Alex Blanchette (Author)
In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action, such as a wayward touch, could have serious physical consequences for animals. Corporations' pursuit of a perfectly uniform, standardized pig—one that can yield materials for over 1000 products—creates social and environmental instabilities that transform human lives and livelihoods. Throughout Porkopolis, which includes dozens of images by award-winning photographer Sean Sprague, Blanchette uses factory farming to rethink the fraught state of industrial capitalism in the United States today.
...MoreReview Jamie Kreiner (2021) Review of "Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism". Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 553-565).
Article
Veronika Settele;
(2020)
Mensch, Tier und Technik: „Doing Technology“ in deutschen Schweineställen und die Veränderung des Verhältnisses zwischen Mensch und Tier seit 1945. (Humans, Animals and Technology: "Doing Technology" in German Pig Houses and the Change in the Relationship between Humans and Animals since 1945)
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Nancy Cushing;
(2018)
'Few Commodities are More Hazardous': Australian Live Animal Export, 1788-1880
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Book
Thomas Fleischman;
Paul S. Sutter;
(2020)
Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall
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Book
J. L. Anderson;
(2019)
Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America
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Thesis
Joshua Albert Specht;
(2014)
Red Meat Republic: The Rise of the Cattle-Beef Complex, 1865-1906
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Thesis
Varno, Theodore James;
(2011)
The Nature of Tomorrow: Inbreeding in Industrial Agriculture and Evolutionary Thought in Britain and the United States, 1859--1925
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Radder, Hans;
(2010)
The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University
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Whitney, Kristoffer;
(2014)
Domesticating Nature? Surveillance and Conservation of Migratory Shorebirds in the “Atlantic Flyway”
(/isis/citation/CBB001420087/)
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Rudy, Kathy;
(2012)
Locavores, Feminism, and the Question of Meat
(/isis/citation/CBB001202115/)
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Helen Anne Curry;
(2022)
Hybrid Seeds in History and Historiography
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Franklin, Sarah;
(2013)
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
(/isis/citation/CBB001422164/)
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Ben Nobbs-Thiessen;
(2020)
Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB898544068/)
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Helen Anne Curry;
(2022)
Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction
(/isis/citation/CBB812650669/)
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Calvert, Scout;
(2013)
Certified Angus, Certified Patriot: Breeding, Bodies, and Pedigree Practices
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Tom Brooking;
(2019)
“Yeotopia” Found … But? The Yeoman Ideal that Underpinned New Zealand Agricultural Practice into the Early Twenty-First Century, with American and Australian Comparisons
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Maria Aparecida Lopes;
(2022)
Rio de Janeiro in the global meat market, c. 1850 to c. 1930: how fresh and salted meat arrived at the carioca table
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Book
Rebecca J. H. Woods;
(2017)
The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900
(/isis/citation/CBB281778458/)
Article
Kyoryen Hwang;
(2023)
Sorting sex, controlling sex: Masui Kiyoshi’s chicken research and experimental system, 1915–1950
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Article
Jim Clifford;
(2021)
London's Soap Industry and the Development of Global Ghost Acres in the Nineteenth Century
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Article
Bruegel, Martin;
Chevet, Jean-Michel;
Lecocq, Sébastien;
(2014)
Animal Protein and Rational Choice: Diet in the Eighteenth Century
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