Introduction: A Cloud over History

Mitman, Gregg; Murphy, Michelle; Sellers, Christopher

doi:10.1086/649391

Cited by 39 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…In all my interviews there was a sense that mitigation is elusive even if the venting systems “work” because there is an ever‐present problem of imperceptibility and uncertainty when living in a contaminated community (Mitman et al ). Residents' embodied thoughts and feelings about toxics mitigation and their critiques of the efficacy of these risk reducing technologies forces a refocusing of the state's mitigation discourse, much of which is built on a promise of good scientific expertise and control.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mitigation, according to both the state and IBM, is a rational‐technical way of dealing with uncertainty, yet residents living in mitigated space still feel they live in an uncertain toxic environment. In other words, no matter the system of environmental contamination response or repair, mitigation experience is emotionally and socially constituted and residents, in their own terms, confide that mitigation systems are just another layer of the “terrain of invisibility” (Mitman et al :267) even though IBM and the state continue to contend that mitigation is a “visible” rational technoscience‐based solution to the problem of vapor intrusion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Living in a toxic environment, as Rob points out, can “get to you,” and researching and listening to those managing to live within sites of industrial pollution “almost inevitably confronts tangles of economy and flesh” (Mitman et al :11), as well as tangles of contamination and emotion. Attending to this emotionality presents an interpretive crux.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Another Angle on Pollution Experience: Toward an Anthropology of the Emotional Ecology of Risk Mitigation

Little¹

2012

Ethos

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Environmental contamination is socially experienced as environmental suffering, bodily distress, frustration, and even pain. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a contaminated community in New York, I engage the complex and variegated ways in which angst, frustration, and uncertainty linger even after state and corporate scientific schemes to mitigate environmental disaster and contamination are initiated. Inspired by emerging discussions of “emotional geography,” I explore how in a sociospatial context where residents live in homes mitigated for intrusive toxic substances, frustration, and uncertainty—both frequent problems experienced by residents living in environments threatened by hazardous substances—continue to inform the pollution experience. Moreover, I address how ethnographic narrative exposes what I call the “emotional ecology of risk mitigation.”

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Another Angle on Pollution Experience: Toward an Anthropology of the Emotional Ecology of Risk Mitigation

Little¹

2012

Ethos

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“…As they are directed explicitly at a disease (dengue fever), the story of the mosquitoes illustrates with particular clarity how ethical decisions surrounding biotechnologies are embedded in political orders, how they transcend scales and how they entwine ideas about nature and health, care and scientific rationality. Moreover, the story of OX513A shows how questions about global health increasingly intersect with questions about the environment and vice versa (Mitman et al, 2004;Mansfield, 2008).…”

Section: The Lively Ethics Of Global Health Gmosmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lively ethics of global health GMOs: The case of the Oxitec mosquito

Nading

2014

BioSocieties

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Social scientists have recently brought renewed attention to the relationship between epidemics and environmental change. Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases (for example, dengue, malaria, avian influenza) are exacerbated by disturbances to the environment, yet historically most solutions to these problems tend to involve further disturbances to environments, notably the mass destruction of non-human life (for example, pigs, sheep, cattle and insects). This article analyzes ethical debates that arose in 2010, when the British biotechnology firm Oxitec Ltd. announced a field test of a technology that would change this story: a genetically modified (GM) version of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits dengue. Designed to control mosquito populations through interbreeding, Oxitec's mosquitoes are an example of what I call 'global health Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)'. As both environmental interventions, like GM crops, and biomedical technologies, like pharmaceuticals, such organisms challenge not only the moral position of social scientists vis-à-vis vector-borne or zoonotic disease but also the relationship of environmental ethics to bioethics. Addressing these challenges alongside the abiding question of for-profit biotechnology's role in global health, I suggest that global health GMOs might be assessed through a 'lively ethics' that emerges not in discrete regulatory spaces ('body', 'nation-state', 'global environment') but in more fluid 'moral spaces'.

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“…But this is just the sort of thing that's at stake in the futures imagined by Terasem and other transhumanist groups, especially as they develop projects that aim to defeat death and achieve the indefinite extension of personhood by technoscientific means (Farman, forthcoming). Beating death is regarded as a medical issue, yet it is pursued through mind- 3 The intertwined nature of human health and nonhuman factors have been well theorized in relation to the environment and in ecobiosocial conceptions of well-being that take into consideration nonhuman entities such as plants, pollutant clouds, and toxic particles (Mitman, Murphy, and Sellers 2004;Singer 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Health beyond the carbon barrier

Farman¹

2019

MAT

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Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of siliconbased digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is 'convergence'-used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the 'project of convergence', tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms.

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Introduction: A Cloud over History

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Another Angle on Pollution Experience: Toward an Anthropology of the Emotional Ecology of Risk Mitigation

Another Angle on Pollution Experience: Toward an Anthropology of the Emotional Ecology of Risk Mitigation

The lively ethics of global health GMOs: The case of the Oxitec mosquito

Health beyond the carbon barrier

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