Epistemic stitching of race, power, and modernity in recent work on white supremacy
Anthropological theory, Apr 15, 2024
1. Worth the Waste
3. Sunk Cost
Just Desserts: The Morality of Food Waste in America
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, Jun 1, 2023
Food, waste, and food waste are embroiled in a wide array of political and moral debates in the U... more Food, waste, and food waste are embroiled in a wide array of political and moral debates in the United States today. These debates are staged across a range of scales and sites—from individual decisions made in front of refrigerators and compost bins to public deliberations on the U.S. Senate and House floors. They often manifest as a moral panic inspiring a range of Americans at seemingly opposed ends of the political spectrum. This article contrasts three distinct sites where food waste is moralized, with the aim of deconstructing connections between discarded food and consumer ethics. In doing so, we argue that across the contemporary American social strata, food waste reduction efforts enfold taken‐for‐granted ideas of moral justice, or theodicy, that foreground individual responsibility and, as a result, obfuscate broader systemic issues of food inequality perpetuated by late stage capitalism.
The paradoxes of failure in post‐welfare: an auto‐ethnography of caregiver labour for disabled persons in New York State
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Feb 5, 2023
In conditions of post‐welfare, failure takes a variety of forms. I offer an auto‐ethnographic acc... more In conditions of post‐welfare, failure takes a variety of forms. I offer an auto‐ethnographic account of state‐funded caregiving for people diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York State, where both caregiver labour and its management have been subjected to greater discipline as post‐welfare initiatives seek to re‐educate recipients of benefits and careworkers to be simultaneously more autonomous from and more accountable to the state. Placing these changes within the specific history of failed disability care in the United States, I explain how new disciplinary devices for reporting further alienate caregiver labour and complicate welfare management in practice.
Two global initiatives, the Genographic Project and the Carbon Lottery, share an ambition to make... more Two global initiatives, the Genographic Project and the Carbon Lottery, share an ambition to make abstract, global processes-human evolution and climate change-comprehensible and engaging to non-specialists. Despite their differences, they both do so by means of selfobjectifications that scale up the selves of participants and scale down complex, spatio-temporal models of human-world relations. Based on the author's auto-ethnographic experience as a participant in both initiatives, it is argued that carbon calculators and personalised genomics involves a pragmatics of scale that evaluates and compares users on the basis of their relative expression of, or deviation from, a standard. Furthermore, this is not based on actual resources that participants do or do not possess, but on forms of capitalist exchange that underwrite carbon trading and population genomics, as experts and corporations make fungible intellectual property derived from purportedly rare DNA and sustainable practices, which are typically indigenous and non-western. In fact, for users of these initiatives, the global inequalities that make possible transactions in carbon offsets and genetic ancestry are obscured from view. As a result, though initiatives like the Genographic Project and Carbon Lottery may provide comprehensible selfobjectifications, they potentially make the world more unequal in the process.
I would like to thank David Giles for organizing a panel on waste and sociality for the 2014 AAA ... more I would like to thank David Giles for organizing a panel on waste and sociality for the 2014 AAA meetings, as well as my co-panelists and our discussant, Debbora Battaglia, for their helpful comments and criticism on an earlier draft of this paper. A shorter version of this same argument appeared on the Discard Studies blog in 2015, and can be found here:
This paper explores the techno-environmental politics associated with government sponsored climat... more This paper explores the techno-environmental politics associated with government sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England's New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the "viability" of "green" waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The paper examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented in order to produce non-controversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy and planning decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but in a disciplined way. Whether through the extrapolation of facts about technical performance by affiliated third party consultants, or the orchestration of visitor centers open to the general public, making the demonstrators public involves controlling the ways in which they are interpreted and perceived. However, the unstable publicity of waste management facilities proliferates unofficial accounts as well. These acts of counter-witnessing, as I refer to them, not only potentially dispute the official evidence collected from the demonstrators, they also can pose a challenge to the understanding of technology upon which such government initiatives are based.
This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with auti... more This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with autism in order to investigate how ideological assumptions about linguistic agency and impairment are constructed and challenged in practice. To the extent that Euro-American techniques of "unnatural" language instruction developed during the Cold War era have been successful, it is because communicative interactions are broken down into basic components and would-be language learners are equipped with materials, devices and habits that make up for their distinct bio/social deficits. Such linguistic equipment can present a challenge to the ideological presumption of a subject inherently gifted with the rudiments of talk, that is, the human as naturally speaking. However, this ideology can reassert itself if the active contribution of unnatural language learners to their technoscientific trials is downplayed. In order to counter this tendency, I propose that speech acts be reimagined as part of a more encompassing semiotic ensemble.
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