Calkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 48821 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Calkin |
| FAMILY NAME | Calkin |
| SIGNATURE | CALKIN |
| AFFILIATIONS | Freie Universität Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0925-2610 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Porous fences and elephant agencies: Rethinking infrastructure in the Okavango Delta
Despite a recent surge of literature on infrastructure and space, infrastructure breakdown in many domains continues to be presented as the result of technical failure, neglect of maintenance, or human sabotage. Infrastructure breakdown is thus mostly cast as abnormal and as caused by deficient materials, lacking resources or disobedient humans, reproducing normative ideas that successful infrastructure should be stable in its environment and wor…
On Growth, Degrowth, and Growing
Today, growth is one of the central frameworks shaping collective life and political action across the globe. Few other ideas are now as commonsensical in guiding the aspirations of people, societies, institutions, nation-states, and entire regions—for all of which the mantra applies: Growth is good. At the same time, the dominance of growth as a self-evident good has triggered strong challenges, one of the most prominent of which is the project …
Mining matters: Coloniality and the politics of the sustainable energy transition
Contemporary talk of sustainable energy transitions, green technologies, or green energy evokes environmentally friendly, benign and forward-looking policy and practice. Typically, such imaginations of a greener energy future avoid mention of the raw mineral realities of mining. To question these dominant policy framings, we use the analytical lens of coloniality to examine continuities, ruptures and expansions of extractive practices on differen…
Making Place with Plants: An Introduction
This special issue brings plant studies into conversation with anthropological discussions of place-making and emplacement, drawing particular attention to the analytical ambit of human–plant intimacies. Plant intimacies—ways of carefully attending to, affecting, and being affected by plants—are ubiquitous and central to many human lives but remain underexamined in anthropological conversations on home and place-making. Closely inquiring into the…
Plant intimacies: Thinking Through Affect and Knowledge in a Perilous World
Vegetal intimacies in science
Growth
T he figure of growth has risen to prominence in economic thinking.Without going into the intricate genealogy of this "great derangement," we simply note that a powerful natural analogy is at work: if the process of growth is fundamental to biological flourishing, then it must be for economic life too. 1 In this way, it becomes hard to think about the economic outside of this framework, where only growing economies are considered healthy. 2 While…
Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science
In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan-Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinar…
On bundling: The aesthetics of exchange and growth in central Uganda
In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods - fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance - in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of 'bundling', reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon's historical and linguistic scaffo…
Affect, Power, and Institutions
Who Knows Tomorrow: Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan
Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms…
The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
While I was reading Joseph Masco's disturbing book The Future of Fallout, news media reported that China had successfully tested a hypersonic missile, a military technology so advanced it could bypass the US missile defense system. This, many nervous commentators noted, put China ahead of the US in the global arms race, justifying further urgent military investments to catch- up. Masco's book is a damning appraisal of such mobilizations of existe…
Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab
This article complicates romances of infrastructural improvisation by describing infrastructural failures that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. To meet project deadlines, to make careers and to participate in transnational collaborative projects, Ugandan biologists have to stand in for decaying or absent infrastructures with their bodies. Ugandan biologists hide such sacrifices from their international…
Food as medicine: Making 'better bananas' in Uganda
Cooking bananas ( matooke) are a main staple in central Uganda and are very important to well-being and health. Recently, matooke have also been associated with micronutrient deficiencies among children and women. For a number of years, this fruit has been at the heart of a public health strategy that seeks to create 'better bananas', that is, biofortified or nutritionally enriched bananas. The efforts to biofortify food crops are part of a recen…
Lab hands and knowing toxic substances in Uganda
How does one know a toxic substance? Perhaps paradoxically, through contact with it, as I show ethnographically from a molecular biology laboratory in Uganda, a site where people routinely handle a range of chemicals, including potentially hazardous toxicants. I analyse an everyday situation in which researchers worked with ethidium bromide, a substance regularly used to stain DNA bands in gels at this Ugandan lab but also in many comparable labs…
Health as growth
What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of hu…
Population (What is It Good For)
Population (What is It Good For?) Sandra Calkins and Tyler Zoanni Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, eds., Making Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. 209 pp. Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 232 pp. Ayo Wahlberg, Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 248 pp. We invoke the anti-Vietnam War song "War" because a…
Divining, testing, and the problem of accountabilityRejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of E…
Who Knows Tomorrow?: Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan
How "clean gold" came to matter: Metal detectors, infrastructure, and valuation
Recently an ancient resource-gold-gained new importance in Sudan. To inquire into the making of values and their negotiation at a time of national economic reorientation, I explore the emergence of a resource category, so-called clean gold, and link this to the introduction of a new prospecting technology-metal detectors. I follow the translation of metal detectors to Sudan and explore them in relation to a broader techno-economic infrastructure …
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Nomaden in unserer Welt: Die Vorreiter der Globalisierung: Von Mobilität und Handel, Herrschaft und Widerstand
Nomaden scheinen aus unserem Alltag fast vollständig verschwunden zu sein. Doch die Abhängigkeit von Mobilität, die Bewältigung finanzieller Unsicherheiten sowie der ausgewogene Umgang mit unserer Umwelt fordern alle, auch ›moderne‹ Gesellschaften heraus. In der Wahrnehmung von Sesshaften verkörpern Nomaden und andere Mobile bis heute allerdings oft das Rückständige, Fremde und Bedrohliche, besonders im Hinblick auf staatliche Ordnungen. Dieser B…
Transformed Livelihoods in the Lower Atbara Area: Pastoral Rashâyda Responses to Crisis
External dynamics and processes have long affected the Lower Atbara area of Sudan, and have irreversibly transformed nomadic pastoral livelihood systems. In the context of resource scarcity and recurring conflicts, this paper analyses how Rashâyda pastoralists from Um Sayâla responded to challenges to their pastoral production. As relative newcomers to Sudan, the Rashâyda represent a peculiar case because their access to pastoral resources has be…
Family Size and Contraceptive Use among Mormons: 1965-75
Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab
This article complicates romances of infrastructural improvisation by describing infrastructural failures that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. To meet project deadlines, to make careers and to participate in transnational collaborative projects, Ugandan biologists have to stand in for decaying or absent infrastructures with their bodies. Ugandan biologists hide such sacrifices from their international…
Health as growth
What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of hu…
Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science
In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan-Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinar…
On bundling: The aesthetics of exchange and growth in central Uganda
In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods - fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance - in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of 'bundling', reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon's historical and linguistic scaffo…
The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
While I was reading Joseph Masco's disturbing book The Future of Fallout, news media reported that China had successfully tested a hypersonic missile, a military technology so advanced it could bypass the US missile defense system. This, many nervous commentators noted, put China ahead of the US in the global arms race, justifying further urgent military investments to catch- up. Masco's book is a damning appraisal of such mobilizations of existe…
How "clean gold" came to matter: Metal detectors, infrastructure, and valuation
Recently an ancient resource-gold-gained new importance in Sudan. To inquire into the making of values and their negotiation at a time of national economic reorientation, I explore the emergence of a resource category, so-called clean gold, and link this to the introduction of a new prospecting technology-metal detectors. I follow the translation of metal detectors to Sudan and explore them in relation to a broader techno-economic infrastructure …
Family Size and Contraceptive Use among Mormons: 1965-75
Plant intimacies: Thinking Through Affect and Knowledge in a Perilous World
Vegetal intimacies in science
Growth
T he figure of growth has risen to prominence in economic thinking.Without going into the intricate genealogy of this "great derangement," we simply note that a powerful natural analogy is at work: if the process of growth is fundamental to biological flourishing, then it must be for economic life too. 1 In this way, it becomes hard to think about the economic outside of this framework, where only growing economies are considered healthy. 2 While…
Food as medicine: Making 'better bananas' in Uganda
Cooking bananas ( matooke) are a main staple in central Uganda and are very important to well-being and health. Recently, matooke have also been associated with micronutrient deficiencies among children and women. For a number of years, this fruit has been at the heart of a public health strategy that seeks to create 'better bananas', that is, biofortified or nutritionally enriched bananas. The efforts to biofortify food crops are part of a recen…
Lab hands and knowing toxic substances in Uganda
How does one know a toxic substance? Perhaps paradoxically, through contact with it, as I show ethnographically from a molecular biology laboratory in Uganda, a site where people routinely handle a range of chemicals, including potentially hazardous toxicants. I analyse an everyday situation in which researchers worked with ethidium bromide, a substance regularly used to stain DNA bands in gels at this Ugandan lab but also in many comparable labs…
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Transformed Livelihoods in the Lower Atbara Area: Pastoral Rashâyda Responses to Crisis
External dynamics and processes have long affected the Lower Atbara area of Sudan, and have irreversibly transformed nomadic pastoral livelihood systems. In the context of resource scarcity and recurring conflicts, this paper analyses how Rashâyda pastoralists from Um Sayâla responded to challenges to their pastoral production. As relative newcomers to Sudan, the Rashâyda represent a peculiar case because their access to pastoral resources has be…
Family Size and Contraceptive Use among Mormons: 1965-75
Transformed Livelihoods in the Lower Atbara Area: Pastoral Rashâyda Responses to Crisis
External dynamics and processes have long affected the Lower Atbara area of Sudan, and have irreversibly transformed nomadic pastoral livelihood systems. In the context of resource scarcity and recurring conflicts, this paper analyses how Rashâyda pastoralists from Um Sayâla responded to challenges to their pastoral production. As relative newcomers to Sudan, the Rashâyda represent a peculiar case because their access to pastoral resources has be…
Nomaden in unserer Welt: Die Vorreiter der Globalisierung: Von Mobilität und Handel, Herrschaft und Widerstand
Nomaden scheinen aus unserem Alltag fast vollständig verschwunden zu sein. Doch die Abhängigkeit von Mobilität, die Bewältigung finanzieller Unsicherheiten sowie der ausgewogene Umgang mit unserer Umwelt fordern alle, auch ›moderne‹ Gesellschaften heraus. In der Wahrnehmung von Sesshaften verkörpern Nomaden und andere Mobile bis heute allerdings oft das Rückständige, Fremde und Bedrohliche, besonders im Hinblick auf staatliche Ordnungen. Dieser B…
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Who Knows Tomorrow?: Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan
How "clean gold" came to matter: Metal detectors, infrastructure, and valuation
Recently an ancient resource-gold-gained new importance in Sudan. To inquire into the making of values and their negotiation at a time of national economic reorientation, I explore the emergence of a resource category, so-called clean gold, and link this to the introduction of a new prospecting technology-metal detectors. I follow the translation of metal detectors to Sudan and explore them in relation to a broader techno-economic infrastructure …
Divining, testing, and the problem of accountabilityRejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of E…
Health as growth
What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of hu…
Population (What is It Good For)
Population (What is It Good For?) Sandra Calkins and Tyler Zoanni Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, eds., Making Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. 209 pp. Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 232 pp. Ayo Wahlberg, Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 248 pp. We invoke the anti-Vietnam War song "War" because a…
Lab hands and knowing toxic substances in Uganda
How does one know a toxic substance? Perhaps paradoxically, through contact with it, as I show ethnographically from a molecular biology laboratory in Uganda, a site where people routinely handle a range of chemicals, including potentially hazardous toxicants. I analyse an everyday situation in which researchers worked with ethidium bromide, a substance regularly used to stain DNA bands in gels at this Ugandan lab but also in many comparable labs…
Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab
This article complicates romances of infrastructural improvisation by describing infrastructural failures that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. To meet project deadlines, to make careers and to participate in transnational collaborative projects, Ugandan biologists have to stand in for decaying or absent infrastructures with their bodies. Ugandan biologists hide such sacrifices from their international…
Food as medicine: Making 'better bananas' in Uganda
Cooking bananas ( matooke) are a main staple in central Uganda and are very important to well-being and health. Recently, matooke have also been associated with micronutrient deficiencies among children and women. For a number of years, this fruit has been at the heart of a public health strategy that seeks to create 'better bananas', that is, biofortified or nutritionally enriched bananas. The efforts to biofortify food crops are part of a recen…
Affect, Power, and Institutions
Who Knows Tomorrow: Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan
Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms…
The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
While I was reading Joseph Masco's disturbing book The Future of Fallout, news media reported that China had successfully tested a hypersonic missile, a military technology so advanced it could bypass the US missile defense system. This, many nervous commentators noted, put China ahead of the US in the global arms race, justifying further urgent military investments to catch- up. Masco's book is a damning appraisal of such mobilizations of existe…
Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science
In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan-Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinar…
On bundling: The aesthetics of exchange and growth in central Uganda
In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods - fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance - in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of 'bundling', reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon's historical and linguistic scaffo…
Vegetal intimacies in science
Growth
T he figure of growth has risen to prominence in economic thinking.Without going into the intricate genealogy of this "great derangement," we simply note that a powerful natural analogy is at work: if the process of growth is fundamental to biological flourishing, then it must be for economic life too. 1 In this way, it becomes hard to think about the economic outside of this framework, where only growing economies are considered healthy. 2 While…
Making Place with Plants: An Introduction
This special issue brings plant studies into conversation with anthropological discussions of place-making and emplacement, drawing particular attention to the analytical ambit of human–plant intimacies. Plant intimacies—ways of carefully attending to, affecting, and being affected by plants—are ubiquitous and central to many human lives but remain underexamined in anthropological conversations on home and place-making. Closely inquiring into the…
Plant intimacies: Thinking Through Affect and Knowledge in a Perilous World
Porous fences and elephant agencies: Rethinking infrastructure in the Okavango Delta
Despite a recent surge of literature on infrastructure and space, infrastructure breakdown in many domains continues to be presented as the result of technical failure, neglect of maintenance, or human sabotage. Infrastructure breakdown is thus mostly cast as abnormal and as caused by deficient materials, lacking resources or disobedient humans, reproducing normative ideas that successful infrastructure should be stable in its environment and wor…
On Growth, Degrowth, and Growing
Today, growth is one of the central frameworks shaping collective life and political action across the globe. Few other ideas are now as commonsensical in guiding the aspirations of people, societies, institutions, nation-states, and entire regions—for all of which the mantra applies: Growth is good. At the same time, the dominance of growth as a self-evident good has triggered strong challenges, one of the most prominent of which is the project …
Mining matters: Coloniality and the politics of the sustainable energy transition
Contemporary talk of sustainable energy transitions, green technologies, or green energy evokes environmentally friendly, benign and forward-looking policy and practice. Typically, such imaginations of a greener energy future avoid mention of the raw mineral realities of mining. To question these dominant policy framings, we use the analytical lens of coloniality to examine continuities, ruptures and expansions of extractive practices on differen…
Sociology (12 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Social science (4 works)