Search Results for: scale

Collaborating Bodies: Community Gardens and Food Forests in Central Texas

Nadia Luis September 11, 2025
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Almost every aspect of life on earth interacts with soil. Soils are old. Soils take time to develop from their parent material. Soils embody life itself. Yet, the concept of soil varies depending on the epistemic culture applied to define what soil is. Often soils exist in states of naturalness or unnaturalness. For example, Minami (2009) describes the Chinese compound character for agricultural soil 土壤 (tǔ rǎng), the first character (tǔ) represents soil in its natural state, and the second character (rǎng) represents soil once it has been broken up for agricultural purposes. Here, an interesting dichotomy presents itself: soil as it is and soil as it is once altered by human intervention. This dichotomous classificatory system describes changes that result from soil processes interacting; however, curiously, soil in only one category is the product of perceived human interaction. (read more...)

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The Politics of Translation Across Policy, Grant Proposal, and Agricultural Landscapes

Cydney Seigerman August 26, 2025
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On Monday, April 14th, my stomach sank as I read an e-mail from the principal investigators of a large-scale, multi-institutional project funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that supported half of my livelihood as a postdoctoral research associate. Following that day’s press release from the USDA—“USDA Cancels Biden Era Climate Slush Fund, Reprioritizes Existing Funding to Farmers”—the email transformed the cloud of uncertainty that loomed over all federally funded scientific inquiry into concrete dejection. (read more...)

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Patch-“working” the Field: Methodological Reorientations During a Global Pandemic

Anushree Gupta July 29, 2025
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I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged tech startup and innovation ecosystem in a rapidly digitizing India. I wanted to examine how top-down imaginaries rooted in technocratic governance regimes were shaping emerging communities of practice and cultures of technology-based entrepreneurship. Deeply inspired by Ho’s (2009), Irani’s (2019), and Gupta’s (2024) ethnographies, I hoped to develop my research similarly through an in-depth investigation of techno-entrepreneurial cultures from within and examine their capture of the public imagination for charting pathways to economic growth and social mobility. The idea was to try and uncover the finer threads that were weaving the tapestry of neoliberal development in what would later be deemed as “pre-pandemic” India. Enter the pandemic and the paralyzing lockdown in March 2020 that brought “normal” life to a screeching halt. A sudden and totalizing isolation was mandated by the social distancing rules meant to keep the virus out. However, it didn’t keep the feeling of disaster at bay. The scenes that unfolded during the lockdown–on national television and social media screens, both closer to home as well as globally–demanded loudly and aggressively a reconsideration of everything important and urgent, and hence, worth studying. (read more...)

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Technics in the Dust

Spencer Kaplan July 22, 2025
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One early morning in August 2024, I boarded a coach bus in downtown San Francisco. We drove over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, past Reno, and through the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation. After six hours, the bus entered the Black Rock Desert and arrived at Burning Man: an annual, week-long event where 63,000 “Burners” create a temporary city dedicated to art, self-expression, decommodification, and self-reliance. (read more...)

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STS Academic Publishing As a Work of Service and Hope: A Conversation with Vivette García-Deister

Vivette García-Deister June 19, 2025
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português
Este contenido también está disponible en español
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Thinking, writing, and publishing from Latin America pose significant challenges, especially for younger researchers. Academic work is affected by various kinds of asymmetries, but when we add to this the centrality of the English language and the predominance of theoretical perspectives from the Global North, the landscape becomes even more challenging. In response to this situation, several projects have emerged that view publishing as an intervention in the politics of knowledge. One such project that aims to undo these asymmetries and contribute to more horizontal practices is Tapuya: Latin American Science Technology and Society, an international journal that fosters conversations between the global North and South and helps its authors navigate the complexities of diverse languages and traditions of critical thinking. On this occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Vivette García-Deister, the editor-in-chief of this journal. In this interview, she talks about why she considers academic publishing a service, how some editorial processes —such as reading, reviewing, and providing feedback— can theoretically and methodologically support young authors’ texts, and why publishing can be a form of hope. (read more...)

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Peasant Reserve Zones as Techno-socio-environmental Assemblages

Julián Medina-Zárate, Nicolas Lara-Rodriguez June 12, 2025
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Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Designed as part of agrarian reform efforts, these zones are intended to promote environmental conservation and socioeconomic sustainability in rural areas. The ZRCs provide peasant organizations with a set of tools to structure their social, economic, political, and environmental governance. However, their effectiveness in achieving social and environmental objectives remains a subject of ongoing research across disciplines such as ecology, sociology, and economics. Existing studies yield inconclusive results, instead highlighting the complexity of the dynamics surrounding this institutional mechanism.   (read more...)

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The Porosity of Promise: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and the New Science of Technofixation

Aaron Gregory May 29, 2025
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Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2 and an expanding array of technoscientific actors and interests. (read more...)

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L’Écosystème Multiple: Naviguer le Destin Transatlantique de la Biosphère 1 ½

Elie Danziger May 8, 2025
This content is also available in English.
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C’est la fin du mois de mars 2022 et, comme toujours, le temps est radieux à Tucson, en Arizona. Mais une grande réunion rassemble un groupe binational à l’intérieur d’un bâtiment climatisé du campus. Pour la première fois depuis le début de la pandémie de Covid-19, des scientifiques français du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) ont pu venir rencontrer leurs homologues de l’Université d’Arizona (UA), pour célébrer le lancement d’un partenariat entre les deux institutions, qui a débuté officiellement en 2021. Grâce à ce partenariat, les deux parties souhaitent favoriser des recherches collaboratives et complémentaires, notamment sur le thème de l’environnement. L’un des points forts de cette collaboration est la perspective de projets conjoints faisant usage d’un laboratoire appelé « Biosphère 2 ». (read more...)

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