An Asymptotic Formalism for Reconstructing Small Perturbations of Scatterers from Electric or Acoustic Far-Field Measurements

We consider the problem of determining the boundary perturbations of an object from far-field electric or acoustic measurements. Assuming that the unknown object boundary is a small perturbation of a circle, we develop a linearized relation between the far-field data that result from fixed Dirichlet boundary conditions, entering as parameters, and the shape of the object, entering as variables. This relation is used to find the Fourier coefficients of the perturbation of the shape and makes use of an expansion of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator

Re-Interpreting West Germany’s Ecological Revolution::Environmental Politics, Grassroots Activism, and Democracy in the Long 1970s

In looking at the ways in which the relationship between environmental matters and the political developed and changed in West Germany during the long 1970s, this article re-interprets the ‘ecological revolution’ that occurred at that time and rethinks the trajectory of German environmentalism. To get at the politicization of environmental concerns in the 1970s, the article compares two narratives: the ‘technocratic invention’ of environmental politics by government officials, and the career of grassroots anti-nuclear activism. It shows that though these two trends developed in relationship with one another, their protagonists increasingly came to speak past one other. Not only did they begin to understand environmental problems in different ways, they also drew different conclusions about where environmental matters were to be debated, and what ought to be done in order to resolve environmental concerns. By describing these developments and the approaches to environmental politics they brought forth, the article reconceives the ecological revolution as an extended period when conflicting interpretations of environmental affairs underpinned competing approaches to politics as such. While government officials sought to make the environment part of standard political praxis, grassroots activists used environmental concerns as a wedge to push open a wider debate about popular participation within parliamentary democracy. The long confrontation between these two perspectives gave way, during the 1980s, to an environmentalism that was not only level-headed and consensual, but also a seminal concern of German politics

From Wyhl to Wall Street:Occupation and the Many Meanings of "Single Issue" Protest

This article studies the mass protests that took place all around the globe in 2011 in order to reconsider scholars’ conclusions about the nature of protest since the 1970s. It challenges accounts that describe recent protest movements as overly self-referential by focusing on the protest tactic of occupation, perhaps the 2011 protests’ most self-evident commonality. The article shows how the tactic of occupation allows broad coalitions to develop around specific demands, and also the ways that disparate occupation protests are linked together across space, particularly in the imagination of their protagonists. As a result, it shows how occupations can serve as the basis for a new collective politics in an era when mass parties appear to be in decline. Using the 1975 occupation of the nuclear reactor construction site near the West German village of Wyhl as a model, the article looks closely at how occupations develop, the problems their diverse protagonists confront as they seek to work together, and their potential to help activists imagine alternative worlds. This case study reveals the importance of the “infrastructure of re-creation” that protesters build-up on occupied sites for coalition-building, for the broadening of protesters’ demands, and also for the expansion of activists’ sense of the possible. Paradoxically, I argue, it is precisely their fragmented nature that makes occupations so difficult to define, so open to people from different backgrounds, and thus so significant for the social totality

A Struggle to Remake the Market: Feed-in Rates and Alternative Energy in 1980s West Germany

Drawing on government documents as well as the papers of renewable energy advocates, this article looks at debates over alternative energy in West Germany during the 1980s. It shows that because West Germany's monopolistic electricity market was dominated by utilities companies reticent to invest in alternatives, struggles over access to the electric grid and the rates independent producers received for their electricity were essential to efforts to add renewables into the German energy mix after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The legislated ‘feed-in tariff’ for electricity generated by individuals from renewable sources, which emerged from these debates in 1990, cemented the idea that individual Germans, not utilities or the state, were responsible for the fate of renewable energy in Germany and paved the way towards an ‘economically viable’ renewables sector