Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.     

Godot’s Shakespeare

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.     

The intuitions of higher dimensional algebra for the study of structured space

Higher dimensional algebra frees mathematics from the restriction to a purely linear notation, in order to improve the modelling of geometry and so obtain more understanding and more modes of computation. It gives new tools for noncommutative, higher dimensional, local to global problems, through the notion of «algebraic inverse to subdivision». We explain the way these ideas arose for the writters, in extending first the classical notion of abstract group to abstract groupoid, in which composition is only partially defined, as in composing journeys, and which brings a spatial component to the usual group theory: An example from knot theory is used to explain how such algebra can be used to describe some structure of a space. The extension to dimension 2 uses compositions of squares in two directions, and the richness of the resulting algebra is shown by some 2-dimensional calculations. The difficulty of the jump from dimension 1 to dimension 2 is also illustrated by the comparison of the commutative square with the commutative cube-discussion of the latter requires new ideas. The importance of category theory is explained, and a range of current and potential applications of higher dimensional algebra indicated.     

The Waikato River: Changing Properties of a Living Māori Ancestor

In Māori cosmology, rivers and other waterways are conceptualised as living ancestors, who have their own life force and spiritual strength. The special status of rivers in Māori society also explains why they are sometimes separated from other Māori claims to natural resources of which they were dispossessed in the 19th century. Until recently, Māori were often eager to contend that ownership of rivers is not their prime interest, but instead, they argued that they feel obliged and responsible to keep rivers fresh, clean, and flowing. This perspective, however, changed under the impact of a new government policy of selling shares in energy corporations that use freshwater and geothermal resources for energy production. In this paper, I provide an ethnohistorical account of the Waikato River and show how conceptions of this ‘ancestral river’ changed in the course of colonial and postcolonial history, more specifically in response to a recent shift in government policy. In 2008, a joint management agreement was signed between the government and Waikato Māori for a ‘clean and healthy river’, leaving the issue of ‘ownership’ undecided. Only two years later, however, Māori felt forced to claim ownership when the government moved to sell shares of power‐generating energy companies located along the river, which effectively transformed their ‘ancestor’ into a property object.     

Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode: Producing Data Assets in the Gig Economy

In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App-governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data as a particular asset class. We reflect on the production of data assets and the unequal distribution of opportunities for their valorisation, after which we survey a number of strategies seeking data-centric worker empowerment. These strategies, we argue, are crucial attempts to push back against platform capitalism’s domination, bankrolled by what we term “meta-platforms”. Ultimately, it is the massive wealth and synergetic capacities of meta-platforms that constitute the most formidable obstacle to worker power and social justice in increasingly data-driven societies.     

The Role of Engineer-in-Chief and the Introduction of Foreign Hydraulic Dredging Technology and River Conservancy into China, 1890s–1930s

This paper discusses studies of the development of river conservancy in modern China, and the role of engineers-in-chief in river improvement planning on rivers such as the Hai-ho (Haihe) and the Whangpoo (Huangpu). It discusses the introduction of foreign hydraulic dredging technology and management into two major Chinese ports. It then analyses the process by which two agencies of the Chinese government absorbed and adjusted this technology to suit local circumstances in the treaty ports of Tianjin and Shanghai beginning in the 1890s. Without prior experience in river conservancy, the conservancy boards adopted a range of foreign technologies. This allowed them to develop into major institutions that facilitated increasing trade flows between China and the rest of the world. Of particular significance in this process of technological change was the role of the expatriate engineers-in-chief who were employed as chief executive officers of both agencies. They were responsible for establishing the operations of the agencies, accommodating an increasing range of responsibilities such as financial and human resource management, and training Chinese engineers and managers for senior positions until they were ready to replace the expatriate engineers-in-chief after the 1930s.     

Making Sense of the Scottish Community Energy Sector – An Organising Typology

The community energy sector is widely understood to be a pluralistic sector, encompassing a broad range of aims, motivations, and practices. This heterogeneity is, however, still not very well understood. Dominant analytical frameworks in the study of energy geographies offer little in the way of exploring the diversity of motivations, visions, and social relations that are present within the community energy sector, nor their causes or consequences. Drawing on the notion of ‘critical pluralism’, this paper aims to highlight the diverse range of sociotechnical configurations that make up this sector in Scotland, and begins to discuss some potential causes and consequences. To do so, it presents a novel community energy typology, based on an analysis of technical and social dimensions of 367 projects in Scotland. This shows that whilst the Scottish community energy sector contains a broad range of motivations, technologies, and social practices, the sector has become dominated by groups for whom energy generation is a means to achieve local socio-economic development. The paper discusses the community-level and policy drivers that may have contributed to this. It also discusses how we can begin to understand a diverse sector’s ability to affect the wider structures in which it operates.