Solutions and frictions in civic hacking: collaboratively designing and building wait time predictions for an immigration office

Smart and data-driven technologies seek to create urban environments and systems that can operate efficiently and effortlessly. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are full of frictions, producing unanticipated consequences and generating turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper, we examine the development of solutions for wait time predictions in the context of civic hacking to argue that a focus on frictions is important for establishing a critical understanding of innovation for urban everyday life. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of queue predictions developed through the civic hacking initiative, Code for Ireland. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets different data sources, technical expertise, frames of understanding, urban imaginaries and organisational practices; and how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.     

Weather sensitivity and climate change perceptions of tourists: a segmentation analysis

ABSTRACT

Many communities rely on tourism spending, so it is important to understand any potential changes to tourist flows resulting from changing climate and weather patterns. However, tourists are not a homogenous group, as they have different motivations, values, and goals. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation is to better understand potentially varying perceptions and behavior of different tourist types, specifically in regards to their weather sensitivity, climate change concern, and behavioral intention for climate change mitigation. Tourists were randomly surveyed at 20 locations throughout the state of Maine in the United States (n = 704). Segmentation analysis on the activities tourists participated in yielded three segments of Maine tourists: non-nature-based tourists (50.6%), nature-based generalists (16.2%), and nature-based specialists (33.2%). Differences across segments were explored for perceptions of weather impacts, climate change concern, and mitigation intent. Additionally, weather sensitivity was analyzed based on type of overnight accommodations to better understand if this also had a role in differences. Non-nature-based tourists thought that weather variables were less influential during their travels in Maine than the other segments, while nature-based generalists perceived weather to have the highest influence. Additionally, nature-based specialists had the highest level of climate change belief, while nature-based generalists had the highest willingness to engage in climate change mitigation behavior. Results are useful to understand how segments of tourism demand may be altered with a changing climate, such as increased temperatures, precipitation, and storms, and what groups may be the most beneficial to target for marketing or educational efforts to reduce the impact of climate change.     

Australia’s engagement with the European Union: partnership choices and critical friends

ABSTRACT

This article examines the development of Australia’s relationship with the European Union (EU) by focusing on drivers and obstacles. Underlying the relationship are the burden of memory and common interests and values. It argues that, although the past still resonates, the changes to the range and depth of interests and values have resulted in a more fruitful engagement. It suggests that a history of a negatively framed context of engagement, characterised by Australian critiques of the EU and, in turn, by EU neglect of the relationship, has contributed to distance between the two interlocutors. It is only in recent years that this distance has been bridged and perceptions have changed. Australia has chosen partnerships with the EU that enhance its economic and political choices. Links with a long-term partner, the UK, are being recast as Brexit presents a new challenge at a time of Australia’s stronger engagement with the EU through a key agreement and trade talks. Finally, the article argues that Australia and the EU are critical friends.     

Freedom,ethical choice and the Hellenistic polis

ABSTRACT

This paper examines ideas of individual freedom in the Hellenistic city-states (c. 323–31 BCE). It concentrates on the civic ideas expressed in the laws and decrees of Hellenistic cities, inscribed on stone, comparing them with Hellenistic historical and philosophical works. It places different Hellenistic approaches alongside modern liberal, neo-Roman republican and civic humanist theories of individual liberty, finding some overlaps with each of those modern approaches. The argument is that the Hellenistic Greeks developed innovative ways of combining demanding ideals of civic virtue and the common good with equally robust ideals of individual freedom and ethical choice. They did so not least by adapting and developing traditional Greek approaches close to modern civic humanism, in ways very relevant to modern debates about how to reconcile civic duty, the common good and pluralism.     

From folklore to patriotic and protest songs: Music,youth, and Basque identity during the 1960s

Taking a bottom‐up approach to the study of nationalism, the following pages constitute an attempt to shed light on the role singing played for a young generation of Basques who actively participated in the process of construction of Basque collective identity during the cultural revival movement of the 1960s. In doing so, this article aims at showing the fundamental role of active audiences, as well as their changing political and social context, in conforming the meaning of “Basque songs” as means to promote Basque nationalism and sustain opposition to the Franco regime. The study of the production, reception, and reinterpretation of Basque music during the cultural revival of the 1960s presented here intends to emphasize the interest of focusing on how ordinary people contribute to the recreation of the nation through their appropriation and interpretation of cultural symbols and practices.     

The Absence of Macpherson and Strauss in Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

Pocock's Machiavellian Moment is monumental in its erudition, and thus one may be surprised that Pocock virtually ignored Macpherson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism in his assessment of seventeenth-century political thought, and ignored Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli. Pocock noted that ‘the schools of Marx, Strauss and Voegelin concur’ in holding Locke to be a bourgeois or possessive individualist. Pocock elaborated a paradigm of republicanism as civic humanism as a contrast to liberalism as possessive individualism. Pocock seemed to accept tacitly Macpherson's and Strauss's view that Locke inverted the Aristotelian view of property as a means to political participation, whereby politics became a means to the protection and accumulation of property. Macphersonian scholars have criticised Pocock for misinterpreting the function of property in the Atlantic republican tradition and Straussian scholars have criticised The Machiavellian Moment for its failure to distinguish ancient from modern republics, and for Pocock's failure to appreciate the epochal significance of Machiavelli's call to master fortune or dominate nature through technique. But it is questionable whether or not it is incumbent on an intellectual historian to address present preoccupations about capitalism or global technique.     

Gustav Metzger: iconoclasm and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) has been described as ‘the conscience of the art world’ for the consistently political content of his art and his commitment to political activism on the subject of nuclear weapons, capitalism and environmentalism. Metzger’s artistic output from the late 1950s onwards reflects a theory of art as both aesthetic form and social action and identifies him as a key precursor of activist art. This article considers the inherent interdisciplinarity of Metzger’s practice as it evolved during this early period between the late 1950s and early 1970s in relation to his agenda of social engagement.     

Interrogating Power: Engaged Energy Anthropology

Human-induced global threats are compelling many anthropologists to rethink roles, methods, and paradigms and engage in public debate and action on energy policies, extraction processes, commodity chains, and consumption. Laura Nader's Energy Reader embodies her decades-long engagement as a catalyst for public debate on U.S. energy issues. Tanja Winther's Impact of Electricity exemplifies ethnography informing development practice. Strauss and colleagues’ Cultures of Energy reflects diverse approaches seeking to build cultural understandings to inform energy choices. There remains a need for collaboration with anthropologists embedded in energy-related agencies—positioned where they can leverage anthropological knowledge to push policy envelopes.     

世界范围内的环境保护主义:在市民运动和政府决策之间

本文通过概述西方环境保护主义在市民与政府之间的发展历程,认识到环境保护主义在不同的时代有不同的讨论议题与内容,而不同的人群对于谁才是环境保护主义者的精英分子也有不同的看法。1970年前后是环境保护主义的转折点,从那时起,环境保护主义关注的议题由单一的要素转向一个综合的网络,并形成了全球范围的广泛联系,在大众运动和广泛的社会关注之下,环境保护主义的政治力量越来越多地显示出来。     

Existential nationalism: Russia's war against Ukraine

‘If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine’ is the sentiment used by Ukrainian protesters mobilising against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Such a sentiment signifies the stakes of a war where Ukraine is a democratic nation-state fighting for its right to exist against a Russian invasion. Meanwhile, Russia is fighting for a version of Ukraine that is subservient to Russia's idea of what Ukraine should be as a nation-state: under a Russian hegemon geopolitically, where Ukraine's national idea and interpretation of history can be vetted and vetoed by the Russian state. While nationalism scholarship equips us to study Russia's war against Ukraine through the lens of Russian ethnic nationalism and Ukrainian civic nationalism, the ethnic/civic dichotomy falls short of unpacking the more pernicious logics that pervade Russia's intentions and actions towards Ukraine (demilitarisation and de-Nazification). Instead, this article explores the logics of Russia's war and Ukraine's resistance through the concept of existential nationalism where existential nationalism is Russia's motivation to pursue war, whatever the costs, and Ukraine's motivation to fight with everything it has.