Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kong's New Territories, 1945–1970

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their differing modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘experimental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because of the local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.     

Crafting the future: envisioning space exploration in post-war Britain

Prior to the launch of Sputnik, knowledge about human space travel was widely circulated by spaceflight proponents, scientists and news producers in mainstream culture through print, film and broadcast media and displayed in public sites such as museums and public exhibition spaces. Focusing on the timeframe 1947–1953, this article examines how key members of the British Interplanetary Society used a combination of craft skills, graphical technologies, and communication media to create pictures and models to support rhetorical claims that spaceflight and astronautics are legitimate fields of scientific research and space travel could and should be achieved in the near future. Production and circulation of factual knowledge about space travel was not confined to material and discursive practices in established fields such as astronomy and aeronautical engineering. Actors from other professional, non-professional, and social groups contributed to the realization of future spaceflight as an heterogeneous cultural endeavor or astroculture encompassing an array of technical processes, artifacts, craft skills, and scientific knowledge.     

Disciplining technology: Electronic reliability,Cold‐War military culture and the topside ionogram

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between cold‐war military electronics and the material culture of space science. Focusing on the world's first ionospheric research satellite, designed and built by the Canadian Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment at the height of the Cold War, it seeks to situate the practices and beliefs that underwrote the reliability of this instrument within more profound changes in electronics and electrical engineering during the 1950s. Rather than invoke a monolithic culture of reliability to explain the work of satellite technicians and engineers, this investigation identifies instead two principle approaches to the question of reliability in cold‐war electronics, their origin in the shortcomings of industrial electronics after the Second World War, as well as the place of the satellite project within them. By concentrating our attention on the conceptual and technical dimensions of electronic reliability, radier than on more traditional aspects of solid‐state research and industrial innovation, we can understand how technicians and engineers, developing weapons systems and scientific instruments alike, struggled to understand and use operationally and cognitively unstable electronic devices, and what these struggles suggest about the complex material and social legacy of the Cold War.     

Between resentment and aid: German and Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist refugees in Great Britain since 1933

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the experiences that German and Austrian émigré psychiatrists and neurologists made in Great Britain since 1933, after the Nazi Governments in Central Europe had ousted them from their positions. When placing these occurrences in a wider historiographical perspective, the in-depth analysis provided here also describes the living and working conditions of the refugee neuroscientists on the British Isles. In particular, it looks at the very elements and issues that influenced the international forced migration of physicians and psychiatrists during the 1930s and 1940s. Only a fraction of refugee neuroscientists had however been admitted to Britain. Those lucky ones were assisted by a number of charitable, local, and academic organizations. This article investigates the rather lethargic attitude of the British government and medical circles towards German-speaking Jewish refugee neuroscientists who wished to escape Nazi Germany. It will also analyze the help that those refugees received from the academic establishment and British Jewish organizations, while likewise examining the level and extent of the relationship between social and scientific resentments in Great Britain. A special consideration will be given to the aid programs that had already began in the first year after the Nazis had seized power in Germany, with the foundation of the British Assistance Council by Sir William Henry Beveridge (1879–1963) in 1933.     

AGGLOMERATION,URBAN WAGE PREMIUMS,AND COLLEGE MAJORS

The aim of this paper is to examine the manner and extent to which worker skill type affects agglomeration economies that contribute to productivity in cities. I use college majors to proxy for skill types among workers with a bachelor's degree. Workers with college training in information‐oriented and technical fields (e.g., STEM areas such as engineering, physical sciences, and economics) are associated with economically important within‐field agglomeration economies and also generate sizeable spillovers for workers in other fields. In contrast, within‐field and across‐field spillovers for workers with college training in the arts and humanities are much smaller and often nonexistent. While previous research suggests proximity to college‐educated workers enhances productivity, these findings suggest that not all college‐educated workers are alike. Instead, positive spillover effects appear to derive mostly from proximity to workers with college training in information‐oriented and technical fields.     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on which socio-political processes play out. The paper develops its argument through analyses of the Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh and a char (sediment) island in the Meghna Estuary to which Bangladesh proposes to relocate the refugees. In the first situation, the sedimentary logics of anticline geology, deforestation and monsoon rains push back against political agendas directed towards constraining refugee movement. In the second, fluvial and oceanic sedimentary dynamics and the post-Holocene volatility of the monsoon throw into doubt the engineering solution proposed by Bangladesh to the political problems the refugee presence poses. Through these examples, the paper adds to literature on how states of matter inflect, exceed, undercut or in other ways interfere with matters of state through their unique, dynamic environmental properties.     

Chemists,engineers and entrepreneurs the chemical institute of sarrià's impact on Spanish industry (1916–1992)

This paper analyzes the influence the Chemical Institute of Sarrià (IQS) ‐a private institution devoted both to the education of chemists and chemical engineers and to applied research‐ has had on Spain's chemical industry from 1916 onwards. The research reported is based upon three data sources (articles on industrial chemistry published by the IQS’ journal Afinidad and M. Se. theses; IQS graduates’ industrial activities; and technical services carried out by the Institute's staff for several companies). The main conclusion is that the IQS has had a remarkable impact on Catalan and Spanish industry. Although there are no other similar studies on Spanish scientific and technical institutions, the IQS case confirms that technical education and institutionalized research have a positive impact on the economic and industrial development of “latecomers” like Spain.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

‘Dominion over palm and pine’: the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920–1947

During the first half of the twentieth century British imperialists invested ardent hopes in the emergence of a self-sufficient, competitive Empire. World War 1 focused some of those aspirations on the progressive management of forest resources, and in 1920 the UK launched a series of British Empire Forestry Conferences in pursuit of that aim. An uneven, intermittent exchange attempted to address the complexities of imperfectly understood cultural, economic, environmental, political, scientific, social and technical change, the pressure of extra-imperial influences, and the independent trajectories of ambitious settler Dominions. The Depression and World War 2 also entered the dynamic, severely testing the foresters' achievements and their resolve. From today's perspective the main products are a small window on the antecedents of modern forestry and the nucleus of a promising archive for interdisciplinary teaching and research.     

Knowledge and professional identity in engineering: code‐switching and the metrics of progress

When nations redefine their priorities and re‐plot their directions of travel, engineers get worried about the contents of their knowledge. The cultural and historical specificity of their responses illustrates the extent to which the questions of what counts as engineering knowledge and what counts as an engineer are linked tightly together, and also suggests that both may be tied to local images of the nation. After summarizing recent historical work comparing national patterns in engineering knowledge and engineers' work, this essay outlines how a focus on professional identity may provide a way of accounting for national and transnational influences on engineers while avoiding the specter of determinism. Offering brief case studies drawn from France, the UK, Germany and the USA, the authors describe engineers as ‘responding’ to codes of meaning that live at different scales, including contrasting metrics of progress and images of private industry. The paper is concluded with a brief assessment of some further implications of the analysis of professional identity for work in engineering studies.     

Chinese Refugee Children and Empires: The Politics of International Adoptions in Cold War Hong Kong

With the support of new sources from British and Hong Kong archives, this study casts new light on the post-war international adoptions of Chinese refugee children in the British colony of Hong Kong. It argues that while children were ‘saved’ and found families overseas, they were also used as pawns in a bigger political game. A way to delegate welfare for the Hong Kong government, a symbolic humanitarian concession vis-à-vis a strict anti-immigration policy for Britain, and an anti-communist propaganda tool for the United States, these adoptions also convey the competing power and population politics played over subject children by two multiracial empires: one in decline (the rapidly decolonising Britain), the other on the rise (the new cold war superpower).     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

国际难民机制与战后初期全球难民治理——以“国际难民组织”为中心的考察

二战的爆发造成全球产生了大量的难民和流离失所者,国际社会围绕这一问题的解决进行了积极探索。国际难民组织作为联合国处理难民问题的专门机构应运而生,通过与各国政府、社团组织开展合作与互动,共同致力于战后国际难民问题的解决。该组织重点从难民的照护、失踪人员追踪、法律和政治保护等领域出发,参与到国际难民保护实践当中。同时,该组织通过遣返、重新安置以及本地安置等方式积极推动难民安置目标的达成。作为联合国对于战后难民问题的制度化回应,国际难民组织的实践本身体现了持不同立场的国家之间的合作,也逐渐显现出各国的合作意愿与冷战现实之间的矛盾。随着冷战在欧洲及其他地区的开启,国际难民问题日趋复杂且出现新变化,联合国难民署的成立标志着全球难民治理进入新的阶段。     

Engineers and engineering history: problems and perspectives

In past decades, the history of engineers and engineering has seen spectacular development. Despite this, major interrogations are still left unanswered. This article examines some of these pending questions, like the type of relation that exists between engineering knowledge and practice, or the complex articulation between continuities and discontinuities that characterizes engineering history. Finally, the article proposes to focus on engineering rationality as a possible way to address some of these issues. In order to do so, engineering rationality is not to be confused with some kind of generic and abstract logic. On the contrary, it must be historicized.     

The technoscientists: a Swedish construction of basic research in World War II

The paper examines a group of engineers and scientists in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s that worked to gain political support for what they called ‘technoscientific research’. Following their own terminology and the ideas of close relations between engineers, scientists, industries, and politics it implied, I call these actors ‘technoscientists’. Critical to their approach was the strategical use of the concept of ‘basic research’, constructed by the technoscientists to associate knowledge production with economic development and demarcate an area of responsibility for public support of industrial research. The technoscientists promoted this strategy by linking basic research to the technical exigencies caused by World War II and by integrating it with politics of welfare, defense, and trade. The technoscientists were thus important political reformers that laid the foundations of public support of science and technology before the 1950s and 1960s when science policy emerged as an institutionalized political practice in Sweden.     

城市空间结构增长原理

城市空间结构是城市地理学、城市规划学的核心研究内容之一。城市结构增长作为一个十分复杂的空间现象,而一直引起各方面学者的关注。本文基于对西方各学派相关研究方法及成果的系统考察,从结构增长、空间组织、增长过程三个方面,以若干具体的原理,对城市空间结构增长进行了全面、深入地阐释,研究了新经济环境、技术要素的相关影响,揭示了城市空间结构演化是建构在社会经济发展过程中的空间过程这一基本原理。本文对城市空间结构研究进行了丰富与完善。     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

Pushed into Pragmatism: British Approaches to Science in Post-War Occupied Germany

One of the most important dilemmas facing the British authorities when they occupied their zone of Germany at the end of the Second World War was what to do with German science. The contributions made by scientists and engineers to the Nazi war machine, in fields such as rocketry and submarines, meant that German science was both revered and feared, and was therefore closely linked to concerns about a post-war military resurgence in Germany. This article aims to chart the changing approaches which the British occupation officials adopted towards German science in this period. While the initial intention was to prevent Germany from ever waging war again, through demilitarisation, denazification and dismantling, the focus changed as British enmity shifted from a former adversary, Germany, to a former ally, the Soviet Union. Policy reflected this shift as technology transfer and the reconstruction of domestic German science won greater favour. This article aims to show that, in the face of growing hostility from the USSR and in the deeply suspicious climate of the early Cold War, Britain was forced to abandon its moral mission towards German science and adopt a far more pragmatic strategy instead.     

Multiple Contexts as Cross-classified Models: The Labor Vote in the British General Election of 1992

Voters make their decisions in social and geographical contexts that can be seen as different levels in an overall data structure. Increasingly these structures are being analyzed by multilevel models, but this approach has so far been limited to structures that are strictly hierarchical. This paper outlines the approach of cross-classified multilevel models in which units at lower levels in the structure can be nested in more than one higher-level unit simultaneously. An appropriate modeling framework is outlined, models are specified, and particular attention is paid to efficient computation. The approach is illustrated through a cross-classified logit analysis of Labor versus Conservative support for a nationally representative sample of voting behavior for the 1992 British General Election. The data is structured so that individual voters at level 1 are nested within constituencies at level 2 which are cross-classified by geographical and functional regionalizations at level 3. A conclusion discusses the general utility of a cross-classified approach to geographically based contextual research, while two technical appendices provide details on model estimation.