Pets that have ‘something inside’: the material politics of in/animacy and queer kin within the childhood menagerie

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hohti and Tammi 2019; Taylor 2011; Malone 2015) reveals child−animal relations to be charged with various pedagogical and ideological assumptions, which we argue are partly exported to the relations that form between children and their toys. We undertake a close examination of the relationalities between humans and a range of toys as a means to explore the ways in which care and liveliness materialize in childhood play and what this means for our conceptualizations of ‘the family’. We put to work the idea of queer worlding (Haraway 2008; Osgood and Andersen 2019) and animacy (Chen 2012) alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, 2011) feminist ethics of care. We then specifically focus on the materiality of robotic toys to illustrate some crucial connectivities and erasures to examine how the queer human−animal and animate−inanimate boundaries are reworked and negotiated in childhood play. These processes create a shift in understanding what matters in children’s lives and how materiality and affective forces co-constitute the posthuman family. This paper engages critically with the ambivalences and tensions that emerge within the domestic menagerie and extend to a planetary scale in ways that are inherently political

PhEMaterialist encounters with glitter: the materialisation of ethics, politics and care in arts-based research

This paper re-turns to a workshop we co-organised in London in 2018 as part of a series called ‘how to do sociology with...’ (Methods Lab, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London). The series aims to consider what happens when the materials, media, objects, devices and atmospheres of social research central to our practices are brought into focus. The specific material that we worked with and thought through in this workshop was glitter – a thing that is ubiquitous in early childhood and in wider feminine, gay and queer cultures. We draw on new materialist theories, methods and practice research, to consider how preparing and dismantling this workshop might be understood as a means of enacting feminist new materialism. We do this not to propose a blueprint for how new materialisms should be done so much as to offer a series of questions, reflections and diffractions on what unfolded and the affective and embodied traces that were left. In this sense, the paper understands arts-based practice to hold unanticipated pedagogical capacities which we attend to throughout the paper in terms of ethics, politics and care. We dwell upon ethics and politics by drawing on long-standing feminist arguments regarding what is often neglected in written accounts of doing research, and through focusing on the affective work involved in designing, choreographing and managing a workshop that asked participants to seriousplay (Haraway, 2016) with glitter and explore its material and affective properties. We discuss our own discomfort with, and uncertainty about, organising such a workshop and go on to outline what we see as the productive aspects and implications of orchestrating a glitter workshop for how we might conceive and do new materialist work. This includes a discussion about the response-ability of seriousplay with plastic in the contemporary climate, and more broadly about what new materialist methods and practice research might contribute to an understanding of educational and social research, and pedagogical and political practice. Throughout, photographs taken by us before, during and after the workshop (as jpeg images) are included, to not only illustrate the points we make and give readers/viewers a different sense of the workshop, but also extend what might count as academic knowledge production and circulation

Concepts of General and Limited War

It is a great pleasure to be back again and to discover how much more you seem to know since I left. I am going to assume that your general level of sophistication in strategic matters ls so great that I can dispense with this terrible semantic bind of defining general and limited war and assume that no very precise definitions are necessary in order to get us off the ground

Properties of cryogenically worked materials Final report

Steel and cobalt-nickel alloy compression and corrosion tests after precipitation hardening at cryogenic temperatures for increased yield strength and corrosion resistanc

Properties of cryogenically worked materials Interim report

Cryogenically worked materials during strain hardenin

The Crinkling Strength and the Bending Strength of Round Aircraft Tubing

The upper limit of the column strength of structural members composed of thin material is the maximum axial stress such members can carry when short enough to fail locally, by crinkling. This stress is a function of the mechanical properties of the material and of the geometrical shape of the cross section. The bending strength, as measured by the modulus of rupture, of structural members is also a function of these same variables. Tests were made of round tubes of chromium-molybdenum steel and of duralumin to determine the crinkling strengths and the bending strengths in terms of the specified yield strength and the ratio of diameter to thickness. Empirical formulas are given relating these quantities

Round Heat-treated Chromium-molybdenum-steel Tubing Under Combined Loads

The results of tests of round heat-treated chromium-molybdenum-steel tubing are presented. Tests were made on tubing under axial load, bending load, torsional load, combined bending and axial load, combined bending and torsional load, and combined axial, bending, and torsional load. Tensile and compressive tests were made to determine the properties of the material. Formulas are given for the evaluation of the maximum strength of this steel tubing under individual or combined loads. The solution of an example is included to show the procedure to be followed in designing a tubular cantilever member to carry combined loads

Column strength of tubes elastically restrained against rotation at the ends

Report presents the results of a study made of the effects of known end restraint on commercially available round and streamline tubing of chromium-molybdenum steel, duralumin, stainless steel, and heat-treated chromium-molybdenum steel; and a more accurate method than any previously available, but still a practical method, was developed for designing compression members in riveted or welded structures, particularly aircraft. Two hundred specimens were tested as short, medium-length, and long columns with freely supported ends or elastically restrained ends. Tensile and compressive tests were made on each piece of original tubing from which column specimens were cut

Hydra 1 data display system

System, named Hydra, generates charts, graphs, and printed matter on slides or conventional negatives and positives, and combines these media with a capability of storage on magnetic tape for future updating to accommodate engineering changes or contract modifications to be readily added to basic data