Warped by the field: the gravity of the margins on West Forty-Sixth Street

Reflecting on a recently completed ethnographic research project, I try to understand how things that may seem marginal to my central question nonetheless remain active within my arguments in unanticipated ways. I begin with an overview of my original research aims and activities before presenting eight marginal examples from fieldwork. I conclude with a meditation on the epistemic force that the marginal must be understood to exert on projects of knowledge production.     

Neurognostics Question

Abstract

Dopamine is among the most well‐researched neurotransmitters at the present time. For the first half‐century of neurotransmitter research, however, interest in dopamine was minimal, and only a few scattered groups of researchers studied it. It was their research that stimulated current interest, and provided the background for our present understanding of this important substance. By the late 1950s, it was clear to these individuals that dopamine served an important physiological role in mammalian brains, and that its role was most likely that of a central nervous system agonist. Soon after this, dopamine, or more specifically the depletion of dopamine, was clearly implicated in Parkinson's disease. This paper looks at the early history of the physiological roles of this intriguing compound.     

Towards Liveable Cities: Progress in the European Union Urban Environmental Agenda

The 2006 “Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment” is the first piece of official European Union (EU) policy solely focused on the urban environment. It follows a process of several years in which the EU has tried to promote an integrated approach to urban management. During the 2005–2007 “Liveable Cities” project, reflection was given to the “Thematic Strategy”. This resulted in important critiques on the EU's approach to the urban environment. Explaining how the initial top-down approach chosen by the EU contributed to the perceived “failure” of the “Thematic Strategy”, suggestions are made for alternative approaches to the creation of liveable cities in Europe.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.     

El Paso del Norte … Modernization Utopias, Othering and Management Practices in Mexico's Maquiladora Industry

Starting from the assumption that maquiladora managers play a crucial role in the current struggle for the discursive construction of the "modern" Mexico, this paper critically engages with these powerful actors and their representations of maquiladora workers and the production environment. Adopting a critical perspective on traditional notions of modernity and modernization, I start my argument from the assumption that the idea of linear progress and its use as a universal blueprint to hierarchically order the social world has not disappeared. Though the idea of progress and development is, at first glance, a simple and straightforward message, it is actually full of paradoxes. Using case-study material from El Paso del Norte, the international agglomeration on the Mexican-US border combining Ciudad Ju´rez and El Paso, I argue that both the image of maquiladoras as developed and the image of them as backward are indispensable to the modernization discourse within the maquiladora industry. I seek to show that maquiladora managers play a powerful role in transmitting the modernization narrative and that in doing so they are getting caught within its contradictions. By producing and reproducing discourses of Ciudad Ju´rez and its inhabitants as backward, while simultaneously attempting to prove that there is progress and development, managers recreate some of the very problems they attempt to overcome.