Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
I offer a counterpoint to the prevailing risk literature that focuses not on (mis)perceptions of danger but on the production and circulation of different forms of evidence and the environmental claims they promote. Rather than reproduce the epistemic dichotomies associated with risk discourse, I discuss attempts by waste-industry technicians, government inspectors, lawyers, area residents, and activists to generate persuasive accounts of a large, U.S. landfill and its porous boundaries. I argue that the differential influence of their various claims is best understood by examining what it means to know and care for a place.
Waste And Waste Management,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Waste And Waste Management, Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes …
Toward A New Theory Of Waste: From "Matter Out Of Place" To Signs Of Life ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Toward A New Theory Of Waste: From "Matter Out Of Place" To Signs Of Life , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
This paper offers a counterpoint to the prevailing account of waste in the human sciences. This account identifies waste, firstly, as the anomalous product of arbitrary social categorizations, or ‘matter out of place’, and, secondly, as a distinctly human way of leaving behind and interpreting traces, or a mirror of culture. Together, these positions reflect a more or less constructivist and anthropocentric approach. Most commonly, waste is placed within a framework that privileges considerations of meaning over materiality and the threat of death over the perpetuity of life processes. For an alternative I turn to bio-semiotics and cross-species scholarship around …
The Life And Times Of Landfills,
2016
Binghamton University
The Life And Times Of Landfills, Joshua O. Reno
Joshua Reno
American landfills are primarily understood as distinctly human and spatial creations, when in practice they are as much temporal as spatial and as much non-human as human. Based on a large landfill on the rural periphery of Detroit, this paper explores the emergent and polychronic forms of life fostered by controlled dumping. Landfill employees work with their ecological surroundings to satisfy regulatory directives and assemble ever-growing mountains of waste. The paper introduces the complex, practical negotiations that result by isolating and diagraming the distinct temporal scales at which nonhuman beings and powers aid in and disrupt the process of landfilling.
Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or …
Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses, Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England’s New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the “viability” of “green” waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The article examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented to produce noncontroversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy and planning decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but …
From Biopower To Energopolitics In England's Modern Waste Technology,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
From Biopower To Energopolitics In England's Modern Waste Technology, Joshua Reno, Catherine Alexander
Joshua Reno
Two energy-generating technologies in Britain which transform waste into a resource are compared. One is the (in)famous Combined Heat and Power incinerator in Sheffield, the other a forgotten biological digester in Devon utilizing anaerobic microbes. Both sites are early exemplars of experimental and biopolitical waste disposal technologies—incineration and anaerobic digestion—now regarded as leading alternatives for reducing the United Kingdom’s dependence on landfill and fossil fuel; both sites also inspired public resistance at critical moments in their development. The analysis here relates how activists and technicians struggle to demonstrate competing truths about alternative energy. Through comparison, it becomes clear that, beyond …
Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
This article examines efforts to reconcile capitalist and ecological values, focusing in particular on the instruments and ideologies that pervade the United Kingdom's developing renewable energy sector. In keeping with neoliberal models of economic knowledge and practice, renewable energy instruments target the motivations of individuals by using incentive programs to reach environmental policy goals. The argument focuses especially on the way newly implemented market devices shape and represent the motivations of energy producers, suppliers, and traders. The centerpiece of the U.K. government's initiative is the creation of an artificial market in renewability, bought and sold as a virtual commodity. Although …
Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Continuity And The Open Whole: A Comparison Of Recent (Peircian) Ethnographies, Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
A comparison of Eduardo Kohn's "How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human" and David Pedersen's "American value: Migrants, money, and meaning in El Salvador and the United States" which explores their relationship to the continuist ontology of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce and its implications for contemporary anthropology.
Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
I offer a counterpoint to the prevailing risk literature that focuses not on (mis)perceptions of danger but on the production and circulation of different forms of evidence and the environmental claims they promote. Rather than reproduce the epistemic dichotomies associated with risk discourse, I discuss attempts by waste-industry technicians, government inspectors, lawyers, area residents, and activists to generate persuasive accounts of a large, U.S. landfill and its porous boundaries. I argue that the differential influence of their various claims is best understood by examining what it means to know and care for a place.
Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners ,
2016
Binghamton University--SUNY
Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners , Joshua Reno
Joshua Reno
This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with autism in order to investigate how ideological assumptions about linguistic agency and impairment are constructed and challenged in practice. To the extent that Euro-American techniques of “unnatural” language instruction developed during the Cold War era have been successful, it is because communicative interactions are broken down into basic components, and would-be language learners are equipped with materials, devices, and habits that make up for their distinct bio/social deficits. Such linguistic equipment can present a challenge to the ideological presumption of a subject inherently gifted with the rudiments …
Suddarth, James Damon (Fa 968),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Suddarth, James Damon (Fa 968), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 968. Project titled: “Folk Songs.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of folk songs collected in Warren County, Kentucky and Tennessee. Sheets include a title, lyrics, and informant’s name.
Miller, Herbert (Fa 971),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Miller, Herbert (Fa 971), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 971. Paper titled: “The Girl in the Window.” Includes descriptions of variations of the Russellville Girl story collected in Jefferson County and Logan County, Kentucky.
Heltzel, Dane Howard (Fa 969),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Heltzel, Dane Howard (Fa 969), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 969. Project titled: “Folk Songs and Ballads.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of folk songs and ballads collected in Christian County, Kentucky and Indiana. Sheets include title, lyrics, motif index number, and informant’s name.
Bostic, Patti (Fa 966),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Bostic, Patti (Fa 966), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 966. Paper titled: “The Function of Various Barns Located in Jefferson County, Outside Jeffersontown.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of barns in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description, owner’s name, terms, and a photo of the barn.
Duncan, Mary Nell (Fa 972),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Duncan, Mary Nell (Fa 972), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 972. Project titled: “Family and Area Stories.” Includes descriptions of Duncan family and area stories collected in Warren County, Kentucky. Stories include a description and informant’s name.
Siddens, Margaret Marie (Fa 967),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Siddens, Margaret Marie (Fa 967), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 967. Paper titled: “Sally’s Rock.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of the history about Sally Beck and Sally’s Rock located in Warren County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description and informant’s name.
Curry, Carolyn (Fa 964),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Curry, Carolyn (Fa 964), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 964. Project titled: “Guns.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of firearms found in Taylor County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description and photo.
Montell, William Lynwood, 1931-2023 (Fa 965),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Montell, William Lynwood, 1931-2023 (Fa 965), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 965. Project titled: “Student Collections: Glassware.” Includes survey sheets from student collections with brief descriptions of glassware, ironstone, copperware, and china found in Hardin County and Taylor County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description, informant’s name, terms, and photo.
Krause, Janet (Fa 970),
2016
Western Kentucky University
Krause, Janet (Fa 970), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
FA Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 970. Paper titled: “Listen to the Children: The Oral Tradition of Jump-Rope Rhymes.” Includes brief descriptions of jump-rope rhymes and games collected at the Hadley Elementary School in Warren County, Kentucky compared to motif variants.
