Browsing by Author "Boyer, Dominic"
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Item A Habitat for Hyposubjects(Rice Design Alliance, 2022) Morton, Timothy; Boyer, DominicItem Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico(Duke University Press, 2016) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, DominicThe conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.Item Aeolian politics(Taylor & Francis, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, DominicOur project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path away from fossilized resources and toward sustainable sources of energy. Mexico has established some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world, including mandates for renewable energy production. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Southern state of Oaxaca, now hosts the densest concentration of on-shore wind development anywhere on the planet. We find, however, that the ‘good’ of wind is differentially felt. The power of the wind is not singular, but rather as multiple as the world it inhabits. We thus develop an argument against a singular interpretation of ‘wind power’ and toward a surfacing of wind's manifold effects and ways of mattering. We call this domain: aeolian politics. In this article, we take several snapshots of aeolian politics to help articulate its multiplicity, showing how wind power becomes contoured by land and desire and by infrastructure and technological management. We also see aeolian political life entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities and implicated within the ethical domains of sustainable development.Item Big Ocean: Marine Conservation, Bureaucratic Practice, and the Politics of Vagueness in the Pacific Islands(2015-05-21) Durbin, Trevor J.; Faubion, James D; Boyer, Dominic; Howe, A. Cymene; Ward, Kerry R.The Cook Islands Marine Park (CIMP) was claimed to be the largest Marine Protected Area in the world when it was declared in August 2012. This event was part of a trend to develop Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas in the Pacific Islands region and beyond. By some estimates only a few LSMPAs account for most marine biodiversity protection globally. This dissertation represents the first ethnographic account of the development of an LSMPA at local, national, regional, and international scales. An analysis of ethnographic and documentary materials shows that the development of the CIMP is not best understood as a process in which clear goals were set and achieved within existing political and administrative institutions but rather occurred within the context of a political ecology of vagueness, where vagueness is characterized by wandering, the same kind of wandering attributed to vagabonds, sailers, and even the ocean itself. A political ecology of vagueness is analyzed in terms of a flexible conceptual network that approach the vague as a political and social resource. This conceptual framework includes Foucault’s heterotopia, Turners’ notions of liminality as a characteristic of communitas, Fischer’s use of deep play and ethical plateau, and Weber’s characterization of appeals to charismatic authority. An approach to vagueness is presented within a political ecology framework in which ecological distribution conflicts are the result of interstitial social and political processes. It is argued that the the CIMP has become a viable political and ecological project because it was not precisely defined conceptually and because it was collectively imagined and worked upon within social, culture, and political “other” spaces that were interstitial to existing structures.Item Embargo A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency(2021-12-03) Storer, Eliot; Faubion, James; Boyer, Dominic; Howe, CymeneThis dissertation investigates contemporary human, social, and cultural responses to climate emergency. My ethnographic field research localizes vanguardist “solutionist” discourses where marginalized environments and aspirational state actors intersect on “The Flow Country” blanket bogs in the far north of Scotland. The Flow Country is the premier site of the UK’s large scale “forest-to-bog” peatland restoration project, one of the few “natural climate solutions” enacted and institutionalized. My fieldwork (2017-2018) approached a boggy, yet “neutral,” “Net Zero” discourse that might confound traditional environmentalist positions. My findings characterize a local Net Zero cultural form with 1) a latent construction of future uncertainty that manages to reproduce the “estate” of land ownership regimes; 2) a rhetorical imaginary of “plausibility” dominated by positive scenario construction over religious or scientific politics; and 3) a lyrical model of ethnography that enjoins a more open strategy of accountability and interlocution. I describe my findings in four chapters approaching: 1) the marginal imaginaries of bogs; 2) the relationship of experts and elites to apocalyptic and climate solution discourses; 3) the “extra-human” sensorial experience and erotic politics of environmental monitoring; and, 4) the parallelism of expositive and narrative strategies in corporate, public, and individual climate accounting.Item Energopolitics(Duke University Press, 2019) Boyer, DominicItem Forum: Russia, Europe and the colonial present: the power of everyday geopolitics(Copernicus Publications, 2023) Bouzarovski, Stefan; Bichsel, Christine; Boyer, Dominic; Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra; Gentile, Michael; Mykhnenko, Vlad; Oguz, Zeynep; Tysiachniouk, MariaItem Embargo Making Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and the Paradoxes of Renewable Futures in Brazil(2024-04-03) Ulrich, Katie; Ballestero, Andrea; Boyer, DominicAmid fossil-fuel-driven climate change, finding sustainable replacements for everyday fuels and materials made from petroleum—from plastics to synthetic fabrics—has been a pressing concern for decades. Plant-based products, enabled by biotech, are one solution. However, “plant-based” or “bio-based” often generically stand in for ethical and sustainable consumption, while the social and environmental impacts of bioproducts can in fact replicate uneven structures of oppression. This dissertation theorizes such contradictions through studying scientists’ efforts to make biofuels, bioplastics, and other bioproducts from sugarcane in Brazil. If between the 16th and 20th centuries Brazilian sugarcane was located at the nexus of plantation and factory, in the 21st century it is squarely located at the nexus of industrial-agricultural field, flexible factory, and biotech laboratory. Complementing the extensive Brazilian scholarship on present-day sugarcane labor, this dissertation looks at another increasingly important site of sugarcane production: the production of knowledge in the lab. I argue that sugarcane-based renewables often reproduce petro-extractivism under the guise of sustainability, yet scientists’ practices also open other possibilities. This dissertation draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and experimental cataloging methods (what I call a sugar library) in São Paulo, Brazil and California, US. I offer changeways as the dissertation’s key conceptual intervention: changeways are particular stories of broader social change embodied in patterns of practices, relations, materials, and molecules surrounding sugarcane-based bioproducts. Put differently, changeways are genres of socio-material change. Each chapter is guided by a key entry from my sugar library in order to analyze a different changeway: flexible change, substitutive change, generic change, sucro change, and excusive change. The first three tend to reproduce petro-extractivism, despite renewable ideals. When sugarcane is transformed into bioproducts, often another important transformation happens too: petro-capitalism’s culpability in climate crises is alchemically transformed into the idea that capitalism is the only way to solve climate change. However, the latter two changeways offer possibilities within and beyond petro-capitalism through challenging how raw materials are conceived in the first place, and challenging the very instrumentality of scientific knowledge production. In all, changeways name how scientists’ technical practices lay the molecular foundations for various ideologies of change in an era of climate change. The dissertation thus provides concepts for STS, environmental anthropology, and energy humanities around contemporary convergences of natural resource extraction, scientific knowledge production, and social transition.Item Moving Ho Chi Minh City: Planning Public Transit in the Motorbike Metropolis(2016-04-21) Lockrem, Jessica; Boyer, DominicThis dissertation analyzes the role of speed in contemporary urban life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While the modern condition often champions speed, I found residents and city planners criticizing the effects of increasingly accelerated movement on street life, safety, and the environment. I argue that trends in transportation planning are shifting from a modernist urbanist emphasis on speed to a holistic integration of mobility with daily activity. The dissertation is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with planners working on the major public transportation plans being developed in 2013 and operators of the current public transportation systems. While planners are often assumed to be concerned mainly with traffic flow, my research shows these experts recognize transport as an important aspect of the social space of the public street. Engaging with scholarly literatures on infrastructure, mobility, and Vietnam, the dissertation is divided into three parts: material infrastructures, lived experiences of transportation, and imagined futures for transport systems. Part I looks into the history of transportation infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City by examining the material spaces these infrastructures create. Part II analyzes lived experiences of transportation infrastructure. Finally, Part III interrogates the imagined spaces of the city through the perspectives and practices of transportation planners. The research is concerned with how the science of urban planning and other technologies shape urban form and mediate individuals’ experiences of and access to the city. As the cities of Southeast Asia rapidly grow, examining the epistemologies and technologies that are guiding their shape becomes ever more important for understanding urban life.Item Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk(Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human SciencesIn recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.Item Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan(2015-04-27) Rodwell, Elizabeth Ann; Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Ostherr, Kirsten; Allison, AnneAs viewing habits have been transformed globally by on-demand services, and viewership has lagged due to competition from social and interactive technologies, television professionals have struggled to articulate a vision for their medium’s future. In Japan, a strong decline in ratings among critical under-40 demographics had already created tension within the dominant broadcast model when the Fukushima disasters ushered in a crisis of confidence in the nation's journalism. While some Japanese media professionals used the incident as an occasion to engage in self-critique, others largely circumvented the delicate questions of self-censorship, reporters’ clubs (kisha kurabu), and sponsor coercion– and focused instead on restoring audience engagement through the development and testing of pioneering interactive television technology. Meanwhile, the technological rather than ethical focus of post-Fukushima changes inspired a new journalistic movement to create alternative digital spaces for informational exchange and political expression, with the intent of harnessing interactive digital technology in a way that bypasses the government controls and self-censorship characteristic of mainstream Japanese media. Despite a common idealism and intellectual curiosity, the two groups are hindered by divergent structural limitations; television industry insiders are fighting a conservative and imitative corporate climate whose content decisions are governed by the interventions of two monolithic advertising firms, while the independent media are profoundly alienated from this system. Engaging contemporary anthropological conversations concerning the evolving nature of mass media and media professionalism in the digital era, my work tracks the Japanese independent media's epistemic project to reform public culture in Japan and dismantle longstanding barriers to freedom of the press, as well as the mass media's more subtle application of interactive technology to TV content. Thus, I argue that analysis of these Japanese media innovations prompts new theoretical consideration of the divide between expert and amateur production, the use of media to constitute social change, and the nature of television itself.Item Remaking the Pilot: Unmanned Aviation and the Transformation of Work in Postagrarian North Dakota(2018-03-23) LaFlamme, Marcel; Boyer, DominicThis dissertation examines changing forms of expertise and their institutionalization as piloting becomes an activity undertaken on the ground rather than in the sky. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota between 2010 and 2015, I show how the maturation and proliferation of unmanned aircraft or drones has precipitated changes in what it means to be a pilot that, in turn, index wider transformations in contemporary work. The forms of skill associated with operating an aircraft are revealed to be in flux, as drone pilots learn to compose environments for perception and action and to navigate new media infrastructures. Yet transindividual social forms also prove to be evolving, as the profession of piloting is riven by heterogeneous temporalities and as the hobby takes on new importance as a handler of exceptions. This dissertation seeks to push past the fascination with spatial discontinuity that marks so many responses to the drone, and to locate the elaboration of this technology in a particular, troubled place. In making sense of a coordinated, decade-long effort to position North Dakota as a center of the unmanned aviation industry, I develop an account of Plains biopolitics, a regionally specific mode of governance that aims to keep a sufficiently vital settler population in place by fostering an economic milieu in which potential outmigrants can and do choose to stay. It is, I argue, the failure of settlement that haunts Plains biopolitics, marking efforts to retain and grow the region’s (non-Native) population as at once a bid to maintain settler dominance and an expression of sublimated anxiety about settlement’s fragility.Item Sound + Vision: Experimenting with the Anthropological Research Article of the Future(American Anthropological Association, 2016) Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; LaFlamme, MarcelItem The Call of Higher Duty: How the Economy of Patriotism Extends from Real Civilians to Virtual Soldiers(Rice University, 2017) Johnson, Robert; Boyer, DominicThis project explores how military first-person shooter videogames serve as cultural artifacts grounded within the economy of patriotism. Essentially, the economy of patriotism is the system of exchange in which civilians are attempting to repay patriotic indebtedness that is enabled by perceptions of soldierly sacrifice, that forces conformity to and propagates an idealized patriotic narrative of sacrifice that is at odds with the real experiences of soldiers. Due to their crafted narrative’s mirroring of real civilian perception of soldierly duty, these videogames not only serve as part of these economic exchanges but extend them into virtual worlds. Focusing on the single-player modes within three recent Call of Duty titles, I explore first how these narrative simulations/simulated narratives invoke the sacrificial mythology of soldiers of the civilian public. Secondly, I detail how Call of Duty videogames expand experiences of the economy of patriotism. Ultimately, I bring attention to how these games may contribute to the civilian-military divideItem The Okjökull Memorial and Geohuman Relations(Berghahn Books, 2024) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, DominicFocusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet. Résumé En se concentrant sur la vie et la mort d'Okjökull, le premier des principaux glaciers islandais à disparaître en raison des changements climatiques anthropogéniques, cet article discute les relations complexes entre la cryosphère et les communautés humaines en Islande. Il questionne la manière dont les distinctions entre entités non vivantes et êtres vivants peuvent offrir des perspectives à l'anthropologie et la transdisciplinarité en tant que modèle pour reconnaitre des précarités mutuelles entre monde vivant et non vivant en face du changement climatique anthropogénique. En détaillant la rencontre ethnographique entre les auteurs, la montagne Ok et l'Okjökull (le glacier), les auteurs défendent l'idée qu'en prenant acte des formes non vivantes et en marquant leur « disparition » ou leur perte, nous sommes en mesure de documenter et de mieux comprendre les événements de bascule dans la vie de notre planète.Item Embargo Unsettling Frontiers, Futures and Democracy: Alaska and Beyond(2024-04-19) Haver, Maureen Siobhan; Boyer, DominicAlaska is frequently imagined by the Lower 48 as the Last Frontier, a vast pristine wilderness, and an essential component to United States energy independence. Alaska is also warming at twice the rate of the rest of the United States and is a contested site for oil and gas development in the Arctic. With over 222 million acres of land controlled by federal government—Alaska represents a third of all federal land holdings, reflecting the legacies of settler colonialism, the conservation movement, and resource extraction while raising questions about the future of decarbonization and decolonization amidst the climate crisis and Indigenous-led movements for sovereignty, climate justice, and land (Byrd 2011; Waziyatawin 2012; Estes 2019; Dhillon 2022). Through anthropological ethnography in Alaska and multidisciplinary research, this dissertation brings together climate, energy, and settler colonial studies to examine how the U.S. settler colonial project as a process of internal expansion enacted through reiterative and theoretical frontiers formed settler identities, notions of democracy and populism, and understandings of nature vis- à-vis resource abundance and extraction and the wilderness that impact the broader fights over public lands—which should also be understood as unceded Indigenous lands—decolonization, climate change, and energy transition.