(Im)mobilizing Technology: Slow Science, Food Safety, and Borders

Smart, Alan; Smart, Josephine

doi:10.1080/1070289x.2011.672851

Cited by 21 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Immobility is often thought to result from power and poverty acting against the acceleration afforded by science and technology (Smart and Smart, 2012). Yet, technology can also be used to restrict and slow mobility, as with border surveillance (Salazar and Smart, 2011).…”

Section: Confinement Spatial and Otherwisementioning

confidence: 99%

Formalization as confinement in colonial Hong Kong

Smart

2017

International Sociology

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The nature of informal economies is structured by conflict between governmental strategies of confinement, to places, times and how things are done, and the transgression of these confines by informal actors in pursuit of survival or advantage. This article examines the influential development program of formalization in the context of these conflicts. Informality can be formalized in two ways, by eradication and by regularization. Building on their past ethnographic research on informality, the authors use released confidential Hong Kong colonial government documents to explore the informal discussions among policy makers about how to respond to informal practices, and how their understanding of street vendors influences their chose of confinement strategies. While insisting on eradication for squatters, various forms of regularization were attempted for street vendors.

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Section: Confinement Spatial and Otherwisementioning

confidence: 99%

Formalization as confinement in colonial Hong Kong

Smart

2017

International Sociology

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“…Viewed from this perspective, meeting this dual governance responsibility would require political-economic transformation of the dominant food system [16,20,33,46,48,76,78,[81][82][83], not just better food-safety policy and legislation. Such new governance for a food-safe/safe food system would involve an epistemic transformation [16,29,49,60,79,84,85]. This epistemic transformation is needed not least because the benefits of the global food system are visible on supermarket shelves and most of the health, social justice and ecological costs are usually invisible, unless, for example CSO organizations such as Fair Trade's networks campaign make them visible.…”

Section: New Safety-glasses: the Need For Epistemic Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This epistemic transformation is needed not least because the benefits of the global food system are visible on supermarket shelves and most of the health, social justice and ecological costs are usually invisible, unless, for example CSO organizations such as Fair Trade's networks campaign make them visible. Food-safety governance seems trapped by modernist traditions of trying to control nature, an approach which now create barriers to dealing with the new kinds of safety problems of late modernity [23,24,49,60,[84][85][86][87]. It will need to be reframed in the context of our profound interdependence with the natural world and the inescapable requirement of confronting social injustice [88].…”

Section: New Safety-glasses: the Need For Epistemic Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Food is to be Kept Safe and for Whom? Food-Safety Governance in an Unsafe Food System

McMahon

2013

Laws

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This paper argues that discussion of new food-safety governance should be framed by the realization that the dominant food system within which food-safety governance is designed to makes food safe is itself a structural and systemic sources of food un-safety, poor health and a future of food insecurity for many. For some, an appropriate policy response lies in addressing the connections between the food system and diseases such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes. For others it means subsuming food-safety governance within food security governance. For yet others, safe food implies food sovereignty governance and the primacy of a climate change resilient food system. Conventional approaches to food-safety governance are typically framed within a liability model of responsibility that has limited usefulness for addressing institutional, structural or systemic sources of harm such as those critics increasingly attribute to the dominant food system and which are not amenable to remedy by food-safety governance as it is widely understood. One cannot identify critical hazard points where risk is to be managed. These are food-system safety challenges. Because food-safety governance is so deeply political there needs to be greater attention to issues of governance rather than the more usual focus on the technologies of food-safety. Feminist political theorists have much to contribute to re-thinking food-safety governance in the context of diversity and the complexities of power. One could usefully start with the simple questions, "what food is to be kept-safe, for whom and who is the subject of food-safety governance in a post-Westphalian political economic order?" These questions can help unpack both the narrow parochialism and the misleading universalism of food-safety talk. This paper answers that neither the citizens of a particular state (or network of states) nor the falsely universalizing identity of 'the consumer' are adequate answers to these questions about 'who' and 'what'. Answering these questions about who and what with respect to food-safety governance brings issues OPEN ACCESS

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“…Sometimes, of course, human mediation is indeed central in such interactions. For example, the prion disease vector for bovine spongiform encephalophy (or mad cow disease) only emerged as a major problem because of human use of rendered cattle parts as animal feed (Smart and Smart, 2012a). Paul Hansen’s contribution shows that multi-species ethnography still does not cover the full expanded terrain that contemporary anthropology should be dealing with, since it omits the machinery that is frequently central to relations between humans and other living species; for such purposes, post-humanism is a better label.…”

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confidence: 99%