Kim Fortun

From Latour to late industrialism

I situate Latour’s latest project—An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)—in the context of late industrialism and query both its conceptual underpinnings and the design of its digital platform. I argue that Latour’s semiotics (and associated conceptions of both networks and ontologies) are functionalist in a way that mimics industrial logic, discounting both the production of hierarchical differentiation within a given system, and the system’s externalizations. The approach thus underestimates the toxicity of its vitalism.

Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files

This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to ethnographic work. The Asthma Files is an experiment in ethnography, and in science, health and environmental communication. The project responds to dramatic increases in asthma incidence in the USA and globally in recent decades, and to wide acknowledgement that new forms of asthma knowledges are needed. The project aims to advance understanding of the way asthma and other complex conditions can be productively engaged, leveraging ethnography, deep play with interdisciplinarity and deep respect for different kinds and forms of knowledges.

Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics:

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand and address environmental problems. Critical data designers need to understand what counts as a societal problem in a particular context, what doesn’t, what is seen as connected and not, what is seen as ethically charged, and what is exonerated and discounted. Such recognition is produced through interpretive, ‘close reading’ of the historical moment in which they operate.

Anthropology in Farm Safety

I have taught anthropological and ethnographic research design to both undergraduate and PhD students for many years, striving to cultivate their capacity to think expansively about ways anthropological approaches can be used to understand and better the contemporary world. I want them to gain what I think of as methodological acumen—a capacity to think about the research that is called for, possible, and strategic in a given context. Towards this end, we do a series of rapidresearch design exercises focused on varied problem domains. In these brief comments, I will relay some of the possible research questions and projects that could be identified in such an exercise, as a way to illustrate the enormous possible scope and potential of anthropological research focused on farm safety. To begin, I always have students quickly sketch the array of stakeholders in the problem domain on which we are focused, mapping what enables and disables a group’s capacity to act in the world. Workers might be enabled by strong labor unions, for example, while at the same time disabled by lack of access to alternative sources of employment. Corporations are usually enabled by a mix of money, capacity to produce slick communications, and political power (often enabled by law, such as the Citizens United decision). Increasingly, corporate interests are further supported by intimate involvement in the way hazards are studied scientifically and then represented in law and policy. Corporate power can be somewhat disabled— or at least rendered more starkly visible—by strong watchdog organizations or citizen protests. Mapping stakeholders points to many possible places for anthropological analysis and begins to offer an analysis of power dynamics in a problem domain. From there, one can imagine clusters of possible research projects, involving many different kinds of data and scales of analysis. Spinning out possible projects that would advance the understanding of the many variables and dynamics shaping farm safety quickly acquires its own momentum. For example, technologies often multiply the power of stakeholders and, thus, are important foci of study themselves. Anthropologists could study how new technologies and techniques are changing farming practices, sometimes improving safety, but also creating new risks and hazards (which can easily be overlooked amidst the reorganization and excitement that often come with new practices). Anthropologists could also study ways new communication technologies are used— or avoided—in farm families and in the many organizations with which they interact. There is a long-running thread of work in anthropology that focused on ways technologies shape and change communities. On another track, anthropologists could extend studies of “safety culture” on and around farms, oriented by studies of safety culture in other domains. Studies of safety culture in the nuclear power industry, for example, have shown that hierarchies of knowledge and authority, which privilege the “calculative” knowledge of managers while discounting the more qualitative and contextual knowledge of plant operators, make it difficult to recognize some types of risk. In farm communities, anthropologists could map out who has coercive authority, who has persuasive authority, and whether there are actors (church leaders or

Thinking Across Disaster

This chapter describes aspects of the Fukushima disaster that were foreshadowed by other disasters, demonstrating the potential of comparative disaster studies. While acknowledging the way disasters are always unique, emerging from complex drivers that produce cascades of interlaced effects, this chapter highlights recurrent patterns across disaster. This chapter encourages development of comparative disaster literacy alongside development of logistical plans for disaster – so that those involved are able to “read” patterns in disaster as they unfold.