Between hope, hype, and hell: electric mobility and the interplay of fear and desire in sustainability transitions

Conceptualizations and articulations of ‘the future’ play a persistent and important role in discussions about technology adoption and the broader domain of sustainability transitions. The Sociology of Expectations, part of the transitions and science and technology studies literature, specifically focusses on the performative role that desirable expectations play in the development and marketing of a technology. In this paper we argue that these insights can be coupled with the performative role of undesirable futures, as outlined by Critical Security Studies. Based on a qualitative diffractive reading of these twin literatures we argue that the performativity around desired and undesired futures, while closely related, constitutes two separate logics. A focus on expectations alone does not explain the initiation and subsequent success of a sustainable innovation nor that a focus on undesired futures fully explains the acceptance of security claims. The paper exemplifies these insights with a reflection on electric vehicle development

The (Mis)Use of Disaster as Opportunity: Coerced Relocation from Celaque National Park, Honduras

“Disaster capitalism” refers to political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio-economic divisions. Here the basic tenets of disaster capitalism are applied in another context: how natural disasters can be used to impose exclusionary protected area conservation principles with similar socio-economic consequences and ecological ramifications. The post-Hurricane Mitch relocation of resident populations from Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a case study whereby a natural disaster, combined with the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, created the opportunity to implement a universal model of exclusionary nature protection. The resultant displacement and increased semi-proletarianization of the affected population effectively served the capitalist interests of international conservation and the agro-export coffee industry and, contradictorily, worked against the proclaimed goals of nature preservation through exclusionary national park policies

Size and Shape Constraints of (486958) Arrokoth from Stellar Occultations

International audienceWe present the results from four stellar occultations by (486958) Arrokoth, the flyby target of the New Horizons extended mission. Three of the four efforts led to positive detections of the body, and all constrained the presence of rings and other debris, finding none. Twenty-five mobile stations were deployed for 2017 June 3 and augmented by fixed telescopes. There were no positive detections from this effort. The event on 2017 July 10 was observed by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy with one very short chord. Twenty-four deployed stations on 2017 July 17 resulted in five chords that clearly showed a complicated shape consistent with a contact binary with rough dimensions of 20 by 30 km for the overall outline. A visible albedo of 10% was derived from these data. Twenty-two systems were deployed for the fourth event on 2018 August 4 and resulted in two chords. The combination of the occultation data and the flyby results provides a significant refinement of the rotation period, now estimated to be 15.9380 ± 0.0005 hr. The occultation data also provided high-precision astrometric constraints on the position of the object that were crucial for supporting the navigation for the New Horizons flyby. This work demonstrates an effective method for obtaining detailed size and shape information and probing for rings and dust on distant Kuiper Belt objects as well as being an important source of positional data that can aid in spacecraft navigation that is particularly useful for small and distant bodies