A cultural Study of Nike
A Cultural Study and Political Ecology of Nike
Partially excerpted from Petrina, S. (2001). The political ecology of design and technology education: An inquiry into methods. International Journal of Technology and Design Education
10, 207-237.
When we put our comfortable shoes on in the morning and take a step, our steps are always already scripted within powerful cultural processes. Shoes, no more so than the apparel covering our bodies, happen to provide particularly robust examples of how this is so. Who we are— identity— is intimately tied to a political ecology of who and what we produce, consume, regulate, represent, and waste. While there may be no escaping political ecology and these cultural processes, there are ways of appropriating, confronting and acting on one's complicity—ways of forming a critical literacy of the world. I use Nike shoes as an example of how we might consciously attend to the levels of our complicity in misappropriations of lives and life in our everyday world. In attending to a "circuit" of cultural processes, we are reminded to pay close attention to even the most mundane of artefacts.
The political ecology of design takes resources into account and helps us take the additional step in accounting for wakes of commodities. A product's wake— the rippling together of production, consumption, and waste— extends outside of resource streams. When we design, build, purchase, use, or dispose of a product, our actions have biophysical, psychosocial, and political consequences. Ecological values such as care, complexity, disequilibrium, interconnectedness, interrelationship, and limitation hold us responsible to product life cycles (Krippendorff, 1989; Manzini, 1992; Pantzar, 1997). But, these values work in tandem with political values such as control, distribution, equity, interests, justice, liberty, and power. What is at question when accounting for wakes are the interrelations among nature, people, and things— the
Partially excerpted from Petrina, S. (2001). The political ecology of design and technology education: An inquiry into methods. International Journal of Technology and Design Education
10, 207-237.
When we put our comfortable shoes on in the morning and take a step, our steps are always already scripted within powerful cultural processes. Shoes, no more so than the apparel covering our bodies, happen to provide particularly robust examples of how this is so. Who we are— identity— is intimately tied to a political ecology of who and what we produce, consume, regulate, represent, and waste. While there may be no escaping political ecology and these cultural processes, there are ways of appropriating, confronting and acting on one's complicity—ways of forming a critical literacy of the world. I use Nike shoes as an example of how we might consciously attend to the levels of our complicity in misappropriations of lives and life in our everyday world. In attending to a "circuit" of cultural processes, we are reminded to pay close attention to even the most mundane of artefacts.
The political ecology of design takes resources into account and helps us take the additional step in accounting for wakes of commodities. A product's wake— the rippling together of production, consumption, and waste— extends outside of resource streams. When we design, build, purchase, use, or dispose of a product, our actions have biophysical, psychosocial, and political consequences. Ecological values such as care, complexity, disequilibrium, interconnectedness, interrelationship, and limitation hold us responsible to product life cycles (Krippendorff, 1989; Manzini, 1992; Pantzar, 1997). But, these values work in tandem with political values such as control, distribution, equity, interests, justice, liberty, and power. What is at question when accounting for wakes are the interrelations among nature, people, and things— the