Aksumite Lithic Industries

A preliminary account is given of a previously unrecorded, abundant, and varied classical and late Aksumite use, in a sophisticated urban context, of carefully made stone scrapers and backed microliths with close affinities to their local Late Stone Age precursors. Examination of microscar patterns on these artifacts has provided an additional source of new information about Aksumite technical, economic, and social practices.Un rapport préliminaire de l'usage, en Axoum pendant les périodes classique et dernier, d'un grand nombre des grattoirs et des microlithes à bord abattu, biens fabriqués et des formes divers. Ces outils lithiques, qui viennent d'un contexte urbain, ont les affinités nombreuses avec les outils de l'âge de la pierre récent dans cette localité. Une étude microscopique des traces d'emploi des outils a donné une nouvelle source d'information sur les pratiques technologique, economique et social d'Axoum.     

The Role of Pilot Projects in Urban Climate Change Policy Innovation

Cities are taking a leadership role in addressing global climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but policy innovations are needed to help cities move from goals to outcomes. Pilot projects are one means by which cities are experimenting with new ways of governing and financing climate change mitigation. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the role of pilot projects in urban policy innovation: their emergence and rationale, and the means by which they ultimately scale up and out to reduce GHG emissions. We use this framework to evaluate a pilot project for retrofitting social housing buildings in Toronto. We find the initial pilot project helped address the challenges of pursuing deep retrofits of social housing. Scaling these lessons up to the city level required overcoming challenges to financing and coordinating a larger project; scaling out to the provincial level revealed institutional and political obstacles to pursuing the co-benefits of deep building retrofits in social housing. Bridging agents play an important role in both scaling processes. The analysis reveals the additive nature of urban policy innovation and the dynamic interplay of change agents and institutional and political context in innovation processes.     

Accompaniment Through Carceral Geographies: Abolitionist Research Partnerships with Indigenous Communities

This article approaches “ea”—a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept meaning life, breath, and sovereignty—as a vital mode of abolition ecologies, and proposes accompaniment as a methodology for mutual collaboration toward this endeavour. Research draws from ethnographic fieldwork on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu in Hawai‘i, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, and reflects upon the author’s positionality on Wai‘anae’s insider–outsider borderlands. The argument is multifold: Carceral geographies inscribe racism by cleaving humans from the environment and each other, depriving life‐giving resources from populations deemed a threat to a dominant socioenvironmental order. At the same time, abolition ecologies entail worldmaking predicated on the interdependence of all life forces, employing syncretic practices that join disparate struggles, people, and places to generate possibilities greater than the sum of its parts. Accompaniment works against racism’s practices of criminalisation and containment while contributing to radical, syncretic placemaking as part of an expansive liberatory practice.     

The Politics of Citizen Access Technology

This article uses comparative case studies to examine the political shaping of public Information utilities developed by American local governments. These public access computer networks are designed lo facilitate access to community information and dialogue. We view technology design as analogous to developing public policy on citizen participation, where the "legislation" is imbedded in the technological design. Research sites included three adopter cities, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Glendale, California, and one nonadopter city, Irvine. This comparison highlights key technology-policy choices (including the choice of not developing this application). Our analysis then examines the role of technological paradigms, local political cultures, and organizational arrangements in shaping municipal approaches to addressing these key policy choices.     

Más o Menos Muerto: Bare Life in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

This article explores Chilean Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 (2004) with a focus on the significance of what Giorgio Agamben describes as ‘bare life.’ In the novel, Bolaño employs Pedro Páramo as a metaphor to talk about feminicide and violence against women in Santa Teresa, the fictional Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The victims of violence in Santa Teresa in 2666 are described as ‘más o menos muerto,’ a condition that points to the way in which disappeared and misidentified bodies are forced into eternal anonymity and denied even the right of death. Whereas the dead in Pedro Páramo are denied the rights of citizenship in life, those in 2666 face a denial of rights that extends from life into death, leaving them with nothing, not even their names. In 2666, the physical violence is preceded by what Juárez photojournalist Julián Cardona describes as ‘economic violence.’     

Short notices

AGERON, C.‐R. and MICHEL, M. (eds), L'Ere des décolonisations, Karthala, 1996, 516 pp., 170F., ISBN 2 86537 579 X

BRIAN, E. and DEMEULENAERE‐DOUYERE, C. (eds), Histoire et mémoire de l'Académie des sciences. Guide de Recherches, TEC & DOC Lavoisier, 1996, 449 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 2 7430 0148

CORRÉARD, M.‐H. (ed.), The Pocket Oxford‐Hachette French Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1996, 784 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0 19 864534 1

CORRÉARD, M.‐H. and O'NEILL, M. (eds), Oxford Starter Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1997, 400 pp., £6.99, ISBN 0 19 864527 9

DURAND, P., Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, Gallimard, 1998, 252 pp., 54F., ISBN 2 07 038939 1 (collection ‘Folio')

HAFEN, L. (ed.), French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West, (Selected with an Introduction by Janet Lecompte) University of Nebraska Press, 1997, 333 pp., £13.95, ISBN 0 8032 7302 9

SOULEZ‐LARIVIÈRE,, D. Grand Soir pour la justice, Seuil, 1997, 175 pp., 110F., ISBN 2 02 032215 3

STEINBERG, P., Chroniques d'ailleurs, Ramsay, 1996, 190 pp., 92F., ISBN 2 84114 133 0     

Women in Neuroscience (WIN): The First Twenty Years

Women in Neuroscience (WIN) is an international organization whose major goal is to promote the professional advancement of women neuroscientists. To this end, WIN facilitates contacts and communication among women working in neuroscience, and organizes appropriate activities at the annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting. WIN was created in 1980, when despite major changes and advances in “equal opportunities“, women were still not achieving a proportionate level of success in the subdiscipline of neurosciences. In 1980, women made up 40 to 50% of entering classes in medical schools or graduate programs, but often comprised only 5 to 15% of leadership in respective organizations. Although there had been women elected to serve as SfN presidents, council, and committee members, women were underrepresented in other positions of the Society, such as symposium and session chairs. There was an even lesser degree of representation in leadership positions at universities and medical schools in terms of full professorships, chairs, and program directors, as well as on editorial boards, advisory boards, and councils. Over the years, WIN has worked with success toward increasing the participation of women in neuroscience.