Re-thinking feminism and democratic politics: the potential of online networks for social change and gender equality in Brazil

The relationship between women and new technologies has been an important area of research for feminist sociologists and others working with gender and cultural studies (i.e. Gill, 2012; Sassen, 2002), as well as for scholars within the GAD (Gender and Development) empowerment framework (Gajjala, 2003). A significant body of international scholarship on gender and the Internet has also developed in the last decades throughout the world (i.e. Haraway, 1991, 2000; Plant, 1995; Harcourt, 2000; Sandoval, 2000; Sutton and Pollock, 2000), including emerging research in Brazil (i.e. Ferreira, 2015; Natansohn, 2013; Matos, 2017). Many Brazilian women, who do not feel represented in the mainstream media and who struggle to have a voice, have increasingly made use of new technologies for self-expression, civic engagement and political mobilization. This article provides a critical summary of feminist theoretical perspectives on the potential of online communications for women's rights, further sketching a brief case study of contemporary Brazilian feminism and the mobilization around women's rights, particularly in the year 2015. This is done through a discussion of the discursive online practices of websites like Blogueiras Feministas and the NGO Think Olga, part of a wider project (Matos, 2017). Questions asked include how the media can better contribute to assist in gender development, and how online platforms can make a difference. I argue that despite constraints and setbacks, the seeds of a wider transformative influence in the offline world are slowly being planted in a highly fragmented, heterogenous and erratic blogosphere

Generalized Gross--Perry--Sorkin--Like Solitons

In this paper, we present a new solution for the effective theory of Maxwell--Einstein--Dilaton, Low energy string and Kaluza--Klein theories, which contains among other solutions the well known Kaluza--Klein monopole solution of Gross--Perry--Sorkin as special case. We show also the magnetic and electric dipole solutions contained in the general one.Comment: 10 latex pages, no figures. To appear in Class. Quant. Gravity

Gravitomagnetic Fields in Rotating Superconductors to Solve Tate's Cooper Pair Mass Anomaly

Superconductors have often been used to claim gravitational anomalies in the context of breakthrough propulsion. The experiments could not be reproduced by others up to now, and the theories were either shown to be wrong or are often based on difficult to prove assumptions. We will show that superconductors indeed could be used to produce non-classical gravitational fields, based on the established disagreement between theoretical prediction and measured Cooper-pair mass in Niobium. Tate et al failed to measure the Cooper-pair mass in Niobium as predicted by quantum theory. This has been discussed in the literature without any apparent solution. Based on the work from DeWitt to include gravitomagnetism in the canonical momentum of Cooper-pairs, the authors published a number of papers discussing a possibly involved gravitomagnetic field in rotating superconductors to solve Tate's measured anomaly. Although one possibility to match Tate's measurement, a number of reasons were developed by the authors over the last years to show that the gravitomagnetic field in a rotating quantum material must be different from its classical value and that Tate's result is actually the first experimental sign for it. This paper reviews the latest theoretical approaches to solve the Tate Cooper-pair anomaly based on gravitomagnetic fields in rotating superconductors

Generation of Closed Timelike Curves with Rotating Superconductors

The spacetime metric around a rotating SuperConductive Ring (SCR) is deduced from the gravitomagnetic London moment in rotating superconductors. It is shown that theoretically it is possible to generate Closed Timelike Curves (CTC) with rotating SCRs. The possibility to use these CTC's to travel in time as initially idealized by G\"{o}del is investigated. It is shown however, that from a technology and experimental point of view these ideas are impossible to implement in the present context.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit