Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Food waste is a compelling and yet hugely under-researched area of interest for social scientists. In order to account for this neglect and to situate the fledgling body of social science scholarship that is starting to engage with food waste, the analysis here does a number of things. It explores the theoretical tendencies that have underpinned the invisibility of waste to the sociological gaze alongside the historical transitions in global food relations that led to the disappearance of concerns about food scarcity – and with them, concerns about food waste – from cultural and political life. It also sketches out some of the processes through which waste has recently (re-)emerged as a priority in the realms of food policy and regulation, cultural politics and environmental debate. Particular attention is paid to the intellectual trajectories that have complemented food waste's rising profile in popular and policy imaginations to call forth sociological engagement with the issue. With this in place, the stage is set for the individual contributions to this Sociological Review Monograph – papers that engage with food waste in a number of contexts, at a variety of scales and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Together they represent the first attempt collectively to frame potential sociological approaches to understanding food waste. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Packaging is central to the economic and cultural organization of food. This mundane material has become fundamental to extending shelf life, brand strategies, the qualities of food and more. From the early twentieth century, packaging has unarguably functioned as a market device, helping to assemble and extend food markets and transforming consumer practices. Over that century, packaging also became a major source of solid waste: filling up landfills, littering streets and clogging waterways around the world. The rise of the waste crisis in urban governance from the mid-1960s has been directly connected to the proliferation of food packaging. This paper takes the stuff of food packaging seriously. Here, I seek to understand its activity as both a market device and major waste problem, and aim to develop an analysis attentive to packaging's performative agency. Rather than see packaging as a passive instrument of economic processes or as an environmental problem, my focus is on how it is enrolled and performs in different arrangements, and also how it acquires the capacity to affect those arrangements in specific ways. A performative analysis focuses on how packaging becomes implicated in producing ontological effects: that is, how it brings new realities and practices into being that have socially binding effects. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article is about cows in Colombia, the practices that make them different. Although our main concern is not the difference among breeds, we pay crucial attention to the word breed which, in its exclusive animal-use, does not exist in Spanish. Its translation becomes raza, a word that is also used to classify humans and therefore easily translates into English as ‘race’. Maintaining these differences in analytical sight, we follow the practices that make res and ejemplar – two types of bovines. Untranslatable to English, res refers to an ordinary cow or bull; the second one indicates an exemplary bovine, even a prized one. The practices that make these animals are different. We explain how making res does not meet the requirements of breed, while making ejemplar does; consequently, while the latter has breed, a res has a slippery raza, one that, difficult to pin down, transgresses the firmness of breeds. Thus, raza can be different from breed, and surprisingly, it is also different from ‘race’ in English: the slippery quality of raza also surfaces when talking about people, at least in Colombia and Peru, the countries of origin of the authors of this article. If classified, their raza may shift from ‘white’ to ‘mestizo’ (not white) depending on the eyes of the beholder – like res! </jats:p>

<jats:p> As critical nodes for global commodity flows, warehouses are an important example of segmented labour regimes which partition workers into groups with different conditions of security or its opposite, precarity. An emerging literature on warehouse work has tended to place segmentation in the context of managerial despotism based upon low wages, high labour turnover and job insecurity. However, the literature has, thus far, tended to pay comparatively less attention to workers’ collective resistance and its relationship to intra-labour divisions reproduced through segmentation. In refocusing attention to this problem, this article addresses the theoretical status of intra-labour groups, the nature of horizontal worker-to-worker relations, and their interaction with workers’ social identities and vertical capital–labour relations. It argues that the Gramscian concept of articulation provides the most promising frame for understanding these networked relations and for addressing how the politics of segmentation can be challenged by building common cause among divided workers. </jats:p>