Suchergebnisse

"Based on a decade of ethnographic and archival research in Peru, Life and Inequality in the Eastern Pacific reveals how dominant representations of the ocean obscure racialized disparities in the ways that different people experience the impacts of the climate crisis. In contrast, the readings offered in this book of waves and coastal development, the circulation of ocean waste, El Niño warming events, and the extraction of jumbo squid draw on experiences and ways of knowing that have been submerged by widely circulating interpretations of the Anthropocene's oceans. Life and Inequality in the Eastern Pacific presents a complex image of Peru's global seascapes as historical spaces comprised of precarious more-than-human life worlds that are tenuously arranged to expose people, non-human species, and places to unequal levels of harm. He traces how powerful actors in Peru represent the ocean through semiotic processes of translation, decontextualization, and erasure. Recognizing the significance of these processes is important for understanding not only how critical aspects of climatological and ecological crises are erased in public discourse, but also for revealing how racializing and classist discourses are inserted into discussions about climate change and environmental problems. This book also addresses expanding scholarly interest in the world's oceans as sites for thinking about social inequalities, environmental politics, and multispecies relationships"--

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the public testimonies of expert witnesses during a Canadian federal commission charged with investigating the reasons for dramatic declines of sockeye salmon returning to British Columbia's Fraser River in 2009. These testimonies were intended to provide a foundation of expert opinion upon which clear policy recommendations could be made. However, the hearings were beset by debates over the ability of scientific research to assess harms to wild salmon. Through a discursive analysis of knowledge performances during the commission's hearings, I argue that neoliberalized approaches to evaluating harm and risk enable the production of uncertainty as a political strategy for blocking regulation and letting markets solve ecological crises. Furthermore, my analysis of expert testimonies underscores the degree to which public discussions of science and ecological crises are about the performance of (non)knowledge and why more scientific information has little impact on their outcomes. [uncertainty, risk, ignorance, science, salmon]

This article examines recent efforts by the Canadian government to silence a federal scientist from publicly speaking about her research on the decline in Fraser River sockeye salmon. I argue that the information embargo through which Canadian officials silenced government science not only served an agnotological function of demobilizing the opposition by promoting public ignorance about ecological issues, but also functioned as a means of state making by producing an image of the state as a unitary and powerful actor. This performance of secrecy represents a critical component of contemporary governance, and its examination has much to reveal about the central role that the production of a state effect plays in neoliberalism.