I'm very excited to have a new article on disaster and body recovery out in Social Studies of Science, with many thanks to the wonderful editors and peer reviewers. The abstract and PDF (open access) are here. I give an overview of the article and its broader context here. The second link goes to the text of… Continue reading Titanic Redux: Bodies as Materials
Tag: bodies
Whale Falls: Making Opression Remote
A whale fall the carcass of a whale as it sits at the bottom of the ocean. A dead whale is a boon for local wildlife, and they swarm it in stages, sometimes reducing it to the bones in a matter of months, although the body can continue to be influential for decades. I first started… Continue reading Whale Falls: Making Opression Remote
Ephemeral Infrastructures
Recently we've been writing about Paul Edwards' (2006) notion of infrastructural globalism, or how "'the world' is produced and maintained" through infrastructures that are aimed at spanning the globe. Walking around London after the bodies conference, I came back to thinking about how different infrastructures come to be seen as ephemeral or obdurate, and how they come to be seen as belonging… Continue reading Ephemeral Infrastructures
Circulating Bodies
My thanks go out to Kristin Hussey, Sarah Morton, and everyone involved in the Corpses, Catalogues, and Catalogues conference last week! There were so many wonderful talks, and the full list is available here. Amber Kiri Aranui spoke on the repatriation of Maori ancestral remains. Ginna Camacho of Equitas presented on the role of bioethics in forensic… Continue reading Circulating Bodies
Cataloguing Corpses
May 18 in London, I'm giving a talk on forensic identification and the economic valuation of life before the advent of DNA. It looks specifically at the role that concerns about life insurance played in decisions to bury bodies at sea, and it's entitled: "Visibility, Value, and the Measure of a Life: Body Recovery and Identification after the… Continue reading Cataloguing Corpses
Jess Bier 