THE ROLE OF PORT FACILITIES IN THE FOOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM: THE HOUSTON CASE

Agribusiness,

Constitutive Equations for Use in Design Analyses of Long-life Elevated Temperature Components

Design analysis needs and procedures relative to elevated temperature components in liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) system were examined. The effects of the thermal transients on the pressure boundary components are enhanced by the excellent heat transfer properties of the liquid sodium coolant. Design criteria for high temperature nuclear reactor components recognize the potential occurrence of inelastic structural response. Specifically, criteria and limits were developed which reflect a recognition of this potential and employ design by analysis concepts that requires that inelastic (elastic-plastic and creep) analyses be performed. Constitutive equations to represent multiaxial time-dependent responses of LMFBR alloys are established. The development of equations applicable under cyclic loading conditions are outlined

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene

Islands and the rise of correlational epistemology in the Anthropocene: rethinking the trope of the ‘canary in the coalmine’

Once on the periphery of international debate, today small islands are seen by many as key to unlocking new ways of thinking about climate change and developing new practices of adaptation in the epoch of the Anthropocene. These approaches differ starkly from modernist, linear, causal frameworks that construct islands as vulnerable objects that require ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’. Instead, islands become instruments of productive knowledge, laboratories for investigation and learning, fundamental to an alternative, correlational, epistemology. In analysing these approaches, we take the prolific trope of islands as the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ in order to draw out the ontological implications of instrumentalising islands as ‘correlational machines’ in the Anthropocene. We raise fundamental problems with this literal instrumentalisation of islands and islanders, drawing out how these logics reduce island life to merely sensing and attuning to the co-relational entanglements of the Anthropocene, rather than offering higher normative aspirations for political change

Response: the Anthropocene Islands agenda

We respond to the generous and constructive commentaries on ‘Anthropocene Islands: there are only islands after the end of the world’ (Chandler and Pugh, 2021) by Craig Santos Perez, Claire Colebrook, Stephanie Wakefield, Elena Burgos Martinez, Kevin Grove, Sasha Davis and Mimi Sheller. We engage and think with their contributions as part of the process of forming a critical research agenda using the initial article as a springboard or platform for discussion - rather than as a set of research conclusions or a polemical statement. The contributions, to our minds, work in critical relation to the field and develop it in significant ways

Correlation: Registers of Change

Chapter 4 analyses how Correlation approaches maintain a knowing human subject and a world of patterned regularity amenable to policy intervention. Here, the island emerges as a ‘correlational technology’ where changes are seen as early indicators of climate change. Central however, is an (onto)epistemology of inter-relation and correlation rather than one of linear cause-and-effect: we move from a temporal and spatial line of movement to one of synchronicity. Correlational modes are deployed for sensing global warming, rising sea levels and other shifting planetary conditions. As islands are reinterpellated as ‘living laboratories’, the authors argue that the island is seen as enabling the generation of onto-epistemologies operating on correlative not causal principles. In addition to such correlational practices as the evolutionary patterns of island life, there is the widespread celebration of Indigenous islanders’ correlational abilities, useful in the ‘forecasting of extreme weather conditions’. Such approaches have received a high-tech boost in the Anthropocene, taking the algorithmic form of the, ‘if this … then that’ logic associated with Big Data, the Internet of Things and the trope of the ‘smart island’. Here, prolific use of Big Data combined with extensive networks of sensors or tracking social media on islands enables rapid policy responsiveness. The authors demonstrate how working with islands as sites for understanding relational entanglements and feedbacks plays an important role in the generation and exponential development of Correlational onto-epistemologies in broader Anthropocene thinking

There are Only Islands After the End of the World

Summarising the contemporary shift towards working with islands in the Anthropocene in a set of concepts, this introduction outlines the key tropes of ‘relational entanglements’, ‘relational awareness’ and ‘feedbacks’ in writing on islands. Working with islands plays an increasingly notable role in Anthropocene thinking as it is precisely with islands that these relational effects come to the fore. Island ‘differences’ – the attributes, relational affordances and powers associated with islands – have put working with islands to the forefront of Anthropocene research and theory. Outlining the rationale for the structure of the book this chapter highlights the key elements of a critical agenda for island studies: focusing upon relational ontologies (Resilience and Patchworks) and relational onto-epistemologies (Correlation and Storiation), and ultimately the importance of island studies in the Anthropocene. To understand why and how Anthropocene thinking is as it is today, is only possible if we are able to more fully consider how and why working with islands is playing such an important and generative role