Legal Form, Commodities and Reproduction: Reading Pashukanis

This chapter offers a feminist reading of Pashukanis’s legal theory as a contribution to critical evaluation of the relationship between legality, commodification and gender. Contemporary feminist interests in the relationship between legal and non-legal norms, in the role of commodification, and in the limits of gender as a category of analysis, make a re-engagement with Pashukanis timely. For Pashukanis, legal form constitutes subjects as if they have property rights over objects, generates exchange value, and represents differently situated subjects as if they are equal. Here I develop an account of legal form analysis that recuperates Pashukanis’s distinction between legal form and technical regulation, his theorisation of the subject of commodification, and his historical method of form/content analysis. Drawing on this critical reading of Pashukanis, I argue for the development of legal form analysis so as to accommodate the roles of social reproduction and consumption in the generation of care value and use value in commodity-exchanging societies. I illustrate this method by providing a legal form analysis of a conflict in consent rights over the use of genetically related embryos. Such an analysis asks how consent rights would extract care value from the subject’s reproductive wishes, recognise contributions to the development of the embryo, and recognise investments in the future use of that embryo. In this way, legal form analysis provides a reading of legal contributions to the generation of value from human reproductive activities without making assumptions about their gendered content

Status of the Electroforming Shield Design (ESD) project

The utilization of a digital computer to augment electrodeposition/electroforming processes in which nonconducting shielding controls local cathodic current distribution is reported. The primary underlying philosophy of the physics of electrodeposition was presented. The technical approach taken to analytically simulate electrolytic tank variables was also included. A FORTRAN computer program has been developed and implemented. The program utilized finite element techniques and electrostatic theory to simulate electropotential fields and ionic transport

Contesting the cruel treatment of abortion-seeking women

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Reproductive Health Matters. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH MATTERS, [VOL 22, ISSUE 44, (2014)] DOI: 10.1016/S0968-8080(14)44818-

The case for the development of novel human skills capture methodologies

As the capabilities of industrial automation are growing, so is the ability to supplement or replace the more tacit, cognitive skills of manual operators. Whilst models have been published within the human factors literature regarding automation implementation, they neglect to discuss the initial capture of the task and automation experts currently lack a formal tool to assess feasibility. The definition of what is meant by "human skill" is discussed and three crucial theoretical underpinnings are proposed for a novel, automation-specific skill capture methodology: emphasis upon procedural rules, emphasis upon action-facilitating factors and taxonomy of skill

Development of a flight-qualified whole-body dosimeter system Final report

Whole-body dosimeter system for monitoring radiation exposure to crew during space mission

Your new colleague is a robot. Is that ok?

Human robot collaboration is a concept under development that will be applied within manufacturing environments in the near future to increase efficiency and quality. While there have been significant advances in technology to enable this progress there is still little known about the wider human factors issues of employing such systems in High Value Manufacturing environments. This paper sets out our current understanding of key organisational and individual factors which need to be explored

Determining Energy Balance in the Flaring Chromosphere from Oxygen V Line Ratios

The impulsive phase of solar flares is a time of rapid energy deposition and heating in the lower solar atmosphere, leading to changes in the temperature and density structure of the region. We use an O V density diagnostic formed of the 192 to 248 line ratio, provided by Hinode EIS, to determine the density of flare footpoint plasma, at O V formation temperatures of 250,000 K, giving a constraint on the properties of the heated transition region. Hinode EIS rasters from 2 small flare events in December 2007 were used. Raster images were co-aligned to identify and establish the footpoint pixels, multiple-component Gaussian line fitting of the spectra was carried out to isolate the diagnostic pair, and the density was calculated for several footpoint areas. The assumptions of equilibrium ionization and optically thin radiation for the O V lines were found to be acceptable. Properties of the electron distribution, for one event, were deduced from earlier RHESSI hard X-ray observations and used to calculate the plasma heating rate, delivered by an electron beam adopting collisional thick-target assumptions, for 2 model atmospheres. Electron number densities of at least log n = 12.3 cm-3 were measured during the flare impulsive phase, far higher than previously expected. For one footpoint, the radiative loss rate for this plasma was found to exceed that which can be delivered by an electron beam implied by the RHESSI data. However, when assuming a completely ionised target atmosphere the heating rate exceeded the losses. A chromospheric thickness of 70-700 km was found to be required to balance a conductive input to the O V-emitting region with radiative losses. The analysis shows that for heating by collisional electrons, it is difficult, or impossible to raise the temperature of the chromosphere to explain the observed densities without assuming a completely ionised atmosphere.Comment: Accepted to A&A 14th September 201