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A contagious living fluid: objectification and assemblage in the history of virology
This article deals with the birth of `the virus' as an object of technoscientific analysis. The aim is to discuss the process of objectification of pathogen virulence in virological and medical discourses. Through a short excursion into the history of modern virology, it will be argued that far from being a matter of fact, pathogen virulence had to be `produced', for example in petri-dishes, test-kits and hyper-real signification-practices. The now commonly accepted objective status of `the virus' has been an accomplishment of a complex ensemble of actors. Indeed, this illustrates why objectification rather than objectivity has become the main focus of science and technology studies. The objectification of `the' virus was by no means a smooth process. It involved more than five decades of highly speculative and fragmented research projects before it became actualized as a separate discipline under the heading of virology. The specific objectification of viruses took place through an inter-disciplinary de-differentiation of research questions, methodologies, techniques and technologies. The main argument of this article is that viruses only became intelligible after the establishment of a virology-assemblage. Its inauguration in the early 1950s was radical and sudden because only then could the various substrands of virological technoscience affect each other through deliberate enrolment, and engender a universal intelligibility
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International terrorism as a nomadic war machine: reflections on the collapse of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath
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Network
Network is a device for organising and conceptualising non-linear complexity. Networks defy narrative, chronology and thus also genealogy because they entail a multiplicity of traces. Networks problematize boundaries and centrality but intensify our ability to think in terms of flows and simultaneity. As a concept, network has been highly conducive to theorizing phenomena and processes such as globalization, digital media (Internet), speed, symbiosis and complexity. This in turn enables us to rethink what constitutes the foundations of intelligence, knowledge and even life itself. One particularly useful application of network as a concept is the notion of the gift, which is often seen as the archetypical figure for understanding the nature of economics and social relationships
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Social spatialization and everyday life
This editorial introduction discusses the problematic âdemonologyâ of spatial analyses that attempt to understand the logic of the social in terms of subject-based origins. Taking the poststructuralist notion of decentred subjectivity to task, it uses the metaphor of exorcism to approach everyday life as a haunted space. Instead of identifying the true demons behind the voices rendering an account of everyday life, it shifts methodological attention to the incommensurable multiplicity of traces through which we map and narrate a hermeneutics of becoming
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Disastrous social theory: lessons from New Orleans
Contemporary social theory struggles to deal with disasters not just because of epistemological shortcomings regarding the continued dualistic nature of its dealings with social phenomena and events, relegating disasters to the real of âextraordinary events,â but also because it has effectively foreclosed on its ability to deal with social reality. The latter is less the consequence of epistemic shortcomings but itself a social by-product of the institutionalization of social thought in the academy. Divorced from an ability to come to terms with social reality, because it lacks both an empirical grounding and a sense of urgency to understand that which lies outside the comfort zone of academic life, social theory is left rather aimlessly afloat amid a sea of debris that signals that the apocalypse has already happened
The low-mass Initial Mass Function in the young cluster NGC 6611
NGC 6611 is the massive young cluster (2-3 Myr) that ionises the Eagle
Nebula. We present very deep photometric observations of the central region of
NGC 6611 obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and the following filters:
ACS/WFC F775W and F850LP and NIC2 F110W and F160W, loosely equivalent to
ground-based IZJH filters. This survey reaches down to I ~ 26 mag. We construct
the Initial Mass Function (IMF) from ~ 1.5 Msun well into the brown dwarf
regime (down to ~ 0.02 Msun). We have detected 30-35 brown dwarf candidates in
this sample. The low-mass IMF is combined with a higher-mass IMF constructed
from the groundbased catalogue from Oliveira et al. (2005). We compare the
final IMF with those of well studied star forming regions: we find that the IMF
of NGC 6611 more closely resembles that of the low-mass star forming region in
Taurus than that of the more massive Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). We conclude
that there seems to be no severe environmental effect in the IMF due to the
proximity of the massive stars in NGC 6611.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS (main journal); 18 pages, 12
figures and 3 table
Star Formation in the Eagle Nebula and NGC 6611
We present IZJHKL' photometry of the core of the cluster NGC 6611 in the
Eagle Nebula. This photometry is used to constrain the Initial Mass Function
(IMF) and the circumstellar disk frequency of the young stellar objects.
Optical spectroscopy of 258 objects is used to confirm membership and constrain
contamination as well as individual reddening estimates. Our overall aim is to
assess the influence of the ionizing radiation from the massive stars on the
formation and evolution of young low-mass stars and their disks. The disk
frequency determined from the JHKL' colour-colour diagram suggests that the
ionizing radiation from the massive stars has little effect on disk evolution
(Oliveira et al. 2005). The cluster IMF seems indistinguishable from those of
quieter environments; however towards lower masses the tell-tale signs of an
environmental influence are expected to become more noticeable, a question we
are currently addressing with our recently acquired ultra-deep (ACS and NICMOS)
HST images.Comment: in "Triggered Star Formation in a Turbulent ISM", IAU symposium,
poster contribution; a full version of the poster can be found at
http://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/~jacco/papers/IAUS237_Eagle_2006.pd
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