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Food and digital culture are mutually implicated in contemporary processes of knowledge production and power contestation around the world. Our introduction and the papers in this special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies seek to draw out the distinctions, parallels and overlaps across food and the digital to offer critical insights into digital food culture's capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life. We ask a series of questions fundamentally focused on issues of power that signal a critical concern for the (re)production and circulation of inequality within the food and digital nexus. For us and the authors here, Cultural Studies is particularly fertile ground from which to analyse digital food culture precisely because of the discipline's commitment to critiquing power and inequality and its subsequent capacity to illuminate everyday digital food politics and their social, cultural and ethical impacts. This article presents and highlights key questions—and introduces related concepts and theoretical debates—that drive this research agenda. In addition, we address the ways the issue's papers connect to digital food culture and power after COVID-19. We conclude with a summary of the articles in the issue and their contributions to digital food culture research and cultural studies more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their 'cases'. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants' bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that 'enacts' the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the 'capacity to act' within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one's life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue contributes to the emerging literature on digitalization and its impact on work and workers in global systems of production. Three key themes are featured in the collection of papers. They are on the relationship between the use of digital communication technologies and power relationships, working conditions of online workers or crowd-workers, and shifting geographies of production. The papers also largely focus on the global South, contributing to research on digitalization and labour which has thus far tended to examine large and higher income countries mainly in the global North. This introductory article expands on and situates the papers broadly within the literature on digitalization and labour and within the three themes more specifically, and discusses their implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the neoliberal transformation of civil society through Mitchel Foucault's insights concerning knowledge, power, and governmentality. The objective of this paper is to trace the evolving understandings of civil society and how they relate to governmental rationalities and technologies of power. The traditional notion of civil society as a distinct and autonomous sphere has shifted toward an intermediary associations approach under neoliberalism. I posit that the mobilization of non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations by states, international organizations, and donor agencies since the 1990s constitutes a form of governmental technology, influenced by neoliberal rationalities. This technology serves the neoliberal agenda of undermining the social state, promoting market creation, and encouraging non-partisanship. This argument suggests that the rise of civil society as intermediary associations coincides with the decline of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a little-known event in the history of neoliberalism: a conference at Stanford University held in 1982 to reconsider Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property 50 years after its initial publication. This event is important as it is where key members of the neoliberal thought collective sought to define and defend the powers and freedoms of the corporation. First, this article outlines the political commitments of Berle and Means by considering the core arguments of The Modern Corporation and Private Property ; second, it addresses key papers from the event published subsequently in the Journal of Law and Economics ; and third, it analyses the neoliberal defence of the corporation that emerged from these papers, and reflects on the limitations of the work of Berle and Means for developing a response to their neoliberal critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Silences around drone warfare and similar covert state practices have often been encountered as a hurdle that hinders us from understanding and interrogating government acts. Scholars as well as human rights actors have opposed silences in a struggle for greater transparency and have called on governments to speak. Through the case study of drone warfare, this paper analyses the productive role of silences and the political struggle to oppose it. Analysing 125 non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports, UN documents and policy papers, this article investigates how silences are encountered, interpreted and opposed by Western human rights actors. This shows that silence is not encountered as a discrete unit but as interdependent layers of denial, partial withholding of information, redactions, delays, lack of oversight and so on. Situated within unequal power relations, I show how the battle against the unsaid is itself based on what has (not) been heard in Western constructions of drone warfare and risks further enabling violent practices. Discussing ways of subverting the workings of silence, the paper not only contributes to academic literature on covert warfare and silence but also speaks to the practical dilemmas faced by non-state actors who are advocating for more transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claim that transitions in international order are not only products of transitions in power, but also products of transitions in shared ideas is now relatively uncontroversial in the International Relations literature. Yet persistent gaps remain in understanding how ideas are shared, and which states play a role in sharing an international order's ideas. This paper demonstrates that ideas are shared through social, interactive processes, which involve both superordinate states and subordinate ones. Nevertheless, as a result of their unequal power, subordinate state agency is typically expressed when subordinate states operate in conjunction with superordinate ones, a finding that poses empirical challenges for studying subordinate states' ideas and their order-shaping role. To resolve this challenge, the paper explores how a pair of superordinate and subordinate states – the United States and the Republic of China – operated in conjunction with one another to shape the transition to a post-WWII order at Bretton Woods. It examines cases of idea convergence and divergence between the United States and China; carefully disentangles the conscious and unconscious drivers of idea convergence; and highlights three distinct mechanisms – amplifying, grafting and resistance by appropriation – through which subordinate states shape a changing order's shared ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many consider academic research an important means to address societal inequality of marginalized groups, such as refugees. However, transformative research arguably requires critically engaged practices that consider and transform dominant exclusive structures permeating both society and knowledge production. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of such research practices, especially given power and (neoliberal) politics around knowledge production within Dutch academic and refugee research structures. Based on 14 researchers' narratives, the results reveal how critically engaged refugee research is challenged by its marginalized position, academic pressures and culture as well as the recently emerged 'refugee research business'. However, the paper also uncovers various ways in which researchers manoeuvre within challenging and facilitating structures by operating outside or in the margins of academic structures, making use of facilitating spaces and strategically employing dominant discourses. Finally, researchers arguably transform academic structures by challenging dominant research paradigms and transforming the institution of academics itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power has always been an element of the program evaluation field, however, it has traditionally been attributed a negative connotation. With that in mind, power is seen as a force possessed to some extent by different stakeholders that can be imposed over others, and by which certain views, ideas, and decisions can be adopted. Given that program evaluation has a political character in which power is always present, we seek to explore a different notion of this concept. In this paper, we intend to take advantage of Michel Foucault's ideas to explore power in the program evaluation field. We illustrate the introduction of these concepts in collaborative evaluations and in doing so, we also explore power as well as power-knowledge relations, adopting a transformative perspective on power. The introduction of these concepts in collaborative evaluation is useful in illustrating how they can be used in non-collaborative evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to conduct an embodied and situated aural analysis of what silence in Northern Norway is about, with the aim of bringing forward the background noise. The paper brings together theories on construction of the rural, time-space relations, soundscape ecology, and on affect and power, and it merges academic traditions about how to communicate findings from non-visual biased studies. This interdisciplinary framework provides a novel structure for both analysing material and communicating findings from embodied studies of listening out. The study found that silence in Northern Norway is about not listening to the economy of scale, to the commodification of the natural conditions and the suppression of lifestyles and territory. The paper illustrates how power is an inherent part of listening and how listening is a practice that is enacted to create emotions that are associated with a specific time-space relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is presented in the context of a gradual move from energy management at a Building level to energy management at Component level. This move requires specific energy consumption and power demand benchmarks to allow measured component energy use and power demands to be put into context. The paper presents a methodology for collecting and collating the data needed for producing these benchmarks from measured operational data. This methodology was tested in the European iSERVcmb project. Example benchmarks from iSERVcmb are provided along with links to the full published data. The paper concludes that large scale measurement and comparison of detailed operational data are possible and useful in support of achieving operationally low energy buildings.Practical application: The explosion of low-cost operational data availability at the level of individual components can be used to improve understanding of their operational energy efficiency in the context of the overall efficiency of a building. The paper shows this data can: Be collected from all types of buildings across all EU Member States Produce benchmark ranges of operational energy consumption and power demands at the level of individual components serving given activities Applying this benchmarked data in the design and operation of buildings will: Improve their operational energy efficiency, Enable legislation using this data to show compliance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This article diverts from this literature by examining the slow uptake of data journalism in sub- Saharan Africa through the prisms of non-newsroom factors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with prominent investigative journalists sampled from several African countries, we argue that to understand the slow uptake of data journalism on the continent; there is a need to critique the role of data politics, which encompasses state, market and existing media ecosystems across the continent. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond newsroom-centric factors that have dominated the contemporary understanding of data journalism practices. A broader, non-newsroom conceptualisation beyond individual journalistic predilections and newsroom resources provides productive clarity on data journalism's slow uptake on the continent. These arguments are made through the conceptual prisms of materiality, performativity and reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waiting is a part of everyday life. It is often characterised by its banality: its quotidian nature. Time spent waiting can be seen as boring, wasted, and at times painful or distressing, or conversely hopeful or full of potential. The experience of Motor Neurone Disease (MND) reveals a population for whom (limited) time has a significant impact on quality of life. This paper will argue that waiting, for people with MND, exemplifies the relationship between time, power and agency. In so doing we can better conceptualise the manifold ways in which time and waiting are experienced through choosing to wait, enforced waiting and waiting when time is known to be 'running out'. Through a sociological analysis of multiple forms of waiting three key themes emerged that characterised waiting as powerlessness; emotional (as a form of production), and; alternating as an experience between patience and endurance. This paper challenges the passivity, universality and ambivalence ascribed to waiting and instead argues that waiting affects the 'time left' for people with MND. It also offers up a lens through which to view time through the multiple textures and tensions of waiting produced through chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waiting is a universal experience and a 'taken for granted' form of time. However, it is given a social specificity when embodied by particular agents in particular settings. This paper reflects on the universal experience of waiting in the very particular setting of the prison, specifically a prison visitors' centre; this is the space where families wait prior to visiting their incarcerated relatives. I draw on the literature of waiting and prisoners' families, as well as my own empirical work and ethnographic observations of waiting families. In this work, I explore issues of power and agency, and explore the social relations which are orchestrated within and beyond this organisation of space and time. This paper aims to bring together two distinct areas of literature: one which explores how prisoners 'do time', and the other which explores the impact of imprisonment on the families outside. In marrying the two, this paper explores the temporal impact of the imprisonment on the family members of those incarcerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an inquiry into the powers at play in the everyday practices of making the city, and the social and spatial relations through which those who inhabit its margins put these powers to work. This exploration is based on a case study that considers informal housing practices and their regulation in allotment gardens in Berlin. To trace the mechanisms through which residents work to stay put in these sites, despite regulations prohibiting residency therein, the paper relates a debate on the transformative potential of the everyday to anthropological literature on the workings of the state, embedding this discussion in relational approaches to power and place. Joining these perspectives, I argue that the gardeners' possibilities to stay put depend on the ways in which they meditate the presence of regulatory practices through their relations to state actors or institutional frames. These mediations not only highlight that people co-construct the order that takes shape, but also point to the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion built up along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations scholars are certain about two facts: power is the defining concept of the discipline and there is no consensus about what that concept means. One explanation for this problematic state of the field is that most International Relations scholars freight their analyses of power with hidden assumptions about time. Temporality is an essential component of political analysis, as a burgeoning literature has begun to explore. This paper argues that there are two latent presumptions about time that fundamentally affect how scholars conceptualize power in world politics. First, scholars are rarely explicit in defining the temporal scope of their key causal processes. The longer the implicit temporal scope, the more expansive their definition and operationalization of power can be. Second, there is considerable variation of beliefs about the temporal returns to power: does exercising or accumulating power generate positive or negative feedback effects over time? Relying on canonical works in the field, this paper examines the hidden assumptions that different paradigms make about power and time. Illuminating these assumptions clarifies the root of cross-paradigmatic disagreements about international politics and suggests some interesting pathways for future theoretical and empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Michel Foucault is commonly considered as a thinker with a primary interest in space and spatiality, his use of temporal categories, tropes and metaphors has until recently been only partially reconstructed. Working through different phases of his writings and lectures, this paper argues that Foucault opened a complex and interesting – yet to be acknowledged – analytical perspective on historically dominant, but fundamentally contested forms of social time-regimes, which accounts especially for contingent ruptures, silent continuities and the power-structured contexts of their emergence. Elucidating conceptual tools designed towards the analysis of rationalities and practises of temporal government and approaching social time regimes along the axes of power, knowledge and subjectivity, the aim of this paper is twofold: on the one side, it tries to further contribute to a 'temporal turn' in Foucault studies; on the other, it attempts to develop a Foucauldian vocabulary of temporal analysis as an alternative or supplement to established approaches in the field of critical social time studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present commentary explores the implicit and explicit role of power in shaping what is remembered and why. By addressing the three papers in this section it argues for the need to more openly consider how power relations, particularly asymmetrical power relations, come to shape the construction of memory. Implications of acknowledging power in memory studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that careful attention needs to be paid to the handling of urban CCTV digital data. Since the early 1990s, CCTV has left an indelible mark on UK cities, and beyond. CCTV is a crime-reduction strategy, and its activation owes much to the laws and regulations that govern its function and the passivity with which it is often viewed. I consider the nature of security when CCTV signs, recorded images and the rights of citizens are interlinked in controlled urban spaces. Despite the regulatory powers of the Data Protection Act, the management of CCTV data is at times poorly operationalised and often obfuscated. The paper discusses my experiences of identifying 17 different CCTV cameras and being recorded, and my attempts to access my images through subject access requests (SARs). In what follows, I draw on different topologies of experience in expanding upon the mutable, unpredictable and intensive relations that guide the management of CCTV data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of recent influential papers, Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe make the case for a 'dialogic model' of police legitimacy, wherein legitimacy is envisaged as emergent in a process through which the police, as power-holders, make claims to authority which are, in turn, responded to by audiences. Our aim in this article is to analyse this model. We argue that while it has the potential to direct legitimacy research along paths hitherto poorly explored, there is a need for conceptual refinement and development in three key respects. First, through recognition of micro- and meso-levels of legitimation. Second, acknowledgement that police claims-making is contingent on the authorization and endorsement of other actors. Third, a fuller consideration of the qualified role of dialogue—i.e. communication between police and policed—in public audiences' legitimacy assessments. In the spirit of critical engagement and conceptual exploration, this article develops these three insights to propose a modified version of the dialogic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Shields’ work demonstrated that it is impossible to practice value-free science. And, despite the efforts of many feminist psychologists who have argued that the question of sex differences is someone else’s question, biological theories about the differences between women and men are still popular and influential today. This paper will call attention to four areas of scholarship produced by second-wave feminist psychologists who were inspired by Shields’ work: (1) rediscovery of the work of first-wave feminist psychologists, (2) discussion of the impossibility of value-free research on sex differences, (3) introduction of new categories of analysis such as “gender” and reframing research based on these new categories, and (4) addition of more value-laden categories to sex such as race, social class, and sexuality and using intersectionality theory to design new avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As critical discourse analysis/studies move into the second decade of the 21st century, there is a need to reflect on their evolution and envision their future development. In this paper, CiteSpace and VOSviewer are employed to gain holistic insights into CDA/CDS research and capture the recent research foci. The Web of Science core collection database is a prominent resource for collecting data. It was found that (1) CDA has broadly absorbed the theories of other disciplines and increasingly developed into a super-discipline; (2) corpus building, the advent of computer technology, and the development of linguistic analysis software have provided effective analytical tools for critical discourse research, making it possible for overall and partial analyses to complement each other and for complementary qualitative and quantitative approaches to be used to enhance the thoroughness and precision of research; and (3) the research methods for conducting CDA tend to be diverse and comprehensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the generationing of education and development in five villages in Northern Sierra Leone. Understood as 'fields' governed by power dynamics, we consider how the interactive 'fields' of generation, education and development coalesce, re/structuring adult and child 'being' and 'doing'. We explore the tensions that arise between transformation and preservation in the field in light of wider social, cultural and economic change, and the negotiation of the generational contract in contexts of high risk and inter-dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the case of the post-crisis discursive defence of shadow banking in the Netherlands to argue, first, that there is a need to dust off older elite theories and adapt them to post-democratic conditions where there are no widely shared ‘political formulas’ to secure mass support for elite projects. Second, that temporality should be taken more seriously; it is when stories fail that elite storytelling can be observed in practice. As new ‘political formulas’ are minted and become established, elites can again hope to withdraw from the political scene and leave policy-making to the self-evidence of output legitimacy and/or the perpetuum mobile of There-Is-No-Alternative (TINA). This suggests that elite theory should replace an epochal reading of post-democracy with a more conjunctural one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistical significance tests done with low statistical power levels can result in reports of exaggerated effect sizes. Funnel graphs can show these exaggerations for a given area of research by revealing a negative correlation between a study's sample size on the y-axis and the effect size obtain by the study on the x-axis. A recent paper by Fritz, Scherndl, and Kühberger (2013) recommended that effect sizes should not be reported when there is a negative correlation between sample size and effect size for a given research area. This recommendation fails to consider magnitudes of the negative correlations and thereby misses the opportunity to mitigate effect size exaggerations and approximate more correct effect size estimates. This comment explains both the incorrectness of the recommendation and the approach and calculations necessary to correct effect size estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gust is a common atmospheric condition encountered by wind turbines. Despite the presence of a vast amount of literature on this topic, few of them involve lateral gust influence. Due to this motivation, this paper presents an investigation on the effects of sinusoidal gusts on a three-bladed vertical axis wind turbine under varying gust parameters including gust direction, velocity amplitude, and frequency. The chimera mesh technique is used to model the real rotation of the rotor, as well as the resolved gust approach model in the DLR (German Aerospace Center) TAU code for gust simulation. Both the general aerodynamic computational fluid dynamics model and the gust model are validated before the following simulations. Numerous new flow phenomena and physics are revealed. The influences of gust on the rotor power output and flowfield characteristics are discussed and analyzed in detail. The findings in this study may be helpful for some practical wind engineering applications, such as atmospheric influence evaluation and field site selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term additive manufacturing (AM) describes a collection of production techniques enabling the layer-by-layer manufacture of components using digital data and raw material as inputs. The AM technology variant most frequently used in the production of end use parts is laser sintering (LS).It has been suggested that efficient usage of the energy inputs is one of the advantages of the technology. This paper presents a comparative assessment of the electricity consumptions of two major polymeric LS platforms: the Sinterstation HiQ + HS from 3D Systems and the EOSINT P 390 from EOS GmbH. The energy inputs to a build consisting of two prosthetic parts were recorded during power-monitoring experiments conducted on both platforms. This paper injects clarity into the ongoing research on the AM energy consumption by applying a novel classification system; it is argued that the AM energy usage can be divided into the job-dependent, time-dependent, geometry-dependent, and Z-height-dependent energy consumption values. The recorded mean real power consumption conforms to the values that have been reported for similar platforms. The measured energy consumption rates are higher than reported elsewhere. It is also shown that the purely time-dependent energy consumption is the main energy drain. Furthermore, the presentation of results in the context of previous literature highlights the caveats attached to summary metrics of the AM input usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relations between affect and military and security geographies. It argues that recent work on spaces of affect and emotion should be supplemented by research on how affects are known, rendered actionable and intervened on. The paper exemplifies such a focus through an example of the targeting of amorphous collective affects - specifically morale and popular support - in the 'effects based' airpower that has been so central to the US led 'war on terror'. Damaging or destroying morale has come to promise victory over a networked enemy. Yet morale is assumed to be distributed throughout life. As such, morale disappears as a definite, determinate, thing in itself. It cannot be fixed and located. Consequently, all of life is made into a potential target. To intervene on morale, airpower must create environments that will bring death and create life. The means for doing so are providential and catastrophic biopolitical 'effects', of which 'shock' and 'awe' are but the most high profile cases. Through the example of how morale is targeted, the paper shows how certain forms of power work by being both inside and outside the aleatory, indeterminate, dynamics of affective life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Introduction to the Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Michel Foucault draws out from the papers included the possibilities for new critiques of the present and new directions for the future, both for research in the social sciences and for imagining alternative ways of being. It highlights the innovative aspects of all the papers, and thus demonstrates that, in spite of the shortcomings in Foucault's work which are picked out in the papers, his explorations of power, subjectivity and what it means to be and to think continue to be relevant as a starting point for a range of reflections about our own times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to inquiries into the genealogy of governmentality and the nature of secularization by arguing that pastoralism continues to operate in the algorithmic register. Drawing on Agamben's notion of signature, I elucidate a pair of historically distant yet archaeologically proximate affinities: the first between the pastorate and algorithmic control, and the second between the absconded God of late medieval nominalism and the authority of algorithms in the cybernetic age. I support my hypothesis by attending to the signaturial kinships between, on the one hand, temporality and authority in our contemporary conjuncture, and, on the other, obedience and submission in Christian thought from late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. I thereby illustrate the hidden genealogical continuities between theological-pastoral technologies of power and technocratic-algorithmic modalities of governance. I conclude by suggesting that medieval counter-conducts may be redeployed in our present circumstances for emancipatory ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender must be taken into account in a full understanding of technologies. Equally, technologies must be taken into account in a full understanding of gender. This poses a challenge for the individual scholarships of feminist studies and science and technology studies (S&TS), which, for the most part, can competently theorize either gender relations or technological relations, but neither school has the theoretical wherewithal to tackle the co-construction of genders and technologies. This paper elaborates the developing theory coalition between feminist studies and S&TS in feminist technology studies. The discussion centres on four main points of tension between the disciplines that I have found particularly challenging in my study of the co-construction of masculinities and (domestic) technology. These points of tension relate to: research sites, analytic lenses, power relations and reflexivity. The objective of working through the points of tension is to elaborate the mutual learning process between the two traditions when conducting empirical research on gender and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article comments on two papers using artificial neural networks published in composites journals. The issues discussed include the predictive capability of the neural networks developed, and the size of the databases for training the neural networks. The article includes criticisms of those previously published papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emphasizes the specific theoretical potential of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality for an analysis of the construction and constitution of power. In contrast to certain criticisms, as formulated for example by Pierre Bourdieu, which reproach the authors for being oblivious of power, it is shown that Berger and Luckmann’s theoretical apparatus indeed offers the possibility to reconstruct established power structures as part of objective reality. Furthermore, the authors open up a distinct perspective from which to systematically analyze the subjective dimension of power constitution with reference to the subjective reality of the individual actor. We argue that the investigation of power inevitably needs to be based on the idea of the dialectical relationship of objective and subjective reality. Moreover, this paper shows that it is specifically the subjective dimension of power constitution based on systems of relevance that allows for an explanation of the resistance to established power structures on the part of the individual actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scan of social research about rural New Zealand from the 1980s reveals power divisions which have muted the voices of 'others'. Listening to these voices could transform how we manage the economy, sustain the environment and promote social well-being in future. Rural sociological attention in New Zealand has focused on the people and communities associated with land and resource-based assets, with little attention to the rural majority not engaged in primary production. Indigenous voices are also missing. As Jessica Hutchings argues, decisions on economic development, the environment and social services continue to uphold colonial hegemony as the dominant worldview in Aotearoa New Zealand. By being open to the perspectives of people normally ignored and particularly engaging with indigenous approaches, application of capital and power in development can be rethought and structural inequalities addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mukti Barton's 2000 paper, 'The Skin of Miriam Became as White as Snow: The Bible, Western Feminism and Colour Politics', reflected on interpretations of the story of Miriam and her sister-in-law Zipporah, that have focused mainly on Miriam becoming white, as indicative of the effect of colour politics on biblical hermeneutics. Updating that article, the focus was on Zipporah and the main text was again Numbers 12. What are the lessons for Feminist Theology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for making thermal images - and employed them to research their surrounding environments. By making and using the thermal flashlights, learners investigated power in two senses: identifying social power relationships embedded within normally unquestioned infrastructures, and exploring these infrastructures' connection to industrial forms of power, such as heat and electricity. Students and instructors came to understand how the control of power, light and temperature is vital to human-made infrastructure and environmental health threats that characterize the 21st century. Through this project, students went from being passive consumers of such power to become active investigators of their socio-technical systems by producing unique knowledge that enabled them to imagine how they might make and inhabit their environments differently. Breaking down the distinction between teaching and research, this article explores the promise of 'making and doing' in university courses to create new collaborative research platforms that could spread laterally and scale to transform social and technical infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the idea of exemplarity outlined by the Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara that forms part of his general case for the centrality of disclosure to emancipatory political reasoning. Ferrara argues that "at its best" political thought should have the capacity to animate the democratic imagination by disclosing new political worlds and hence new possibilities for thought and action. I argue that Ferrara's notion of exemplarity provides important conceptual resources for a re-grounding of critical theory in the type of experientially based disclosing critique that has, post Habermas, been marginalized. Ferrara's work is significant in two respects. First, exemplary universalism provides a much-needed alternative to the assimilative paradigms of normative reasoning that dominate contemporary political theory. Exemplary normativity suggests a mode of reasoning from concrete particularity that is more inclusive than principle-based approaches of voices which, by virtue of their marginal or disempowered status, are often absent from democratic deliberation. Second, Ferrara shows us how, contra Habermas, far from being an unstable process of meaning creation, exemplary disclosure has a systematic internal rationale that renders it open to inter-subjective validation. I contend, however, that the critical promise of the idea of exemplarity is unfulfilled because of its grounding in the speculative construct of sensus communis defined as a set of trans-cultural intuitions about human flourishing. This socially deracinated abstraction blocks an adequate understanding of the asymmetrical relations of power around which social difference is always constructed. Ultimately, Ferrara is unable to demonstrate how exemplarity does in fact disclose new political worlds and new possibilities for thought so much as confirm established liberal norms. Drawing on critical race theory, I propose a re-politicized understanding of exemplarity that locates its disclosing force in the actual dynamics of struggles against oppression rather than in a socially weightless abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article establishes the physics of the complex interaction of discrete multiple inflows with the stationary shroud and the rotating channel of a Tesla disc turbine. Using a large number (150) of separate, fully three-dimensional computational fluid dynamic simulations, we demonstrate the (sometimes dramatic) role of four important input parameters, namely the number of nozzles (Nnozzle), rotational speed of the discs (Ω), radial clearance between the rotor and the shroud (Δrc), and disc thickness (dt), in the fluid dynamics and performance of a Tesla turbine. An increase in Nnozzle or Δrc assists in the attainment of axisymmetric condition at rotor inlet. Ω influences significantly the distribution of radial velocity including the fundamental shape of its z-profile (parabolic, flat or W-shaped). The paper demonstrates the existence of an optimum Δrc for which the efficiency of the rotor (η) is maximized. Present computational fluid dynamics simulations for many combinations of Nnozzle and Ω establish that the η versus Ω curves, for each fixed value of Nnozzle, are of the shape of an inverted bucket. With increasing Nnozzle, the operable range of Ω decreases, the buckets become more peaky and the maximum possible η increases substantially (by a factor of 2 in the example calculation shown). The present systematic work thus demonstrates quantitatively, for the first time, that an axisymmetric rotor inflow condition represents the best possible design for the rotor. It is further shown that, as the disc thickness is increased, the efficiency may decrease substantially (even dramatically) and its maxima occur at lower rotational speeds. Chamfering of the disc edge or partial admission decreases the turbine efficiency. Thus, small disc thickness, flat disc edge, full nozzle opening, optimum radial clearance, and inlet condition as close to axisymmetry as is possible are recommended for the design of an efficient Tesla disc turbine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose an ‘undisciplinary’ meeting between Elinor Ostrom and Judith Butler, with the intent to broaden the theory of the commons by discussing it as a relational politics. We use Butler’s theory of power to problematize existing visions of commons, shifting from Ostrom’s ‘bounded rationality’ to Butler’s concepts of ‘bounded selves’ and mutual vulnerability. To be bounded – as opposed to autonomous being – implies being an (ambiguous) effect of socio-power relations and norms that are often beyond control. Thus, to be a collective of bounded selves implies being mutually vulnerable in power relations which are enabling, albeit injurious. A politics of commoning is not a mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). We argue that the multiple exposures which produce us are also the conditions of possibility for more just and equalitarian ‘re-commoning’ of democracies around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we reply briefly to Emmet Fox’s response to our paper, ‘Worlds, Fields and Networks’. Our reply centres upon three themes. Firstly, we argue that interactionist and network analytic approaches are sensitive to the impact of power, status and inequality in ‘empirical relations’ and we add that it is important to maintain a focus upon such relations when dealing with power, status and inequality because the latter are not only reproduced in the context of the former but may also be challenged therein. Secondly, we argue that habitus are moulded by empirical relations and interactions as much as they mould those interactions and relations. Agency and the potential for creativity in social life are central to both of these first two points. Finally, we discuss the gaps that often open up between what theorists say they want to achieve and what they actually do achieve in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents multivocal exchanges between evictees and frontline demolition personnel regarding urban housing demolition in China. I discovered that evictees and evictors alike stick to the official rules but contest vigorously the interpretation, each in accordance with their tacit understanding of the norm of practising demolition and particular tactics of bending the rules of compensation. This paper provides a detailed, rarely available ethnographic record of the encounters between evictees and evictors, and contributes to the study of how agents strategise and interact within a habitus of micro-power relationships. It is concluded that the agency of various players is simultaneously reproducing the social structure but paradoxically working to sabotage the very structure within which they practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Axel Honneth reconstructs Hegel’s social and political philosophy on the basis of the concept of recognition. For Honneth, recognition is a constitutive relation between individuals that is in principle symmetrical. By conceiving recognition through symmetry, Honneth effectively bans the inclusion of power within recognitive relation. He thus regards the relations of power as cases of non-recognition or misrecognition. In this paper, I develop an alternative theory of the constitutive relation between individuals for Hegel, one that is based on the asymmetrical relation of power. To this aim, I focus on the chapter of “determinations of reflection” in the Science of Logic. Through a close analysis of Hegel’s Logic, I argue (a) that the most fundamental form of relation between individuals is the relation of opposition, (b) that individuals are solely constituted in and through the relation of opposition, and (c) that the relation of opposition is essentially asymmetrical. Together, these claims establish that, for Hegel, power is not external to the structure of individuals, but is constitutive of them. Finally, in order to illustrate the social ontology based on Hegel’s conception of opposition, I discuss Catharine MacKinnon, who argues that the male and female genders are solely constituted through the relation of power of the former over the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underground coal gasification is a conversion and extraction process, for the production of useful synthetic product gas from an in-situ coal seam, to use in power generation, heat production or as a chemical feedstock. While many variants of the underground coal gasification process have been considered and over 75 trials performed throughout the world, the recent work has tended to focus on the control of the process, its environmental impact on underground and surface conditions and its potential for carbon capture and storage. Academic research has produced a set of mathematical models of underground coal gasification, and the European Union-supported programme has addressed the production of a decarbonised product gas for carbon capture and storage. In recent years, significant progress has been made into the modelling of tar formation, spalling, flows within the cavity and the control of minor gasification components, like BTEX and phenols, from underground coal gasification cavities (BTEX refers to the chemicals benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene). The paper reviews the most recent underground coal gasification field trial and modelling experience and refers to the pubic concern and caution by regulators that arise when a commercial or pilot-scale project seeks approval. It will propose solutions for the next generation of underground coal gasification projects. These include the need to access deeper coal seams and the use of new techniques for modelling the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Elites and Power after Financialization’. It is presented in three parts. The first sets out the original Weberian problematic that directed the work of Michels and Mills, in the 1910s and 1950s respectively. It then discusses how this framework was appropriated and then cast aside as our understanding of capitalism changed. The second section makes the case for a reset of elite studies around the current capitalist conjuncture of financialization. It is explained how this unifying theme allows for a diverse set of approaches for answering old and new questions about elites and power. The third part identifies four key themes or sites of investigation that emerge within the nine papers offered here. These are: new state-capital relations, innovative forms of value extraction, new elite insecurities and resources in liquid times and the role of elite intermediaries and experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As efforts are being made to quickly adopt zero carbon technologies and replace fossil fuel powered trains, the design requirements are explored using train dynamics simulations to establish energy needs. The test case was a freight train of 3030 gross tonnes consisting of two locomotives and thirty wagons operating on a relatively flat coastal rail route. Then, assuming rapid deployment of existing and near market technologies, speculative locomotive designs are proposed for both battery only and hydrogen-battery systems. Batteries were assumed as rack mounted systems and hydrogen assumed at 250 bar gaseous. The results showed that full recovery of dynamic braking required only a very small amount of storage to capture and allow re-use, requiring a battery of only 6% of the trip total of recovered energy. The haulage task was found to require traction energy of 10.7 MWh per locomotive but reduced to a net requirement of 7.6 MWh per locomotive with recovery of dynamic braking energy. The large mass of batteries needed for the operating trip, however, limits the practical operating range. The results showed that, although hydrogen storage and equipment occupy considerable space and the containment systems have large mass, the space and mass requirements for a hydrogen system in this case study could be as low as half that required for batteries, while higher pressure or cryogenic approaches to hydrogen storage will allow the scaling for longer range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically argues that in the debates on international sexuality rights, global civil society actors assume leadership to represent the voices of those who are seen as marginalized or voiceless due to diverse injustices. This process, however, itself creates a layer of power relations within civil society which in turn leads to an under-representation of the voices and demands of people who don’t appear in the global register of sexuality politics. The paper unpacks the nature of global civil society actors’ claim to represent others and the implications of these claims for those who are being represented. The particular focus here is the ongoing debates on the position of sexual minorities in Africa with special reference to Uganda and Malawi. An analytical framework is also developed to understand the underlying mechanisms of global civil society advocacy. This is done by considering Michel Foucault’s work on pastoral power and Gayatri C. Spivak’s work on post-colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]