This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities tha... more This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities that our Editorial Collective (EC) has imagined and sought to implement for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). Community-building as an ethic characterizes all aspects of our EC’s work: from editorial practices to infrastructural development, and from content publication to the broader initiatives that we undertake. In a context where the role of scholarly journals is increasingly instrumentalized through corporate-led valuation systems that effectively also render them largely inaccessible, we see this as an especially important value to affirm in and through strengthening open access publication.
In our inaugural editorial, we, the incoming Editorial Collective (EC) of Engaging Science, Techn... more In our inaugural editorial, we, the incoming Editorial Collective (EC) of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), describe the digital and social infrastructural work that we have undertaken since assuming editorship of the journal. We also note some of the changes we have introduced in terms of the journal’s content and policies. A key argument is that even though publishing infrastructures shape the form and movement of scholarly content in crucial ways, they often remain black-boxed, rendering invisible the time, labor, and skill in developing and sustaining them.
Energy literacy scholarship has taken on the notable challenge of understanding and influencing t... more Energy literacy scholarship has taken on the notable challenge of understanding and influencing the way people think about and consume energy to develop more sustainable energy systems. The idea is that information and understanding are the primary missing links between our current society and a future, more sustainable populace. Recent work in this field, however, has presented evidence to the contrary, throwing the value of current frames and programs of energy literacy into question. In this paper, we identify productive tensions and conceptual affinities between energy literacy and energy vulnerability and suggest, as a way forward, their exploration through the use and development of an energy ecology framework. The energy ecology framework focuses ethnographic and analytical attention to the place specific dynamics of energy infrastructures, access, and use that shape people's relationships to themselves, to other humans and non-human life, to materials and objects, and to their environment. This paper focuses on the energy literacy of more vulnerable energy users who experience inadequate access to affordable and reliable energy services, and also may have less financial and material resources to buffer harm. We use this data to argue that pinning energy literacy to energy vulnerability foregrounds how the knowledge, skills, and practices of relevance to energy literacy change over time and over the course of life, based upon one's changing position within different energy ecologies and also based upon changes in the relations within and across the open systems of which each energy ecology is composed.
In our previous editorial (Khandekar et al. 2021), we noted the blackboxing of scholarly publicat... more In our previous editorial (Khandekar et al. 2021), we noted the blackboxing of scholarly publication infrastructure that we encountered when we assumed editorship of the journal. We outlined several aspects of infrastructuring that we have undertaken since, with an explicit goal of supporting transnational workflows and participation in ESTS. In this editorial, we continue describing our infrastructural work, highlighting especially the work of content production at ESTS. We also discuss the relevance of our infrastructural work for open access (OA) scholarly publishing.
To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence... more To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City’s civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City’s digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars,...
Tiffany is running down a suburban street with headphones and a hoodie on. Her breath is clearly ... more Tiffany is running down a suburban street with headphones and a hoodie on. Her breath is clearly audible, rhythmic, steady, and in pace with her footsteps. The Tiffany’s Story video testimonial on the Be Smart. Be Well. website then cuts to Tiffany sitting at home describing her earlier experiences with asthma: “The hospital became like my second home... I couldn’t breathe on my own.” Dr. Wolf, who has been treating Tiffany since she was diagnosed with asthma at age 8, joins in, “At that time she had really severe asthma. It was very difficult to manage and remained very difficult to manage for many years” (Be Smart. Be Well). As a child, Tiffany could never run, with steady breath, as she did at the beginning of the video, titled The Right Meds Keep Her in the Ring (Be Smart. Be Well). But after figuring out a treatment regime that worked, Tiffany became a healthy teenager; the video features her in contexts where she is jogging, smiling radiantly with her mother, and holding up vi...
Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed b... more Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed by the residues of industrialization as well as continued pollution. But it also risks a disconnect between the functioning of planetary atmospheres and the functioning of local airs. In this thought-piece, we consider together the potato chip bag, the asthma inhaler, and climate positive building design as scalar practices of Anthropocene air. By figuring Anthropocene air as an interscalar vehicle, we show connections between matter and relations that seem distant and disconnected. We do this by honing in on respiration as a transformative atmospheric process that has been designed in advanced capitalism to extend life for some, while denying life for others. We point to seconds, hours, days, weeks, and seasons to highlight how containment technologies and respiratory processes function in the Anthropocene to remake air. These technologies and practices, which all too often go unnoticed ...
Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile app... more Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile apps: Social networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are now accessed through smartphones by most users; popular service apps like Yelp are used for finding restaurants and services; geolocation apps for way finding, such as Google Maps, plot drives, commutes by public transportation and even walks around the block; and there are tons of personal health and fitness trackers that count everything from steps to calorie intake. For anthropologists, mobile apps provide the opportunity for an enhanced methodological approach that provides new possibilities to engage with the people they study, heighten their reflexive capacities and link to new forms of data. While many approach these possibilities with trepidation, our collective sentiment is that these new forms of communication provide more promise than pitfalls for anthropology. The use of apps is transforming human experience. Mobile apps are part of everyday life around the world, including the lives and livelihoods of anthropologists. Anthropologists aren’t just “using” apps; they’re also being “used” by them, in that the structures of app platforms affect what anthropologists know and how they know it. Just as the individuals that anthropologists study are producing the digital labor and content that drives apps, anthropologists, in turn, are supplying the same amount of material and utilization. In this sense, when it comes to mobile apps, we are part of the same public sphere as the populations with whom we work. Apps can also provide many anthropological insights. Each mobile app platform tells researchers not only what people who use them think is important, but also the way different media and different functions are expected to link together in user practice. In other words, apps can tell users and developers how they should be moving around in the world and what they should pay attention to and capture as media, and simultaneously provide conduits for sharing all of this information and collective experience. Increasingly, anthropologists are returning from field research with diverse media: recordings, notes, photos, digital records and all sorts of cultural items. Mobile apps suggest ways of integrating the work anthropologists do to communicate with other anthropologists with this material from field research. They also provide a possible way for anthropological research to become increasingly relevant and accessible to wider publics. Anthropologists can and should use their knowledge,
Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In... more Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In the United States, treatment non-adherence has become the most pressing asthma risk; as such, emphasis has increasingly focused on getting asthmatics to take medications as prescribed. In this article I examine how mobile Asthma (mAsthma) apps operate as part of digital risk society, where mobile apps create new modes of risk identification and management; promise to control messy and undisciplined subjects and care practices; use algorithms to generate new risk calculations; and make risk livelier through digital assemblages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of mAsthma app design, as well as interviews with app developers, in this article I argue that these digital care technologies strip disease and risk of biographical, ecological and affective detail in ways that largely reinforce biomedical paradigms. Yet some apps offer new insight into the place-based dynamics of environmental health, a view made possible with digitised personal tracking, visual analytics and crowdsourced data. mAsthma apps are caught in the tension between the biopolitics of existing chronic care infrastructure, which reinforce a strict neoliberalised patient responsibility, and the promise of collective, place-based approaches to global environmental health problems.
As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists ... more As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. Attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-technical transitions at various scales and for differently invested communities, but because we need more informed participants, users who can question the system in ways that make it more robust. This essay suggests that digital infrastructure design and development should be organized around (1) platform affordances, (2) support for labor, (3) emerging circulation practices, and (4) opportunities for collaboration. By tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for Cultural Anthropology to go open access earlier this year, this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes ...
Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the ... more Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the term has become synonymous with collapse, describing everything from crumbling infrastructure to outmoded paradigms. But the “late” in “late industrial” carries radical potential, too. It points toward the possibility of another world taking shape within the wreckage as people retrofit broken systems, build flexible coalitions, and work creatively with time. In this collection, we train our eyes on these refashionings, asking how late industrial systems might be put to life-affirming work. Specifically, we track cases where breath, air, and atmosphere help inaugurate a “phase shift” (Choy and Zee 2015) from breakdown toward worlds otherwise. Breath has sentinel qualities: it can warn of trouble in the air. But it is also an animating force. Taking conceptual cues from this duality, contributors attend to late industrialism as it is sensed and transformed into something vital.
To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence... more To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City's civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City's digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars, I describe the community's work as civic infrastructuring, a sociotechnical process that utilized public infrastructure to better understand government failure and build community capacity to engage the administration, even if on late industrial terms.
Perceptions of vacant urban land and resulting policies are based in nature/ culture dualisms tha... more Perceptions of vacant urban land and resulting policies are based in nature/ culture dualisms that condemn abandoned properties as wasteful at best and at worst outright dangerous for communities. Decades of research on urban vacancy reinforce these perceptions, with findings showing higher crime rates, lower property values, and poorer mental health in communities with high rates of vacancy. These established paradigms for thinking about vacant land obscure any benefits that such spaces have while also justifying gentrification. In this essay, we suggest there is more than meets the eye in common assessments of vacant lots. Biodiversity, ecosystem services, and informal community land use are all routinely overlooked in municipal decision-making processes. Using photographs from a pilot field study on ecological health in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we advance a politics of sight that reframes overlooked features of abandoned properties. Rather than approaching urban vacancy as a problem to be addressed through development, we argue that vacant land is a problem-space with potential for transformation already contained within it.
This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities tha... more This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities that our Editorial Collective (EC) has imagined and sought to implement for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). Community-building as an ethic characterizes all aspects of our EC’s work: from editorial practices to infrastructural development, and from content publication to the broader initiatives that we undertake. In a context where the role of scholarly journals is increasingly instrumentalized through corporate-led valuation systems that effectively also render them largely inaccessible, we see this as an especially important value to affirm in and through strengthening open access publication.
In our inaugural editorial, we, the incoming Editorial Collective (EC) of Engaging Science, Techn... more In our inaugural editorial, we, the incoming Editorial Collective (EC) of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), describe the digital and social infrastructural work that we have undertaken since assuming editorship of the journal. We also note some of the changes we have introduced in terms of the journal’s content and policies. A key argument is that even though publishing infrastructures shape the form and movement of scholarly content in crucial ways, they often remain black-boxed, rendering invisible the time, labor, and skill in developing and sustaining them.
Energy literacy scholarship has taken on the notable challenge of understanding and influencing t... more Energy literacy scholarship has taken on the notable challenge of understanding and influencing the way people think about and consume energy to develop more sustainable energy systems. The idea is that information and understanding are the primary missing links between our current society and a future, more sustainable populace. Recent work in this field, however, has presented evidence to the contrary, throwing the value of current frames and programs of energy literacy into question. In this paper, we identify productive tensions and conceptual affinities between energy literacy and energy vulnerability and suggest, as a way forward, their exploration through the use and development of an energy ecology framework. The energy ecology framework focuses ethnographic and analytical attention to the place specific dynamics of energy infrastructures, access, and use that shape people's relationships to themselves, to other humans and non-human life, to materials and objects, and to their environment. This paper focuses on the energy literacy of more vulnerable energy users who experience inadequate access to affordable and reliable energy services, and also may have less financial and material resources to buffer harm. We use this data to argue that pinning energy literacy to energy vulnerability foregrounds how the knowledge, skills, and practices of relevance to energy literacy change over time and over the course of life, based upon one's changing position within different energy ecologies and also based upon changes in the relations within and across the open systems of which each energy ecology is composed.
In our previous editorial (Khandekar et al. 2021), we noted the blackboxing of scholarly publicat... more In our previous editorial (Khandekar et al. 2021), we noted the blackboxing of scholarly publication infrastructure that we encountered when we assumed editorship of the journal. We outlined several aspects of infrastructuring that we have undertaken since, with an explicit goal of supporting transnational workflows and participation in ESTS. In this editorial, we continue describing our infrastructural work, highlighting especially the work of content production at ESTS. We also discuss the relevance of our infrastructural work for open access (OA) scholarly publishing.
To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence... more To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City’s civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City’s digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars,...
Tiffany is running down a suburban street with headphones and a hoodie on. Her breath is clearly ... more Tiffany is running down a suburban street with headphones and a hoodie on. Her breath is clearly audible, rhythmic, steady, and in pace with her footsteps. The Tiffany’s Story video testimonial on the Be Smart. Be Well. website then cuts to Tiffany sitting at home describing her earlier experiences with asthma: “The hospital became like my second home... I couldn’t breathe on my own.” Dr. Wolf, who has been treating Tiffany since she was diagnosed with asthma at age 8, joins in, “At that time she had really severe asthma. It was very difficult to manage and remained very difficult to manage for many years” (Be Smart. Be Well). As a child, Tiffany could never run, with steady breath, as she did at the beginning of the video, titled The Right Meds Keep Her in the Ring (Be Smart. Be Well). But after figuring out a treatment regime that worked, Tiffany became a healthy teenager; the video features her in contexts where she is jogging, smiling radiantly with her mother, and holding up vi...
Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed b... more Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed by the residues of industrialization as well as continued pollution. But it also risks a disconnect between the functioning of planetary atmospheres and the functioning of local airs. In this thought-piece, we consider together the potato chip bag, the asthma inhaler, and climate positive building design as scalar practices of Anthropocene air. By figuring Anthropocene air as an interscalar vehicle, we show connections between matter and relations that seem distant and disconnected. We do this by honing in on respiration as a transformative atmospheric process that has been designed in advanced capitalism to extend life for some, while denying life for others. We point to seconds, hours, days, weeks, and seasons to highlight how containment technologies and respiratory processes function in the Anthropocene to remake air. These technologies and practices, which all too often go unnoticed ...
Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile app... more Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile apps: Social networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are now accessed through smartphones by most users; popular service apps like Yelp are used for finding restaurants and services; geolocation apps for way finding, such as Google Maps, plot drives, commutes by public transportation and even walks around the block; and there are tons of personal health and fitness trackers that count everything from steps to calorie intake. For anthropologists, mobile apps provide the opportunity for an enhanced methodological approach that provides new possibilities to engage with the people they study, heighten their reflexive capacities and link to new forms of data. While many approach these possibilities with trepidation, our collective sentiment is that these new forms of communication provide more promise than pitfalls for anthropology. The use of apps is transforming human experience. Mobile apps are part of everyday life around the world, including the lives and livelihoods of anthropologists. Anthropologists aren’t just “using” apps; they’re also being “used” by them, in that the structures of app platforms affect what anthropologists know and how they know it. Just as the individuals that anthropologists study are producing the digital labor and content that drives apps, anthropologists, in turn, are supplying the same amount of material and utilization. In this sense, when it comes to mobile apps, we are part of the same public sphere as the populations with whom we work. Apps can also provide many anthropological insights. Each mobile app platform tells researchers not only what people who use them think is important, but also the way different media and different functions are expected to link together in user practice. In other words, apps can tell users and developers how they should be moving around in the world and what they should pay attention to and capture as media, and simultaneously provide conduits for sharing all of this information and collective experience. Increasingly, anthropologists are returning from field research with diverse media: recordings, notes, photos, digital records and all sorts of cultural items. Mobile apps suggest ways of integrating the work anthropologists do to communicate with other anthropologists with this material from field research. They also provide a possible way for anthropological research to become increasingly relevant and accessible to wider publics. Anthropologists can and should use their knowledge,
Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In... more Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In the United States, treatment non-adherence has become the most pressing asthma risk; as such, emphasis has increasingly focused on getting asthmatics to take medications as prescribed. In this article I examine how mobile Asthma (mAsthma) apps operate as part of digital risk society, where mobile apps create new modes of risk identification and management; promise to control messy and undisciplined subjects and care practices; use algorithms to generate new risk calculations; and make risk livelier through digital assemblages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of mAsthma app design, as well as interviews with app developers, in this article I argue that these digital care technologies strip disease and risk of biographical, ecological and affective detail in ways that largely reinforce biomedical paradigms. Yet some apps offer new insight into the place-based dynamics of environmental health, a view made possible with digitised personal tracking, visual analytics and crowdsourced data. mAsthma apps are caught in the tension between the biopolitics of existing chronic care infrastructure, which reinforce a strict neoliberalised patient responsibility, and the promise of collective, place-based approaches to global environmental health problems.
As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists ... more As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. Attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-technical transitions at various scales and for differently invested communities, but because we need more informed participants, users who can question the system in ways that make it more robust. This essay suggests that digital infrastructure design and development should be organized around (1) platform affordances, (2) support for labor, (3) emerging circulation practices, and (4) opportunities for collaboration. By tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for Cultural Anthropology to go open access earlier this year, this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes ...
Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the ... more Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the term has become synonymous with collapse, describing everything from crumbling infrastructure to outmoded paradigms. But the “late” in “late industrial” carries radical potential, too. It points toward the possibility of another world taking shape within the wreckage as people retrofit broken systems, build flexible coalitions, and work creatively with time. In this collection, we train our eyes on these refashionings, asking how late industrial systems might be put to life-affirming work. Specifically, we track cases where breath, air, and atmosphere help inaugurate a “phase shift” (Choy and Zee 2015) from breakdown toward worlds otherwise. Breath has sentinel qualities: it can warn of trouble in the air. But it is also an animating force. Taking conceptual cues from this duality, contributors attend to late industrialism as it is sensed and transformed into something vital.
To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence... more To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City's civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City's digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars, I describe the community's work as civic infrastructuring, a sociotechnical process that utilized public infrastructure to better understand government failure and build community capacity to engage the administration, even if on late industrial terms.
Perceptions of vacant urban land and resulting policies are based in nature/ culture dualisms tha... more Perceptions of vacant urban land and resulting policies are based in nature/ culture dualisms that condemn abandoned properties as wasteful at best and at worst outright dangerous for communities. Decades of research on urban vacancy reinforce these perceptions, with findings showing higher crime rates, lower property values, and poorer mental health in communities with high rates of vacancy. These established paradigms for thinking about vacant land obscure any benefits that such spaces have while also justifying gentrification. In this essay, we suggest there is more than meets the eye in common assessments of vacant lots. Biodiversity, ecosystem services, and informal community land use are all routinely overlooked in municipal decision-making processes. Using photographs from a pilot field study on ecological health in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we advance a politics of sight that reframes overlooked features of abandoned properties. Rather than approaching urban vacancy as a problem to be addressed through development, we argue that vacant land is a problem-space with potential for transformation already contained within it.
Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 2013
Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a mu... more Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a multilateral approach of study in order to better understand its many facets. Apart from being a health problem, asthma is seen as a knowledge problem, and as we argue here, a cultural problem. Employing cultural analysis we outline ways to challenge conventional ideas and practices about asthma by considering how culture shapes asthma experience, diagnosis, management, research, and politics. Finally, we discuss the value of viewing asthma through multiple lenses, and how such explanatory pluralism advances transdisciplinary approaches to asthma.
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Papers by Alison Kenner