‘Stick them to the cross’:Anti-trafficking apps and the production of ignorance

There is a long history of ignorance production around trafficking in human beings. A proliferation of anti-trafficking apps plays an important role in the reinforcement of this ignorance. Anti-trafficking apps work in different ways to other (mis)information tools, but there is a lack of academic research on the topic. This paper addresses this gap through an agnotological approach: focusing on how ignorance is produced and becomes productive, rather than seeing ignorance as just a lack of knowledge. We investigate how anti-trafficking apps are used to manipulate (mis)understandings of and responses to human trafficking by enabling new types of awareness raising, user participation and ignorance production. The networking of ignorance that this allows – and the integration of this into new aspects of everyday life – illustrates de Goede’s (2012) warning that “the network is problematic as a security technique…because, ultimately, it has no outside” (p. 228)

Close Encounters: Intimate service interactions in lap dancing work as a nexus of ‘self-others-things’

Drawing on ethnographic research on lap dancing work, this paper focuses on how the subjectivities, interactions and settings that constitute the lap dancing industry come into being through three interrelated processes of encoding, embodying and embedding. In considering how these processes combine to ‘enact’ the industry, the paper draws on Merleau Ponty’s understanding of the world as a dynamic nexus of ‘self-others-things’. Focusing on how this nexus shapes lived experiences of intimate service interactions, the analysis considers how dancers continually negotiate customers’ expectations of the service encounter given the ways in which these are: (i) encoded in depictions of lap dancing work in marketing and advertising materials on club websites; (ii) embodied by lap dancers through their interactions with customers; and (iii) embedded within the materiality of lap dancing clubs. The paper shows how intimate service encounters can be understood as the outcome of a nexus of ‘self-others-things’ through which particular organizational subjectivities and settings are brought into being through these three interrelated processes

[United States Soil Survey Report]

Text describes the area, climate, agricultural history and statistics, soil-survey methods and definitions, soils and crops, land uses and agricultural methods, irrigation, and morphology and genesis of soils of Harris County, Texas