Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women’s lives—even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints—are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women’s lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men’s days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women’s everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel’s military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border.     

“Removes All Obstacles”: Abortifacients in Nineteenth-Century Toronto and Beyond

Exploring the biographies of small artifacts from archaeological contexts is an endeavour that can expose unrealized or forgotten historical and cultural meaning at local, regional, national, and international levels. The recovery of a small glass bottle embossed with the name “Sir J. Clarke’s Female Pills” from a site in Toronto has drawn together the production history and advertising during the nineteenth century of a patent medicine product classed as an abortifacient. Furthermore, it connects the history of women’s health and fertility rights to the social and economic motivations influencing control over family planning.     

Anton Raederscheidt’s Distorted Self-Portraits and Their Significance for Understanding Balance in Art

Following a right cerebral stroke, the German artist Anton Raederscheidt produced a remarkable series of self-portraits that depicted his severe visual neglect and gradual recovery. These distorted images, like those drawn by others with this disorder, inform us about lateral balance in art and why it is common in the art of cultures separated in time and space. After describing how artists in various cultures have employed lateral balance, I present Arnheim’s view that this aspect of art is the result of visual forces generated by the brain. Following a brief history of visual neglect, I present evidence that this disorder provides us with clues to the origin of the visual forces responsible for lateral balance in art. The relevant brain mechanisms control exploration of visual space by integrating orienting movements with visual spatial information. The prevalence of lateral balance in art becomes understandable when we consider that these brain mechanisms evolved to promote survival in our vertebrate ancestors. I end with a speculative neurological account of the aesthetics of lateral balance – why it is pleasing and its absence is displeasing.     

Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode: Producing Data Assets in the Gig Economy

In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App-governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data as a particular asset class. We reflect on the production of data assets and the unequal distribution of opportunities for their valorisation, after which we survey a number of strategies seeking data-centric worker empowerment. These strategies, we argue, are crucial attempts to push back against platform capitalism’s domination, bankrolled by what we term “meta-platforms”. Ultimately, it is the massive wealth and synergetic capacities of meta-platforms that constitute the most formidable obstacle to worker power and social justice in increasingly data-driven societies.     

A Forgotten Legacy: The Romanov Patronage of Finland’s Early Art Collections

The earliest art collections of Finland’s National Gallery came into being when, as the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was an autonomous part of imperial Russia (1809–1917). The prevailing view of Finnish museum studies, however, sees the Finnish Art Society, the precursor of the Finnish National Gallery, as being modelled on exclusively European cultural institutions. The history of the Society and its collections have thus been seen as resistant to any alien eastern influences, and as an attempt to differentiate Finnish culture from Russian art collecting practices. Drawing on the theoretical shift in cultural studies from the conception of stable, clearly demarcated cultural identities of nation states toward less rigidly defined identities, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the hidden Russian presence in Finnish museum historiography. Based on original unpublished sources, my study shows that the earliest support of Finland’s cultural infrastructure was given by the Romanov patrons Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Alexander III. By exposing the absence and physical erasure of “imperial identity” in the official Finnish museum narrative, I reveal how museums can at once elevate particular discourses and practices while marginalizing other historical processes in a nation’s cultural past.     

Eyes on the alley: children’s appropriation of alley space in Riverdale,Toronto

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that numerous positive physical, cognitive, and social benefits can be derived from independent mobility and play agency amongst children, necessitating an understanding of how physical and social environments facilitate this development. This study involved parents, and children aged 9–13 from twelve households in the neighbourhood of Riverdale in Toronto. Using a mapping exercise to instigate discussion, participants were asked to describe where, how, and with whom play occurs in their neighbourhood. A reoccurring theme emerged amongst households that border a back alley where parents perceived this space as safer allowing them to grant greater independent mobility to their children and use this space as an intermediary tool to prepare their children for greater independence. For children, this space serves as one of creative appropriation, granting them access to more space and friends to play with. Situated within the context of age-friendly cities, this research identifies several socio-spatial qualities found in alleys that have the potential to contribute to the discussion of more inclusive city-building practice.     

From ‘Breathless Catalogue’ to ‘Beyond Text’: A Hundred Years of Children’s Folklore Collecting

This lecture draws attention to research into children’s folklore in Britain from the last century, stressing its potential to inform understandings of contemporary childhoods, particularly children’s play. The emphasis is on archival sources, such as the collections of Norman Douglas, James Ritchie, and Iona and Peter Opie. The changing nature of contemporary evidence, such as children’s self-produced films of their play shared on YouTube, is also illustrated, and the importance of a multimodal approach stressed. The author compares the historical sources with the collectors’ published work, and highlights the need for rigour in appraising these differing forms of evidence.     

Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of Art

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook.     

Beyond Metrics: Reappraising York’s Hungate “Slum”

Much of the excitement generated in Britain since 2007 by the York Archaeological Trust’s excavations of the city’s Hungate neighborhood, which Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree characterized as a “slum” in his pioneering poverty survey of 1901, derives from the unexpected volume and variety of material evidence uncovered about life in a poor community within a modern industrial city. Such material evidence and its often uncertain relationships to other historical data can enhance analysis by complicating understanding of the past, rather than echoing conventional wisdom. Findings from Hungate can thus contribute to nuanced understandings of urban social disadvantage not only at the neighborhood level in this one particular British city, but at the larger scales of analysis that encompass the growth of cities and interacting urban regions in Britain and around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These understandings have contemporary relevance for a world in which over half of humanity now lives in urban areas, as misconceptions about “slums” continue to undermine efforts to reduce urban inequality.     

A sociotechnical order for the umma: connecting Islam and technology in Suharto’s Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores narratives connecting Islam and technology that arose in Indonesia during the New Order period (1965–1998). These public discussions defined technological work, especially work in high technology, as a vital spiritual and economic arena for Indonesian Muslims. By asserting technology as a site for spiritual action, Indonesian Islamic activists offered a redefinition of economic development intended to alter both its goals and the character of participation in the development enterprise. In doing so, they framed technological activity as a crucial form of moral agency. Embracing the postsecular turn in historical scholarship which emphasizes attention to the ongoing social processes which define religiosity and secularity, this article investigates how religion and technology are entangled in contemporary Indonesia.     

Beyond ‘resistance’: rethinking nonhuman agency for a ‘more-than-human’ world

This article argues that rethinking historical agency to include nonhuman agents is one way to integrate better animals into historical narratives. Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and forming part of a growing interest in nonhuman, particularly animal, agency, it aims to clear some theoretical and historiographical ground to provide a basis for claims that nature has agency. It then argues that environmental and animal historians have too readily equated nonhuman agency with ‘resistance’, a concept that does not easily map onto animal behaviour and one which also fails to capture the diversity of nonhuman agencies. Using case studies of Police rescue dogs in early twentieth-century France and animals on the Western Front, it argues that exploring the diverse types of nonhuman agencies and their deep and multiple entanglements with human agents will extend studies of nonhumans beyond the resistance model.