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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses, Joshua Reno
Managing The Experience Of Evidence England’S Experimental Waste Technologies And Their Immodest Witnesses, Joshua Reno
Anthropology Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom , Joshua Reno
Motivated Markets: Instruments And Ideologies Of Clean Energy In The United Kingdom , Joshua Reno
Anthropology Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno
Beyond Risk: Emplacement And The Production Of Environmental Evidence , Joshua Reno
Anthropology Faculty Scholarship
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.