Inside “the system”: engineers,scientists, and the boundaries of social protest in the long 1960s

By the end of the 1960s, many engineers and scientists in the US questioned the social and political dimensions of science and technology. This introspection came as critics assailed science and technology as elements of the militaristic, alienating structure of modern society. Engineers and scientists repudiated, appropriated, or sometimes even acted in concert with these critics. Also relevant, however, in engineers' and scientists' evaluations of their role in society were the emergence of “engineering science,” pre‐existing political ideologies, and simply making a living in a volatile economy. This paper presents dissention from three vantages within the technical community: design engineer Steve Slaby at Princeton University, the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the activist organization Science for the People, located in chapters across the country. These cases differ in the actors' level of political consciousness, their involvement in military research, and the tactics they employed. All, however, suggest cause for reassessment both of the borders between “critics” and “scientists” and of the culture of “total control” ascribed to the era.     

Contract-Workers in Swedish Agriculture,c. 1890s–1930s: a comparative study of standard of living and social status 1

In the political and medial discourse of the 1930s the contract-work system (stat/ar/systemet) was depicted as a relic of pre-modern society and contract-workers (statare) as the highly exploited lower class with no legal rights, low incomes, miserable housing conditions and a chaotic family life. This picture has dominated Swedish social history ever since, and the main argument of this article is that it has to be modified. With regard to the material standard of living, for example, employment terms, working conditions, wage levels and housing conditions, contract-workers were no worse off than other worker groups in the countryside. On the contrary, the contract-work system had its own rationality and advantages. It made it possible for young couples without land or a croft to marry and establish their own household since housing was included in the payment, and the yearly employment and large proportion of in-kind payments provided income security. However, the political discourse of the 20th century was based on the growing importance of the town and industry. The more regulated employment conditions, higher wages and better housing for industrial and urban workers became the yardstick by which the contract-workers' situation was judged. Agriculture was an economic sector in decline and the contract-work system appeared to be outdated. The abolition of the contract-work system in 1945 was definitive confirmation of the victory of modernity.     

Social observation in early commercial print media. Towards a genealogy of the social sketch (ca. 1820–1860)

Nineteenth-century journalism has rarely been an object of attention in the humanities and social sciences – despite its political and cultural significance and its documental value. This article explores the verbal-visual social sketch, as it has evolved as a journalistic genre on the expanding market of periodicals in early nineteenth-century Europe. The social sketches (often referred to as ‘panoramic literature’) provide rich ethnographic micro-analysis and often relate to debates held by statisticians, moralists, folklorists, and ethnologists. This article, rather than providing a close reading analysis of selected texts, attempts to trace a genealogy of the sketch of society from a history of knowledge perspective. After placing the consolidation of the social sketch within its socio-medial contexts, the article considers various literary and epistemic ‘regimes’ that have preconditioned and influenced the evolution of this verbal-visual genre of social observation and formulates cross-genre and interdisciplinary perspectives on the refinement and institutionalization of social inquiry throughout the nineteenth century.     

The rhetoric of science and the critique of imperialism in British social anthropology,c. 1870–1940

In this article I discuss issues of memory and historicity in a contemporary African prophetic movement, the Tokoist church. I do so by focusing on the multiple processes of “biographization” of the prophet’s (Simão Toko) life from the different allegiances within the movement. I suggest that, despite recent critiques on the biographical method, the ethnography of those (unstable and heterogeneous) processes can be very helpful to understand the place of memory and historical consciousness in contemporary Christianity.     

'Who do you talk to,when a body's in trouble?: M. Nourbese Philip's (un)silencing of black bodies in the diaspora

This paper examines Marlene Nourbese Philip's 'Dis Place—The Space Between' to argue that black women's bodies are troubled by Philip in order to reconceptualize and reinvent location, corporeality, subjectivities, and dominant historical narratives. In situating blackness and black femininity within a displaced, or 'anywhere' framework, Philip scrutinizes and redraws the places of black women's bodies in the New World so that we might reconsider the geographical and historical importance of blackness. This paper therefore analyses how Philip takes up the chaotic in between-ness of black womanhood in order to embrace discourses and spaces of 'elsewhere' and possibility, while also acknowledging sites of racism, sexism, memory and struggle.     

“Neptune to the Common-wealth of England” (1652): the “Republican Britannia” and the continuity of interests

ABSTRACT

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant.     

The effectiveness of public participation in the environmental impact assessment process – a case study of the projected Sierilä hydropower station at Oikarainen,northern Finland

One of the most difficult challenges in environmental impact assessment (EIA) is the effectiveness of public participation. This article addresses this question by looking at evaluation criteria applied during the EIA process for a northern Finnish hydropower project. The problematics of public participation is discussed in connection with the EIA process and social impact assessment for the projected Sierilä hydropower station in the village of Oikarainen, near Rovaniemi, in northern Finland, during which the local population has been viewed as not being sufficiently competent as the project developer, Kemijoki Ltd. Nevertheless, carrying out an EIA seems to be a starting point in the long‐term process of increasing the effectiveness of public participation and the influence of local communities on hydropower planning processes in Finland.     

Yeats,Samhain, and the aesthetics of cultural nationalism: ‘a supreme moment in the life of a nation’

Together, in the plays and essays published in the 1903 issue of Samhain, William Butler Yeats assembled writings that endorse his vision of cultural nationalism in that they stress the possibilities of an artistic regeneration that that has the power to reconcile perceived exclusive strata within Irish society and also to herald a new age not only for Irish culture but for the Irish nation. Yeats, in his cultural nationalism, ultimately vested faith in an Ascendancy tradition, defined not by birth as much as by a willingness to surrender not just political ambitions but all ambition to that of the artist.     

The Colonial (Dis)order and the (Im)possibility of Redemption: Jeong,Abolition, and Living from the “End of the World”

This article develops the oppositional edge of postcolonial theologies by way of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial desire for the “end of the world.” It connects W. Anne Joh’s elaboration of jeong – the living in excess of (neo)colonial violence – to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-fascist critique of the godlike desires of European humanism (the sicut deus). The overall aim of the article is to clarify and assess what is at stake in a project of eschatological decolonialism. What might it mean to think theologically about salvation as abolition? And what might it look like to live from the “end of the world?”