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Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming
João Biehl,Peter Locke +1 more
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The article was published on 2017-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 52 citations till now.read more
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Unbuilt and Unfinished: The Temporalities of Infrastructure
Ashley Carse,David Kneas +1 more
Abstract: Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many—if not most—of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructures from anthropology, architecture, geography, history, and science and technology studies, this article examines the ways in which temporalities articulate as planners, builders, politicians, potential users, and opponents negotiate with a project and each another. We develop a typology of heuristics for analyzing the temporalities of the unbuilt and unfinished: shadow histories, present absences, suspended presents, nostalgic futures, and zombies. Each heuristic makes different temporal configurations visible, suggesting novel research questions and methodological approaches.
Journal ArticleDOI
Theorizing global health
TL;DR: The authors advocates for a critical and people-centered approach both to and within global health, arguing that an ethnographic focus on evidence and efficacy at the local level raises rather than lowers the bar for thoughtful inquiry and action.
The Promise of Poison: Life in the Field of Pediatric Cancer Treatment
TL;DR: This dissertation explores practices of total care at Bay Area Children’s Hospital, which is the site of a major pediatric cancer treatment center in the San Francisco Bay Area, and shows how models of pediatric cancer care intersect with models of communication and youth in ways that can produce multivalent effects that range from therapeutic to iatrogenic.
(re)insurgent ecologies: dwelling together between queasy worlds
TL;DR: In this article, a project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and self, makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship.
Journal ArticleDOI
Locating a zeitgeist: Displacement, becoming and the end of alterity:
TL;DR: As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences, the future-focused analytic of becoming is gaining considerable traction in anthropological theorising as mentioned in this paper, which is a common theme in many anthropological works.