D Boyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 13434 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Boyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Boyer |
| SIGNATURE | BOYER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8944-406X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 954 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Impact in the energy social sciences and humanities: How we matter matters
Recent developments in energy social science and humanities (SSH) research raise two questions that this Dialogue jointly addresses. How do these fields of enquiry matter? And relatedly, how can we engage across our scholarly praxes and differences to complement and bolster the strengths of each field? These fields include energy anthropology, energy geography, energy science and technology studies, and energy humanities more broadly. We argue th…
Cascades of Un/Becoming: How Blackouts Impact Transitional Electropolitics
Blackouts, though typically dismissed as momentary disruptions, can catalyze sweeping shifts in energy governance and public consciousness. In examining the 2016-2017 blackout in South Australia and the 2021 Texas Freeze, we introduce transitional electropolitics to capture how these infrastructural crises reveal both the fragility of incumbent fossil-fuel regimes and the potential for rapid transitions. We show how blackouts, as "cascades of un/…
The Great EV Road Trip Journal
This past summer, my family attempted our first-ever cross-country road trip in an electric car—from our home in Houston to Los Angeles. The backstory is a bit complicated and there were some logistical reasons why it was necessary. But, if I’m being honest, we did it mostly to face our fears. We moved to Houston as a two-fossil fuel car household in 2009 and gradually morphed into a one-electric-car household over the following decade. But I cou…
The Okjökull Memorial and Geohuman Relations
Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living…
Afterword: Kill the petrostate
Afterword to "Contesting Transitions" special issue, eds. Mark Goodale and Zeynep Oguz
Infrastructural citizenship and geosolidarity: Making green infrastructure in petroliberal Houston
In northeast Houston, a community organization is experimenting with building green infrastructure, beginning with rain gardens. In doing so, the project's participants are engaging in what might be called "infrastructural citizenship." This form of citizenship uses "civil power" to defy white-supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control, which have made northeast Houston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city. Yet infrastruct…
Chapter 5 Reflexivity Reloaded: From Anthropology of Intellectuals to Critique of Method to Studying Sideways
Flooded City: Affects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston
Within 24 months (2015-2017), Houston was struck by three "500-year flood" events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians' emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature on disasters and its focus on technopolitical re…
Revolution andRevellion
It has been increasingly common to hear talk of the need for "revolutionary action" to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition-oriented political movements like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion. At other times, it is the mild liberal-consumerist "join the revolution" discourse put forward by green capitalist ventures. In both cases it raises the question of what is mea…
Afterword
Joint Preface to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
Joint Conclusion to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
Toward Adversary Anthropologies, or, How to Build Your Own Revolutionary Infrastructure
Some three decades ago now, Ulf Hannerz (1987) wrote an appreciation of what he called "anthropology's other press": periodical publications that were neither flagship journals like American Anthropologist nor devoted to a specific subfield, but that were sustained by an essentially local scholarly community.Hannerz (1987, 214) recounts one characterization of these journals as "the samizdat of anthropology," noting that they often appear at some…
Circling Back
proclaimed that our mission was to create circles, not pyramids (Boyer, Faubion, and Howe 2015).Back then, Donald Trump was still only the stuff of reality TV and tabloid journalism.Our city of Houston was not yet infamous for new rainfall measurement codes on weather maps, before a slow hurricane named Harvey dumped four feet of rain across too much asphalt and sprawl.But since beginning our work with the journal, we've also seen a great resurge…
The Necessity of Being a Writer in Anthropology Today
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Financing Open Access: Introducing Friends of Cultural Anthropology
Sound + Vision: Experimenting with the Anthropological Research Article of the Future
Are we satisfied with the conventional media for anthropological research and publication?The question is obviously not a new one.Even before anthropological research and scholarship had consolidated its modern standards of fieldwork, theory, and ethnography in the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropological writing was already part of an ecology of recordings and representations of other ways of being human that ranged from colonial …
Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico
The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done…
"Comment on "World Anthropology with an Accent: World Anthropology
Expertise, Anthropological Approaches to
Energy, Anthropology of
Aeolian politics
Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path away from fossilized …
Anthropology Electric
Why an open access publishing cooperative can work: A proposal for the AAA’s journal portfolio
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has recently announced that it will soon issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) to invite potential publishers to bid for the business of managing the association¿s publishing program (see Schmid 2015). The new contract would begin January 1, 2018 and likely run for the next ten years. Because the AAA is the world¿s largest publisher of anthropology titles (twenty-one journals and Anthropology News), th…
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Energopower: An Introduction
This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential paradigm of "biopower" developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays…
American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West
This essay asks what the study of socialism and its legacies still offers anthropology of the contemporary world and argues that studying late-socialist aesthetics and practices can provide unexpected insight into late-liberal political culture, communication, and subjectivity. In the first half of the essay, we concentrate on a particular mode of parody (known in Russia as stiob) that imitated and inhabited the formal features of authoritative d…
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts
This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and impasses of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in social-cultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography of experts and cultures of expertise rem…
Ostalgieand the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany
Research Article| May 01 2006 Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany Dominic Boyer Dominic Boyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2006) 18 (2): 361-381. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Dominic Boyer; Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany. Public Culture 1 May …
Simply the best: Parody and political sincerity in Iceland
Pursuing a self-described anarcho-surrealist politics in the aftermath of Iceland's banking crisis, Jón Gnarr shocked the country's political establishment by winning the mayoral election in Reykjavík in May 2010. In this article, I explore the rise of Gnarr's Best Party, especially its refusal to accept a distinction between parody and sincerity in its mode of political performance. Against the backdrop of the increasing monopolization of (neo)l…
Energopolitics and the Anthropology of Energy
energy, energopolitics, environment, anthropology of energy, energy transition, political anthropology
Anthropology Electric
The corporeality of expertise
In this essay, I write about the relationship between corporeality and expert knowledge while simultaneously, and only partly successfully, trying to avoid writing about 'theintellectual's body.' The first half of the essay enlists Marxian social theory to model how the division and specialization of intellectual labors generates a certain experiential relationship between expert and objects of expert knowledge that I have termed elsewhere the 'p…
Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic
What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He-almost certainly 'he'-would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censor's shelves-why read when your l…
Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements
To what extent are intellectuals artisans of nationalism? In this chapter we review past and present anthropological research that has helped to reveal the agency of intellectuals in the projects and operations of states and nations. If the intellectual has long been defined in the Marxian-Gramscian tradition as a social actor with a special praxical investment in ways and forms of knowing, then what we discuss as "intellectualism," the social fo…
Aeolian politics
Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path away from fossilized …
On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany
Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico
The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done…
Conspiracy, history, and therapy at a BerlinStammtisch
In this article, I analyze conspiratorial knowledge in discussions of East German politics and history around a Berlin Stammtisch (regulars' table). The Stammtisch is a venerable, mostly masculine institution of German political culture that defines an intimate fraternal space within which social knowledge and political judgments are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Here, I am particularly interested in how talk of the "covert agencies" an…
Foucault in the Bush. The Social Life of Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg
This essay seeks to make critical theory an object of ethnographic con-textualization and inquiry through an exploration of the social life of post-structuralist theory in 1980s East Berlin. The 'Prenzlauer Berg Scene' of artists and writers utilized post-structuralism as a distinctive register for defining their social identity and as an analytical and interpretive paradigm for articulating their alienation from the state-crafted language of GDR…
Visiting knowledge in anthropology: An introduction
It is symptomatic of my dilemma in introducing this special issue of Ethnos that the title of this project went through a half-dozen different iterations before settling at 'Revisiting the Anthropo
Turner's Anthropology of Media and Its Legacies
In the 1990s, Terry Turner produced some of the most conceptually and ethnographically important research anywhere in the anthropology of media, apparently without having intended to do so. This article reviews the impact of his collaboration on the Kayapo Video Project both in terms of its effects in Kayapo communities and in terms of the debates it catalyzed in anthropology over the relationship of human productive powers with representation an…
Integral Europe: Fast‐Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism
Integral Europe: Fast‐Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Douglas R. Holmes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii. 253 pp., notes, bibliography, index
Media Markets, Mediating Labors, and the Branding of East German Culture at Super Illu
Social Text - 68 (Volume 19, Number 3), Fall 2001
Flooded City: Affects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston
Within 24 months (2015-2017), Houston was struck by three "500-year flood" events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians' emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature on disasters and its focus on technopolitical re…
Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology)
This article explores the connection between digital media practices and digital (self-) understandings in western news journalism today. I describe how German and US online journalists translate their experiential familiarity with a plethora of digital information and communication technologies into narratives of digital expertise that contrast their "non-linear," "iterative," "interactive," and "network" modes of thinking from the journalistic …
Yellow Sand of Berlin
While conducting fieldwork in Berlin in 1996 and 1997, I encountered a Zeitgeist of `becoming' enveloping all aspects of my life in the city - from the sensory experiences of walking a metropolis under intense revision, to listening to public discourse on the future of the `New Berlin' as symbol of German cosmopolitanism, to hearing my East German interlocutors recount the erasure of the GDR past from the historical narratives of unified Germany.…
Revolution andRevellion
It has been increasingly common to hear talk of the need for "revolutionary action" to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition-oriented political movements like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion. At other times, it is the mild liberal-consumerist "join the revolution" discourse put forward by green capitalist ventures. In both cases it raises the question of what is mea…
Welcome to the new Europe
The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice
The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice. Bradley A. Levinson. Douglas E. Foley. and Dorothy C. Holland. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. xiv. 338 pp., notes, references, contributors, index
On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany
Media Markets, Mediating Labors, and the Branding of East German Culture at Super Illu
Social Text - 68 (Volume 19, Number 3), Fall 2001
Yellow Sand of Berlin
While conducting fieldwork in Berlin in 1996 and 1997, I encountered a Zeitgeist of `becoming' enveloping all aspects of my life in the city - from the sensory experiences of walking a metropolis under intense revision, to listening to public discourse on the future of the `New Berlin' as symbol of German cosmopolitanism, to hearing my East German interlocutors recount the erasure of the GDR past from the historical narratives of unified Germany.…
Foucault in the Bush. The Social Life of Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg
This essay seeks to make critical theory an object of ethnographic con-textualization and inquiry through an exploration of the social life of post-structuralist theory in 1980s East Berlin. The 'Prenzlauer Berg Scene' of artists and writers utilized post-structuralism as a distinctive register for defining their social identity and as an analytical and interpretive paradigm for articulating their alienation from the state-crafted language of GDR…
Integral Europe: Fast‐Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism
Integral Europe: Fast‐Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Douglas R. Holmes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii. 253 pp., notes, bibliography, index
The African Crisis in Context: Comparative Encounters with Educational Rationalization
Productivity, Professionalism and the Academic Labor Market in Anthropology
The Mischief of Tropes in the New Germany: On Glaeser’s Divided in Unity
Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic
What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He-almost certainly 'he'-would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censor's shelves-why read when your l…
Gender and the Solvency of Professionalism: Eastern German Journalism before and after 1989
In this article, the author examines the intersection of gender, professionalism, and post-socialist transitions in East-Central Europe through a case study of the gender politics of journalistic labor in eastern Germany before and after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic from 1989 to 1990. Beginning with the concrete ethnographic problem that gender tends to be marginalized within eastern German journalists' contemporary narratives o…
Welcome to the new Europe
The corporeality of expertise
In this essay, I write about the relationship between corporeality and expert knowledge while simultaneously, and only partly successfully, trying to avoid writing about 'theintellectual's body.' The first half of the essay enlists Marxian social theory to model how the division and specialization of intellectual labors generates a certain experiential relationship between expert and objects of expert knowledge that I have termed elsewhere the 'p…
Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements
To what extent are intellectuals artisans of nationalism? In this chapter we review past and present anthropological research that has helped to reveal the agency of intellectuals in the projects and operations of states and nations. If the intellectual has long been defined in the Marxian-Gramscian tradition as a social actor with a special praxical investment in ways and forms of knowing, then what we discuss as "intellectualism," the social fo…
Visiting knowledge in anthropology: An introduction
It is symptomatic of my dilemma in introducing this special issue of Ethnos that the title of this project went through a half-dozen different iterations before settling at 'Revisiting the Anthropo
Conspiracy, history, and therapy at a BerlinStammtisch
In this article, I analyze conspiratorial knowledge in discussions of East German politics and history around a Berlin Stammtisch (regulars' table). The Stammtisch is a venerable, mostly masculine institution of German political culture that defines an intimate fraternal space within which social knowledge and political judgments are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Here, I am particularly interested in how talk of the "covert agencies" an…
Ostalgieand the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany
Research Article| May 01 2006 Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany Dominic Boyer Dominic Boyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2006) 18 (2): 361-381. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Dominic Boyer; Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany. Public Culture 1 May …
Turner's Anthropology of Media and Its Legacies
In the 1990s, Terry Turner produced some of the most conceptually and ethnographically important research anywhere in the anthropology of media, apparently without having intended to do so. This article reviews the impact of his collaboration on the Kayapo Video Project both in terms of its effects in Kayapo communities and in terms of the debates it catalyzed in anthropology over the relationship of human productive powers with representation an…
Introduction to Turner Special Issue
Of Dialectical Germans and Dialectical Ethnographers: Notes From an Engagement With Philosophy
Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of Parody and American Stiob
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts
This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and impasses of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in social-cultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography of experts and cultures of expertise rem…
‘What is driving university reform in the age of globalization?’: ‘What Is Driving University Reform’
IThe critical narrative we often hear about current institutional reforms of higher education is that, regardless of where they are taking place and what flag they are flying,theyhaveasingularobjective:todissipateorganizationalandcollegialautonomy in order to better saturate the university field with market-oriented principles (e.g. knowledge as commodity, faculty as wage labour, administration as management, student body as consumer public, univ…
On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: From crisis talk to multiattentional method
Response to Elizabeth Rata: ‘What Is Driving University Reform’
Sociology (47 works) · Political science (26 works) · History (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · History (14 works)