambió de la COP 21 a la COP 28? ¿Cómo influyen las condiciones globales evolucionando en el proceso? Y ¿qué permite el acto de observar dentro de los espacios multilaterales y el proceso de elaboración de políticas? (read more...)

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