Alex Blanchette
Biographic Data
| ID | 157123 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Blanchette |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Blanchette |
| SIGNATURE | BLANCHETTE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Why Work? Doing the Anthropology of Work
The authors declare no conflicts of interest
Work and the Data Economy
The 2024 joint meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work took the theme of "Work and the Data Economy." The articles in this special issue, first presented at the meeting, explore the datafication of ethnographic settings not conventionally associated with high-tech or knowledge work. In this introduction, we argue that datafication is a key technology of abstraction that aggregates and transfor…
Forum 62
Studies of more-than-human sociality in general, and multispecies ethnography in particular, are becoming an increasingly popular trend in global (social, human, and transdisciplinary) scholarship. In the current forum, researchers from various disciplines discuss the advantages, limitations, and challenges of this trend. They also share their thoughts on why multispecies research has (or has not) an appeal in Russian academia and what the future…
Chapter three The Politics of Palatability hog viscera, pet food, and the trade in industrial sense impressions
Visceral MonoculturesA squat white metal-and-concrete building sits in a barren, dusty Great Plains industrial park outside the town of Dixon. 1 It is unremarkable and is dwarfed by its two gargantuan neighbors: a slaughter house that kills more than nineteen thousand hogs per day and a factory that converts the ensuing harvest of 282,000 pounds of rendered fat into commercial biodiesel and glycerin for cosmetics.There are no signs or forms of br…
Ending Things, as an End in Itself
The COVID-19 pandemic, and its incessant spread through American meatpacking plants, has been making me rethink the time I spent in animal agribusinesses. I find myself remembering most vividly the
Porkopolis
Alex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism
Deindustrial Chicago and the Ruralization of The Jungle
This brief essay proposes ways of seeing the city and the country as relational and interdependent, cued to a cultural moment at which these spaces are often scripted as occupying separate worlds with distinct issues and dilemmas. It does so by juxtaposing the present-day struggles of Chicago's Back of the Yards, the setting of Upton Sinclair's infamous 1906 meatpacking exposé The Jungle, in relation to ascendant and highly industrialized pockets…
Introduction
Critically cued to a political moment at which "the rural" across diverse North American locales is taken to be a singular, homogeneous place, this introduction to the special issue explores the value of comparative inquiry into settings and subject positions that index the rural in markedly different ways. It does so through the conceit of an anthropological almanac: a genre of forecasting through brief, necessarily ephemeral provocations, which…
Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms
In the 1930s, erosion caused storms of dust to hurtle across the American Great Plains and Midwest. While agricultural conservation methods helped remediate this landscape, recent studies suggest the region is contending with a new type of particle cloud: desiccated fecal dust that renders the vitalities of factory farms airborne, potentially exposing those in their surrounds to various forms of illness while spreading antibiotic resistance genes…
Industrial Meat Production
This review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words of the article's title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses. In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of industrialisms both…
Nothing New
Herding Species
This article examines microbial ecologies and industrial ontologies as they unfold in the animal worlds created by the American factory farm. Based in a hundred-mile radius region of the U.S. Great Plains-where some seven million hogs are annually manufactured from prelife to postdeath-it unpacks agribusiness managers' varied modes of socio-ecological intervention once porcine overproduction causes disease to breach the indoor spaces of confineme…
Herding Species
This article examines microbial ecologies and industrial ontologies as they unfold in the animal worlds created by the American factory farm. Based in a hundred-mile radius region of the U.S. Great Plains-where some seven million hogs are annually manufactured from prelife to postdeath-it unpacks agribusiness managers' varied modes of socio-ecological intervention once porcine overproduction causes disease to breach the indoor spaces of confineme…
Porkopolis
Alex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism
Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms
In the 1930s, erosion caused storms of dust to hurtle across the American Great Plains and Midwest. While agricultural conservation methods helped remediate this landscape, recent studies suggest the region is contending with a new type of particle cloud: desiccated fecal dust that renders the vitalities of factory farms airborne, potentially exposing those in their surrounds to various forms of illness while spreading antibiotic resistance genes…
Introduction
Critically cued to a political moment at which "the rural" across diverse North American locales is taken to be a singular, homogeneous place, this introduction to the special issue explores the value of comparative inquiry into settings and subject positions that index the rural in markedly different ways. It does so through the conceit of an anthropological almanac: a genre of forecasting through brief, necessarily ephemeral provocations, which…
Deindustrial Chicago and the Ruralization of The Jungle
This brief essay proposes ways of seeing the city and the country as relational and interdependent, cued to a cultural moment at which these spaces are often scripted as occupying separate worlds with distinct issues and dilemmas. It does so by juxtaposing the present-day struggles of Chicago's Back of the Yards, the setting of Upton Sinclair's infamous 1906 meatpacking exposé The Jungle, in relation to ascendant and highly industrialized pockets…
Nothing New
Herding Species
This article examines microbial ecologies and industrial ontologies as they unfold in the animal worlds created by the American factory farm. Based in a hundred-mile radius region of the U.S. Great Plains-where some seven million hogs are annually manufactured from prelife to postdeath-it unpacks agribusiness managers' varied modes of socio-ecological intervention once porcine overproduction causes disease to breach the indoor spaces of confineme…
Industrial Meat Production
This review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words of the article's title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses. In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of industrialisms both…
Nothing New
Deindustrial Chicago and the Ruralization of The Jungle
This brief essay proposes ways of seeing the city and the country as relational and interdependent, cued to a cultural moment at which these spaces are often scripted as occupying separate worlds with distinct issues and dilemmas. It does so by juxtaposing the present-day struggles of Chicago's Back of the Yards, the setting of Upton Sinclair's infamous 1906 meatpacking exposé The Jungle, in relation to ascendant and highly industrialized pockets…
Introduction
Critically cued to a political moment at which "the rural" across diverse North American locales is taken to be a singular, homogeneous place, this introduction to the special issue explores the value of comparative inquiry into settings and subject positions that index the rural in markedly different ways. It does so through the conceit of an anthropological almanac: a genre of forecasting through brief, necessarily ephemeral provocations, which…
Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms
In the 1930s, erosion caused storms of dust to hurtle across the American Great Plains and Midwest. While agricultural conservation methods helped remediate this landscape, recent studies suggest the region is contending with a new type of particle cloud: desiccated fecal dust that renders the vitalities of factory farms airborne, potentially exposing those in their surrounds to various forms of illness while spreading antibiotic resistance genes…
Porkopolis
Alex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism
Ending Things, as an End in Itself
The COVID-19 pandemic, and its incessant spread through American meatpacking plants, has been making me rethink the time I spent in animal agribusinesses. I find myself remembering most vividly the
Chapter three The Politics of Palatability hog viscera, pet food, and the trade in industrial sense impressions
Visceral MonoculturesA squat white metal-and-concrete building sits in a barren, dusty Great Plains industrial park outside the town of Dixon. 1 It is unremarkable and is dwarfed by its two gargantuan neighbors: a slaughter house that kills more than nineteen thousand hogs per day and a factory that converts the ensuing harvest of 282,000 pounds of rendered fat into commercial biodiesel and glycerin for cosmetics.There are no signs or forms of br…
Forum 62
Studies of more-than-human sociality in general, and multispecies ethnography in particular, are becoming an increasingly popular trend in global (social, human, and transdisciplinary) scholarship. In the current forum, researchers from various disciplines discuss the advantages, limitations, and challenges of this trend. They also share their thoughts on why multispecies research has (or has not) an appeal in Russian academia and what the future…
Work and the Data Economy
The 2024 joint meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work took the theme of "Work and the Data Economy." The articles in this special issue, first presented at the meeting, explore the datafication of ethnographic settings not conventionally associated with high-tech or knowledge work. In this introduction, we argue that datafication is a key technology of abstraction that aggregates and transfor…
Why Work? Doing the Anthropology of Work
The authors declare no conflicts of interest
Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Biology (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Agriculture (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Business (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (3 works) · Geography (3 works) · Law (3 works)