Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • there is no transition

    Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but seeing arguments for non-solutionist and demand-side approaches to decarbonisation research appearing in a journal from the Nature stable feels like a sign that the idea is getting some traction at long last. That said paper is by Elizabeth Shove, a brilliant and tenacious researcher whose work has been a huge…

  • stop press: technologist spontaneously (re)invents postmodernism

    Matt Webb thinks through the map’s mediation of the territory. I don’t mean to whale on Webb here, to be clear, as he’s by far one of the more enlightened and well-intentioned thinkers in that space. But nonetheless this is a salutory reminder that, sociologically and philosophically speaking, the tech world is lagging the leading…

  • syndemic

    Richard Horton at The Lancet (via Andrew Curry): Two categories of disease are interacting within specific populations—infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and an array of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These conditions are clustering within social groups according to patterns of inequality deeply embedded in our societies. The aggregation of these diseases on…

  • reific(a)tion

  • Indistinguishable from magic? Extractivism, the infrastructural metasystem, and the obfuscation of consequences

    This is a video-paper I prepared for a virtual conference called Extraction: Tracing the Veins, running this week under the aegis of the Political Ecology Research Center at Massey University, NZ and Wageningen Univeristy, NL. My paper is a part of the Technology & Infrastructure panel, and if you think mine sounds of any interest…