Suchergebnisse

Reading for the planet -- Citizens and consumers -- Consumption for the common good? : commodity biography in an era of postconsumerism -- Hijacking the imagination : how to tell the story of the Niger Delta -- Resource logics and risk logics -- From waste lands to wasted lives : enclosure as aesthetic regime and property regime -- How far is Bhopal? : inconvenient forums and corporate comparison -- Fixing the world.

AbstractThis essay discusses "Forms of Life" in two senses: first, infrastructure as a social process that fosters particular forms of collective life and second, the agency/vitality imputed to infrastructure. The essay considers an unremarked ambivalence in energy humanities about infrastructure: the extant infrastructure of fossil fuels poses an obstacle to energy transition, while the act of making infrastructure visible and "following the pipeline" is regarded by incisive petrocritics as necessary but insufficient. What do cooling towers, electric pylons, or railways make happen (or keep from happening), socially and narratively, when they "work" or when they're hacked? In other words, is there a narrative grammar of infrastructure? How much has to happen for nothing to happen? And how do cultural texts differ from built environments in thinking infrastructure as a form of life? China Miéville's story "Covehithe" mobilizes the literary imagination to depict sunken oil platforms as revenant and reproductive organisms that pose new questions about relationships among humans, nature, and technology, and about the care, responsibility, and politics such forms of life demand. This weird tale doubles as documentation of dead infrastructure: its platform characters are actual rigs that litter sea beds around the world. What imaginative or conceptual forms, then, can help us grasp infrastructure's forms of life? This question is particularly urgent with regard to fossil infrastructure, which here names not only infrastructure that processes, circulates, or depends on fossil fuels but also infrastructure that is archaic, obsolete, and otherwise tethered to the past, standing as an obstacle to transition.

In an effort to overcome the US Senate's continued resistance to ratification of the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Representative Lynn Woolsey & a group of other women brought a copy of a supportive letter signed by 100+ representatives to the offices of Senator Jesse Helms. Helm's refusal to meet with the women legislators & admonition to them to "act like ladies" as they were thrown from his office is viewed here as yet another example of "miscommunication" between men & women; examples of other instances of gendered miscommunication in US history are reviewed. This episode also demonstrates the perpetuation of a prejudicial distinction between the public & the private spheres in terms of what men & women are allowed to discuss & in what settings. The gendered nature of the public-private distinction made in several leading international human rights documents is elucidated, & a similar dichotomization between the public/male & private/female is identified in the literary form of the 18th-century epistolary novel. The designation of letter writing as an "appropriate" female activity, so long as such private missives were never made public, is described, & the disturbances to the social order thought to result from violations of this code are revealed in epistolary fiction by more modern women writers, including Helena Araujo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, & Janette Turner Hospital. 12 References. K. Hyatt Stewart