Risk Stories in the Media: Food Consumption, Risk and Anxiety

Although media-fueled food scares are often described as linked to consumers’ food anxieties, previous studies of food consumption have failed to explore fully how foodscare reports add to consumers’ anxieties. Using a relational theory of risk and a narrative approach, this article highlights how food-scare reports, through various risk accounts, create anxiety-inducing stories where consumers are appointed as handlers of conflicting food risks. Based on material collected from a 2009 Swedish food scare, the article suggests that food-scare reports construct multiple conflicting risks. The analysis also shows that news reports make consumers responsible for handling these risks and, in addition, involve conflicting instructions regarding how consumers should handle the risks described. The article concludes that it is the combination of conflicting risks and conflicting prescriptions for handling those risks that feeds consumers’ anxieties

Infrastructuring alternative markets: Enabling local food exchange through patchworking

The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of the complex material arrangements involved in the formation of AFNs by applying the concept of market infrastructure and turning our attention to the process of infrastructuring. Based on an ethnographic study of REKO rings, a network of local food markets, we show howdisparate elements, e.g. digital interfaces, parking locations, and Swish (an electronic payment system), are interconnected and configured to form the REKO ring market infrastructure patchwork – an infrastructure made by linking together previously unrelated elements and re-purposing them. We then demonstrate how this patchworkinfrastructure enables the formation of market actors, coordination of the market actors’ activities, and the qualification and valuation of foods, thereby making the exchange of alternative food possible. Our analysis of infrastructurepatchworking illustrates a different type of infrastructure-making resulting in a temporary and fragile infrastructure which, despite its instability, enables exchange. Drawing on this analysis we argue that the potential of AFNs to take form and impact contemporary modes of food provisioning cannot be understood without exploring the process of infrastructuring

Etnomatemática y escuela: algunos lineamientos para su integración

La etnomatemática es considerada como una línea de investigación que busca pensamiento matemático en ambientes extraescolares, ingenuamente se podría creer que este tipo de conocimiento no tiene nada que ver con la racionalidad occidental presentada en la escuela, sin embargo considerar esta idea como válida implicaría que el mundo social y la cultura en la cual vive el estudiante no aporta nada en su formación, idea que ha refutada. En el presente documento se pretende mostrar algunas relaciones entre la Etnomatemática y la escuela a partir de la triangulación de datos obtenidos en una búsqueda y análisis bibliográfico de autores que relacionen estos conceptos

Quantum simulation of dark energy candidates

Additional scalar fields from scalar-tensor, modified gravity or higher dimensional theories beyond general relativity may account for dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the Universe. These theories have lead to proposed models of screening mechanisms, such as chameleon and symmetron fields, to account for the tight experimental bounds on fifth-force searches. Cold atom systems have been very successfully used to constrain the parameters of these screening models, and may in future eliminate the interesting parameter space of some models entirely. In this paper, we show how to manipulate a Bose-Einstein condensate to simulate the effect of any screened scalar field model coupled conformally to the metric. We give explicit expressions for the simulation of various common models. This result may be useful for investigating the computationally challenging evolution of particles on a screened scalar field background, as well as for testing the metrology scheme of an upcoming detector proposal.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

How Green Marketing Works: Practices, Materialities and Images

There are surprisingly few empirical studies of green marketing practices, and when such studies are carried out, they tend to take a simplistic approach. In this paper, the need to develop more complex and critical analyses of green marketing practices is addressed through the development of a practice theory approach to green marketing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Nature Shop, this paper explores the marketing of green outdoor products. Through various marketing practices, the Nordic Nature Shop presents the purchase and use of green outdoor products as a way to carry out outdoor practices while simultaneously protecting a fragile outdoors and thereby enabling consumers to be good both in and to nature. The analysis shows that not only are green products marketed through practices, but they are also marketed as practice-enablers, that is, tools in the accomplishment of environmentally problematic practices

Enacting Green Consumers: The Case of the Scandinavian Preppies

The aim of this paper is to develop and illustrate an analytic approach that brings the active making and makings of green consumer images to the fore. Efforts to “know” the green consumers have generated multiple representations. Enactments of the green consumer are not innocent but also play a role in shaping how we understand and approach sustainable consumption. Because of this it is important to examine and critically discuss how green consumers are enacted today. This paper develops an approach that allows us to examine how green consumers are enacted and discuss the consequences these constructions might have for sustainability. Theoretically, a performativity approach drawing on theories from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and economic sociology is used to discuss the enactment of green consumers. Empirically, focus is on Boomerang – a Swedish fashion retailer, brand, and producer – and its marketing practices. The analysis shows how the marketing work of the Boomerang Company leads to the enactment of the Green Scandinavian Preppy. This specific version of the green consumer is a combination of the knowledgeable green connoisseur – a consumer that knows quality when he/she sees it – and the green hedonist in search of the good life. The Green Scandinavian Preppy wants to enjoy nature, go sailing, and do so wearing fashionable quality clothes. This is a consumer that knows quality, appreciates design, and has the means to pay for both. While this is a version of the green consumer that might be appealing and thus have the potential to pro-mote a version of green consumption, it is also a green consumer image that has lost much of its political power as green consumption is framed as simply another source of pleasure and identity-making

Images of Responsible Consumers: Organizing the Marketing of Sustainability

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain what organizes the marketing of retail sustainability. Design/Methodology/Approach: Theoretically, this paper takes a marketing-as-practice approach and makes use of practice theory to conceptualize the marketing of sustainability. Methodologically, an ethnographic study of three Swedish retail chains and their marketing work has been conducted. Interviews with management, observations made at the stores of these three retailers and various marketing texts and images produced by these retailers form the material analysed. Findings: This paper illustrates three different ways of marketing and enacting sustainability. It shows that sustainability is framed differently and, indeed, enacted differently in order to fit various ideas about who are the responsible consumers. The argument is that rather than consumer demand, supply pressure or media scandals, the marketing of sustainability is in each of the cases studied configured around a specific notion of the responsible consumer. What sustainability work is marketed, through which devices it is marketed, and how it is framed is guided by an idea of whom the retailers’ responsible consumers are, what their lifestyles are, and what they will be interested in. Images of responsible consumers work as configuring agents around which retailing activities and devices are organized. Originality/value – The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the marketing of sustainability and offers a new explanation about what it is that influences the various approach to sustainable marketing taken by retailers

Algunas posturas con respecto al sistema de numeración muisca

En este artículo se presenta la hipótesis de la posible existencia de un sistema de numeración, utilizado por los indígenas Muiscas, los cuales habitaron desde el siglo VI A.C.-XIX, en el centro geográfico de lo que hoy denominamos Colombia, más específicamente en los departamentos de Cundinamarca, Boyacá y parte de Santander. Para la exposición de esta hipótesis se utilizan varias fuentes históricas, entre ellas manuscritos del siglo XVIII del padre José Domingo Duquesne, quien fue la primera persona en escribir acerca de la posible existencia de un sistema de numeración escrito utilizado por esta comunidad nativa

Algunos enfoques de investigación en Etnomatemática

La etnomatemática como campo de investigación ha tenido diferentes definiciones y tendencias metodológicas, cada una de estas muestra una concepción de las matemáticas y del conocimiento. Diferentes autores han presentado algunas clasificaciones de las investigaciones en este campo, sin embargo para estas clasificaciones sólo han tenido en cuenta elementos como el tipo de población o el énfasis  de las mismas. En este documento se propone tener en cuenta las metodologías utilizadas como un criterio de clasificación de investigaciones en este campo. Las propuestas de clasificación de investigaciones en etnomatemática buscan establecer tendencias y comprender el comportamiento de ésta, generando su diversificación y posicionamiento. Para esta labor se consultaron diferentes propuestas de clasificación y posteriormente se elaboró una propuesta propia teniendo como criterios de clasificación la metodología implementada. Fruto de este proceso se presentan tres categorías (estudios interpretativos de objetos, estudios interpretativos con comunidades, y estudios emancipadores- transformadores con comunidades) las cuales están relacionadas con los tres paradigmas del conocimiento: positivismo, interpretativo y crítico