El Paso del Norte … Modernization Utopias, Othering and Management Practices in Mexico's Maquiladora Industry

Starting from the assumption that maquiladora managers play a crucial role in the current struggle for the discursive construction of the "modern" Mexico, this paper critically engages with these powerful actors and their representations of maquiladora workers and the production environment. Adopting a critical perspective on traditional notions of modernity and modernization, I start my argument from the assumption that the idea of linear progress and its use as a universal blueprint to hierarchically order the social world has not disappeared. Though the idea of progress and development is, at first glance, a simple and straightforward message, it is actually full of paradoxes. Using case-study material from El Paso del Norte, the international agglomeration on the Mexican-US border combining Ciudad Ju´rez and El Paso, I argue that both the image of maquiladoras as developed and the image of them as backward are indispensable to the modernization discourse within the maquiladora industry. I seek to show that maquiladora managers play a powerful role in transmitting the modernization narrative and that in doing so they are getting caught within its contradictions. By producing and reproducing discourses of Ciudad Ju´rez and its inhabitants as backward, while simultaneously attempting to prove that there is progress and development, managers recreate some of the very problems they attempt to overcome.     

Folgen der Emigration deutscher und österreichischer Wissenschaftstheoretiker und Logiker zwischen 1933 und 1945

The paper begins by delimiting the scope of ‘logic’ and ‘philosophy of science’ and goes on to present the biographies and select bibliographies of 36 émigré scholars from Germany and Austria working in these fields. An evaluation of this material, and of data on societies, congresses, lecture series, books and periodicals on logic and philosophy of science, is then undertaken. Against the rich background of activity in the 20s and 30s of our century, there is manifest a rapid decline of high-ranking research in the philosophy of science and (to a lesser degree) in logic in Germany and Austria. Since, with one exception, émigré logicians and philosophers of science did not return after the breakdown of the Third Reich, recovery in these fields has been extremely slow. Pertinent knowledge had to be re-imported, and a satisfactory level has been reached only with the coming of a new generation.     

The Mixed Potential of Salvage Commoning: Crisis and Commoning Practices in Washington,DC and New York City

This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent-teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed potential of salvage commoning—especially in the face of ongoing and emerging crises in which such orientations are likely to become increasingly prevalent.