This paper explores some of the ways in which gender and class emerge in relation to the altered soundscape that follows technological change. As such, it takes seriously not only practices of noisemaking and disruptive sounds, but also the implication of silence and different modes of listening. The findings call for an enhanced understanding of the ephemeral qualities of sound, as well as the subsequent listening practices, and how these factors contribute, both to enforce and challenge the ways in which gender and class are enacted. This paper also adds to the discipline of ethnography, the importance for an ethnographer of acknowledging production of sound as well as subsequent listening practices as part of meaning-making practices.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36019293
Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork at a waste facility site in the northern parts of Sweden, this article investigates organizational framings of risk (Hutter and Power 2005) in relation to waste and practices of waste management, employing the concept of temporality. The suggestion is that organizational framings of risk, as it contributes to steering the risk perception of the employees, also cater to a particular temporal register. In relation to the purposes of this article, the risks that my informants mentioned and/or perceived -as part of a particular organizational framework - were most often seen in terms of situated inconveniences and hazards that required technical, and logistic solutions. While this enabled them to take action, it also contributed to bounding risk and risk perception to a particular temporal register, intimately linked to what Barbara Adam (1998) refers to as the logics of industrial time. The logics of industrial time also suffuse formulations of current environmental policies and waste management plans, on a national as well as on an EU level where waste is seen primarily as a resource that continuously needs to be invented anew. As such, the logics of industria ltime follow closely the beat of market fluctuations. Talking to representatives for the current waste facility site and observing some of their daily activities, potential risks with waste and practices of waste management were often weighed against other factors such as...
COBISS.SI-ID: 36019037
This article addresses the relation between the current proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) goods and services and the development of different kinds of risk assessments and policy documents. The ambition is to shed light on a, hithertho, less-discussed aspect of the development of risk assessments and policy documents, namely the time span between the development of new technologies and the development of regulatory frameworks. The concept of risk and danger can be seen as a potential means through which we can start to think about the consequences of the delay between the increased generation of electronic waste (e-waste) and the regulations to manage this increase. By using e-waste as a case study, this article provides the basis for a more general understanding of the relation between the development of new technologies and the development of regulatory frameworks. While it might be difficult to pin down the effects that this delay had/has for the subsequent development of ICTs, this article highlights the importance of taking into account not only how and by whom risk assessments and policy documents are developed, but also when they are developed in relation to the technologies that they serve to regulate.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34892125