Electrifying Anthropology

Electrifying Anthropology PDF Author: Simone Abram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100018160X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. Through ethnographic studies of bulbs, bicycles, dams, power grids and much more, the contributors shed light on practices that are often overlooked, showing how electricity is enacted in multiple ways. Electrifying Anthropology moves beyond the idea of electricity as an immovable force, and instead offers a set of potential trajectories for thinking about electricity and its effects in contemporary society. With new contributions on an emerging area of research, this timely collection will be of value to students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology studies, geography and engineering.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology PDF Author: Maja Hojer Bruun
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811670846
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 809

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Book Description
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies. Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Ethnographies of Power

Ethnographies of Power PDF Author: Tristan Loloum
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789209803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

Electrifying Anthropology

Electrifying Anthropology PDF Author: Simone Abram
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350102668
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about 'it' in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. Through ethnographic studies of bulbs, bicycles, dams, power grids and much more, the contributors shed light on practices that are often overlooked, showing how electricity is enacted in multiple ways. Electrifying Anthropology moves beyond the idea of electricity as an immovable force, and instead offers a set of potential trajectories for thinking about electricity and its effects in contemporary society. With new contributions on an emerging area of research, this timely collection will be of value to students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology studies, geography and engineering.

Ecologics

Ecologics PDF Author: Cymene Howe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004401
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.

Electrifying India

Electrifying India PDF Author: Sunila S. Kale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804791023
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Throughout the 20th century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity. Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers both a regional and a historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans, but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variation in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms from the 1990s onward.

Energopolitics

Energopolitics PDF Author: Dominic Boyer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.

Research Handbook on Energy and Society

Research Handbook on Energy and Society PDF Author: Webb, Janette
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839100710
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
This incisive Research Handbook examines the relationship between energy and society, across both macro- and micro-scales, in the context of the climate crisis. Featuring an extensive examination of current research in the field from fifty expert international contributors, it offers important insights into the inter-connections between the globally organised fossil fuel energy system and the changing structures of society.

Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future

Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future PDF Author: Sarah Pink
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100064362X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future invites us to think forward from our present moment of planetary, public and everyday crisis, through the prism of emerging technologies. It calls for a new ethical, responsible and equitable path towards possible futures, curated through in-depth engagement with and across experiential, environmental and technological possibilities. It tackles three of the most significant challenges for contemporary society by asking: how emerging technologies are implicated in the sites of everyday lives; what place emerging technologies have in an evolving world in crisis; and how we might better imagine and shape ethical, equitable and responsible futures. The book interweaves three narratives, each of which advances three sets of concerns for our societal futures: ‘Emergence’, which addresses futures, trust and hope; ‘Worlds’, which addresses data, air and energy; and ‘Technologies’, which addresses the future of mobilities, homes and work. Not simply a critical study of emerging technologies, this book is also an approach to thinking and practice in times of global crisis that plays out a mode of future-focused scholarship and action for the first half of the twenty-first century.

State Intimacies

State Intimacies PDF Author: Eva Fiks
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805394657
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The public healthcare system in rural India is chronically under-resourced. It embodies and often perpetuates the wider politics of the Indian state towards its rural communities with provisions of care that are deeply entangled with violence and disgust. For rural women, such care deepens reproductive chronicity while providing temporary relief. Grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan, State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguities and fragilities of care in post-colonial rural North India.

Infrastructural Being

Infrastructural Being PDF Author: Jarno Valkonen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303115827X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary naturecultural world by exploring infrastructures through the dwelling approach. The notion of naturecultures has been utilized in environmental humanities and social sciences to emphasize the inherent messiness of the lived world and the inseparability of social and biophysical elements. Concept of naturecultures stresses that seemingly “natural” is always simultaneously “cultural” and vice versa. This approach allows fleshing out the messy engagements with infrastructures, which in this book is conceptualized as infrastructural being. This book is a contribution to emerging discussions on infrastructures in the fields of environmental social sciences and humanities. It sensitizes to the peculiarities of modern dwelling and modern, yet often overlooked, ways of being connected with nature. Moreover, it provides tools for speculating, how could things be otherwise. The book is a topical response to the urgent call for developing new forms of human-nature relations in times of environmental turbulence.