1,721,152 research outputs found
Surveillance State: An Ethnography of the Optics of Police Surveillance and Anti-Surveillance Advocates in the Southern United States
No full textEMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2025-05-01It is hard to be a stranger to the surveillance state. In my ethnographic research, I address this issue in the context of Houston and the greater southern US. My research examines how legal and policing decisions materialize based on eighteen months of fieldwork studying interactions between law enforcement and anti-surveillance advocates. Rather than study the state as a top-down force of governance, my research interrogates how legal reasoning intersects with state-sponsored surveillance, including discriminatory designs that intensify racial hierarchies. By tracing how and why surveillance can be both a historical and contemporary tool of oppression, I show that surveillance is not only a tool of security but also a tool of insecurity
Meantime Design: Architecture, Infrastructure, and Housing Struggles in Post-Apartheid Cape Town
No full textThree decades after the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime, Cape Town remains a deeply fractured city with little prospect for transformation or systemic change. It is still one of the least integrated and most segregated cities in the world. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Cape Town between 2018 and 2024, this dissertation examines how architects, housing activists, and other built environment professionals have developed alternative designs and participatory initiatives to address the urgent needs of residents living in flood- and fire-prone informal settlements and occupations. Designing in and with the meantime was a common denominator in many of these architecture initiatives. While liberatory promises of the post-apartheid era have been repeatedly deferred, the “meantime” emerged as a temporal horizon for alternative designs, including public housing upgrades, adaptive reuse models, and incremental building typologies. By emphasizing small-scale, imaginative, and participatory models and upgrades that negotiate alternative urban futures and improved infrastructural conditions, this dissertation complements anthropological research on architecture, infrastructural temporalities, and housing struggles. Through an analysis of various “meantime designs” and their characteristics in each chapter, it also contributes to a deeper understanding of design interventions that may reflect potential urban futures yet perpetuate South Africa’s most exclusionary housing landscape
Hyperanimals: framing livestock and climate change in Danish imaginaries
No full textThe IPCC and UN FAO have both suggested a global reduction in meat consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But how do nations and citizens resolve tensions between ecological stewardship and meat consumption? What is implied in eating meat and raising livestock in a country where the historical imaginary yokes national values to the pig-producing countryside? To answer these questions, this dissertation examines how climate change is affecting meat consumption and production logics in Denmark. Though the country has a reputation for progressive environmental policy, its formerly large agricultural sector continues to exert disproportionate political influence, and many citizens consider pork its most "traditional" food. In 2016, a publicly-funded advisory council issued a report suggesting that parliament pass a beef tax to reduce consumption and reflect its environmental impact. The report was the most controversial the council had ever issued, with members receiving angry phone calls and politicians arguing the council should be disbanded. The proposal put national tensions between sustainability and agriculture in full view, and it became clear that such a tax would not be passed. Based on 16 months of fieldwork with meat industry workers, food innovation NGOs, environmental activists, and animal rights advocates, this dissertation explores how stakeholders in the meat-climate debate produce and enact knowledge; while industry scientists used quantification as a stand-in for making ethical claims, NGOs attempted to make new environmental subjects through educational eating programs and pressure campaigns to increase availability of plant-based foods. These efforts are contrasted with activists who work directly with animals, whose work is biopolitical and affective. All actors claim to be in favor of "environmental sustainability" but are governed by conflicting internal regimes and motivations. What emerged was a hydra of anxieties not just about climate but human-animal relationships in general, that I call "hyperanimal.
The Archive of the Self: Trans Self-Making and Social Media in Santiago de Chile
No full textThis dissertation argues that social media constitutes a space for innovation on pre-existing forms of narrative resistance dating back to Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), in which individual and group memory-work became a salient form of resistance. I argue that online Chilean trans subjectivities and social media archives are to some extent mutually constitutive; as my interlocutors discover a broad range of trans subjectivities and experiences, they also alter their subjectivities in relation both to the platform itself and the communities it makes possible. I begin by outlining the long-standing relationship between alternative media and Chile’s LGBTI community, theorizing the importance of nontraditional archives as both an analytic and object of study, and situating it within the importance of alternative archival culture in post-dictatorship Chile. I then theorize the central analytic of the dissertation, the archive of the self. I characterize the archive of the self as social and didactic; as an inherent challenge to the putative objectivity of hegemonic historical narratives; and dialectically related with the embodied, gendered self.
The subsequent chapters are organized around terms and concepts that emerged as salient during my fieldwork. Historia (History) juxtaposes hegemonic historical narratives of the country’s LGBTI movement with personal and archival narratives to position social media as a uniquely effective tool for the production of alternative histories. In Siempre (Always), I argue that social media has emerged as a tool for questioning, reifying, and maneuvering between teleological and counterhegemonic narratives of gender transition, in favor of one that neither follows nor disavows either entirely. Calle (Street) explores the meaning of this popular slang word, associated with sex work and the country’s travesti population, historically a theme of travesti activism and artistic output. In analyzing this phenomenon online, I argue that social media plays both an archival and instructive role, simultaneously preserving these histories while also preparing younger generations of travestis for the life that may await them. Finally, Animita (an informal Chilean shrine) is an ethnographic exploration of online mourning practices. In this chapter, I propose the ‘networked animita’ to understand the multiply connected traces of the deceased across social media.
Funding Disability: Ambivalences in Nonprofit Fundraising in the United States
No full textThis ethnographic study discusses the ambivalences, complexities, and contradictions involved in nonprofit fundraising practice, based on three and a half years of fieldwork in a disability-focused nonprofit and CDFI in the United States. I show how Loans for Independence (LFI) must balance competing pressures in delivering services and in securing funding for those services. Chapter One discusses the legacies LFI emerges from, including the Independent Living Movement as well as postwar rehabilitative medicine and barrier-free design. Chapter Two explores how LFI balances different portrayals of disability in order to reach people who qualify for services but who do not recognize themselves within the rubric of disability and considers the ramifications of this individual framing of access. Chapter Three focuses on client stories in fundraising and the challenges of meeting the conventional form of telling client stories while avoiding the charity model of disability; I link the discussion to humanitarian imagery and urge for a greater attention to the field of action open to nonprofits. Chapter Four addresses the marketization of nonprofits through reference to two institutional forms that LFI occupies, which carry competing demands and best practices; I show how LFI carves a line through this space that satisfies the form but exceeds what is imagined within it. Chapter Five analyzes how LFI depicts disability in grant applications in order to meet funding conventions and expectations; I draw attention to the creative practice involved in this endeavor of incorporating disability into a space where it is not imagined to belong. Throughout I frame the dynamics in terms of friction (Tsing 2005) and note the fraught lines that LFI follows, seeming to bend toward logics of rehabilitative medicine and cure (Clare 2017) to secure the necessary resources to pursue a different kind of project. I argue through this dissertation that we cannot talk about NGOs without talking about NGO funding and we cannot fully engage in critique regarding NGOs without attending to this central problematic that NGOs face: the fact they need to secure resources in order to deliver programs
Tomboys & Sissies: Queer Childhood in the Fiction of the Southern Renaissance, 1929-1961
No full textMy thesis considers representations of childhood in the literature of the 20th Century American South. During the Southern Renaissance period, such authors as Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams looked to the child – often the tomboy, or her male counterpart, the sissy – as a figure of resistance against adult society. In a region that still clung to antebellum ideals of female chastity, white supremacy, and benevolent paternalism, these characters served to interrupt the dominant cultural script, and thus reimagine queer counternarratives of racial, sexual, and gendered subjectivity
Anthropocene Unseen : A Lexicon
No full textThe idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril
Latin America in the Anthropocene: Energy Transitions and Climate Change Mitigations
No full textEnergy creates both possibilities and liabilities. Plentiful, inexpensive energy has long been a cornerstone of modernist dreams of never-ending expansion. While this may be a fantasy, the truth—at least according to overwhelming scientific evidence—is that our use of fossil fuels has led to distressing global consequences. In May 2013, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the average daily level of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had exceeded 400 parts per million, a density of heat-trapping gases that has not existed for at least three million years, long before humans evolved (Gillis 2013). The Holocenic conditions in which we developed as a species have expired, and the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by the advent of urban-industrial society as a geological force, seems to have taken its place. Human landscape transformation now massively exceeds natural sediment production and ocean acidification and the destruction of biota are the new norm, meaning that evolution itself has been “forced into a new trajectory” (Davis 2010:31). The reality of increased global energy consumption and its concomitant climatological effect has meant that local practices are now universal concerns. In this special issue of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology each author works within this spirit of currency, recognizing that we—as social subjects, as a species, or as inhabitants of a planet shared with other biotic life—are living in a time of decisions that will echo for centuries to come. In this collection, we examine the complexity of renewable energy transitions in Latin America and we analyze the related processes of its twin (or perhaps its impetus): the policies and projects intended to address global climate change. While anthropological work on petroleum has been important to our better understanding of the social, economic, and environmental consequences of hydrocarbons (Behrends et al. 2011; Breglia 2013; Coroníl 1997; McNeish and Logan 2012; Sawyer 2004), this volume maintains a critical focus on forms of renewable energy and climate mitigation efforts. Our understanding is that, first, “renewable” energy and sustainability are categories that must remain bracketed (in the case of hydroelectric dams, for example)[1] and second, that many renewable energy projects succumb to the habits of hydrocarbon extraction in their financing and production processes if not in their cumulative environmental consequences. The articles collected here are committed to engaging questions of extraction and generation, implementation policies and reactions to them, as well the cultural, social, and scientific intersections of energy, political power, and climatological warming. Ultimately, we ask how it is that the Anthropocene2 is being experienced, negotiated, and remapped in Latin America
Unnatural Disasters: Healing Epistemic Invisibility Through Digital Archiving
No full textEMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2030-08-01Unnatural Disasters: Healing Epistemic Invisibility Through Digital Archiving identifies the emerging genre of the digital disaster archive and argues that this genre exposes the concept of disaster as deeply entangled with and produced by epistemological erasure. Invested in the concept of “disaster” as unnatural and unequivocally social, political, and temporal, I connect a growing awareness of environmental precarity to this new kind of digital memory practice to examine how the archive’s methodology and infrastructure engender a vital politics of accountability. I argue that the digital archive is uniquely suited to address epistemologically produced invisibility by challenging the historical processes and systems that lead to disaster; in so doing, the archive proffers an expanded understanding of health, healing, and care from the margins. This project considers collections from disparate geographies, cultures, and languages that respond to the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (digitized in 2010), Japan’s triple disaster (2011), and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (2020) to explore how the digital archive is both an open encounter and an exchange of knowledge and power. To specifically reflect on the healing affordances of this increasingly popular form of cultural production, I critically approach the archive through the concepts of digital witnessing, archival methodology as recovery, healing nostalgia, digital self-help, and digitality as care, while grappling with the ways that digital tools can exacerbate or expose the unevenness of vulnerability. By delineating the socio-political processes that lead to disaster and by demonstrating how the digital archive is a potential site of activism that de-naturalizes and thus re-politicizes disaster, Unnatural Disasters charts new paths for critical disaster studies and global digital humanities and ultimately argues for a translational digital humanities approach to global disaster response and humanitarian aid
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