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This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.
This chapter explores the impact of science and technology’s objectifying gaze on society, Culture, and politics throughout history. It discusses how this gaze has turned the world into an object and humans into observers, diminishing moral, psychological, and political aspects. The chapter analyzes the duality of objectification, which renders man-made objects external despite embodying human values and actions. It examines the Industrial Revolution as a pivotal historical context where technology was seen as a mark of progress and an embodiment of objective Nature. Eventually, the human choices and interests behind technology were exposed, leading to the reconsideration of technologies from ethical, economic, political, and aesthetic viewpoints. The chapter also points to the ambivalence surrounding technology, including both fear and admiration, and how the disillusionment with technology has impacted the democratic epistemological framework. Additionally, it discusses the influence of philosophers-scientists like Descartes and Newton on modern dualistic cosmology, highlighting how science and technology have shaped various socio-political fields such as law, medicine, economics, and political science.
Law enforcement institutions in India are undergoing fundamental media technological transformations, integrating digital media technologies into crime investigation, documentation, and presentation methods. This article seeks to understand these transformations by examining the curious case of 65-B certificates, a mandatory paper document that gatekeeps and governs the life of new media objects as evidence in the Indian legal system. In exploring the tensions that arise when bureaucratic institutions change their means of information production, the article reflects on the continued stubborn presence of paper at this transformative juncture in the life of legal institutions. By studying the role of paper in bureaucratic practices, analyzing jurisprudential debates and case law surrounding 65-B certificates, and thinking through some scattered ethnographic encounters around these certificates involving police officers, forensic scientists, and practicing lawyers, this article argues that despite ongoing digital transformations, law essentially remains a technology of paper.
Discourses and how they construct policy ‘problems’ delimit ‘solutions’, including the scale, shape and structure of services. This article discusses how the adult social care sector in England is presented as a policy problem, with the greater use of technology the associated ‘common-sense’ solution – both to the ‘crisis of care’ in a society with an ageing population and as a means to stimulate the national economy. It draws upon critical discourse analysis to examine English policy documents and other government texts published between 2020 and 2022. In doing so, it de-objectivises and de-universalises semiotic claims around care and technology and explores omitted alternatives. In discourse, ageing and care are framed as both problems to be solved and opportunities for entrepreneurship. Technologies are bound together with efficiency, with limited exploration of how use of the former necessarily entails the latter. Technology is, in addition, presented as agentic, inevitable and unassailable, closing off debates as to whether other, less seemingly ‘innovative’ options for reform and change could entail more favourable outcomes. Discourse thus limits the role of the state to stimulating the environment required for technological advancement.
Leveraging blockchain technology in the energy sector holds immense potential, particularly in facilitating decentralised energy systems. However, the legal and regulatory landscapes of several countries, including Malaysia and Australia, pose significant obstacles to its effective implementation. This article examines the specific legal and regulatory hurdles hindering the incorporation of P2P energy trading systems in these two jurisdictions: Malaysia and Australia. Through a comparative analysis, the authors aim to provide valuable insights for policymakers and regulators seeking to develop comprehensive frameworks that encourage blockchain adoption in the energy sector. The article highlights the need to address the under-inclusiveness of laws, legal uncertainty around novel blockchain-based concepts like smart contracts, and the obsolescence of legal frameworks designed for traditional centralised energy systems. By examining Malaysia’s and Australia’s unique challenges, the article seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the complexities of adapting legal and regulatory frameworks to accommodate this transformative technology.
Satellite remote sensing is vital for monitoring anthropogenic changes and for alerting us to escalating environmental threats. With recent technological advances, a variety of satellite-based monitoring systems are available to aid conservation practitioners. Yet, documented knowledge of who uses near-real-time satellite-based monitoring and how these technologies are applied to inform conservation decisions is sparse. Through an online survey and semi-structured interviews, we explored how developers and users leverage conservation early-warning and alert systems (CEASs) for enhanced conservation decisions. Some 167 developers and users of near-real-time fire and forest monitoring systems from 40 countries participated in this study. Globally, respondents used 66 unique CEASs. The most common applications were for education and awareness, fire/disaster management and law enforcement. Respondents primarily used CEASs to enforce land-use policies and deter illegal activities, and they perceived these tools as underutilized for incentivizing policy compliance or conservation. Respondents experienced inequities regarding system access, exposure and ability to act upon alert information. More investments in capacity-building, resources and action plans are needed to better link information to action. Implementing recommendations from this research can help us to increase the accessibility and inclusivity of CEAS applications to unlock their powerful capabilities for achieving conservation goals.
This article highlights the importance of European scientists, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, in shaping global research policies through active advocacy in science policy. The European Union (EU) is a significant transnational research funder, largely through its multiannual Framework Programmes, such as Horizon Europe (2020–2027), which support collaboration between researchers worldwide. This funding drives innovation and societal benefit, influencing global standards on topics like sustainability, cultural heritage, and data protection. The EU’s openness to consultation makes it unique compared to countries like the United States and China, where funding decisions are decided top-down by governments and policymakers. Thus, European humanities and social science researchers have a unique opportunity to shape the political research agenda. To strengthen this advocacy, three practical steps await researchers: (1) understand national research narratives, (2) ensure research impacts policymaking, and (3) support international research organisations.
In this chapter, I show how the current shift to digitalising tax administration in Kenya is connected to its colonial fiscal structures both in its design and implementation. Firstly, the idea that technology can help economic development in countries like Kenya has existed since colonial times and still features in current policies that endorse technology for economic development. Secondly, colonial structures are also present in the implementation strategies of a digital platform like the e-filing system central in this case study as they rely on colonial infrastructures for implementation. ITax, the e-filing system that is the focus of this chapter, was implemented quite rapidly and made mandatory within a short period. This chapter argues that the ‘promise’ of digitalisation as a driver of sustainability, modernisation, and economic growth is outweighed by the harm done by colonial history impacting its practice. I argue that colonial fiscal policies are still shaping Kenya’s tax practices. A closer look at Kenya’s colonial fiscal history is important for understanding how the current tax systems are shaped and informed by past practices.
As legal design, technology, and innovation initiatives proliferate, more academic institutions are developing and launching certificates, concentrations, and full-fledged degree programs focused on legal innovation, design, and related subjects. Parallel to that promising development are the increased calls for the professionalization of legal design. This chapter posits that adopting a guild mentality toward legal design would unwisely curtail the rapid proliferation of this interdisciplinary movement, resulting in fewer practitioners and far less impact in both the short and long term. It proposes instead the embrace of an expansive identification of who is a “legal designer”: any creative soul with an interest in improving our justice system.
This article follows the early history of the Eastman Kodak Company, examining how the photographic company came to be led by experts in chemistry, who created manufacturing processes that were crucial to the mass manufacture of motion pictures. It argues that celluloid film, the substance necessary for motion pictures, was central to the evolution of Kodak into an industrial chemical company. Kodak’s work to manage the specific technological problems and risks created by this material was itself constitutive of the new industrial shape the firm took. In embracing an intraplant goal of purity of raw materials and finished goods, Kodak made it possible for cinema to become a mass medium, with moving images able to look the same way across time and space, over countless copies. Kodak’s transformation, however, was uneven, as the firm’s photosensitive emulsion continued to be made according to far more empirical, secretive, and artisanal procedures, developed by a photographer without a high school degree. These artisanal processes coexisted alongside a highly standardized plant regime, and both were required to make celluloid film. This history demonstrates one way in which broad cultural transformations of the early twentieth century were closely tied to material and practical transformations within industrial firms.
Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.
This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.
This article reviews Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024) and Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024), situating them within recent scholarship on a future-oriented, speculative, and economic subject. It focuses on the relationship between financial speculation and temporalities in the twentieth century, specifically on futures and the politics of value in American literature and the calculating technology of discounting. These books bridge what have been two distinct scholarly approaches to studies of capitalist futures: a theoretical focus on futures as cultural imaginaries or narratives of economic action and a material emphasis on practices for anticipating futures and managing risk. The article concludes with a discussion of power and profit in speculation and discounting, emphasizing inequitable access to speculative futures, and suggests that the multidirectional, nonlinear, recursive mode of financialized temporalities in these books might offer a guide to imagining and creating more just futures for us all.
The initial creation of the United States' ocean-going battlefleet – otherwise known as the 'New Navy' – was a result of the naval wars and arms races around the Pacific during the late-nineteenth century. Using a transnational methodology, Thomas Jamison spotlights how US Civil War-era innovations catalyzed naval development in the Pacific World, creating a sense that the US Navy was falling behind regional competitors. As the industrializing 'newly-made navies' of Chile, Peru, Japan, and China raced against each other, Pacific dynamism motivated investments in the US 'New Navy as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. In this provocative exploration into the making of modern US navalism, Jamison provides an analysis of competitive naval build-ups in the Pacific, of the interactions between peoples, ideas, and practices within it, and ultimately the emergence of the US as a major power.
Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.
Online 24-h dietary recall tools are commonly used in nationwide nutrition surveys to assess population diets. With a steep rise in the development of new and more advanced 24-h dietary recall tools, the decision of which tool to use for a national nutrition survey becomes increasingly challenging. Therefore, this short communication outlines the process of selecting a 24-h dietary recall tool for a national nutrition survey in New Zealand.
Design:
To identify suitable 24-h dietary recall tools, a review of peer-reviewed and grey literature was conducted (2019–2022). Data on functionalities, validation, usability and adaptability were extracted for eighteen pre-specified tools, which were used in the subsequent evaluation process.
Results:
Six of the eighteen tools had new relevant publications since 2019. The fourteen new publications described six validation studies and eight usability studies. Based on pre-selection criteria (e.g. availability, adaptability, previous use in national surveys), three tools were shortlisted: ASA24, Intake24 and MyFood24. These tools were further evaluated, and expert advice was sought to determine the most suitable tool for use in the New Zealand context.
Conclusions:
A comprehensive yet time- and cost-efficient approach was undertaken to identify the potential use of online 24-h dietary recall tools for a national nutrition survey. The selection process included key evaluation criteria to determine the tools’ suitability for adaptation within the New Zealand context and ultimately to select a preferred tool. A similar approach may be useful for other countries when having to select 24-h dietary recall tools for use in national nutrition surveys.
Much has been made about the impact of new technologies on the organisation of work in the professions. However, the gendered effect of technological change has rarely been a focus of investigation, even though these transformations are occurring in a context of persistent and pervasive gendered inequality. This paper aims to address this gap, using the case of the legal profession to understand the gendered impact of technological change. Drawing on insights developed through interviews with 33 senior legal stakeholders, the paper finds that technological change plays out in contradictory ways, offering both promise and peril for gender equality within the legal profession. We identify four key concepts – bifurcation, democratisation, humanisation, and flexibilisation – to elucidate the intricate interplay between technology and gendered legal careers, acknowledging the dual potential that technology holds for advancement and adversity. We argue for proactive measures and strategies to be adopted by legal institutions, professional associations, and employers, to harness the benefits of new technologies while mitigating the very real risks such technologies pose to a more gender-equitable future of work.
The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.
The Conclusion provides a very brief recap of the issues discussed in the preceding chapters. It reflects on the larger context of regulatory change, and touches upon contemporary challenges of regulation such as the role of gender, race, sustainability, and future generations in the regulatory process.
This chapter offers an introduction to the book. It defines regulation, distinguishing it from other concepts such as governance. We define regulation as ‘intentional, organised attempts to manage or control risk or the behaviours of a different party through the exercise of authority, usually through the use of mechanisms of standard-setting, monitoring and information-gathering and behaviour modification to address a collective tension or problem’. The Introduction reflects upon the most important changes in regulation in the last two decades and the growing relevance of regulation in society. The chapter explains significant changes in the practice and context of regulation that have occurred since the first editions was published.