Establishing Connections,Restoring Relationships: Exploring the Historiography of Nursing in Britain

This paper provides a comparative historiographical framework within which to reconsider the history of nursing. It asks why nursing has remained largely sidelined within the history of medicine, while the latter has gained mainstream respectability in the wider field of historical research. Gender historians are challenged to look at the under‐explored aspects of nursing's history such as pre‐Nightingale nurses and nursing, and the multiple and international meanings of race, class and gender as experienced by this unique cohort of women and men. The paper draws upon key texts in the history of nursing and of medicine and includes a discussion about use of imagery within significant publications and what this says about intended readerships. It concludes that, unlike medicine, nursing professionals have to some extent hijacked the history of nursing, while the subject has been further hampered by Florence Nightingale's legacy and the subsequent emphasis on the professionalisation of nursing.     

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

Harvesting different species as foods or raw materials calls for differing skills depending on the species being harvested and the circumstances under which they are being taken. In some situations and for some species, the tactics used are mainly behavioral—that is, people adjust, or adapt, their own actions to fit the behavior and circumstances of the species they are taking. Under other circumstances and for other species, the skills and tactics used may call for greater environmental preparation or manipulation. Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish people today and in the past as either foragers or farmers, it makes sense to define human subsistence behavior as an interactive matrix of species and harvesting tactics, that is, as a provisions spreadsheet.     

Washing urban water: diplomacy in environmental art in the Bronx,New York City

Lillian Ball's art project WATERWASH creates a new ecological imaginary in the South Bronx. Building on a tradition of ‘maintenance art’, the work exhibits the power of soil, plants and microorganisms to clean water – in effect maintaining urban water. An overarching goal of WATERWASH is to educate local people about the metabolism of urban water, causes of river pollution, and to familiarize them with the capacity of soil and plants to respond to that problem. As part of its creation, the project provided diverse groups of people with opportunities to participate, including a group of Bronx youth who assisted in planting the wetland. Several of these apprentices will be involved in future monitoring of the effectiveness of the wetland in mitigating parking lot runoff. I use Isabelle Stengers' notion of ‘diplomacy’ to interrogate the efforts of the artist in negotiating and creating an occasion in which people with divergent interests can both recognize and maintain the relationships of care that sustain them. In effect, this effort extends the feminist discourse of maintenance work to include that undertaken by the ‘other-than-human’.     

Defining,explaining and managing high-tech growth: The case of Oxfordshire

The formerly sleepy, rural county of Oxfordshire is now one of Europe's leading centres of enterprise, innovation and knowledge. It is a hotspot for high-tech manufacturing and service employment. But what is behind this phenomenon, and to what extent has it been managed? This paper sets out the facts, and explores the underlying factors. It starts with a number of definitional questions and approaches used in the research. It concludes with an examination of the role of planning in the process—and the extent to which is has helped or hindered the rise of “Enterprising Oxford”.