Inscriptions of resilience: Bond ratings and the government of climate risk in Greater Miami, Florida

In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts” as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.

Effects of Limited Hold on Equivalence Class Formation

In an attempt to limit the opportunity to engage in mediating behavior, two groups of adult participants received preliminary training in identity matching with limited hold levels (LH) for responding of 0.7 s for the sample and 1.2 s for the comparisons. The two groups were subsequently trained to form three 5-member classes, using the same LH levels, where the A, B, D, and E stimuli were abstract stimuli, and the C stimuli were meaningful pictures. In two tests for emergent relations, the LH for Group Short was unchanged, whereas 5 s were added to the LH for the comparisons for Group Long. None of the participants in Group Short responded in accordance with stimulus equivalence in either of the two tests. In Group Long, one participant responded in accordance with stimulus equivalence in the first test, and an additional eight participants formed equivalence classes in the second test.

Naming of Stimuli in Equivalence Class Formation in Children

In the present study, two typically developing 4-year-old children, Pete and Joe, were trained six conditional discriminations and tested for the formation of three 3-member equivalence classes. Pete and Joe did not establish the AC relation within 600 trials and were given two conditions of preliminary training, including naming of stimuli with two different stimulus sets. Pete started with preliminary training with common naming of stimuli, followed by conditional-discrimination training and testing for emergent relations, and continued with preliminary training on individual naming of stimuli, followed by the same training and testing as described previously. Joe experienced the same conditions but in reversed order. Pete responded in accordance with equivalence in the second round in the condition with common naming. In the first round of testing in the condition with individual naming, he responded in accordance with equivalence. In the condition with individual naming, Joe did not respond in accordance with stimulus equivalence but established all of the directly trained relations during training. In the condition with common naming, he responded in accordance with equivalence in the first round of testing. The results from the experiment support earlier findings that both common and individual naming could facilitate the emergence of equivalence classes.

“You’re a Sociologist, I Am Too . . . ”: Seducing the Ethnographer, Disruption, and Ambiguity in Fieldwork with (Mostly) Undocumented Youth

The article is about a set of methodological disruptions that occur in ethnographic fieldwork and what these disruptions mean for ethnographic studies, including analysis, representation of data, and experiences of the ethnographic self. This article documents the process of a minoritized high school youth, Queen, entering the research space and the emergent relations among Queen and Latinx undocumented youth. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s analytics, I theorize disruption as a core concept in this particular experience of engaging in fieldwork as part of a multisite critical ethnography. Presenting three frames of disruption—relating to the research space, analyses and findings, and the ethnographic self—I complicate who gets included and excluded from a study and the implications for relational ethnics in ethnographic fieldwork. Ultimately, I argue that our methodological practices and selves need to be disrupted in order to enhance our views of who/what gets included/excluded during our fieldwork.

Remaking the Hindu/Nation

Angana P. Chatterji excavates the contemporaneous practices of Hindu majoritarianism in Uttar Pradesh surrounding the 2014 elections. This chapter elaborates on the emergent relations between Hindu cultural dominance and nationalist Hinduism that induce and deepen cultural anxiety, xenophobia, misogyny, as well as hate and violence. This chapter also details select examples of actions to discipline and terrorize religious minority/ othered subjects (including Adivasis and Dalits) undertaken by Sangh Parivar organizations in Uttar Pradesh between January 2014 and September 2018, and those resultant from the undercurrent of hate and estrangement fostered by the majoritarian culture at large. These events pertain to the Ayodhya campaign, forcible conversions to Hinduism, framing ‘love jihad’, opposing reservations and cattle slaughter, and the promotion of hate speech. The everyday and episodic targeting of vulnerable communities is supported by the deeply rooted inequities of caste, class, and hetero/ normative gender, and such targeting, the chapter argues, strengthens cultures of violence and facilitates governance through fear.

Cheapness and (labor-)power: The role of early modern Brazilian sugar plantations in the racializing Capitalocene

This essay looks at the historical geography of sugar plantations in Northeast Brazil during the 16th- and 17th-centuries to critique the spatio-temporality of the discourse of the Anthropocene. I argue that sugar plantations were key places in early systemic cycles of capital accumulation with their grim calculus of cheap labor-power and acceptable deaths. Sugar plantations were simultaneously prototypical racializing state actors and part of the emergent relations of capital changing the climate. With their rationalized, time-disciplined labor for processing cane into sugar, plantations were not only fundamentally proto-industrial sites, but also one of capital’s laboratories of modernity. They were primordial sites of proletarianization, of spatio-temporal patterns that repopulated the Americas and central in the production not of the Anthropocene but of the racializing Capitalocene.