"Probably new to science," and other links

Sun, 05 May 2019 15:29:15 GMT

"Probably new to science": Locating Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Archives, by Keri G. Lambert at Environmental History Now. I love this blog -- they do a wonderful range of posts from scholars working in environmental history. This essay about archival work on 1880s Gold Coast rubber plantations and how knowledge becomes "scientific" is definitely going into my file for the "worldbuilding politics of rubber in Discworld" piece I'm not writing, HBBO ... :)

"... If you skimmed that, I urge you to read it again. It’s just a short letter talking about plants you’ve probably never seen and a language you may never have heard of. But seriously, take a look at what is going on here: a reasonably powerful colonial official is drawing on indigenous botanical knowledge (as reflected in Twi nomenclature) to report to the metropole’s epicenter of imperial science what he believes to be a novel scientific discovery.

In one fell swoop, Tudhope recognizes a sophisticated knowledge regime that classifies plants by genus and sex… yet he defines that knowledge as not quite “science,” which he insinuates is that which is advanced by non-Africans. In much the same way, Evans, in his letter (above), had described coagulation-via-“Diecha” as a “new process”—but to whom was it new? It’s highly likely that he learned it from experienced Gold Coast rubber workers.

In four letters, exchanged over ten months, we see the extraction, exchange, and embrace of indigenous knowledge, as well as the delimitation of a narrow “scientific” knowledge."

Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality, by starchythoughts. Developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutic injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” This post is specifically about ace issues but this concept seems rich and powerful to me -- it makes it possible for me to recognize the extent to which, as a writer, I'm invested in the internal and external formations and effects of this kind of injustice. Fricker, via starchy: “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”

The Disability Gulag, Harriet McBryde Johnson. I wish Johnson were still alive; I wish I had found her work soon enough to put it on my syllabus. This piece is specifically about the harms and threats of institutionalization. Despite the pain of the subject matter, I find her to be an absolute pleasure to read.

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Link Roundup and not-dead notice

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 05:51:07 GMT

I tapered off my SSRIs and I'm almost all done with the ensuing sensation of being periodically electrocuted and I feel great. I have interns now which seems like a mistake. Here are some things I have liked.

Freedom Should Be Free: A Brief History of Bail Funds in America. Robin Steinburg, Lillian Kalish, and Ezra Ritchin. UCLA Criminal Law Review, Vol 2, Issue 1. 2018.

Bail funds have long presented a pathway to freedom—a disruptive fissure in a system that criminalizes both poverty and race. In many ways, the story of bail funds provides a window into many critical moments in American history over the last century. Bail funds have sprouted up during times of intense conflict between the United States government and political activists, suspected Communists, civil rights leaders, and students. Visually, the history of bail funds would look much like the ebb and flow of an ocean’s tide, growing with consciousness about injustice and falling into extinction once the momentum, or often the money, dies out. The creation of bail funds in the United States is a tribute to the power of individuals to create a collective force to push back against the complex and growing force of mass incarceration.

Bail funds build on the tradition of churches, families, and other community members who, as black communities did during slavery, join together to purchase the freedom of their loved ones. As mass incarceration has entrapped more and more of the country, communities have responded in recent years with an increasing commitment to the direct action of bailing strangers out of jail. While marginalized communities have long been pooling resources to pay bail, organized bail funds—often aimed at bailing out strangers—were few and far between for much of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first century. But as mass incarceration has spread across the country, more Americans have come to understand the injustice that has long been apparent to low-income communities and communities of color, and there has been a subsequent influx of resources into decarceration efforts.

Digital Media is a Wasteland: a prose poem in 11 parts, by John DeVore.

So I decided to create a slideshow to boost my pageviews, but I had no idea what to create. I clicked around the internet for inspiration and read a slideshow on a website that I forget. The title was “Navy SEALS vs. Baby Seals.” It was alternating photos of buff Special Forces soldiers and adorable baby seals, with some meaningless copy underneath. I almost wept at the brilliance of this slideshow. (I like to think I was a pioneer of slideshows.) There, in front of me, was another subterranean internet Morlock who also had to hit their traffic goals. And so they built a completely meaningless and utterly irresistible blackhole of clicks. If you created that, please, I want you to know that someone out there, a colleague, gazed upon it with wonder. I was inspired, obviously, so I grabbed some stock photos of creepy dolls and stuffed animals and wrote “13 Toys That Whisper Things In Your Ears While You Sleep.” No, it wasn’t nearly as brilliant as “Navy SEALS vs. Baby Seals.” But I thought it was brilliant.

Two articles reviewing the promises of fair trade cocoa certification programs: Fair game: How effective is cocoa certification? by Olivier Nieburg for Confectionery News back in 2017 and Ethical cocoa schemes no panacea for struggling farmers by Ana Ionova for Reuters in spring 2018.

Three poems by Jos Charles at The Spectacle -- my favorite --

A current gives
as much as it has
given

you who, I swear, I saw

gone round the tidepools yesterday at noon But the world is
gone But the world is

a lake the size of
a lake

And one, Autobiography, by Kristin Tracey, via Poetry Daily, originally on The Seawall.

When I was a child

the Teton Dam broke.

Everyone lost their carpet.

The mildew wouldn’t stop blossoming.

Over time, everything got better.

People bought more dogs.

I loved the yippy ones most.

Tiny and fierce and shitting everywhere.

My closet was so small.

I had almost no clothes.

We were rich in other ways.

My grandparents owned a speedboat.

And here I am today, timid

around water, but enduring.

Responsibly burying everyone I love

into that dry earth.

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Digs

"Probably new to science," and other links

Link Roundup and not-dead notice