Archeology in Conflict and UNESCO: Legal Aspects

This article analyzes the obligations under the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two Protocols related to the protection of cultural property in occupied territory. It goes on to provide practical examples of the return of cultural property from Iraq to Kuwait following the entry of Iraqi military forces into Kuwait in August 1990 and the legal framework of the return of Iraqi cultural property under operative paragraph 7 of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1483, adopted on 22 May 2003.     

Historiographical layers in the relationship between science and technology

Abstract

This paper aims to examine historiographical layers in the historical narrative on the relationship between science and technology, a topic which has been exhaustively discussed without consensus by both historians of science and technology. I will first examine two extreme positions concerning this issue, and analyze the underlying historiographical standpoints behind them. I will then show that drawing implications for the relationship between science and technology from a few case studies is frequently misleading. After showing this, I .will move to the “macrohistory” of the relationship between science and technology, which reveals a long process in which the barriers between them gradually became porous. Here, I will examine the historical formation of three different kinds of “boundary objects” between science and technology, which facilitated their interactions by making their borders more permeable: instruments as a material boundary object; new institutions, laboratories, and departments as a spatial boundary or boundary space; and new mediators as a human hybrid.     

Feminist epistemology after postmodernism: critiquing science,technology and globalisation

Abstract

This article provides a reasoned overview of contemporary developments within feminist theories of the subject after the decline of postmodernist thought. It stresses the foundational importance of feminist situated epistemology, and hence of a brand of materialism that stresses embodiment and embedded perspectives. The article explores neo-materialist feminist theories in a number of areas, with special emphasis on science and technology studies and critiques of globalisation. It argues that the neo-materialist trend results in a new call for an ethics attuned to the complexity of our era.     

Collaborating with the Machines: A Hybrid Method for Classifying Policy Documents

Governments produce vast and growing quantities of freely available text: laws, rules, budgets, press releases, and so forth. This information flood is facilitating important, growing research programs in policy and public administration. However, tightening research budgets and the information's vast scale forces political science and public policy to aspire to do more with less. Meeting this challenge means applied researchers must innovate. This article makes two contributions for practical text coding—the process of sorting government text into researcher-defined coding schemes. First, we propose a method of combining human coding with automated computer classification for large data sets. Second, we present a well-known algorithm for automated text classification, the Naïve Bayes classifier, and provide software for working with it. We argue and provide evidence that this method can help applied researchers using human coders to get more from their research budgets, and we demonstrate the method using classical examples from the study of policy agendas.     

International regulation of historic buildings and nationalism: the role of UNESCO

This article focuses on the (ambiguous) relationships between nationalism and international regulation of historic buildings, namely, the activity of UNESCO in this field. It studies two different forms of UNESCO intervention: the creation of a list of world heritage sites of outstanding universal value, which includes several historic cities and buildings; and UNESCO Recommendations aimed at protecting historic urban landscape. The article shows that UNESCO seems to favour both political and cultural forms of nationalism and can significantly affect the nationalistic use of historic buildings and, more broadly, affect on the very idea of Nation and nationalism.     

Usable Pasts Forum: UNESCO and Heritage Tourism in Africa

African Archaeological Review -     

Ireland and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage

Ratification by Ireland of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage will not be able to take place until after enactment of additional domestic legislation. The reasons for this are examined in the context of Ireland’s legal system. Since 1987 Ireland has had extensive legal protection for underwater cultural heritage, but the jurisdictional aspects of the Convention are key to understanding why additional legislation is necessary. Issues relating to salvage law are also considered. The 2001 Convention is placed in the context of development of Irish policy on underwater cultural heritage.     

UNESCO, URI, and Archaeology in the Deep Blue Sea: Archaeological Ethics and Archaeological Oceanography

Multiple groups have interests that intersect within the field of deep submergence (beyond the 50 meter range of SCUBA) archaeology. These groups?? differing priorities present challenges for interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly as there are no established guidelines for best practices in such scenarios. Associating the term ??archaeology?? with projects directed at underwater cultural heritage that are guided by archaeologists poses a real risk to that heritage. Recognizing that the relevant professional organizations, local laws, and conventions currently have little ability to protect pieces of cultural heritage across disciplines and international boundaries, the authors propose institution-specific mechanisms, called Archaeology Review Boards, guided by local and international laws and conventions concerning cultural heritage, as the best means to provide oversight for academically centered archaeological activities at the local level.     

论近代留美学生促进中国科技发展的途径和方法

在中国近代科技发展史中,留美学生通过对中国科技体制化的建构、引进与传播自然科学知识和基础学科新成果、引进与应用近代科学研究方法、倡行科学精神、培养科技人才等多种途径和方法,传播了近代西方科技,促进了中国科技的发展,当之无愧地成为中国科技发展的主导力量,这是其它留学生群体无法比拟的。     

Competition and cooperation among jurisdictions: The case of regional cooperation in science and technology in Europe

This article analyzes the possible conflict between regional cooperation and jurisdiction and the cases in which cooperation is compatible with competition. This analysis is carried out beginning with the concrete case of regional cooperation that has been called the ‘Four Motors for Europe’ established in the field of cooperation in science and technology. The basis for the analysis of cooperation between jurisdictions in science and technology is the same as that for cooperation in the same field between companies. It allows the establishment of when this cooperation can degenerate into collusion or else when the result is a socially efficient organization. The risk of regional cooperation in science and technology is that it degenerates into collusion between the regions that occupy a more favourable technological position at the cost of those that are in a worse situation. The solution in order to avoid this risk would be to guarantee political competition in the same way that through regulations competition in the market is guaranteed.     

现代农业与小农制衔接的两个理论问题

走中国特色农业现代化道路需要解决两大实践难题：一是如何实现小农制与现代农业的有效衔接;二是如何培育资本农业的生成机制。归结起来就是“钱从哪里来”和“人往哪里去”的问题。这里涉及到两个理论问题：如何认识现代小农制的历史地位,如何解决资本与劳动的矛盾对立。本文围绕上述问题,对19世纪末以来马克思主义经典作家的相关讨论做一回顾性阐释。     

United States: Responses to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage

While the US is not a signatory to the 2001 UNESCO Convention, much progress has been made by US agencies to implement its Rules and principles. The US signed an Agreement on Titanic with Rules that are nearly identical to the UNESCO Convention. US agencies have also expressed support for the Rules and their implementation into their programs. This paper identifies these positive actions as well as the two primary concerns that have prevented the US from signing the Convention to date: (1) “creeping coastal State jurisdiction” and (2) treatment of sunken state vessels.     

Passing strange: the convergence of evolutionary science with scientific history

In the second half of the twentieth century, a surprising change in the notion of scientific truth gained ground when an evolutionary cosmology made the Newtonian world machine into no more than a passing phase of the cosmos, subject to exceptions in the neighborhood of black holes and other unusual objects. Physical and chemical laws ceased to be eternal and universal and became local and changeable, that is, fundamentally historical instead, and faced an uncertain, changeable future just as they had in the initial phases of the cosmos. The earth sciences along with biology had become historical in the nineteenth century; and the Big Bang cosmology in effect brought physics and chemistry into line, allowing venturesome intellects to concoct a new all‐embracing worldview that recognizes the catalytic role of the observer in defining what is observed, and how different levels of local complexity provoke new and surprising phenomena—including terrestrial life forms, and most notably for us, humanly‐constructed symbolic meanings—of which science is only oneexample. The article then argues that it is time for historians to take note of the imperial role thus thrust upon their discipline by making a sustained effort to enlarge their views and explore the career of humankind on earth as a whole, thus making human history an integral part of the emerging scientific and evolutionary worldview. Tentative suggestions of how this might be addressed, focusing on changes in patterns of communication that expanded the scale of human cooperation, and thus conduced to survival, follow. Dance, then speech, were early breakthroughs expanding the practicable size of wandering human bands; then caravans and shipping allowed civilizations to arise; writing expanded the scale of coordination; warfare and trade harshly imposed best practice across wide areas of Eurasia and Africa and kept the skills of that part of the world ahead of what the peoples of other continents and islands had at their command. Then with the crossing of the oceans after 1492 our One World began to emerge and swiftly assumed its contemporary shape with further improvements in the range and capacity of communication—for example, printing, mechanically‐powered transport, instantaneous data transmission—with consequences for human society and earth's ecosystem yet to be experienced. Much remains to be investigated and, in particular, interactions between the history of human symbolic meanings and the history of other equilibria—ecological, chemical, physical—within which we exist needs further study. But with suitable effort, history can perhaps become scientific and the emerging scientific evolutionary worldview begin to achieve logical completeness by bringing humankind within its scope.