Kim Fortun | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (original) (raw)

Papers by Kim Fortun

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2021

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon T... more In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This is an edited transcription, which accompanies the full audio file also available in this issue of the journal. The interview supplements the text of Traweek’s 2020 Bernal lecture. In this interview, Traweek discusses her research, academic career, the many influences on her life, and her thoughts on STS—in the past and in the future.

Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, 2017

This paper describes work-in-progress to understand how information technology is both an environ... more This paper describes work-in-progress to understand how information technology is both an environmental problem and an environmental resource. My research questions include the following: I) How have environmental problems prompted the design of new information collection, processing and distribution systems? 2) What are the cultural and political effects of the massive amount of environmental information now available? 3) What is constraining access to environmental information? 4) What kinds ofliteracy are required for effective engagement with environmental iriformation? 5) Can environmental ethics be updated to encourage critical engagement with information technology?

... I was also interested, in a less concentrated way, in how and why corporate actors experience... more ... I was also interested, in a less concentrated way, in how and why corporate actors experienced the good, bad and ugly. ... Page 99. Scaling and Visualizing Multi-sited Ethnography 81 was a prosthetic of knowing that determined who and what received care, and did not. ...

Writing Anthropology, 2020

Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing, 2021

Collaborative Anthropology Today, 2021

This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape,... more This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like matryoshka dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.

Anthropological Data in the Digital Age, 2019

In this chapter, based on fieldwork with the Research Data Alliance and our work designing the Pl... more In this chapter, based on fieldwork with the Research Data Alliance and our work designing the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), we elaborate on the concept of data ideologies and examine how they have informed work and data-sharing practice in academic research, and in cultural anthropology more specifically. Data ideologies refer to people’s underlying assumptions about data, the way they operate, and the consequences they produce. We argue that, while many cultural anthropologists have been reticent to share their data, making anthropological data more open and accessible affords new possibilities for multi-perspectival analysis and re-interpretation of data—practices that can make ethnographic narratives more robust and pluralistic. Metadata is key to encouraging re-interpretation of archived data, as it situates data collection and analysis in a particular time, setting, and cultural context. We demonstrate how we implemented data-sharing infrastructure and metadata standards in PECE—not to advance reproducible research practices, but instead to encourage collaborative hermeneutics and iterative re-analysis of data. We conclude that attending to complex contemporary problems will demand linking undervalued and underfunded infrastructural work to the cultural work of shifting the discipline’s data ideologies.

Science & Technology Studies, 2021

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical... more In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...

Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 2008

As we have seen a global increase in asthma in the past three decades it has also become clear th... more As we have seen a global increase in asthma in the past three decades it has also become clear that it is a socially patterned disease, based on demographic and socioeconomic indicators clustered by areas of residence. This trend is not readily explained by traditional genetic paradigms or physical environmental exposures when considered alone. This has led to consideration of the interplay among physical and psychosocial environmental hazards and the molecular and genetic determinants of risk (i.e., biomedical framing) within the broader socioenvironmental context including socioeconomic position as an upstream "cause of the causes" (i.e., ecological framing). Transdisciplinary research strategies or programs that embrace this complexity through a shared conceptual framework that integrates diverse discipline-specific theories, models, measures, and analytical methods into ongoing asthma research may contribute most significantly toward furthering our understanding of soc...

Technology and Culture, 2004

and LSA technologies. Nonetheless, as a jargon-free introduction to African forager technologies ... more and LSA technologies. Nonetheless, as a jargon-free introduction to African forager technologies and subsistence practices spanning as much as 2.7 million years, Kusimba’s book does an admirable job. She has touched on most of the major controversies and concludes each chapter with a nice summing-up ideal for students. I don’t think this works as a stand-alone textbook, but coupled with appropriate background readings it will be most useful.

Journal of the History of Biology, 2005

American Anthropologist, 2005

HCII, 2021

Community archives serve an array of purposes and types of communities (fan clubs, scientists in ... more Community archives serve an array of purposes and types of communities (fan clubs, scientists in particular disciplines, ethnic neighborhoods). We discuss here civic community archives; civic archives, like “civic science,” haveexpressly progressive political aims, question established order, and contribute to inclusive knowledge production and prosperity. Designing civic archives involves many types of analysis and poses many design challenges. In this paper, we share an analytic framework developed to guide the design of civic community archives, drawing on both cultural theory and our experience designing archives for different kinds of communities, with different purposes, within larger ethnographic projects. We question how to characterize “the community” in community archive projects, and the stakeholders in such projects. We ask what should be recollected in community archives and for what purposes. We also ask how, by design, community archives can connect diverse users, ana...

Big Data & Society, 2016

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ aga... more In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand a...

Cultural Anthropology, 2007

... In early 2006, the American Anthro-pological Association's Labor Relations Commission (L... more ... In early 2006, the American Anthro-pological Association's Labor Relations Commission (Louise Lamphere, Lesley Gill, Bill Mitchell, Rob O'Brien, Paul Durrenberger, Polly Strong, and LucilleHorn) wrote to the AAA Executive Board, calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola products ...

The Anthropocene Review

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical... more The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural, et...

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic s... more Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic exposures in the history of US soldiering—from Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, to still unspecified exposures that produced Gulf War Syndrome in the first Gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. While all toxic subjects are at odds with established systems of medicine and law, we argue that toxic subjects in military formations are especially challenging. Deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice (coupled with the logics of entrenched legal and biomedical systems) make toxic soldiers particularly difficult to account and care for. We describe the experiences, structural positioning, dispossession and resistances of toxic soldiers at different historical conjunctures, pointing to cultural logics that connect them. Worki...