Post-doc
James Battle • 2013-2015
James Battle is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. A graduate of the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program, Dr. Battle’s work focuses on the medical anthropology and sociology of The Black Atlantic, creolization, and the political economy of race. A member of the Race, Genomics and the Media Working Group at UCSC, his current research examines the discursive politics of race since the genomic revolution. In particular, this project explores the bioethical implications of changing institutional relationships and approaches to health disparities research. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining genomic “Africa” and its intersections with historical discourses of race, gender, and kinship in anthropology and sociology. His Science & Justice Research Center participation reflects his larger research concerns about the ways categories mobilize differential practices, resources, and forms of care.
Mentored by Jenny Reardon.
Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages
The Science & Justice Working Group presented “Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages,” exploring a comparative approach to mountain biking in California and Austria. This panel explored how riders’ subjectivities are attached to and enacted by (changing) technologies of leisure, in context of local discursive and bodily practices.
Rap Report > Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages
In today’s late modern society the increasing importance of leisure activities, of having fun, of getting or staying fit and healthy is suggested by the media and a plethora of artifacts as found in sporting goods. When viewing leisure practices as mutual co-formation of making one-self available to what happens in contact with things, investigations can be anchored at debates on (new) technological objects. However, not only the talk surrounding technological objects is of interest here but how incremental changes of them can have effects on the activity, hence on us. Therefore the incremental change of wheel standards in mountain biking is chosen to finely investigate how classifying products, positioning and evaluating them leads to the formation and classification of subjects attached to those goods.
What makes this case particularly interesting is how this incremental innovation seems to provoke or allow questioning and (re-)negotiating affiliated subjectivities, pointing to the entanglement of capabilities of the subject and the object. As debates on the matter of bigger mountain bike wheels often suggest, all discourse is arbitrary if not also experiencing the ride, trail, and artifact with the body. To account for bodily and discursive practices in the field and the cultural embeddedness of this bike-body-trail assemblage, a multi-sited comparative approach between California and Austria is chosen to see one site through the lens of the other. Methods contain the observation of online forum discussions, sales situations in shops, participant observation of test rides, and interviews with riders and sales persons. The research addresses a shortage of international comparative small- to medium-scale leisure studies, extends existing studies on media and mountain biking into the practices themselves, and aims to offer insights on how subjects and objects are (re-)configured in leisure and sporting practices.
Robin Rae: Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, SJRC Visiting Scholar
Wade Hall: Owner and Fitter, Spokesman Bicycles
Emilie Dionne: Postdoctoral Researcher, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Engineering 2, room 506 | October 8, 2014