We work from soiled grounds, in an atmosphere thick with the byproducts of fossil-fuel-intensive political and economic systems. Our anthropologies to come must work to dis- lodge the future these systems so forcefully anteriorize.”
Kim Fortun, “From Latour to Late Industrialism”
Abstract: I situate Latour’s latest project—An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)—in the context of late industrialism and query both its conceptual underpinnings and the design of its digital platform. I argue that Latour’s semiotics (and associated conceptions of both networks and ontologies) are functionalist in a way that mimics industrial logic, discounting both the production of hierarchical differentiation within a given system, and the system’s externalizations. The approach thus underestimates the toxicity of its vitalism.”
Bio: Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Science & Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental ethnographic methods and research design. Fortun’s book Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, disaster, new world orders was awarded the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. From 2005 to 2010, Fortun coedited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Currently, Fortun is working on a book titled Late industrialism: Making environmental sense, on The Asthma Files, a collaborative project to un- derstand how air pollution and environmental public health are dealt with in dif- ferent contexts, and on design of the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), an open source/access digital platform for anthropological and historical research.
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welcome aboard JT, hadn’t heard of Fortun before this issue came out what would you suggest in terms of her work for an overview of her approach/style?
Thanks, Dirk, I’m glad to be in such good company. Kim’s work is fascinating – mostly about informatics and the way that digital information systems can facilitate (and hinder) environmental advocacy. She does some work with models, which is why she is on my committee, and has had a lot of helpful guidance for me on my project. For a general idea of her work, I would suggest her book Advocacy After Bhopal, though this article is a great example as well. Definitely worth looking at, and potentially one of those guides to “hacking” you’ve been looking for.
alright thanks I’ll see if I can find a copy of her book and looking forward to reading yer own manuscript in the making.
maybe you can push the envelope some on what an e-dissertation can be in terms of something more like the cd-rom books from a while back with animations of models and all, if you’re interested in such things let me know and I’ll try and link you in with some folks working along these lines of digtial-humanities and maybe that Bogost fellow would lend a hand with the “carpentry”.