Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies

This essay contains an overview on worldwide researches on Maintenance and Repair topics in Science and Technology Studies

Toward a new poetics of space in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer

Caribbean self-formation is a project in constructing a new poetics that situates itself against imposed and fixed ideas about culture, language, and personhood. For places like the Caribbean, history is indexed by linguistic and bodily fragmentations, ecological upheavals and transformations, and diasporic wanderings to and from the islands. Literature can then be thought of as an aesthetic project in making sense of the present and visualizing alternatives for the future. Walcott’s Midsummer opens up a space in which to consider the relationship between human beings, landscapes, and culture. Derek Walcott’s Midsummer captures the cadences of life and time in the tropics: the time between a moment, a season, a life, or an era. This particular sequence of fifty-four poems records a full year, the period between one summer and the next. The liminal space of the in-between in Midsummer lends itself to reversals of time, the poems traverse back and forth between the then and now, taking time to linger and take pause in memory and imagination, but also in moments of lived experience. The aperture created between the past and future frees us to think about the multiple, uncertain temporalities of the present, and the position of the poet between two cultures mimes the central ambivalence of midsummer. In these poetic musings, Walcott considers his own positionality vis-à-vis the Caribbean and its colonial past, Europe, high literary culture, and poetry itself. It explores the extent to which place produces literature or that literature produces place and culture, leaving open a productive possibility of rearticulating the conceptual framework for the idea of culture.Englis

To Have To Do With The Law: An Essay

This is an experimental text with three voices. The first one is an autoethnographic study of being called on jury service at the Old Bailey, London. The second is a theoretical voice, analysing the theory of the lawscape as I have developed it in my writings, in combination with issues about atmospherics, enclosures, control of bodies and spaces, and temporalities of law. The third voice operates as commentary on the other two and the whole chapter as such, offering an antilogos to the traditional understanding of essay writing, especially for law students but also for academics. This last voice suggests the disruption of the flow of textuality in order for materiality to flood in

Reshaping collective memory: transparent cloning as a strategy for heritage building preservation

The main topic of this thesis is building preservation and redevelopment. It begins by discussing heritage sites, their importance on a sociological, cultural, and aesthetic level, and their role in shaping collective memory. Different preservation techniques, that have been practiced during the centuries, are analysed, to understand how present- day conservation has evolved, and why it is so important. The thesis proceeds with an exploration of important architectural design aspects — materiality, shape, foundations, and programme, and the affect of ruins. The goal is to understand their connection to memory and to determine their importance. Introduced next is a contemporary preservation technique — transparent cloning. It raises the question if the duplication of shape and structure through translucent materials, such as glass and polycarbonates, is a viable option for heritage building preservation. Finally, these ideas are tested in an architectural project — the preservation of a heritage sugar factory “Zaharna Fabrika” in Sofia, Bulgaria

The racist bodily imaginary: the image of the body-in-pieces in (post)apartheid culture

This paper outlines a reoccurring motif within the racist imaginary of (post)apartheid culture: the black body-in-pieces. This disturbing visual idiom is approached from three conceptual perspectives. By linking ideas prevalent in Frantz Fanon’s description of colonial racism with psychoanalytic concepts such as Lacan’s notion of the corps morcelé, the paper offers, firstly, an account of the black body-in-pieces as fantasmatic preoccupation of the (post)apartheid imaginary. The role of such images is approached, secondly, through the lens of affect theory which eschews a representational ‘reading’ of such images in favour of attention to their asignifying intensities and the role they play in effectively constituting such bodies. Lastly, Judith Butler’s discussion of war photography and the conditions of grievability introduces an ethical dimension to the discussion and helps draw attention to the unsavory relations of enjoyment occasioned by such images

Salvage Watery Memory: Water and Memory in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

In this article, I will investigate the entanglement of water and memory in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011). To analyze the multiplicity of literal and figurative references to water, I will refer to posthumanist and new materialist water scholarship as well as Black Studies. I argue that the narrated water scales up the time and space of the story and thereby situates Hurricane Katrina in the history of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage. By functioning as a keeper of memory and archive in the novel, water evolves as a substance that enables the concurrent examination of racialized histories and contemporary environmental disasters

Historical geography III: hope persists

The final report in this series focuses on the emerging intersections between historical geography, archaeology and the law. Whilst staying attuned to the darkest of geographies emerging from the sub-field, this report turns its attention to the creative and critical ways in which the dead are being used to reveal past lives and worlds that have been destroyed and forgotten. Using soil and the archaeological imagination as a pivot, this report centres on the interweaving themes of fragile environments, resurfacing and legal worlds in order to suggest the emerging possibilities for a hopeful excavation of new historical geographies