Follow the Thing: Data

This research starts its journey from a video that failed to be published during the 2009 uprising in Iran. By following data outside the common trajectories of data circulation in the global North, this paper offers new geographical and data imaginations neglected by the universalised understandings of data and its political economy. Consequently, data’s behaviour as a thing is thoroughly investigated in the “follow the thing tradition” by scrutinising data as a commodity, its meanings and its associations. Using actor-network-theory, the paper highlights data’s open and contested character as well as the breakdowns throughout its journey. Following an uncirculated video via its traces sheds light on data’s agency in evoking different assemblages and spatialities. It also reflects on the epistemological importance of not treating the Southern data as exceptional and calls for a theoretical landscape that does not leave many realities of data out in its homogenised universal narrative.     

Suggestive Experten: Zur Etablierung der US‐amerikanischen Medienforschung in den 1930–1950er Jahren

Suggestive experts: The rise of American communication studies (1930s to 1950s). – The history of social engineering and its rise in the first half of the twentieth century is a well developed field today. This article attempts to add the history of communications research to this field of historical study. The focus lies on the experts for mass communication and their difficulties to combine scientific methodology with the promise to explore how human behaviour can be influenced by the mass media.     

To live among the stars: artificial environments in the early space age

Startled by NASA’s decision to let orbiting astronauts collect their own feces in a bag for medical experiments, a pair of sanitary engineers at Berkeley designed an algae-based bio-regenerative system to recycle oxygen, water, and even nutrients. This article explains the technological choice facing the emerging space program between the infamous ‘fecal-bag’ and a now-forgotten alternative, the ‘Algatron’, in the mid-1960s. The article situates the case of the Algatron at the intersection of the history of the space program and the history of biology; it uses the case of the Algatron to expose the different meanings of ‘shit’ as an object of scientific, medical, and engineering study. For nearly a decade after Sputnik, engineers worked under the assumption that human waste was part of a new space ecology, but by the time Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, human excrement had become understood solely as a diseased and disposable medical object to be contained and preserved in a bag. The ecological system was rejected in favor of a medical device and served to elevate Man above Nature in contrast to placing people as but one component in a biospheric system.     

HUMAN NATURE,THE ENVIRONMENT,AND BEHAVIOUR: EXPLAINING THE SCOPE AND GEOGRAPHICAL SCALE OF FINANCIAL DECISION‐MAKING

This article explores two inter‐related themes. One addresses fundamental questions of human nature, arguing that conventional theories of behaviour lack a credible appreciation of the interaction between cognition and context (or what is often termed as the ‘environment’). The second considers decision‐making under risk and uncertainty, focusing upon customary behaviour and the significance or otherwise of conscious deliberation. My argument is intended to be both critical and constructive, exploring the claims of the emerging school of behaviouralism associated with Kahneman and Tversky now sweeping the social sciences. Most importantly, it is argued that economic geography should take more seriously the nature and scope of behaviour recognizing its attributes including related social and cultural aspirations. These ideas are illustrated by a set of recent studies dealing with financial decision‐making and individuals' attitudes towards risk in personal and occupational pension plans. The importance of this project lies in the urgent need to understand the diversity of behaviour of men and women in, and through, the communities in which they live without being reduced to yet another version of environmental determinism. In the final section, implications are drawn for understanding the global financial crisis.     

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.     

Schomburgk’s Chook: the entangled South Australian collections of a German naturalist

Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

The Irish Sandow school: physical culture competitions in fin-de-siècle Ireland

ABSTRACT

Beginning with an examination of Ireland’s turn of the century interest in physical culture, this article highlights the case of Eugen Sandow’s “Great Competition” and its Irish contestants. Seen as a precursor for today’s bodybuilding competitions, Sandow’s contest enjoyed submission photographs from hundreds of half-naked men – many of whom were Irish – posing in Greco-Roman pose. In studying this topic, the article addresses two pressing issues. In the first instance, the article examines how and why physical culture competitions became a competitive outlet for Irishmen in the first decade of the twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that these contests were often connected to broader societal ideals surrounding acceptable forms of masculinity. The article thus examines a previously unexplored but nevertheless important part of sporting and athletic behaviour in early twentieth-century Ireland.     

清代鄂尔多斯地区的垦殖活动

鄂尔多斯位于内蒙古西南部农牧业交错带上。当它被游牧民族占据时,以游牧为主要生产方式;中原王朝国力强盛,占居该地时,便转而以农耕为主要生产方式,秦、汉、唐、清等朝代便是如此。清代随着国家的安定与清后期财政支出的增加,对鄂尔多斯的垦殖从禁止到弛禁直至规模持续上升,超过以前任何朝代。本文以垦殖力度的差异将其垦殖活动分为两个时期加以考察,前一个时期自清初至光绪二十年,这一时期经历了从禁垦到驰禁的过程,开垦规模逐渐扩大,一些水利工程也开始兴修;后一个时期则是政府组织的大规模放垦阶段,各旗根据自身的自然条件均有不同程度的放垦。     

The legal (de)construction of geography: race and political community in supreme court redistricting decisions

This article examines the different conceptions of racial identity and ‘geography’ in two landmark Supreme Court decisions, Shaw v. Reno (1993) and Easley v. Cromartie (2001). Both decisions evaluated similar Congressional redistricting plans in North Carolina, but reached opposite conclusions. In Reno, the Court based its reasoning on the ‘objective’, ‘natural’ and ‘rational’ geography of North Carolina. Such geographic relationships create political communities and constrain the way in which state legislatures can draw electoral districts. In contrast, the Easley decision based its reasoning on voting behaviour, and makes an implicit appeal to deliberative democratic principles. From this perspective, political relationships create the geographic relationships defined by Congressional district boundaries. Where the Reno decision treats race as an arbitrary social distinction that the state should not use as the basis of political representation, the Easley opinion argues that the state can consider differences in racial voting behaviour during the redistricting process. More fundamentally, the Easley decision implies that racial identity is formed by deliberative political communities, rather than being an objective, static characteristic. This suggests that disputes over spatial relationships are critical to the construction of hegemonic racial identities, and that space is fundamental to the conception of racial difference.     

Indian Objects,English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Focusing on the representation of Indian shawls and Indian tea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, this article has two aims: first, it argues that the novel creates its ideology of domesticity and proper femininity through the creation of a readable object world. It is evident that one of the consequences of the empire was to Indianise its English subjects, thereby making them more cosmopolitan and making the English home a monument to imperial Britain’s success in the global system of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. These links then brought together the materiality of the empire and the Victorian preoccupation with material culture, constituting an imperial culture based on domestic interiority, visual and tactile pleasure, and political economy. Second, the article attempts to show how the ambiguities that enter the text along with these foreign objects unsettle the status quo established by the novel’s middle-class ideology and propose utopian alternatives to it through a mobile, boundary-crossing female body and a more porous domestic setting. These alternatives are entirely speculative, incomplete, and restrained, but significant nonetheless, precisely because they turn this ideology’s emphasis on the middle-class female body inside out, so as to recompose this body and its habitual spaces in new ways.     

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.     

Asia's century and the problem of Japan's centrality

Japan has long been regarded as a central component of America's grand strategy in Asia. Scholars and practitioners assume this situation will persist in the face of China's rise and, indeed, that a more ‘normal’ Japan can and should take on an increasingly central role in US‐led strategies to manage this power transition. This article challenges those assumptions by arguing that they are, paradoxically, being made at a time when Japan's economic and strategic weight in Asian security is gradually diminishing. The article documents Japan's economic and demographic challenges and their strategic ramifications. It considers what role Japan might play in an evolving security order where China and the US emerge as Asia's two dominant powers by a significant margin. Whether the US–China relationship is ultimately one of strategic competition or accommodation, it is argued that Japan's continued centrality in America's Asian grand strategy threatens to become increasingly problematic. It is posited that the best hope for circumventing this problem and its potentially destabilizing consequences lies in the nurturing of a nascent ‘shadow condominium’ comprising the US and China, with Japan as a ‘marginal weight’ on the US side of that arrangement.     

Lightening Europe: Establishing the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF)

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) was the first collaborative synchrotron radiation facility in Europe. This article chronicles and analyzes decisive events during ESRF’s foundation phase from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and sheds light on the politics that mattered for its realization as a scientific collaboration in Europe. As part of a broader effort to chronicle the history of the ESRF, this article contributes to an enriched understanding of intergovernmental scientific cooperation in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century by drawing on so far unexplored material from the French National Archives and the German National Archive.     

SPACE,SCALE AND LOCALITY*

The importance of spatial variations for social behaviour has recently been re-established in social theory. But, paradoxically, space does not exist in the sense of being an object that can have properties and effects. How, then, are these two axioms to be reconciled? Recent attempts to solve this question have been centred around the concept of ‘locality’. In this paper we subject this concept to critical evaluation. First, we consider in abstract terms the way in which spatial variation affects social phenomena. Subsequently, we discuss the implications of this, focusing around the use of ‘locale’ and ‘local labour market’ as operationalisations of ‘locality’. Next, we review and comment on the debate on locality in the light of this discussion. The upshot is that locality is shown to provide an inadequate conceptual scheme for dealing with spatial patterning.     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

Präzision versus Exaktheit: Konfligierende Ideale der angewandten mathematischen Forschung: Das Beispiel der Tragflügeltheorie

It is often supposed that mathematical argument provides a model of precision for the sciences. In contrast to this view, the present article proposes to distinguish between mathematical exactness as a (historically variable) ideal regulating the inner standards of mathematical argumentation and precision as a (historically variable) norm governing the relation between products of mathematical reasoning in scientific contexts and empirical or practical data. By discussing a major achievement in the mathematization of flight, Ludwig Prandtl's lifting line theory of wings, it is shown that exact reasoning does not necessarily lead to scientific precision, and that the achievement of precision may even require to loosen existing standards of exactness. It is argued that the main contribution of mathematical argument to generating precision in science lies in its capacity to provide sophisticated tools for the production of data, rather than in its adherence to an ideal of exactness.     

‘I don't think it was such an issue back then’: changing experiences of pregnancy across two generations of women in south-east England

Based upon in-depth interviews with recent mothers and their own mothers in London, England, this article uses a cross-generational perspective to examine the changing experiences/perceptions of pregnancy over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Pregnancy is a biological process, but exists within social, economic, political and cultural realms and is both spatially and temporally located. In this article we argue that advances in gender equality, maternity benefits, technological innovation and mass media have meant that pregnancy is now increasingly experienced in the ‘public’ sphere, whereas, in earlier twentieth century Britain at least, it was often relegated to the realm of private or domestic life. However with these changes have come new types of surveillance in the form of scientific ‘advice’, medical technologies and media dissemination of cultural ‘norms’ regarding appropriate dress, lifestyle and behaviour during pregnancy. Based upon the findings of our research we examine these changes from two different perspectives: firstly a Foucauldian notion of surveillance in relation to ‘medical’ advice on diet/lifestyle during pregnancy, and secondly new expectations regarding body image and clothing in the context of the emergence of ‘pregnancy chic’ and the figure of the ‘celebrity mum’.     

Explaining Nationalist Violence

Abstract. Nationalism often involves risky and violent action. This has led many scholars to believe that its roots must be irrational. This attribution is ambiguous, however, because it fails to distinguish between two quite different meanings of the term ‘irrational’. In principle, nationalism can emanate either from social or from individual irrationality. Only the latter kind of irrationality is theoretically provocative, however. The hallmark of rational individual action lies in its instrumentality. Whereas many aspects of nationalism have been analysed successfully using instrumental behavioral assumptions, nationalist violence has been a significant exception. This article offers a framework for the explanation of nationalist violence in instrumental terms. It concludes by suggesting that the temptation to view nationalism as an outcome of individual irrationality should be resisted.