Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society

How does modernity arrive and take hold? In this article, I examine efforts by the recent administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to modernize railroad infrastructure in Argentina amidst ongoing decay. In the wake of a large-scale train crash and decades of improper railroad maintenance, in 2013 former President Fernández de Kirchner's administration launched a so-called railroad revolution (revolución ferroviaria), predicated on the purchase of new trains from China, the renovation of track and station infrastructure, the renationalization of the railroad network, and the reeducation of the traveling public. Tracing the awkward arrival of new rolling stock and the patchy renovation of aging railroad infrastructure, this article examines how glitches in this highly-anticipated modernization project fueled anxieties over the incompatibility of foreign technology and local infrastructure, the tenuous nature of modernity, and the obduracy of decay. The technologies and infrastructures that underpin modernity, it illustrates, are entangled in messy relationships and shaped by unruly material histories.

Stephanie McCallum

Tapuya Latin American Science Technology and Society

Railroad revolution: infrastructural decay and modernization in Argentina

铁路革命：阿根廷基础设施衰退与现代化

The collapse of a tailings dam at the Samarco Mine in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais on November 5th 2015 suddenly released around 62 million cubic meters of semi-liquid mining waste. The subsequent “wave of mud” (Creado and Helmereich 2018) travelled 879 km until reaching the Atlantic ocean, leaving a landscape of massive destruction, pollution, and death in its wake. The magnitude of the disaster immediately turned the spill into the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history, according to most commentators. Then, on January 25th 2019, the collapse of another tailings dam at the Brumadinho Mine, located in the same Brazilian state and owned by the same mining corporation, killed at least 248 people, mostly mine workers, becoming the deadliest industrial disaster in Brazil’s history. In just three years, a single region and company experienced two of the most polluting and deadliest disasters, not only in Brazil’s history, but in Latin America as a whole. At the center of both disasters was the sudden collapse of a humble piece of mining infrastructure: a tailings dam. Simply defined in technical mining literature as “purposebuilt sedimentation lagoons” (Lottermoser 2007, 157), tailings dams are the place where all the unwanted leftovers of the mining extraction process come to rest, forever, materializing the “ultimate sink” (Tarr 1996) principle behind most mining enterprises worldwide. In most aspects, tailings dams appear as the ultimate example of a “boring” infrastructure, or complex pieces of technology that are “designed to become invisible as [they are] stabilized” (Lampland and Star 2009, 207). But then something happened. The ever-precarious balance between water and minerals that holds tailings dams together shifted in favor of water, and the dam collapsed. We will likely never know the exact moment or place where the collapse of the dams began, but in both cases the result was the same: destruction, death, and pollution. Everywhere. Brazil’s twin mining disasters dramatically show us how infrastructures never become completely stabilized, or even invisible, in the first place. As a large body of STS literature has explored, instead of being perfectly immutable devices, infrastructures are highly paradoxical things – large and global, yet local and intimate; malleable, yet

Raquel Velho

Sebastián Ureta

Frail modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

脆弱的现代性：拉丁美洲基础设施在修复与荒废之间

Among the dominant narratives that form the ideological substrate of global processes, we can identify powerful deterministic and substantivist mythologies about technology. The most influential of these is the worldview of Silicon Valley, as a producer and exporter of a political theology that holds that the impending civilizational crisis will find a technical solution. This worldview has colonized the daily life of the world, providing a new spatial ordering for our present temporality. Various critical currents have placed the substantivist-deterministic narrative in the context of an intellectual history linked to political theology, a conceptual framework that illuminates several functions of this narrative – chief among these, the function of legitimation. Therefore, the sociology of concepts proposed by Carl Schmitt allows us to identify the contradictions present within these contemporary narratives. Political theology, seen as the study of the structures and sources of political legitimacy, helps us elucidate the power that the Siliconian worldview exerts. Among other aspects, the framework of political theology highlights the fundamental invisibility of these mythologies, which is proportional to their power of domination, and sets the basis for a new digital nomos of the earth.

Cristina Andrea Sereni

Digital Nomos and the new world order: towards a theological critique of Silicon Valley

数字诺莫斯与新世界秩序：迈向对硅谷的神学批判

This paper analyses the experiences of Venezuelan migrant workers in Colombia as Rappi couriers. Rappi is a "work-on-demand via app," founded in 2015 in Colombia, that links clients with nearby restaurants and stores through a couriers' network. Drawing on STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholarship on labor and infrastructures, we explore the ways in which migrant workers interact with Rappi algorithmic, material and legal infrastructures, the coercion and violence they experience, and the tactics and solidarities that they create to make a living. We understood migration as a domination relation within gig workers, an approach that allows us to identify specific exclusions that migrant couriers suffer in an already precarious local labor market. Methodologically, we have developed an Ethnography for the Internet conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic through three different sources and interaction layers: WhatsApp and Facebook non-participant observation and exploratory interviews with Rappi migrant workers. In what follows, we offer a theoretical analysis of the intersections between migration and the gig economy infrastructures based on the Colombian case. Navigating the experiences of migrant gig workers with Rappi, we discuss the dynamics of inclusion-exclusion they live in their interaction with the platform and the infrastructures that support and constitute their work.

Derly Yohanna Sánchez

Oscar Javier Maldonado

Sandra Agudelo-Londoño

Mabel Hernández

Luis Jorge Hernández

Zuly Bibiana Suávez

Laura Mantilla

Infrastructuring platform delivery work: exclusions, coercions and resistance in delivery platforms’ migrant work in Bogotá, Colombia

基础设施化平台配送工作：波哥大移民工人在配送平台中的排斥、胁迫与抵抗

Andrea Ballestero

Kregg Hetherington

Eden Medina

Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America

事实从不孤立：拉丁美洲事实的未来

Clarissa Reche Nunes da Costa

Naedja Cristiane Vieira Costa

Daniela Tonelli Manica

Menstruation as a research topic in the humanities in Brazil: a state of the art

巴西人文科学中的月经研究主题：现状

We present a framework regarding analysis of, and engagement with, socio-technical innovations and power/knowledge trajectories for sugarcane ethanol biofuel in Brazil, testing post hoc our prognostics against recent factual evidence. This assessment offers evidence regarding the value of such analysis, given the relative rarity of research that revisits anticipated changes in Science and Technology Studies. Contending that learning and improving our forms of engaged analysis demands such retrospective assessment, we report results of a 2014/2015 study on sugarcane ethanol biofuel and automobility in Brazil. In this study, we analyze the discourse of a "responsible research and innovation" (RRI) perspective and confirm particular trends in Brazil.

André Sica de Campos

David Tyfield

Leonardo Freire de Mello

Brian Garvey

Sweet dreams? Testing prognostics and reinterpreting sugarcane ethanol biofuel in Brazil

甜蜜的梦想？测试预测与重新解读巴西甘蔗乙醇生物燃料

Vivette García-Deister

After the fact. An afterword

事后思考：后记

短名	Tapuya.
Journal Impact	1.02
国际分区	SOCIAL ISSUES(Q3)

ISSN	2572-9861
h-index	11

涉及主题	sciencetechnologysocietylatin america
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基本数据	创刊年份: 2018，原创研究文献占比: ，自引率:， Gold OA占比:
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平均审稿周期	19 weeks

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Railroad revolution: infrastructural decay and modernization in Argentina

Frail modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

Digital Nomos and the new world order: towards a theological critique of Silicon Valley

Infrastructuring platform delivery work: exclusions, coercions and resistance in delivery platforms’ migrant work in Bogotá, Colombia

Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America

Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America

Infrastructuring platform delivery work: exclusions, coercions and resistance in delivery platforms’ migrant work in Bogotá, Colombia

Menstruation as a research topic in the humanities in Brazil: a state of the art

Sweet dreams? Testing prognostics and reinterpreting sugarcane ethanol biofuel in Brazil

After the fact. An afterword