Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite

With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses

Class, CO2 and urban climate change mitigation: On saving energy in a post-industrial German city

As part of its urban redevelopment strategies, the city of Bremerhaven transformed itself into Germany’s centre for the offshore wind energy industry. Locally produced wind turbines have come to embody the promises of the city’s regeneration in the context of the nation’s once ambitious efforts to switch to renewable energies. The Energiewende should have resulted in a sustainable future for Bremerhaven, both in economic and ecological terms. However, as Germany’s poorest city, Bremerhaven continues to face severe social problems, from high unemployment to widespread poverty. Under these circumstances, the city pledged to fight the impact of non-renewable energy by becoming a Climate City. It started a process that shall result in the wholesale transformation of the city and its citizens. Bremerhaven’s climate change mitigation efforts involve various projects of energy education, which interpellate the whole strata of the local population into reducing the impact of their energy consumption. This chapter unpacks the logics and effects of such attempts at producing energy-efficient citizens by exploring how local activists conceptualise energy impacts in the context of urban poverty and deprivation. Whilst most of my informants take issues of class into consideration, they frame mitigation as an ethical, not a political project, falling short in demands for energy justice and citizens’ rights to secure environmental futures

Postsocialist Dialectics or Postindustrial Critique? On Discomfort in a Former Socialist Model City in East Germany

Over the last 30 years, the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda, the German Democratic Republic’s second socialist model city, have struggled through de-industrialisation, unemployment, outmigration and urban decay. With the help of Karl Polanyi’s concept of ‘countermovement’, this essay scrutinises their various critiques of contemporary forms of capitalism. I investigate how these critiques help them to navigate their hometown’s prospects in the postindustrial era in order to rethink more generally the temporal implications of the social sciences’ conceptualisations of postsocialist critique. I approach my interlocutors’ expressions of discomfort amidst current political and economic crises as complex negotiations of the postindustrial present that are not determined by their socialist past

Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability: Maintenance and Endurance as Progressive Alternatives in the Postindustrial Era

Different times evoke different relations to the future. Recent additions look discouragingly conservative: sustaining, maintaining, and enduring describe practices that look like they are aimed at preventing change rather than provoking it. However, once we change our own expectations, we can see them as radically progressive alternatives for future-making in the postindustrial era. But what kind of futures do these practices help us and our informants to envision? And are these futures necessarily “otherwise”—and otherwise with regard to what: the state of the present or dystopian expectations of worse futures? Based on the material from a prototype postindustrial German city, I explore my informants’ seemingly disappointing attempts at maintaining urban sustainability and expand our analytic toolkit by fully contextualizing their own searches for lost futures

Sensing late-liberal state failure: Ecologies of resistance in a post-industrial German city

Harbour cities smell differently: the sea mixes its own odours of fish and seaweed with the exhaust gases of heavy ships and marine industries. In one of those major seaports, the German city of Bremerhaven, my informants noticed a different smell in the hot summer of 2014: the stench of waste from other European countries temporarily stored near the city’s touristic fishery harbour. Whilst the public outrage forced local authorities to swiftly remove the waste, the wastes of the local incineration plant are not sensed so easily. This paper concentrates on the work of a local activist group against the extension of the landfill where the plant’s toxic filter dusts are deposited. A group of former natural scientists, they track these carcinogenic dusts with the help of both their senses and their scientific training. By that, they draw into power’s remit what cannot be seen. They hold the power of a failing late liberal state accountable by producing knowledge that transcends the limits of governance as defined by local authorities. Although my informants’ attempts often remain unsuccessful, their scientific-sensory agency exemplifies an important ecological take on power and resistance. This form of ecological agency takes into account a variety of nonhuman actors and intricate sets of biochemical and geological data. It also favours ideas of longevity and sustainability. As an exercise in ecological thought, this form of activism forces us to redefine the nature of power and the responsibilities of the state in the age of the Anthropocene

O onome što predvidljivo ne obuhvaća. Zamišljanje budućnosti u Srbiji

In order to be able to contextualize and understand social worlds, anthropologists pay close attention. We observe how individuals and communities relate to each other and to their ideas. We study the intimate and subjective, as well as the large-scale cosmologies by which people make themselves and the world. Our participatory methods and reflective analysis document the complex, intricate, patterned, and also random aspects of people’s reasoning and actions. These activities, on anthropology’s part, supposedly offer not only critical descriptions of the present (on its historical trajectories), but possible intimations of a society’s future. Anthropological analysis, in other words, not only describes but also anticipates. This position paper focuses on the notions of anticipation, predictability, and possibility in anthropology. It asks what methodological and theoretical assumptions are built into our ways of making predictions about our field sites. It invites the reader to consider the effects certain anticipatory practices have for the people and phenomena we study as well as for the discipline. Centrally, the paper proposes different ways of attending to visions that anticipate the future. By reflecting on my ethnographic and analytical journeys in Serbia, I attempt to explain why I currently make so much of questions of predictability and possibility in both the field and the discipline. My desire is to open up a discussion on the value of cultivating attention to what seems to emerge on the side of predictable.Da bi mogli kontekstualizirati i razumjeti društvene svjetove, antropolozi pomno promatraju. Promatramo kako se pojedinci i zajednice odnose jedni prema drugima i prema svojim idejama. Proučavamo intimno i subjektivno, kao i kozmologije velikih razmjera pomoću kojih ljudi ostvaruju sebe i svijet. Naše participativne metode i reflektivne analize dokumentiraju kompleksne, zamršene, uobličene, ali i nasumične aspekte ljudskog razmišljanja i djelovanja. U antropologiji takve aktivnosti nude ne samo kritičke opise sadašnjosti (na njihovim povijesnim putanjama) već i moguće nagovještaje budućnosti nekog društva. Drugim riječima, antropološka analiza ne samo da opisuje nego i predviđa. Ovaj rad razmatra ideje predviđanja, procjenjivanja i mogućnosti u antropologiji. Propituje koje su metodološke i teorijske pretpostavke ugrađene u antropološke načine predviđanja, odnosno opisa i posljedične analize naših terena. Istražuje kakve učinke imaju prakse anticipacije, kako na ljude i fenomene koje proučavamo tako i na disciplinu. U središtu rada su prijedlozi različitih načina pristupanja vizijama koje predviđaju budućnost. Reflektirajući o svojim etnografskim i analitičkim putovanjima po Srbiji, nastojim pojasniti zašto sam trenutačno posvećena pitanjima predvidljivosti i mogućnosti i na terenu i u disciplini. Želja mi je potaknuti raspravu o vrijednosti pažnje usmjerene na ono što predvidljivošću ne možemo obuhvatiti

Hamiltonian submanifolds of regular polytopes

We investigate polyhedral $2k$-manifolds as subcomplexes of the boundary complex of a regular polytope. We call such a subcomplex {\it $k$-Hamiltonian} if it contains the full $k$-skeleton of the polytope. Since the case of the cube is well known and since the case of a simplex was also previously studied (these are so-called {\it super-neighborly triangulations}) we focus on the case of the cross polytope and the sporadic regular 4-polytopes. By our results the existence of 1-Hamiltonian surfaces is now decided for all regular polytopes. Furthermore we investigate 2-Hamiltonian 4-manifolds in the $d$-dimensional cross polytope. These are the "regular cases" satisfying equality in Sparla's inequality. In particular, we present a new example with 16 vertices which is highly symmetric with an automorphism group of order 128. Topologically it is homeomorphic to a connected sum of 7 copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. By this example all regular cases of $n$ vertices with $n < 20$ or, equivalently, all cases of regular $d$-polytopes with $d\leq 9$ are now decided.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure

Examination of Apoptosis Signaling in Pancreatic Cancer by Computational Signal Transduction Analysis

BACKGROUND: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains an important cause of cancer death. Changes in apoptosis signaling in pancreatic cancer result in chemotherapy resistance and aggressive growth and metastasizing. The aim of this study was to characterize the apoptosis pathway in pancreatic cancer computationally by evaluation of experimental data from high-throughput technologies and public data bases. Therefore, gene expression analysis of microdissected pancreatic tumor tissue was implemented in a model of the apoptosis pathway obtained by computational protein interaction prediction. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Apoptosis pathway related genes were assembled from electronic databases. To assess expression of these genes we constructed a virtual subarray from a whole genome analysis from microdissected native tumor tissue. To obtain a model of the apoptosis pathway, interactions of members of the apoptosis pathway were analysed using public databases and computational prediction of protein interactions. Gene expression data were implemented in the apoptosis pathway model. 19 genes were found differentially expressed and 12 genes had an already known pathophysiological role in PDAC, such as Survivin/BIRC5, BNIP3 and TNF-R1. Furthermore we validated differential expression of IL1R2 and Livin/BIRC7 by RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry. Implementation of the gene expression data in the apoptosis pathway map suggested two higher level defects of the pathway at the level of cell death receptors and within the intrinsic signaling cascade consistent with references on apoptosis in PDAC. Protein interaction prediction further showed possible new interactions between the single pathway members, which demonstrate the complexity of the apoptosis pathway. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our data shows that by computational evaluation of public accessible data an acceptable virtual image of the apoptosis pathway might be given. By this approach we could identify two higher level defects of the apoptosis pathway in PDAC. We could further for the first time identify IL1R2 as possible candidate gene in PDAC