An account of the making of the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, an autobiographical inquiry into the circumstances and legacy of the suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother. (The production, in rehearsal in the fall and winter of 1976, held an open rehearsal in December before opening the following spring.) The chapter considers the Wooster Group’s approach to acting (distinct from the style of its predecessor, the Performance Group), the visual art sources for the production’s imagery and structure, the use of recording technology, the role of the spectator, and the nature of privacy.

This chapter introduces the discussion of the ineluctable obsolescing of the technological apparatus of theatre. Opening with a discussion of the representation of technological and human obsolescence in Star Trek, this chapter repositions the work of media archaeology, which typically excludes theatre from its purview. And yet, in its attention to the operational dimension of lost, dead, or passing technological instruments, media archaeology locates a network of inquiry profitably directed toward theatre. In a reading of the work of Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Rebecca Schneider, and others, this chapter introduces the ways apparatus, nostalgia, and obsolescence provide a lens for thinking contemporary theatre.

Law’s governance seemingly faces an uncertain future. In one direction, the alternative to law’s governance is a dangerous state of disorder and, potentially, existential threats to humanity. That is not the direction in which we should be going, and we do not want our escalating discontent with law’s governance to give it any assistance. Law’s governance is already held in contempt by many. In the other direction, if we pursue technological solutions to the imperfections in law’s governance, there is a risk that we diminish the importance of humans and their agency. If any community is contemplating transition to governance by technology, it needs to start its impact assessment with the question of whether the new tools are compatible with sustaining the foundational conditions themselves.

This chapter explores the relationship between technology and US national security. While it affirms the continuing importance of “traditional” historical subjects like war and diplomacy, it calls for scholars to bring more rigorous research and critical sophistication to bear on them. In other words, it calls for scholars to take a “process-based” approach to these historical subjects rather than the “outcome-based” approach favored by strategic studies scholars. It explains how the author came to study the relationship between technology and national security and how other scholars influenced her approach, which seeks to blend empiricism with theory and benefits from a comparative perspective. Next, the chapter offers tips for conducting broad and deep archival research, emphasizing the value of finding aids and the need to minimize reliance on intermediaries between the researcher and the evidence. It also offers tips on reading in and across subfields and disciplines. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of taking technical matter, whether it be weapons technology or law, seriously on its own terms while also understanding its constructed nature.

This chapter assesses the potential of technological tools to ensure voluntary compliance without coercion and improve the predictability of trustworthiness, focusing on the ethical challenges such differentiation might create.

This chapter considers the meanings of human labor in the work of three Bloomsbury writers: John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. The psychological and social potential of “idleness” is discussed with reference to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of Peace and his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he argues that in future, society will see a radical reduction in working hours. Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” is also analyzed in relation to his argument that “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all.” These positions are contrasted with Woolf’s explorations of the increasing access of women to professional work. Woolf’s focus is not on the liberatory potential of “idleness” but rather on the continuing barriers to productive work faced by women in the period. The chapter concludes that while for Keynes and Russell “idleness” offered an opportunity to live a more meaningful and free life, for Woolf the recent entry of women to the professions offered important new opportunities for individual agency and financial autonomy through work.

Chapter 5 discusses how intensifying transpacific traffic along the Kuroshio affected Japan’s geopolitical situation in the mid nineteenth century. It argues that the so-called “opening” of Japan was a process that began at sea and crept ashore in peripheral locations such as the Yaeyama Islands of Ryukyu, where a mutiny on a “coolie” ship involved local authorities in a violent, international conflict. For decades, Japanese governments had been coping with naval incursions and weighed different strategies for defense reforms, though domestic controversies delayed these efforts. By 1853, the American quest for steam-powered access attracted new interest to land-borne coaling infrastructure across the Japanese archipelago, a pursuit that materialized with Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan, Ryukyu, and the Bonin Islands. The chapter shows how the shogunate and Japanese domains competed to reverse engineer steam engines and sailing technologies, and eventually to deploy their own steam-powered facilities to reclaim the strategically located Bonin Islands.

This chapter explores the transformative role of knowledge and technology in Europe’s economic history, with a special focus on the Industrial Revolution. It examines how the transfer of scientific and technological knowledge contributed to economic growth and convergence between European countries. The chapter highlights the role of education, institutional frameworks and innovation in facilitating the diffusion of technology across borders. It also considers the factors that limited convergence, such as disparities in institutional and educational development. By tracing the evolution of technological and scientific advancements, the chapter provides insight into the processes that allowed Europe to lead global economic development during the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

This chapter examines economic growth in pre-industrial Europe, focusing on the agricultural sector as the primary driver of progress. It explores how technological innovations in farming, such as crop rotation and selective breeding, allowed for sustained economic growth despite limited resources. The chapter also discusses the Great Divergence, a period in which Europe’s economic development began to outpace that of other regions, and investigates the factors behind this phenomenon. By analysing the nature of pre-industrial growth, the chapter demonstrates how advances in agriculture and slow, but continuous, technological progress in other sectors provided the basis for Europe’s later industrialization. It highlights the importance of both internal and external factors in shaping Europe’s economic trajectory.

In the ‘betweens’ of art, research and teaching, this chapter adopts an a/r/tographic approach to explore children’s learning through media art within the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch that acknowledges human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. This learning is thought of as ‘connected learning’, a type of learning that emphasises the integration of educational experiences across various settings, leveraging new media to foster innovative approaches to knowledge creation. The idea of connected learning aligns with the linked concept of children’s lifeworlds – which Arnott and Yelland take to encompass the everyday interactions that children negotiate in daily life as well as the less visible social, technical and material forces that shape those experiences – and the significance of Land as a participant in children’s learning. Children co-labour (or collaborate) with words, materials, technologies and Land to make meaning with their lifeworlds (e.g. semiosis as a process of wording and worlding). They do this in situated practice and through speculation (e.g. by asking “What if...?) to examine possible futures and alternative realities.

For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.