Community Narratives of Disaster Risk and Resilience: Implications for Government Policy

The paper explores how subjective risk perception intersects with government disaster management policy that is premised on an objective approach to risk assessment and mitigation. It finds that the presumption of objective risk management underpinning government policy is fundamentally at odds with community risk perceptions. This paper applies the techniques of ethnographic study to explore how communities understand and frame risk narratives. Using qualitative methods, the paper constructs the risk narratives of residents of Rocklea, Brisbane, following their experience with the 2011 Brisbane Flood. These risk narratives are considered in light of the Australian National Strategy for Disaster Resilience and recommendations are accordingly made for government disaster management policy.     

Gendered discipline,gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.     

Farming is easy,becoming Brazilian is hard: North American soy farmers’ social values of production,work and land in Soylandia

Since the late 1980s, North American farmers have been migrating to Brazil to produce soybeans and escape a general farm crisis in the United States. This paper analyzes their work, values, social relations and relations with the land in order to understand transnational farming and agrarian change from the perspective of transnational farmers. North Americans’ migration to Brazil and soy production in Brazil can inform our understanding of the mechanisms of the soy boom and unpack the relative significance of social values at play in intensive, technified and financialized agriculture. It also provides an evocative perspective of the soy boom as it engages with issues of transnationalism, crisis, migration and change in business and farming practices. Using ethnographic data, this paper explores the intimate and emerging realities of agrarian change by detailing four elements of transnational farming – migration, farm management, land use and work – through the narration of three farmers’ career histories. These cases address the transformation of social values of work, land and social relations through the processes of migration and agrarian change. Farmers’ work, it is found, emerges out of an entanglement of regulations, expertise, meanings of work and land, worker relations and the political economy of Brazil and the United States.     

Genetically modified soybeans,agrochemical exposure,and everyday forms of peasant collaboration in Argentina

Since the 2000s, both the production of genetically modified (GM) soybeans and the cases of agrochemical exposure have grown exponentially in Argentina. Drawing on ethnographic research, I analyze how peasant social movements understand the socio-environmental problems caused by the expansion of GM soybeans. I argue that at national, provincial, and local scales, the institutional recognition of peasant social movements and the performative actions of authorities discourage contentious collective action through subtle yet powerful mechanisms. The article contributes to social movement research and to the literature on peasant resistance by analyzing the cultural dynamics that constrain contention and shape processes of peasant collaboration, which are arguably as important as peasant resistance, although much less studied.     

The things a man once saw (and was): an appreciation of Richard Quinney

Richard Quinney ranks among the noted criminologists of the twentieth century, especially among progressives. He is also a photographer of note, drawing on scenes from his native Wisconsin to reflect his deep inner life. Things once seen, published in 2009 by Borderland Books, is a 40‐year retrospective of his photographic work. It is a deeply religious work that celebrates the requirements of life lived by a “radical realism”. In June 2009 Doctor Quinney was presented with the Sullivan–Tifft Vanguard Award at the annual meeting of the Justice Studies Association.     

The role of power in shaming interactions: how social control is performed in a juvenile court

Shaming is a mechanism theorists have highlighted as an important means of social control. However, this concept and the ways in which officials use shame in the context of formal social control is not easily studied. Interviews with a Southern California juvenile court judge and observations of his interactions with youths on probation are used to illustrate the reflexive nature of social control interactions. This ethnographic study illustrates how the emotion of shame is used to manage delinquent and defiant young people in a justice setting. A nuanced analysis of the various strategies used by this juvenile court judge to evoke signs of remorse, accountability, and deference from young offenders is provided. Such an investigation informs theoretical perspectives on how social control is employed, highlights the important role of power in the interactions, and provides a better understanding of theoretical concepts, such as reintegration and stigmatization.     

Logics of interdisciplinarity

Abstract

This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.     

Lacan, Science, and Law: Is the Ethnography of Scientism Psychoanalytic?

By adopting an idealized conception of the scientific enterprise, mirroring scientists' own self-conception, courts minimize the social and rhetorical aspects of science as ornamental, contingent, and eliminable. Lacan's reflections on science, and on the question of whether (or in what sense) psychoanalysis is scientific, parallel and enrich the efforts in science studies to show that the social and rhetorical aspects of science are co-productive, constitutive, and inevitable. Specifically, Lacan's identification of science as a discourse in denial of its subjectivity leads to a psychoanalytic re-orientation of ethnomethodology - an anthropological approach now favored in science studies. In the context of litigation involving scientific expertise, attorneys already assume, in their depositions and cross-examination, the role of ethnographers on foreign ground, but to the extent that the discourse of science replaces or dominates the discourse of law, legal ethnographers should also assume the role of analysts exploring the unconscious of science. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

写文化之争--人类学中的后现代话语及研究转向

20世纪 6 0年代以来兴起的后现代主义掀起了一股质疑权威和结构的思潮。在人类学领域 ,后现代主义的批评精神得到极大的扩展和延伸 ,与人类学内部业已存在的理论趋势一拍即合 ,推动形成了 2 0世纪 80年代一场声势浩大的“写文化”大论争。探讨人类学在“写文化”论争后所能扮演的理论和实践角色。其理论基调都带有明显的后现代的阐释和质疑 ,对整体论的质疑甚至抛弃的影响更是致命的。这种怀疑和批评体现了后现代主义对宏大叙事的批判 ,是后殖民主义对西方文化霸权的批判在人类学领域中的一种呼应     

“These Are Kids’ Lives!”: Dilemmas and Adaptations of Juvenile Aftercare Workers

Despite a growing literature on best practices, the details of how aftercare workers help young people transition into the community after incarceration remain unexplored. This ethnographic study examines the daily practices of direct care workers within a large juvenile aftercare organization, focusing on the dilemmas that they face as street level bureaucrats. Although aftercare workers face tremendous organizational constraints, they do not always exhibit the bureaucratic responses that some scholars describe. Using care work and public administration theory as a lens, we explore how juvenile aftercare workers draw upon intrinsic motivation to provide meaningful services for returning youth.