Road-kill on the information highway: repetitive strain injury in the academy

Most critical scholars who study disabilities question how specific environments effectively enable or disable persons with mental or physical impairments, and avoid locating disabilities as objective realities for affected individuals. Applying such insights to intensive use of desktop computers within office environments such as universities, affords a critique of the disabling aspects of computer keyboarding and video display terminal viewing. Computer-related repetitive strain injury is a physical impairment whose seriousness, treatment, solutions and accommodation within the workplace are currently in dispute; in part due to lobby efforts by the IT industry and computer‐intensive employers.     

Entrenched Disbelief: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Case for Inclusive Cultural Evolutionary Thinking

Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.     

A Founder: Aaron Wildavsky and the Study of Public Policy

During the decade of the 1960s a new social science discipline was created. Aaron Wildavsky, along with a small number of other scholars, began focusing their research on public policy studies and the analysis of governmental policy. This article discusses Professor Aaron Wildavsky's original interest in this field, how he institutionalized it by creating a Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and his major contributions to the emerging field. Aaron Wildavsky was one of the preeminent social scientists of the twentieth century, and this article is intended to explain why.     

Land Uses and Environmental Conflicts in the Arcachon Bay Coastal Area: An Analysis in Terms of Heritage

Abstract

Coastal zones are specific areas which usually have natural resources of particular interest from ecological and heritage points of view. They are nevertheless subject to considerable pressure because of their attractiveness. Integrated coastal zone management is supposed to take into account these multiple factors in order to preserve natural resources and to allow for coastal development. In this context, land-use conflicts may emerge. This study aims to identify such conflicts and to explain them in terms of heritage conventions. An interesting methodology is implemented, using both focus groups' representations and daily press articles concerning the specific coastal zone of Arcachon Bay in the south west of France. The results raise questions on the link between water and land in coastal land-use management.     

Gender, nature, empire: women naturalists in nineteenth century British travel literature

Among the many British women abroad in the late nineteenth century were a number of travellers who toured the American West with a naturalist's pen and sketchbook. California, with its giant sequoias and redwoods, scenic Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean flora of the southern coasts, especially attracted travellers with a naturalist orientation. We examine the botanical and naturalist writings and art of two well-known (and well-heeled) world travellers – Constance Gordon Cumming and Marianne North – and another more obscure British aristocrat, Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, who travelled in California in the late nineteenth century. We examine relationships among these elite women's association with the Romantic aesthetic and naturalist traditions, natural sciences, class-based associations between women and flowers, and emergent environmentalism. The works of these women indicate the process by which natural history rhetorics and styles became embedded within gender, class, and imperial relations; and how the division of natural history into professional and amateur domains relegated women to discursive margins.     

Reasonable hope: Kant as critical theorist

Sister and brother Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825) and John Aikin (1747–1822) are two famous Rational Dissenting writers who strategically appropriated republican discourse to advance the Dissenting cause. Both make the case that, far from being subversive, Rational Dissent actually granted its adherents the independence that, from a republican perspective, was considered essential to true patriotism. In a fresh formulation of republican discourse, they present the strength of the Rational Dissenting commitment to ‘free inquiry’ as security for continuing independence, enabling liberal Dissenters to act as patriotic guardians of British virtue and liberty against the dangerous effects of luxury, even as they continued to contribute towards the development of the British commercial economy and to promote the benefits of commerce, traditionally regarded with hostility by classical republicans. Effectively exploiting the classical republican belief in the central role of education, Barbauld and Aikin particularly sought to publicize the role that the Dissenting academies had played in producing patriots by making ‘free inquiry’ the basis of their pedagogical philosophy and practice.     

Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis

This article examines the historically and culturally specific valence of ‘gender’ as currently deployed in the field of gender and women's history. It draws broadly on the scholarship on gender since the 1980s, while focusing particularly on the case of the British North American colonies and the early United States republic. The essay argues against the common practice of assuming that gender, understood as an oppositional binary, functions virtually universally as a primary process for representing differential power. It concludes by calling for a way of thinking about gender that can recognise important historical and cultural alternatives.