What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ (...) phenomenology of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

An exploration of the links within the study of history between experience and identity, history and various theories of subjectivity, extreme events and their representation, institutional structures and the knowledge produced within them.

Acts of sexual violence in transit environments are everyday occurrences for women across the globe, and the fear of being on the receiving end of sexual violence severely impacts women’s mobility patterns. Gill Valentine, in her examination of women’s fear of male violence and women’s perception and use of public space, has argued that the impact on women’s mobility amounts to a spatial expression of patriarchy. The aim of this paper is to expand upon Valentine’s notion of “the spatial (...) expression of patriarchy” by engaging feminist philosophy within the context of sexual violence against women on public transportation. More specifically, I will argue for two particular interpretations of the spatial expression of patriarchy, one structural and one relational. It follows from my view that solutions to overcoming and ending sexual violence against women on public transportation hinge on both a structural and a relational understanding of the spatial expression of patriarchy. (shrink)

This article puts Shani Mootoo’s novel, Polar Vortex (2020), in conversation with the vitalist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, as illustrated in the study Posthuman Feminism (2022) and Libe García Zarranz “Sustainable Affects” (2017a, 2020b). I look at the centrality of affective relations in the transformation of queer subjectivity under processes of the growing (un)happiness in the diasporic homeSpace. Shani Mootoo’s (non)diasporic cross-border narrative proposes contrastive figurations of the subject through temporal and spatial frameworks. Mootoo’s “transposable moves” resist a naïve return (...) to sentimentality or nostalgic love to advocate instead a turn to sustainable affects. (shrink)

This article explores the problems and possibilities of different feminist theoretical models of identity for challenging women's symbolic and strategic positioning in the discourses and conflicts that produce national, ethnic and racialized community identities. The discussion focuses on two of the most popular alternative models to emerge within white western feminism, the nomad and the cyborg, while also considering some other suggested paradigm shifts emerging from diasporic and postcolonial feminisms. It asks how successfully these feminist alternative models of the self (...) and community identities deal with two key issues relating to women's positioning in prevailing identity discourses – on the one hand, women's relationship to questions of ‘place’, location and dislocation, and on the other, questions of female embodiment and the ways in which the specifically female body becomes both a symbolic and material target of conflict and contestation in processes of constituting community identities. (shrink)

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ (...) phenomenology of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation. (shrink)

As of 2017, 65.6 million individuals have been displaced from their homes, fleeing their homelands in search of refuge from the violence, oppression, and chaos of civil war. The mass movement of people across internal and external borders only proves that there are certain aspects of the human condition that cannot be confined within the strict idea of territories and nation-states, that the political and legal approach in organising the interaction and relationships between people is deficient. I argue that there (...) is a need to recalibrate all existing ideologies in relation to the interactions and relationships between peoples coming from different parts of the world. In order to do this, I intend to examine the current legal norm and connect it to cosmopolitan ethics that are grounded on the idea of spatiality. Elucidating on the ideas presented by thinkers such as Seyla Benhabib, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Gloria Anzaldua, and Tetsuro Watsuji, I argue that to fully actualise cosmopolitan ethics we must investigate how space operates in the existence of man—a deterritorialised existence found in the borders. (shrink)

This essay details a historical crossroad in biochemistry and microbiology in which penicillin was a co-agent. I narrate the trajectory of the bacterial cell wall as the precise target for antibiotic action. As a strategic object of research, the bacterial cell wall remained at the core of experimental practices, scientific narratives and research funding appeals throughout the antibiotic era. The research laboratory was dedicated to the search for new antibiotics while remaining the site at which the mode of action of (...) this new substance was investigated. This combination of circumstances made the bacterial wall an ontology in transit. As invisible as the bacterial wall was for clinical purposes, in the biological laboratory, cellular meaning in regard to the action of penicillin made the bacterial wall visible within both microbiology and biochemistry. As a border to be crossed, some components of the bacterial cell wall and the biochemical destruction produced by penicillin became known during the 1950s and 1960s. The cell wall was constructed piece by piece in a transatlantic circulation of methods, names, and images of the shape of the wall itself. From 1955 onwards, microbiologists and biochemists mobilized new names and associated conceptual meanings. The composition of this thin and rigid layer would account for its shape, growth and destruction. This paper presents a history of biochemical morphology: a chemistry of shape – the shape of bacteria, as provided by its wall – that accounted for biology, for life itself. While penicillin was being established as an industrially-manufactured object, it remained a scientific tool within the research laboratory, contributing to the circulation of further scientific objects. (shrink)

This book continues the exploration of themes either neglected or devalued by others working in the field of philosophy and culture. The authors in this volume consider the domain of travel from the broadest and most diverse of philosophical perspectives, covering everyday topics ranging from commuting and vacation travel to immigration and forced relocation. Our time in transit, our being in transit, and our time at rest, whether by choice or edict, has always been at issue, always been (...) at play, for our species. The essays collected here explore the possibilities of the material impact of being able to move or stay put, as well as being forced to go or prevented from leaving. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Greenwich Prime Meridian is one of the iconic features of the Royal Museums Greenwich. Visitors to the Museum even queue up to pose with one leg on either side of the Line. Yet, the Airy Transit Circle, the instrument that defined the meridian, is almost always excluded from these photographs. This paper examines how the instrument has become hidden in plain sight within the stories of Greenwich Time and Greenwich Meridian, as well as within the public imagination, by (...) providing an analysis of the instrument’s transformation from a working astronomical instrument to a museum object. The paper highlights the gradual decoupling of the instrument from narratives of Time and Longitude, which resulted in the Line’s popularity overshadowing the instrument that defined it. By doing so, the paper aims at showing the symbiotic relationship between the materiality of the instrument and the meridian line that it defined. Approaching the instrument through the lenses of object biographies, the paper raises the question of whether the life of the instrument came to an end once operations with it were terminated. The analysis of the Transit Circle’s life reveals that it reached its end multiple times, which shifts the emphasis away from a single and ultimate end of scientific objects to a process of gradual downfall, during which they can “end” several times. In addition, through the object biography approach, the Transit Circle no longer appears as a dead object reaching an afterlife within a museum setting. Instead, the approach demonstrates that, though the instrument can still be restored to an operational order, doubts about its accuracy, and its relevancy to today’s astronomical methods, have led the instrument to be considered obsolete, transforming it into a museum object on display. (shrink)

As part of the international efforts to observe the Venus transit of June 1769, Protestant Denmark-Norway engaged the Viennese astronomer Maximilian Hell, despite Hell being Catholic and even Jesuit. Hell’s site of observation was Vardø in the remote northeastern corner of Norway. He had ambitions to present his journey and scientific results—which reached far beyond astronomy—in a grand work entitled Expeditio litteraria ad Polum arcticum. This work was never printed, although several fragments were published otherwise. Among the pieces not (...) published were his geomagnetic observations. Hell’s original manuscripts contain a considerable amount of declination readings as well as notes on instruments, practical procedures, and theoretical reflections involved in his work. In Vardø he set up a magnetic observatory, along with the astronomical one, and recorded, on an irregular schedule, the magnetic declination several times a day from April to June 1769. The records exhibit a clear signature of the diurnal variation as well as magnetic storms. Hell vigorously refuted contemporary suggestions of a connection between magnetic storms and Northern Lights. On the return voyage, a number of observations of magnetic declination along Norway were carried out, with a technique combining a gnomon with observations of the Sun’s altitude with a quadrant. (shrink)

The Awakening of Osiris and the Transit of the Solar Barques: Royal Apotheosis in a Most Concise Book of the Underworld and Sky. By Joshua Aaron Roberson. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vol. 262. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 175, illus. FS 57.

En una época de éxodo masivo global, se explora el documental De Nadie (2005) de Tin Dirdamal, el cual, a través de una variedad de instancias narrativas, presenta la experiencia y condición migrante, aún actual, de centroamericanos en su tránsito por México en su camino hacia EE.UU. Frente a la exclusión en el pasado de personajes migrantes femeninos, el cine y la narrativa literaria contemporánea despliegan significados culturales y sociales que avivan la presencia de mujeres como protagonistas en el vertiginoso (...) cruce entre fronteras, bajo los regímenes de movilidad. Estas narrativas ponen en evidencia la trascendencia identitaria de las mujeres migrantes a partir del desplazamiento. En específico, en este trabajo se examina el documental De Nadie (2005) bajo la lupa de la performatividad de género de la hondureña María, antes y durante su recorrido migratorio. (shrink)

Optimal strategy, one of the main transit assignment models, can better demonstrate the flexibility for passengers using routes in a transit network. According to the basic optimal strategy model, passengers can board trains based on their frequency without any capacity limitation. In the metropolitan cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, morning commuters face huge transit problems. Especially for the metro system, there is heavy rush in metro stations. Owing to the limited train capacity, some passengers (...) cannot board the first coming train and need to wait for the next one. To better demonstrate the behavior of passengers pertaining to the limited train capacity, we consider capacity constraints for the basic optimal strategy model to represent the real situation. We have proposed a simulation-based algorithm to solve the model and apply it to the Beijing Subway to demonstrate the feasibility of the model. The application of the proposed approach has been demonstrated using the computational results for transit networks originating from practice. (shrink)

Most new drugs are protected by pharmaceutical patents, which give the patent holder exclusive control over that drug’s supply for 20 years. When the patent term expires, the drug becomes available for generic production by any company. The resulting competition typically leads to dramatic reductions in price. In Brazil, generic drugs are on average 40% cheaper than reference or brand-name drugs. In the United States, the Federal Drug Administration reports up to 85% price differences. Consumers in India have witnessed more (...) than 100-fold price reduction for antiretroviral drugs due to generic production. Generics thus play a key role in broadening access to health care, mostly by driving costs down, both in the developing and developed world. (shrink)

Access to medicines faces a new legal threat: “border enforcement” of drug patents. Using Brazil as an example, this article shows how the right to health depends on international trade. Border seizures of generic drugs present human rights and trade institutions with a unique challenge. Can public health advocates rise to meet it?

This paper considers the condition of single adolescent migrants who arrive in Italy to explore the pedagogical tools that are useful to foster their growth in the new context and to trace the obstacles encountered in this process. It also examines the actions aimed at promoting the “Best interest of the child” principle, particularly in supporting the delicate transition from adolescence to adulthood, through the advancement of educational development, sense of belonging, and active participation in the host society.

This article examines problems that arise when women enter nontraditional blue-collar occupations. Despite job security, women's arrival in one such workplace generated strains by threatening assumptions of male supremacy. Previous research has examined women's modes of accommodation to male-dominated workplaces. In this case, men as well as women developed accommodative patterns that allowed them to accept women as co-workers without giving up their beliefs about male superiority.

Este artigo trata das formas de construção e reelaboração identitárias que ocorrem a partir dos processos de adesões religiosas em curso nos contextos urbanos atuais. Através das narrativas midiáticas e dos depoimentos orais de fiéis que aderiram ao neopentecostalismo, busca-se perceber como ocorrem os trânsitos por entre modalidades religiosas. Neste texto discuto os modos de recepção de uma modalidade de narrativa recorrente nos programas televisivos da Igreja Universal - os testemunhos – destacando a força incorporadora desta modalidade narrativa nas mediações (...) culturais de que se utiliza e os processos de reordenamento simbólico e identitário que esta modalidade narrativa provoca. Noções como identidade-diferença, apropriação e recepção propostas por autores do grupo dos Estudos Culturais são utilizadas para compreender, como, mediante a nova adesão religiosa, fiéis reordenam suas identidades, configurando novos modos de compreensão de si mesmos, dos outros, da divindade e do mundo. A metodologia utilizada decorre das análises propostas pela História Oral sobre narrativas televisivas e os depoimentos orais de fiéis e ex-fiéis neopentecostais. Palavras-chave : Neopentecostalismo; Mídia Evangélica; Narrativas Orais; Identidades.This article deals with the ways of construction and reworking of the identity that occurs from the ongoing religious accession processes on the current urban contexts. Through the media narratives and the oral testimonials of the people who joined the neopentecostalism, the way transits between religious modalities occur has been studied. In this text, I discuss the ways of reception of a recurrent narrative modality on television programs of The Universal Church – the testimonials – highlighting the developing power of this narrative modality on the cultural mediations it makes use of, and the processes of symbolic and identity reordering this modality provokes. Notions as identity-difference, appropriation and reception, proposed by authors of the Cultural Studies group are used to comprehend how, by the new religious accession, people reorder their identities, configuring new ways of comprehension of themselves, of the others, of the divinity and of the world. The methodology that was used comes from analysis proposed by the Oral History about the television narratives and the oral testimonials of people who follow, or do not follow anymore, the neopentecostalism. Keywords : Neo-Pentecostalism; Evangelical Media; Oral Narratives; Identities. (shrink)