ARTICLE ABSTRACT: In contested areas of environmental research and policy, all stakeholders are likely to claim that their position is scientifically grounded but disagree about the relevant scientific conclusions or the weight of the evidence. In this article, I draw on a year of participant...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: In the early 1970s, the idea of precaution "of heeding rather than ignoring scientific evidence of harm when there is uncertainty, and taking action that errs on the side of safety" was so appealing that the US Congress used it as the basis of the toxics provisions of the Clean...Read more
This paper discusses typical aspects of environmental sociology in Japan and what characteristics can be found in Japanese environmental problems when they are viewed from their relation to environmental
"Scholarship in the social studies of science has argued convincingly that what demarcates science from nonscience is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behavior known as “boundary work” (...Read more
While the anthropological study of infrastructure is a fairly recent and uncommon phenomenon in Japan, there has always been a strong interest in infrastructure among Foucault-inspired urban sociologists who emphasize the way infrastructures work as apparatuses to shape and orient...Read more
This paper is an introduction to the special issue "Infrastructuring Environments," which is one of the outcomes of the KAKEN research project "Environmental Infrastructures: Comparative...Read more
Kim Fortun's 2014 article is available on the website for HAU's Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
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...Read more