Familiar Horror: Toward a Critique of Domestic Space

The essay seeks to revisit the history of domestic typology from the point of view of the politics of reproductive labour

Analysis of Coherence-Collapse Regime of Semiconductor Lasers Under External Optical Feedback by Perturbation Method

This chapter investigates a preliminary interpretation of the experimental results recently obtained with InAs/InP quantum-dash Fabry-Perot lasers, by using the formalism developed from the so-called asymptotic method

Safeguarding Imperiled Biodiversity and Evolutionary Processes in the Wallacea Center of Endemism

Wallacea—the meeting point between the Asian and Australian fauna—is one of the world's largest centers of endemism. Twenty-three million years of complex geological history have given rise to a living laboratory for the study of evolution and biodiversity, highly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures. In the present article, we review the historic and contemporary processes shaping Wallacea's biodiversity and explore ways to conserve its unique ecosystems. Although remoteness has spared many Wallacean islands from the severe overexploitation that characterizes many tropical regions, industrial-scale expansion of agriculture, mining, aquaculture and fisheries is damaging terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, denuding endemics from communities, and threatening a long-term legacy of impoverished human populations. An impending biodiversity catastrophe demands collaborative actions to improve community-based management, minimize environmental impacts, monitor threatened species, and reduce wildlife trade. Securing a positive future for Wallacea's imperiled ecosystems requires a fundamental shift away from managing marine and terrestrial realms independently

Safeguarding Imperiled Biodiversity and Evolutionary Processes in the Wallacea Center of Endemism

Wallacea—the meeting point between the Asian and Australian fauna—is one of the world's largest centers of endemism. Twenty-three million years of complex geological history have given rise to a living laboratory for the study of evolution and biodiversity, highly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures. In the present article, we review the historic and contemporary processes shaping Wallacea's biodiversity and explore ways to conserve its unique ecosystems. Although remoteness has spared many Wallacean islands from the severe overexploitation that characterizes many tropical regions, industrial-scale expansion of agriculture, mining, aquaculture and fisheries is damaging terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, denuding endemics from communities, and threatening a long-term legacy of impoverished human populations. An impending biodiversity catastrophe demands collaborative actions to improve community-based management, minimize environmental impacts, monitor threatened species, and reduce wildlife trade. Securing a positive future for Wallacea's imperiled ecosystems requires a fundamental shift away from managing marine and terrestrial realms independently

Familles, je vous hais! On Architecture and Reproduction

Far from being a haven of tranquillity, the house is not only the battlefield of social and personal conflicts of class, gender, and ethnicity, but it is also arguably the most important workplace. However, while in the pre-modern era the productive vocation of the home was not qualified, the refined division of labour that is a hallmark of early capitalism expelled the production of goods from the home, leaving behind the unwaged and unseen toil of women. The institutionalization of reproductive labour, that is to say the sum of the efforts needed to generate, maintain, educate and care for the workforce, is perhaps the single most effective act of primitive accumulation we can imagine; in this process, half of the population is dispossessed of any control on their work which becomes a simple natural destiny sweetened by the trappings of domesticity and familial love. The home of the middle and working classes, which had hardly been a concern for European architects until the late Renaissance, is invented precisely as a tool to optimize this process. The presentation used projects and writings developed in France from Sebastiano Serlio to Charles Briseux, the Grands Ensembles, and Lacaton and Vassal to retrace the way domestic space has been choreographed first as a mechanism to separate production and reproduction, and later as a disciplinary microcosm of which the housewife is both victim and villain. Such a critique is all the more urgent today as the last decades have seen the ambiguous blurring of reproductive labour into the ungendered, micro-entrepreneurial field of ‘affective labour’. It is perhaps in such a conjuncture that architecture could claim the responsibility it refused to assume before, and think again housing within and against the realm of labour

Bridging the Religious-Secular Divide within Transnational Women’s Movements? Muslim-Western Partnerships for Women’s Rights

Across the “Muslim world”, women play key roles in petitioning for political and legal reform, combating religious extremism and advancing women’s rights. Their activism has received significant interest in the West, with Western organizations increasingly seeking partnerships with women’s groups in Muslim-majority countries. Yet, Muslim women’s rights are contested in a global religio-political context in which distrust of Islam persists on one side while fear of Western secular imperialism pervades on the other. For women’s rights activists—whether religious or secular, Western or living in a Muslim country—this global dilemma can be challenging terrain. This paper explores how Muslim-Western partnerships are working across religious, secular and cultural divides to advance women’s rights. How are they affecting, and affected by, the broader religio-political context, in which increasing fundamentalisms and politicized religion disproportionately impact women’s rights? Based on an in-depth case study enhanced through interviews with a sample of Muslim-Western partners, I argue that religious-secular partnerships are most effective when they privilege local religious and cultural advocacy strategies. Rather than stand in opposition to one another, secular and religious frameworks of women’s rights can be compatible and complimentary—when the partnership recognizes Muslim women as agents of their own religiosity. This paper draws from and contributes to scholarship on religion and transnational women\u27s movements, bringing important insights on the dynamic gendered experiences with religion and secularism in our current era—a topic of growing priority for scholars, policy makers and activists alike