In 2007, Canada was the third-largest producer of diamonds in the world. Marketed as ethical alternatives to ”blood diamonds,” Canadian gemstones are said to go beyond basic “conflict-free” designations by providing northern Indigenous peoples with high-wage work and training. This article makes two connected points. First, it describes how the ethics of diamond mining are connected to the uneasy management of people groomed to do extractive work. Second, following the development and delivery of job training programs for Indigenous people over the course of the financial crisis of 2008–2009, this article reveals how mandatory “soft skills” courses attempt to adjust would-be worker speech to meet corporate norms in ways that were essential in maintaining the ethical sign value of subarctic stones.
L’image dominante associée aux francophones du Canada est celle de la sédentarité de collectivités bien ancrées dans un territoire et s’y reproduisant. Cette vision gomme presque complètement les formes de mobilité, pourtant liées depuis toujours à l’emploi des travailleurs francophones comme main-d’oeuvre de réserve mobile, aussi bien dans le système économique colonial classique que dans l’économie capitaliste mondialisée d’aujourd’hui. Dans ce texte, nous explorons l’interdépendance passée et actuelle de la mobilité et de la sédentarité dans la construction de l’identité des francophones au Canada, à partir des résultats d’une enquête ethnographique reliant les populations francophones de la péninsule acadienne à celles du nord-ouest du pays. Nous montrons que l’effacement des travailleurs mobiles au sein des représentations officielles des francophones au Canada (dont celle de la vitalité) contribue à créer des inégalités, mais que cet effacement est de moins en moins soutenable.
The world is experiencing new relations and transformations between natural, synthetic, and digital substances. Rather than considering these as materially distinct or ontologically separate, this Special Issue of TSANTSA interrogates how they are interlocked in socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation, and valuation. By conceptualizing the specificity of their separateness, the special issue makes possible the comparison and commensuration of their relationship, and to move beyond their essential qualities. What are the boundaries, leakages, or dis/connections between human and digital, natural and artificial, the organic and synthetic matters? Based on ethnographic research in laboratories, gold refineries, bio-tech microbial seeds and digitally-produced natural sounds, human-machine apps and cellular agriculture, each contribution theorizes the mediation, transmutation, and valuation of natural synthetics, the humanness of artificial intelligence, or the materiality of digital elements.
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