The Rolling Apocalypse of Contemporary History

When the Aftermath Network assembled in early 2009, our scholarly mission was based on a seemingly self-evident model of contemporary history. An economic crisis occurred in the fall of 2008. We would examine its aftermath, with special attention to its cultural dimensions. Crisis and aftermath, cause and effect: it seemed straightforward

Bruno Latour

This slender, quirky, and intriguing book collects three pièces d'occasion that collectively extend the argument against the fetishism of facts so memorably advanced in Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993 [1991]). The first piece is a translation of a 1996 pamphlet that Latour wrote about an internship with an ethnopsychiatric practice at the Centre Devereux in Paris. The second republishes the introduction (coauthored by Peter Weibel) to the catalogue of the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash, which Latour co-curated, at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. The third selection was published in 2005 in the volume Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (Oxford), edited by James D. Proctor

The Lantern-Bearers of the history of technology

Historians of technology need to focus more on studying human experiences of technological change rather than technological objects. Aesthetic debates over ‘realism’ and ‘romance’ in the later nineteenth century suggest that greater attention to the inward world of lived experience can enhance our understanding of historical experience. The well-known writer Robert Louis Stevenson experimented with a variety of new forms of romance to write about contemporary events in the South Seas with primary attention to inward experiences of technological change, as opposed to accounts of technological objects

Did that Professional Education about Mental Health Promotion Make Any Difference? Early Childhood Educators' Reflections upon Changes in Their Knowledge and Practices

This item is under embargo for a period of 12 months from the date of publication, in accordance with the publisher's policy.Educators are at the heart of educational reforms, such as the introduction of mental health promotion initiatives into early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Good quality implementation of reforms requires educators to engage in high quality professional learning: If educators have not had opportunities to gain appropriate knowledge and expertise, new initiatives may be poorly implemented and may consequently achieve limited outcomes. This article reports ECEC educators’ perspectives about the impact on their knowledge and practices of the professional education component of the KidsMatter mental health promotion initiative. Educators from 111 ECEC services across Australia contributed a range of types of data, including questionnaires about their knowledge and self-efficacy, feedback about each professional education session, and photo stories about their changed professional practices. Participants indicated that their professional learning led to changed practices in areas such as interpreting children's behaviours, interacting with children, approaching parents, and collaborating with colleagues. Participants’ photo stories illustrate how professional education that focuses on content, active learning, coherence, and collaboration can positively influence knowledge and practices. However, if such gains are to last beyond relatively highly resourced start-up phases of initiatives, professional education needs to integrate with, and draw from, the ongoing availability of other professionals such as guidance and counselling staff, who have complementary knowledge and expertise; be recognised and embedded as a core component of ECEC educators’ roles and their workplace practices; and be culturally and contextually situated. Staff accounts of the impact of their professional learning on their practices can highlight to policy-makers the practical outcomes of strong investments in professional education. Awareness by other professions of the affordances and constraints faced by ECEC educators may contribute to interdisciplinary synergies among the range of professions involved in mental health promotion in educational setting

Sustainable professional learning for early childhood educators: Lessons from an Australia-wide mental health promotion initiative

Author Version made available in accordance with the Publisher's PolicyNew policy initiatives, such as those concerned with promoting young children’s positive mental health, highlight the need for good quality professional education in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. However, although a wealth of literature exists from the school sector, little is known about professional education in ECEC settings. This paper presents an analysis of ECEC educators’ perspectives about their professional learning during an initiative to promote young children’s mental health in 111 ECEC centres in Australia. Questionnaires and feedback forms were collected from educators on four occasions over two years. In addition, program facilitators rated the quality of implementation of the initiative in each centre. Thematic analysis indicated that the professional education was instrumental in building ECEC educators’ knowledge about children’s social-emotional learning and mental health, increased educators’ self-efficacy for mental health promotion, and encouraged a more collegial and collaborative workplace. Hierarchical linear modelling supported the learning gains identified in the qualitative analysis, but showed that the effect sizes for positive change depended on the quality of program implementation. The findings highlight important synergies between opportunities for professional learning and workplaces that are conducive to transformation and renewal. Recommendations from participants for improvement included the need to ensure the relevance of content to local contexts, more extended learning opportunities, translation of unfamiliar language, and more accessible timetabling of professional learning sessions. Issues concerning the need to advocate for, and sustain, professional education in ECEC settings are discussed

Citizens\u27 Perceptions of Body-Worn Camera Usage by Law Enforcement

A need for more transparency and accountability of police misconduct was obvious from citizen\u27 complaints and media coverage of inhumane actions of law enforcement offers unequipped with body-worn cameras (BWCs). With the fatalities of citizens by law enforcement on the rise, it was incumbent upon the officials in two communities to deliver measures to improve citizens\u27 perceptions of police officers\u27 use of BWCs and how much trust the citizens have in the use of these instruments, as a whole. The purpose of this study was to explore citizens\u27 confidence levels, sense of safety, and perception of civility when police officers use body cameras. The two research questions asked how has being made aware of the usage of BWCs by law enforcement impacted the perception of rural area citizens, and what is the perception of law enforcement officers\u27 usage of BWCs among rural area citizens? The theoretical framework for this study was the self-awareness theory. Data were collected via interviews The data were collected and coded for analysis. Coded data were generated from responses in face to face interviews of participants. Themes were developed from key words in the context and word repetition. Seven main themes were created. The findings of the research show that the usage of body-worn cameras is wanted by citizens in small rural cities and the citizens have a positive perception of officers who utilize body-worn cameras. The results of the study have substantial implication for social change and suggest the people are calling for the use of BWC\u27s by law enforcement officers to aid in increased transparency and trust in police officers on patrol. By carrying out this research, I was able to validate the perception of the citizens

Scribal service people in motion: Culture, power and the politics of mobility in India’s long eighteenth century, c. 1680–1820

A decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of these key communities, this Special Issue turns the focus to the eighteenth century. We explore the strategies of individuals as they navigated new conditions of service, unexpected opportunities for personal advancement and the complexities of affiliation amid personal networks that extended across boundaries of region, language and religion. We investigate the important role of scribal people in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century, and the new meanings that their participation gave to literary syncretism and hybridity. We return again to questions of intellectual history and the reflections of scribal service people as they sought to find meaning in the collapse of old political formations and the rise of new ones. This Introduction surveys the recent scholarly literature in these connected fields, situates the essays here in the context of this new work, and identifies some of the key questions which remain to be answered in this critical era of transition between the India of ‘early modernity’ and the coming of the colonial world

Blood in the Archive: Rethinking the Public Umbilical Cord Blood Bank

The collection of umbilical cord blood (UCB), a source of clinically-useful stem cells, has become a highly strategised process known as ‘banking’, with 160 banks globally. State-funded public banks rely on unremunerated donations of UCB from women. STS scholarship has explored the broader ethical and economic tensions of such banks and the private enterprises offering banking for a family’s exclusive future use of their own donated tissue. Less focus has been given to public banks’ institutional practices and strategic concerns. I address this gap by adopting an archival lens popularised by Jacques Derrida (1996). How, I explore, might it help to think of these collections not as banks, but as archives? Using a number of qualitative data collection approaches, I develop an archival anatomy to highlight different elements of these selective collections of biological matter. I explore the issues of archival order and the racialised dimension of tissue selection criteria that guide UCB collection. I also interrogate the exclusionary practices of these collections. Whose donations are excluded, and what does this mean for a system reliant on the appeal to communitarian donation? Attention is given to how use is made of the archive. How might archivists be making the collection more appealing to these users? This leads to an exploration of the risk of obsolescence in UCB collections which struggle to sustain relevance alongside changing clinical requirement. The thesis demonstrates how an archival lens offers the heuristic richness that ‘bank’ thinking cannot provide to highlight important aspects of operating and planning the future of a collection of biological material. It thus provides a novel contribution to the STS literature on regenerative medicine and tissue banking and the growing interdisciplinary corpus on the usefulness of the archive in understanding the complex aggregations of matter and data facilitated by contemporary technologies

Everyday curation? Attending to data, records and record keeping in the practices of self-monitoring

This paper is concerned with everyday data practices, considering how people record data produced through self-monitoring. The analysis unpacks the relationships between taking a measure, and making and reviewing records. The paper is based on an interview study with people who monitor their blood pressure and/or body mass index/weight. Animated by discussions of ‘data power’ which are, in part, predicated on the flow and aggregation of data, we aim to extend important work concerning the everyday constitution of digital data. In the paper, we adopt and develop the idea of curation as a theory of attention. We introduce the idea of discerning work to characterise the skilful judgements people make about which readings they record, how readings are presented, and about the records they retain and those they discard. We suggest self-monitoring produces partial data, both in the sense that it embodies these judgements, and also because monitoring might be conducted intermittently. We also extend previous analyses by exploring the broad set of materials, digital and analogue, networked and not networked, involved in record keeping to consider the different ways these contributed to regulating attention to self-monitoring. By paying attention to which data is recorded and the occasions when data is not recorded, as well as the ways data is recorded, the research provides specificity to the different ways in which self-monitoring data may or may not flow or contribute to big data sets. We argue that ultimately our analysis contributes to nuancing our understanding of ‘data power’