Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10742481
Ryo Morimoto
Abstract The article explores the tensions between the state, science, and the lived experience among the residents in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. The author proposes the analytics of the “surreal” to apprehend the incommensurable divide invisible radiation in society had produced between the state's techno-scientific focus on making the radiation visible and people's diverse everyday experience of radiation in various aspects of life. Ethnographically retelling the struggles of a medical doctor who came to understand the manifold consequences of the accident in coastal Fukushima, the article shows how social science is a critical stakeholder in addressing the surreal to mediate between science and the lay public, the state and citizen, and risk and life to prevent the individuation of risk perceptions that follow with the emergence of invisible hazards in society.
{"title":"Radioactive Mosquito Bite and Its Surreal Life","authors":"Ryo Morimoto","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10742481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742481","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article explores the tensions between the state, science, and the lived experience among the residents in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. The author proposes the analytics of the “surreal” to apprehend the incommensurable divide invisible radiation in society had produced between the state's techno-scientific focus on making the radiation visible and people's diverse everyday experience of radiation in various aspects of life. Ethnographically retelling the struggles of a medical doctor who came to understand the manifold consequences of the accident in coastal Fukushima, the article shows how social science is a critical stakeholder in addressing the surreal to mediate between science and the lay public, the state and citizen, and risk and life to prevent the individuation of risk perceptions that follow with the emergence of invisible hazards in society.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135934956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10742523
Emmanuel Henry
Abstract If the words “our product is doubt” characterize the production of ignorance, in turn, the production of nonproblem could be encapsulated by “our product is silence.” This article looks behind both these words and this concept of nonproblems, drawing attention to public policy mechanisms whose effect (whether explicitly intended or not) is to reduce the attention paid to a given problem, resulting in public inaction, not taking charge of a problem. It highlights the role in those dynamics of two factors: the scientific instruments attempting to quantify environmental and occupational health issues and the regulatory instruments used in the field of the regulation of chemicals. Downstream of these regulatory processes, the use of science-based regulatory instruments implicitly steers regulatory policies in a direction that results in tolerance of certain risks (rendering them acceptable) and can lead to forms of public inaction.
{"title":"Toxic Avoidance","authors":"Emmanuel Henry","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10742523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742523","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract If the words “our product is doubt” characterize the production of ignorance, in turn, the production of nonproblem could be encapsulated by “our product is silence.” This article looks behind both these words and this concept of nonproblems, drawing attention to public policy mechanisms whose effect (whether explicitly intended or not) is to reduce the attention paid to a given problem, resulting in public inaction, not taking charge of a problem. It highlights the role in those dynamics of two factors: the scientific instruments attempting to quantify environmental and occupational health issues and the regulatory instruments used in the field of the regulation of chemicals. Downstream of these regulatory processes, the use of science-based regulatory instruments implicitly steers regulatory policies in a direction that results in tolerance of certain risks (rendering them acceptable) and can lead to forms of public inaction.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135973711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10742537
Christo Sims, Akshita Sivakumar
Abstract “Sustainability” is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts’ different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the design process as a key site where political questions about sustainability in the built form get settled pragmatically.
{"title":"Making Sustainability Concrete","authors":"Christo Sims, Akshita Sivakumar","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10742537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742537","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Sustainability” is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts’ different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the design process as a key site where political questions about sustainability in the built form get settled pragmatically.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135933841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10742495
Diana Graizbord
Abstract This article examines how and to what effect the scientific ideal and practice of replication is adopted by a Mexican federal government agency charged with measuring poverty. The commitment to replication among state poverty experts is traced to their self-conception as democratic reformers working against cultures of state opacity associated with an authoritarian past. These experts deploy the ideal of replication as a bureaucratic ethos and the practice of replication as a public-facing and legitimating strategy. Replication successfully performs transparency and generates trust by appealing to, and strengthening ties with, elite academic and policy actors. Ultimately, the article shows how scientific ideals and practices adopted by state actors are cast as democracy enhancing even as they produce elite closure and limit public participation.
{"title":"State Calculations and the Political Promise of Replication","authors":"Diana Graizbord","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10742495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742495","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how and to what effect the scientific ideal and practice of replication is adopted by a Mexican federal government agency charged with measuring poverty. The commitment to replication among state poverty experts is traced to their self-conception as democratic reformers working against cultures of state opacity associated with an authoritarian past. These experts deploy the ideal of replication as a bureaucratic ethos and the practice of replication as a public-facing and legitimating strategy. Replication successfully performs transparency and generates trust by appealing to, and strengthening ties with, elite academic and policy actors. Ultimately, the article shows how scientific ideals and practices adopted by state actors are cast as democracy enhancing even as they produce elite closure and limit public participation.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135973288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10742635
Waqar Zaidi
Abstract This article suggests that aerial networks can be usefully conceptualized as broad “aerial social spaces” that can (and often do) extend, produce, and reproduce state power. They are not easily created: their creation and maintenance require large resources both on land and in the air. The same aerial network can be embodied in multiple aerial social spaces that produce and reproduce state power in different ways. This article highlights two such pathways: the first through cultural and the second through logistical impact. In support it presents two case studies based on the expansion of civil aviation in the developing world in the 1940s and 1950s: the International Civil Aviation Authority's interventions in the Middle East and US involvement in Saudi Arabian aviation.
{"title":"Aerial Social Spaces and State Power","authors":"Waqar Zaidi","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10742635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742635","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article suggests that aerial networks can be usefully conceptualized as broad “aerial social spaces” that can (and often do) extend, produce, and reproduce state power. They are not easily created: their creation and maintenance require large resources both on land and in the air. The same aerial network can be embodied in multiple aerial social spaces that produce and reproduce state power in different ways. This article highlights two such pathways: the first through cultural and the second through logistical impact. In support it presents two case studies based on the expansion of civil aviation in the developing world in the 1940s and 1950s: the International Civil Aviation Authority's interventions in the Middle East and US involvement in Saudi Arabian aviation.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135973563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575567
Valerie Werder
In 1850 Harvard University commissioned daguerreotypes of seven enslaved people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—as part of its effort to popularize the racist theory of polygenesis. Today the same university retains possession of the photographs but now reframes them as evidence of a liberal idea of shared humanity. This article argues that such reframings are a form of harm made possible by Harvard's proprietary and discursive capture of the photographs, which is currently being contested in a reparations lawsuit brought by Tamara Lanier, a descendent of Renty and Delia. Focusing on this lawsuit and its historical precedents, this article claims that the spectral forms of Renty and Delia recur in Harvard's institutional mediascape not only because they are routinely instrumentalized by the university but also because the ongoing harms of slavery and anti-Blackness have not yet been acknowledged, much less repaired, within or beyond the US legal system.
{"title":"In the Time of the Law","authors":"Valerie Werder","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575567","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1850 Harvard University commissioned daguerreotypes of seven enslaved people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—as part of its effort to popularize the racist theory of polygenesis. Today the same university retains possession of the photographs but now reframes them as evidence of a liberal idea of shared humanity. This article argues that such reframings are a form of harm made possible by Harvard's proprietary and discursive capture of the photographs, which is currently being contested in a reparations lawsuit brought by Tamara Lanier, a descendent of Renty and Delia. Focusing on this lawsuit and its historical precedents, this article claims that the spectral forms of Renty and Delia recur in Harvard's institutional mediascape not only because they are routinely instrumentalized by the university but also because the ongoing harms of slavery and anti-Blackness have not yet been acknowledged, much less repaired, within or beyond the US legal system.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45054534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575595
Elana Resnick
This essay rethinks writing on “intimate labor” to ethnographically explore the intimacy of labor by attending to how Romani women waste workers in Bulgaria assert workplace friendships to lay claim to public space and cultivate life-sustaining solidarities. Under conditions of racialized and degrading labor, they play with their uniformed hypervisibility, catcall white men on city streets, and temporarily unsettle normative expectations of womanhood. With this disruptive power of workplace intimacy, street sweepers use humor and play to create collective pleasure for themselves and one another. As they explain that they “die so that white Bulgarians can live,” they also use their friendships to generate pleasurable forms of living, what they term “anything else.”
{"title":"The Intimacy of Labor","authors":"Elana Resnick","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575595","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay rethinks writing on “intimate labor” to ethnographically explore the intimacy of labor by attending to how Romani women waste workers in Bulgaria assert workplace friendships to lay claim to public space and cultivate life-sustaining solidarities. Under conditions of racialized and degrading labor, they play with their uniformed hypervisibility, catcall white men on city streets, and temporarily unsettle normative expectations of womanhood. With this disruptive power of workplace intimacy, street sweepers use humor and play to create collective pleasure for themselves and one another. As they explain that they “die so that white Bulgarians can live,” they also use their friendships to generate pleasurable forms of living, what they term “anything else.”","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41823887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575609
Ritu Birla
This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels processes of financialization more broadly, which accelerate and shorten circuits of profit making and, in tandem, short-circuit democratic political representation. Crypto magnifies the tension between the semiotics of the social contract among nations moored in rights, and that of currency as a global language. Digital-speculative monetization warns that the social contract, a futures contract for a secure and stable future, may approach the aleatory contract of the futures trade.
{"title":"Short Circuits and Seizures","authors":"Ritu Birla","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575609","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels processes of financialization more broadly, which accelerate and shorten circuits of profit making and, in tandem, short-circuit democratic political representation. Crypto magnifies the tension between the semiotics of the social contract among nations moored in rights, and that of currency as a global language. Digital-speculative monetization warns that the social contract, a futures contract for a secure and stable future, may approach the aleatory contract of the futures trade.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45264934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575553
A. Appadurai, V. Rao
{"title":"The Circulation of Forms and Forms of Circulation","authors":"A. Appadurai, V. Rao","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575553","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43964158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-05DOI: 10.1215/08992363-10575859
Farhan Samanani, S. Crockford, Daniel M. Knight, Craig Stensrud, Girish Daswani, M. Tuters, Io Chaviara
Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly-) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements—from Black-LivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post-crash political imaginaries in Greece, to the Boogaloo Bois in the United States. Across these cases, the authors argue that irony becomes an important means of gathering, orienting, and animating political collectives, in two ways: first, within contexts of deep uncertainty or instability, where it can be extremely hard to trace political cause and effect and to know how to act effectively, irony provides a useful interpretative tool. Irony allows actors to position themselves between competing values, and attend to contradictions, enabling them to imagine common cause and possible futures within a radically unsteady world. Second, irony generates intensities in excess of understanding. Irony can generate surpluses of meaning, cultivate spaces of play and freedom from responsibility, and amplify the felt potentiality of ideas through memetic repetition. Such intensities have the capacity to spill over into decisive action. The authors conclude by unpacking the implications of these ironic forces for engaging in politics today.
{"title":"Animating Irony","authors":"Farhan Samanani, S. Crockford, Daniel M. Knight, Craig Stensrud, Girish Daswani, M. Tuters, Io Chaviara","doi":"10.1215/08992363-10575859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10575859","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly-) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements—from Black-LivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post-crash political imaginaries in Greece, to the Boogaloo Bois in the United States. Across these cases, the authors argue that irony becomes an important means of gathering, orienting, and animating political collectives, in two ways: first, within contexts of deep uncertainty or instability, where it can be extremely hard to trace political cause and effect and to know how to act effectively, irony provides a useful interpretative tool. Irony allows actors to position themselves between competing values, and attend to contradictions, enabling them to imagine common cause and possible futures within a radically unsteady world. Second, irony generates intensities in excess of understanding. Irony can generate surpluses of meaning, cultivate spaces of play and freedom from responsibility, and amplify the felt potentiality of ideas through memetic repetition. Such intensities have the capacity to spill over into decisive action. The authors conclude by unpacking the implications of these ironic forces for engaging in politics today.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47803207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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