Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology
Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology

Author: Peter C. Little

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1666901105

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This book explores technology and the global tech industry in relation to social, health, economic, and environmental relations and politics. Peter C. Little argues that the power and influence of electronics and Big Tech—from the proliferation of digital platforms to the expansion of global electronic waste streams—is a political-ecological problem that impacts communities and lives in both the Global North and South. From intense resource extraction, industrial pollution, and surging health and economic inequalities, to data-driven surveillance, platform economy proliferation and intrusion, and Silicon Valley corporate-power, Little argues that the political ecology of tech matters now more than ever. Based on a mixture of engagements with tech criticism, ethnographic case studies, and critical analysis and development of guiding concepts—ranging from technocapital to technoprecarious political ecology—the book exposes and interrogates the underlying toxicity, precarity, and planetary politics of global tech. Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology also tracks justice struggles that confront technopower, including “just tech” forms of social action that further reinforce the importance of a global political ecology of technocapitalism in the digital age.

Toxic Heritage
Toxic Heritage

Author: Elizabeth Kryder-Reid

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-21

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1000918017

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Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.

Bioinformation Worlds and Futures
Bioinformation Worlds and Futures

Author: EJ Gonzalez-Polledo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1000486222

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This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

Burning Matters
Burning Matters

Author: Peter C. Little

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0190934549

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Introduction: From e-waste ashes to ethnographic intervention -- Amidst global e-waste trades and green neoliberalization -- "We are all North here" : Dagomba migrations and meanings -- Erasure, demolition, and violent obsolescence in the urban margins -- Embodied burning, e-waste epidemiology, and toxic postcolonial corporality -- Visualizing Agbogbloshie and re-envisioning e-waste anthropology -- Looming uncertainties and neoliberal techno-optimism -- Conclusion: New openings, relations, and burning matters.

Toxic Town
Toxic Town

Author: Peter C. Little

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0814770649

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Shows the risks of high-tech pollution through a study of an IBM plant's effects on a New York town In 1924, IBM built its first plant in Endicott, New York. Now, Endicott is a contested toxic waste site. With its landscape thoroughly contaminated by carcinogens, Endicott is the subject of one of the nation’s largest corporate-state mitigation efforts. Yet despite the efforts of IBM and the U.S. government, Endicott residents remain skeptical that the mitigation systems employed were designed with their best interests at heart. In Toxic Town, Peter C. Little tracks and critically diagnoses the experiences of Endicott residents as they learn to live with high-tech pollution, community transformation, scientific expertise, corporate-state power, and risk mitigation technologies. By weaving together the insights of anthropology, political ecology, disaster studies, and science and technology studies, the book explores questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics of risk and the ironies of technological disaster response in a time when IBM’s stated mission is to build a “Smarter Planet.” Little critically reflects on IBM’s new corporate tagline, arguing for a political ecology of corporate social and environmental responsibility and accountability that places the social and environmental politics of risk mitigation front and center. Ultimately, Little argues that we will need much more than hollow corporate taglines, claims of corporate responsibility, and attempts to mitigate high-tech disasters to truly build a smarter planet.

Terrestrial Transformations
Terrestrial Transformations

Author: Thomas K. Park

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1793605475

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Humanity’s future may rest on how we deal with climate change, environmental problems, and their impacts on society. Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature recognizes that such problems have social, political, and cultural contexts, and that politics, money, and power have physical impacts on nature and society that cannot be ignored. This book brings together a set of chapters that provide an overview of the political ecology approach, illustrating its theoretical underpinnings, central concepts, methods, and major interests. The authors examine the political contexts of a broad range of environmental and social problems, drawing attention to the political and economic forces driving environmental and ecological problems, how societies are transformed as they attempt to cope and adapt to a changing nature, and who pays the price.

Ecology and Socialism
Ecology and Socialism

Author: Chris Williams

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2010-08-17

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1608460924

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Around the world, consciousness of the threat to our environment is growing. The majority of solutions on offer, from using efficient light bulbs to biking to work, focus on individual lifestyle changes, yet the scale of the crisis requires far deeper adjustments. Ecology and Socialism argues that time still remains to save humanity and the planet, but only by building social movements for environmental justice that can demand qualitative changes in our economy, workplaces, and infrastructure. Chris Williams is a longtime environmental activist, professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University, and chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate Institute. He lives in New York City.

The Power of the Machine
The Power of the Machine

Author: Alf Hornborg

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2001-10-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0759116911

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Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine—'industrial technomass'—as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology has the tools to deconstruct the concepts of production, money capital, and market exchange, and to analyze capital accumulation as a problem at the very interface of the natural and social sciences. His analysis provides an alternative understanding of economic growth and technological development. Hornborg's work is essential for researchers in anthropology, human ecology, economics, political economy, world-systems theory, environmental justice, and science and technology studies. Find out more about the author at the Lund University, Sweden web site.

Globalization, the State, and Violence
Globalization, the State, and Violence

Author: Jonathan Friedman

Publisher: AltaMira Press

Published: 2004-09-08

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0585471398

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Friedman and a distinguished group of contributors offer a compelling analysis of globalization and the lethal explosiveness that characterizes the current world order. In particular, they investigate global processes and political forces that determine networks of crime, commerce and terror, and reveal the economic, social and cultural fragmentation of transnational networks. In a critical introduction, Friedman evaluates how transnational capital represents a truly global force, but geographical decentralization of accumulation still leads to declining state hegemony in some areas and increasing hegemony in others. The authors examine the growth and increasing autonomy of indigenous populations, and the massively destabililizing effect of migration processes. They describe the rapid increase in criminalization of ethnic and immigrant groups as well as an increase in class stratification, creating new forms of social confrontation and violence. In addition to ethnic, identity-based conflict there are analyses of transnational criminal networks, which also represents disintegration of larger homogeneous territories or hierarchical orders. The authors ask us to reevaluate the dynamics of globalization—the contradictions of centralization and fragmentation around the world—as we discover how best to transform these conditions for the future. This research was originally funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Globalization, the State and Violence will be a valuable reference in anthropology, social theory, international politics and economics, ethnic conflict, immigration, and economic history.

The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters
The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters

Author: Eric C. Jones

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2009-05-16

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0759113114

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Throughout history, societies have had to decide whom to 'sacrifice' and whom to help in times of disaster. This volume examines how elite groups attempt to maintain power through the use of particular economic, political, and ideological instruments and how both ruling elites and common people endeavor to create meaningful traditions while enduring hardship.The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters demonstrates how vulnerability is economically constructed, primary producers adapt their production regimes, how traders and merchants adapt their practices, and how political economic objectives play out in recovery efforts.