Browsing by Author "Ureta, Sebastian"

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    Mobilising poverty?: Mobile phone use and everyday spatial mobility among low-income families in Santiago, Chile
    (TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC, 2008) Ureta, Sebastian
    In the last few decades physical mobility has become one of the key elements of contemporary societies. This centrality of mobility also means the development of a new kind of social exclusion caused by the problems of living in a social context in which one has to be increasingly "on the move" to access goods and services. In this article, based on fieldwork conducted with 20 low-income family inhabitants of the city of Santiago, Chile, we study the role that mobile phone usage has in relation to physical mobility in the everyday lives of these individuals. Through an analysis of the pattern of usage and mobility of these devices, we arrive at the conclusion that rather than giving rise to an experience of constant mobility and "anytime-anywhere" availability, the individuals studied face limitations and exclusions that profoundly constrict the potential "mobility" afforded by these devices.
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    Noise and the battles for space: Mediated noise and everyday life in a social housing estate in Santiago, Chile
    (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2007) Ureta, Sebastian
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    Pacifying seaweed: imagining docile objects for novel blue bioeconomies
    (2024) Ureta, Sebastian; Flores, Patricio; Barrena, Jose; Miranda, Paula
    In recent years the blue bioeconomy has been presented as a way for marine-based industries to break with traditional models of relentless resource extraction and extensive damage on marine ecosystems. Centering in innovation and biotechnological enhancement, the concept promises a future that makes compatible continual economic growth with environmental sustainability. In practice, however, the blue bioeconomy still mostly an object of imagination than a reality. In this paper we analyze a leading cause for such lack of effectiveness: the reductionistic ways in which most blue bioeconomy proposals engage with the agencies of marine entities. Adopting an analytical frame from science and technology studies (STS), we understand the multiple strategies oriented to produce neat and simple versions of marine beings as forms of "pacification" that enable the transformation of these beings in commodities that could be easily traded in global markets, at the expense of their sociobiological complexity. To explore the ways in which pacification works, the paper analyzes current attempts at renovating the seaweed industry in Chile. Especially we analyze two policy proposals - one focused on turning seaweed into the basis of a blue carbon economy and the other centered on the potential of seaweed as high-end novel foods for export - showing how they produce a highly pacified versions of seaweed that bear little resemblance with the complex beings populating Chilean seas. Pacified seaweed comes handy for market-oriented policy proposals but tend to fare quite poorly beyond them.
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    Soil publics: regenerating relations with urban soils through citizen science
    (2024) Price, Hannah L.; Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore; High, Kathy; Ramirez-Andreotta, Monica D.; Ureta, Sebastian; Walls, Dan; Xu, Chie; Kinchy, Abby
    In contexts of regulatory neglect, it often falls to concerned individuals and community groups to identify and reduce people's exposure to health-threatening pollutants in urban soils. The Our Soil project, based in Troy, New York (U.S.A.) proposed that engaging people in a "do-it-together" process of scientific inquiry could cultivate both appreciation of soil's value and urgency to protect people from toxic soil pollution. In this paper, we develop the concept of "soil publics" and use it to critically reflect on how Our Soil used participatory research methods to measure urban soil pollution, exchange and value local knowledge, and cultivate a sense of concern for soil as a public issue. Soil publics come together through collective participatory practices, such as community gardening or, in this case, citizen science. This paper argues that when citizen science is pursued with a focus on producing soil publics, it is not just a means of collecting data about soil; it is part of the process of recognising past harms and transforming human-soil relations.Key Policy HighlightsEfforts to increase public awareness and appreciation of the vitality of soil to ecosystem health should also address soil pollution as a matter of environmental justice."Do-it-together" soil testing can be an effective means of both raising the issue of soil pollution and forming a public that wants to address it.Citizen science can be more than a means of collecting data about soil; it can be part of the process of recognising past harms and transforming human-soil relations.
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    Technopolitics of fear: managing emotions about infrastructural collapse at a mining business conference
    (2024) Contreras, Joaquin; Ureta, Sebastian
    Despite the regular occurrence of disasters such as infrastructural collapse and massive pollution, the mining industry has failed to introduce substantive innovations in waste management. In this paper, we explore a key factor behind such reluctance, which we have called a technopolitics of fear. Based on a science and technology studies framework, such technopolitics will be understood as a complex assemblage of affects, practices, and technologies with its governing logic and producing multiple effects. To explore the contours of such technopolitics we analyze a business conference of the mining industry occurring in Chile in 2019. Emerging first as an emotional outpour, the uncertainty caused by recent mining waste disasters was turned into something much more productive; first as "sound" economic valuations and then as conventional techno-fixes. In the conclusions, we will speculate about alternative ways in which the mining industry could truly enact the radical transformations needed to keep practicing extraction in vulnerable worlds.
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    To Move or Not to Move? Social Exclusion, Accessibility and Daily Mobility among the Low-income Population in Santiago, Chile
    (2008) Ureta, Sebastian
    Changes in the patterns of quotidian physical mobility of the population are at the very centre of transformations in contemporary urban life. The city of Santiago, Chile is no exception to this trend. But these changes do not affect the whole population in the same way. This paper is based on a case study of a low-income population group and how their situation of social exclusion interferes with their patterns of everyday mobility. In order to do so we describe in-depth their everyday mobility in two central interrelated aspects: where and how these individuals travel during workdays and weekends. We conclude that in contemporary Santiago the low degrees of motility of low income population constitute one of the main ways in which contemporary social exclusion is enacted in everyday practice.