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Over the past couple of months I’ve been spending a lot of time with Joan Didion. In addition to re-reading her collected nonfiction, I made my way through Tracy Daugherty’s Read more
The post A Material World first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
Summertime can present an interesting tension for many of us.
On the one hand, we spend more time enjoying the world and the people we love, away from screens. On the other hand, those screens are how we often capture the gazillion ideas running through our heads.
For what it’s worth, many clients and readers have told me that part of their anxiety about going without a device for a few days (or longer) is they don’t know where they’re going to capture ideas and to-dos. Even when I remind them about notecards and little notebooks, they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of getting all of those ideas and to-dos from analog into whatever digital tool they use to capture and track them.
In a post for another day, I’ll tackle what’s really going on with this “capture everything” anxiety, but, for today, I’m going to focus on toolsets rather than mindsets.
What you’ve probably experienced is that the problem with loose tasks and ideas isn’t how much time they’re going to take to do, but that a) they don’t have a default home and b) they keep nagging you to remember them. By “default home,” I don’t mean the 82 sticky notes all over the place. Those sometimes cause more swirl because you have to remember which ideas are on what stickies and where those stickies are.
Being away from your default home (and toolsets) is what makes the summertime especially spacy and ball-droppy for so many people. Per the usual, whenever you have a major change in context, you probably need to update your habits and tools to compensate.
Here are some tools that will help you find a home for those loose tasks and ideas:
When in doubt, go with the simpler option.
Printing out the Action Item Catcher so that you have a default home for those loose ideas and tasks may be more inefficient than 2 and 3 above, but it’s far more effective at making time and space than opening your phone, in most cases. Opening our devices is far more likely to lead to being sucked into work when you’re out or accidentally falling into social media scrolling when you just meant to drop off a task or deliverable.
Whichever tools or methods you choose, focus on the capture aspect and save the sifting and sorting of those ideas for when you’re really back at work. The purpose here is to ease that “capture everything” anxiety in the moment, and get back to enjoying your time away.
The post How to Tame Those Gazillion Ideas appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
The concluding post from the author herself, drawing our symposium on The Ideal River to a close. Dr Joanne Yao is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, Joanne taught at Durham University and the LSE, where she completed her PhD in 2017. Joanne was also one of three editors of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 43 (2014-2015) and is currently a member of Millennium’s Board of Trustees.Her research centers on environmental history and politics, historical international relations, international hierarchies and orders, and the development of early international organizations. The Ideal River is her first book; Joanne’s next project focuses on the history of Antarctica and early outer space exploration.
One question that repeatedly comes up from readers of this book is about its disciplinary identity. On the one hand, this is one of the book’s strengths – it seems to shapeshift across disciplinary boundaries and some of the central conclusions, particularly on the desire to control nature as a marker of a Western-led (imposed) modernity, might have been arrived at from a variety of different disciplinary starting points. On the other hand, this question puzzles me since the book is self-consciously situated in International Relations which is a clear path-dependent consequence of the intellectual riverbeds my own thinking has flown through. Perhaps what they wish to know is how did someone who started her academic life with the ‘Great Debates’ of IR end up contemplating the physical and metaphysical river (especially since I might have gotten ‘here’ more quickly and eloquently from elsewhere). But like all aspects of social and political life, we don’t get to re-run the experiment, and so this book is here, with its IR-warts and all.
But aside from my own intellectually situatedness, this book is a work of IR because, alongside the three rivers, international institutions are also pivotal characters in my story. Perhaps starting from IR, this point is obvious, and I felt the harder sell was to illuminate my three rivers as worthy protagonists in a story about international order. For this, I might have neglected my other characters.
International institutions have inspired less poetry than rivers, but what I want to show is that their veneer of technocratic dullness does not mean international institutions are devoid of poetry and the imaginaries that animate our dreams and nightmares of the future. The idea that international institutions or organizations can be purely technocratic and therefore apolitical and infinitely generalizable is as lofty an ideal as a river that is perfectly straightened and a frictionless conduit for global commerce. The ideal international institution does political work in that it prevents us from seeing the deeply ideological content of Harrington’s phrase ‘engineers rule the world’. And my hope is that by pinpointing how imaginaries of specific rivers influenced moments of institution-building at three 19th century diplomatic conferences, I can make some effort towards Harrington’s challenge to show when and how geographical imaginaries work (and save them from being relegated to that positivist dustbin of ‘epiphenomena’).
The ideal river and the ideal international institution are siblings conjoined at birth, and in constructing the ideal river, we as an international society are also trying to create the ideal international institution – one model built on all past human knowledge and expertise that can ensure peace and security across the infinite variety of human societies. It is the same grand vision that rests on the same totalizing logic and the same certainty that if we are clever enough and have big enough data, we can find a model that fits. Perhaps because the river is more concrete, it is easier to see the violence the ideal river does to actual rivers (and Danewid expresses this perfectly in comparing the caging of rivers to carceral capitalism), but I think equally, we can consider how the ideal institution does violence to everyday, lived institutions that flower around us. In this way, institutions are also assemblages in the way Phull describes the river, and that we can even think of braided institutions, to borrow from Phull’s (and Wall Kimmer’s) lovely imagery where we can imagine distinctiveness and harmony both at once.
An antidote to the destructive ideal river, Carabelli suggests, is a different way of loving the river. Rather than “projecting, assuming, and directing” the river in an effort to love it through control, Carabelli pushes us to listen, observe, and learn from the actual river to practice a love freed from the need to control. We might also make the same observation about institutions – that we engage in love as control by seeing international politics as solely problems that must be fixed through increased technical expertise. What would happen if we stopped to listen, observe, and learn from the infinite varieties of collective solidarities that have always already populated the international without a desire to fix, control, and master? Perhaps this is a first step towards what the international would look like while immersed in the river.
And, as Birkvad reminds us, in resisting the ideal river and ideal international institution, we must look both ways in time. It is just as easy to idealize an imagined future of straight lines and modern efficiency as a romanticized past where the river and society are frozen in the gauzy prison of nostalgia. Rivers and institutions interact and evolve, and a controlling love over either might seek to return them to an imagined mythical past. In my recent travels, I met a geographer in New Zealand whose research also focused on the ‘ideal river’, but his project looked backwards as different actors steering current river restoration efforts clashed over what they believed to be the ideal river. This romantic yearning for return, Birkvad warns us, can paper over oppression and injustices, and prevent the river and society from flowing and evolving. The question then, is how to look forward downriver without being ensnared by a singular idealized future, and how to recognize the past upriver without being held prisoner by it.
disorderedguests
We now approach the end of our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This last commentary is from Dr Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research engages with questions related to international political theory, histories of imperialism, and non-Western agency in International Relations.
She previously wrote for us on Judith Butler in Norway.
Two years after laying the foundation stone for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in 1961, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that hydroelectric dams were the ‘new temples of India, where I worship’ (Yao 2022, 205). Charting the length of the country’s postcolonial history, this infrastructural project of unprecedented scale and ambition was originally conceived of by Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in the years immediately following independence. In 2017, more than seventy years later, the network of dams horizontally spanning over half of India’s interior landscape, following the Narmada River from the state of Madhya Pradesh to the coast of Gujarat, was finally completed.
The romantic flourishes of Nehru’s characterisation, tying rivers and their taming to the spiritual realm, constitutes my starting point for this book symposium. In the following, I place Joanne Yao’s luminous charting of the emergence of environmental politics through the erection of 19th century river commissions into conversation with Dalit and anti-caste critiques of the collusion between Romantic thought, elite politics, and Brahmanical supremacy in the context of the Sardar Sarovar Dam development. Indeed, while Yao’s The Ideal River might seemingly focus rather exclusively on the role of Enlightenment rationality in the taming of the river, I argue that her book allows us to glean the dynamic relationship, at times mutually constitutive and at times in mutual contestation, between Enlightenment thought and the role of the other intellectual movement of modern history, namely Romanticism, in environmentalist thought.
Displacing an astounding 245 villages and submerging 37,555 hectares of land, the Sardar Sarovar Dam has caused immense debate and uproar, intensifying especially from the late 1980s onwards when its erection began on a mass scale (Rao 2022). However, the grandiose nature of the size and scope of the dam was from the outset rivalled only by the resistance movement forming to stop it. Taking shape in the late 1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) consisted of a broad coalition of adivasis (India’s indigenous population), farmers, environmentalists, and human rights activists. Organising to both resist the expansion of the dam, as well as to mitigate the consequences for the people whose lives were disturbed and uprooted by it, the NBA constituted one of the largest political resistance movements of its time. Its tactics included rallies, marches, hunger strikes, and perhaps most spectacularly the action of jal samarpan, in which activists stood neck-deep in the river, demonstrating their willingness to drown rather than to leave their lands (ibid.).
Beyond the anti-dam efforts often spearheaded by grassroots movements led by adivasi communities, the well-known social and political activist Arundhati Roy also contributed to bringing attention to the cause. Having just won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy’s campaigning attracted an increasingly global audience. In the early 2000s she wrote furiously on the subject, participating in marches and rallies and famously donating her Booker prize money to the NBA. For Roy, the question of the Sardar Sarovar Dam had come to ‘represent far more than the fight for one river’ (Bose 2004, 147). Indeed, from being a struggle ‘over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?’ (ibid.). The case of the Narmada dams, according to Roy, could ultimately provide ‘important lessons about the real costs of modernist fantasies’ (ibid.).
Roy’s efforts were controversial, also within the resistance movement itself. In a series of speeches, articles and open letters, Gail Omvedt, the prominent American-born anthropologist turned anti-caste and farmers’ activist in the western state of Maharashtra, accused both Roy and the top leadership of the NBA of having become ‘the voice of the eco-romanticists of the world’ (ibid, 150). Dams were not, according to her, an unqualified evil (Omvedt and Kapoor 1999). Indeed, opposing them on principle was socially irresponsible, ignoring the needs of the impoverished populations living along the banks of the river. In their blanket opposition to industrial development, the leadership of the NBA and their urban, middle-class spokespersons were at fault of romanticising the past, trading in reactionary tropes fearful of modernity and progress. Omvedt, who had lived in the village of Kasegaon since the 1970s, shared this view with many Dalits amongst whom she lived and worked. They all seemed to ask: how could social change happen when the movement’s leaders were always looking backward for their political ideals?
As Yao elucidates so expansively and in such breathtaking historical detail in her book, infrastructural and political projects to tame the river have marred societies for centuries. Indeed, she would probably agree with Roy that this at times Sisyphean effort does indeed constitute a fantasy of modernity, one which, as Yao writes, involved a ‘desire for neatness, predictability, finite boundaries, and a straightened sense of political purpose’ (2022, ix). Despite the scientific rationale that undergirds this fantasy, Yao insists that the intrinsic relationship between the project of taming nature and the emergence of modern environmental politics needs to be understood through its ties to what is called the second scientific revolution. Emerging in the early 19th century, this new scientific revolution proscribed a change in perception where ‘scientific progress combined with Romanticism to create a vision of nature as infinite and mysterious’ (ibid., 21). In other words, the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality. Returning to the debates over the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, Dalit critics interjected that not only did the middle class and caste privileged leaders romanticise the river, seeing it as something to be worshipped and conserved, rather than utilised and managed, but also that their anti-developmentalism was casteist. In their romantic quest to preserve ‘village life’, Roy and others effaced the hierarchies and structural oppressions existing within Indian rural communities. In the words of writer and journalist Mukul Sharma,
dominant environmental narratives in India are often infused with nostalgic and romantic accounts of traditional knowledge of water management, emphasising its community-based systems and methods. However, they overlook the fact that (…) they are embedded in deeply structured hierarchies of caste, based on control, power and dominant religious rituals, which are intermeshed in an invisible line of caste presuppositions (2017b).
A more forgiving interpretation of the movement’s romanticisation of the river and its peoples would see them as furthering a politics of strategic essentialism where the mobilisation of certain tropes might allow for a broadening of political support. Beyond the concern for activist strategy, however, the critiques elaborated above clarifies Yao’s illumination of the creative relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticist logics in contemporary environmentalist contestation. This dynamism is further underscored by the strikingly rationalist approach of Dalit and anti-caste thought which advances an overtly Enlightenment infused approach to questions of the environment and industrial modernity.
For B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, political thinker, and primary architect of the Indian constitution, modernity itself was an ethical project. Indeed, in contrast to his main political adversary, Mohandas Gandhi, who saw the village as India’s exemplary political community, Ambedkar pointed out that cities were in fact places of relative freedom for Dalits. Urban space afforded them anonymity, with the individualising effects of industrial labour standing in stark contrast to the feudal rigidities of rural economies (Teltumbde 2019). In the words of Ambedkar: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’ (Gopal 2015).
Following these insights, we can see how Dalit thought de-naturalises the ostensibly progressive nature of key categories orienting environmentalist politics, namely the village as the ultimate harbinger of ‘local solutions’ and urban industrialisation as the definitive cause of alienation from nature. Indeed, the category of nature itself is key to these critiques. Many Dalit thinkers would claim that the idea of living in accordance with nature is in itself a casteist concept. This is because Brahmanical Hinduism’s non-dualist ontology claims the indivisible link between the physical and the moral realm. Here, caste hierarchy is rationalised as a law of nature, where the individual remains no more than a functional part of an overarching entity, namely caste society. As pointed out by Ambedkar, Hindu society is not a community but rather a collection of castes (Ambedkar 2016, 242).
In addition to his other political achievements, Ambedkar also became India’s first minister for water resources. This was particularly powerful because of the role that the access, distribution, and management of water plays in the logics and perpetuation of caste hierarchies. In his ministerial role, Ambedkar made the development of irrigation and power, including hydroelectric power, one of his key priorities. New technology and scientific discovery in these fields were according to him ‘key determinants in the struggle against the obscurantism and backwardness of caste Hinduism’ (Sharma 2017a, 150). Large dam constructions, presumably such as the Sardar Damodar Dam project, was to him necessary in order to realise ‘a modern social vision’ (ibid.).
Yao’s attention to the dynamic relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, often understood to be diametrically opposed in their logics, sets her book apart from more conventional approaches in the discipline of International Relations, and indeed wider social science literatures, which elucidates more straightforward narratives of the collusion between Enlightenment rationality, imperialism, and modern environmental politics. What we learn both from The Ideal River as well as from Dalit thought is that the overplaying of the significance of the role of Enlightenment rationality in this context comes at a cost. Directing our theoretical and political critique solely against this rationale does not only produce analytical blind spots in our analysis of environmental conflict. It can also lead us to unwittingly reproduce essentialist ways of thinking. If the hydroelectric dam is considered the materialisation of only Enlightenment ideas of scientific rationality, then Romantic notions of the sanctity of nature and the unimpeachable status of ‘local communities’ start to appear as forms of anti-hegemonic resistance, rather than as constitutive parts of global relations of dispossession. These points stand, I believe, even after the insight that, in the end, the NBA’s dire projections all seemed to bear out. After its completion, the world’s second-largest concrete gravity dam by volume, encompassing more than three thousand smaller dams across the length of the Narmada River, displaced over two hundred thousand people. A disproportionate amount of the environmental and economic cost of its development fell on the poorest communities living along its banks.
Bibliography
Ambedkar, B. R. 2016. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Edited by S. Anand. London: Verso.
Bose, Pablo S. 2004. “Critics and Experts, Activists and Academics: Intellectuals in the Fight for Social and Ecological Justice in the Narmada Valley, India.” International Review of Social History 49.
Gopal, Vikram. 2015. “Ambedkar’s Assertion Still Rings True: What Is a Village but a Sink of Localism, a Den of Ignorance and Narrow Mindedness.” Caravan Magazine, April 2015.
Omvedt, Gail, and Ashish Kapoor. 1999. “Big Dams in India: Necessities or Threats?” Critical Asian Studies 31 (4): 45–58.
Rao, Rahul. 2022. “Statue of Impunity: Monumentalisation under Modi.” Caravan Magazine, May 2022.
Sharma, Mukul. 2017a. “Ambedkar and Environmental Thought.” In Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics.
———. 2017b. “Observing Water Day on Ambedkar’s Birthday Is a Hollow Exercise If His Legacy on Water Is Ignored.” Scroll India, April 2017.
Teltumbde, Anand. 2019. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi: Navayana.Yao, Joanne. 2022. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
disorderedguests
Post #5 in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, from Dr Giulia Carabelli. Giulia is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in affect theory, nonhuman agencies, and social justice. Her current research project, Care for Plants, explores the shaping of affective and intimate relationships between humans and houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are three protagonists in The Ideal River: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. We meet them at different times in history when they become crucial agents in the (re)making of international orders. These three rivers illustrate different yet analogous processes of intervention aimed at domesticating what escapes human control (nature) to establish order as a matter of “progress”. As Yao argues, the taming of rivers exemplifies the “fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise that humanity stood together as masters over nature”, which is rooted in an unquestioned “optimism toward international progress” (186). The Rhine is the “internal European highway”, the Danube “the connecting river from Europe to the near periphery” and the Congo “the imperial river of commerce” (10). From the outset, the book sets expectations for nonhuman actors to take centre-stage in the recounting of history and to reveal their obscured roles in the development of global (human) politics. My reflections thus aim to discuss how the book foregrounds nonhuman agencies and to advance an argument for centring care and love to appreciate the potentially disrupting roles of rivers in reshaping political imaginaries, which become more and more urgent as that optimism towards human control flails.
1. The image of the river
I start from the cover of this book; an image taken by NASA/USGS Landsat 8 depicting the Mackenzie River in Canada. From above, this river is rendered through solid shades of blues, browns, and greens. This river does not flow. Similarly, when we imagine rivers on a two-dimensional map, they appear as homogeneous streams, whose ability to connect and serve human settlements we value. Such rivers become boundaries, obstacles, or opportunities to facilitate the movement of people, goods and capital, while ignoring their much more complex life as eco-systems in a constant process of change. These static representations of rivers, so instrumental to human life and its “progress”, become protagonists of the historical conferences discussed in the book. These rivers are ideals of what a river can become when understood as precious, yet disposable, resource.
Rivers on maps are what humans have long attempted to tame, because, as Yao discusses, to exercise control over nature ultimately proves, and provides, human progress. It drives and tests advancement in technology whilst gratifying the assertion of moral superiority. Clearly, this perspective results from thinking “human” and “nature” as dramatically different whereby the former is always standing above the ‘Other’; and to tame the Other for the sake of progress. The history of global politics, as shown vividly in this book, can be framed as the history of taming rivers. This is also the history of human faith in science and technology as the desperate attempt to prove that rationality is what sets us above all other species. It is the history of “transform[ing] irrational nature and society into economically productive and morally progressive units of governance” (200).
2. To tame and to care
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of European modernity as the impulse to “weed the social garden”, which engenders modern imperialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust (31), Yao draws parallels between the taming of rivers and the taming of nature in the garden (Bauman 1989). The gardener becomes the emblematic figure of modernity – the one who transforms the wild into the familiar through a process of weeding. Crucially, to tame nature in the garden means to organise space according to a specific aesthetic that builds order by planting, pruning, or extirpating plants. What drives the gardener is the desire to make plants work and to become more efficient and productive. Yet, as many of us would know from having gardens or houseplants, it is by tending plants that we discover what the garden is, and what makes a garden a garden: a space we cannot fully control but that can surprise and mesmerise us.
The activity of caring for plants enables us to develop intimate relationships that are easily understandable through love. This is a love for disorder. It is a love that grows by letting go of control and accepting that the making of a garden is a collective activity where plans are shared and built with the plants. The garden is a story of compromise, conflict and love. The garden shapes us as gardeners, as much as we shape the garden to reflect our inner desires.
So how does it relate to the river?
3. On Love
What happens when we care for the plants in the garden, and to the life in the river, is that we appreciate them differently because we develop intimate and affective forms of attachment to them, which transform these nonhuman beings from objects to interlocutors. And here, I wish to focus on the tensions that love generates – between the love for order that comes from domination and the acceptance of disorder spurred by another kind of love.
As Yao highlights in her introduction, “to tame nature has not been confined to rivers and forests but also extends to ‘untamed’ elements in human society – indeed, to civilize the savage beyond the pale has long been a central aim and justification for colonial and imperial practices” (7).
I wish to connect this point on taming as a matter of civilisation with another argument made by Carolyn Ureña (2020), for instance, about colonialism and love – the coloniser/ the missionary are bound by the love for the uncivilised and it is their love that moves them to re-shape Indigenous lives to become more modern/ more rational/ more right. Thus, she concludes, love needs to be decolonised for love to be freed from desires of control. If we understand love as an affect that shapes relationality, the revolutionary potential of love exists in the possibility of love to make us realise that we cannot be in control.
To appreciate the river could become an act of love only if we switched our goals towards observing, listening, and learning rather than projecting, assuming, and directing.
If the modern love for rivers reflected the love for progress and order, which translated into a desire to tame them, how can we love rivers otherwise? Or, what makes a river a river?
4. Who is the river?
If only we immersed ourselves in the river, if we entered the water, we could see the plants, the animals, the limestone, soil runoff, sediments, minerals, and algae that colour rivers, making them blue or green or yellow and brown. The river is always changing; it moves, it transforms, and it does so relationally to the multiple human and nonhuman beings that coexist within its eco-system. Thus, to tame rivers can but be a delusion. We can only tame rivers when they are deprived of their life on flat maps.
Immersed in the river, we can create new connections that are affective, visceral, and potentially transformative. What, then, does the international look like while immersed in the river? What if, instead of drawing on rationality and science to transform the river into the ideal river, which means to cure the river from “its uselessness, laziness, and waste” (207), we could engage with the river by listening to what the river can teach us.
The book has started answering this question by accounting for Indigenous populations living with the rivers who nurture different relationships with their non-human kins. For example, for Native Americans activists at Standing Rock, the river is a nonhuman relative, who cannot be sold (214). Yao warns us from the dangers of essentialising Indigenousness “unfairly making them the bearers of responsibility for saving the destructive modern world from itself” (215), yet re-valorising Indigenous knowledge allows for important interventions in policy making. For example, the rights given to nature in Ecuador and Bolivia or those granted to the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Ganges and the Yamuna in India (215). Although granting rights did not, especially in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia, stop extractive practices (Valladares and Boelens 2017), it remains a space where to start a conversation about “unlearn[ing] the ideational legacies of colonialism” (216) and the challenges faced when encountering the state in the process.
Crucially, the desire to tame rivers went along with the process of subjugating communities that stood by and with rivers – the “unimagined communities” that stand “on the way to progress” (208) . As the examples of the Narmada project in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt illustrate, altering rivers destroy places “of cultural and spiritual importance and [the] communities that depend on them” (208). Yet, these colonising projects also serve as platforms to nurture river-human solidarity for mutual survival. Thus, rivers can become allies in resisting the violence of colonialism.
5. Conclusion
The nature we wish to tame is also the nature we come to love and desire. To tame nature becomes one with our love for an idealised form of nature that we wish to preserve and care for as a matter of ethics, and which becomes urgent at a time of environmental crisis.
Lesley Head (2016) discusses this as the paradox of the human in the Anthropocene;
“a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human […] [and yet] a period that is now out of human control”. And for Head, the issue of climate catastrophe is emotional as we grief “our modern self, our view of the future as containing unlimited positive potential. We grieve a stable and pristine past” (Ojala 2017)
Thus, the importance of this book is not only in bringing attention to the historical contingencies that shaped human desires to tame rivers as part of the making of global orders. As Yao writes in the conclusion, the “climate crisis has highlighted [..] the catastrophic disconnect between the dream of Western modernity and the nightmare of ecological collapse”, which has been long in the making (219). Thus, the book should also be appreciated as a cautionary tale for imagining our future on this planet at a time when our society has become “disenchanted with the politics of climate change precisely because we are losing faith in the [promise of the] Enlightenment” (221). If we live in a time of change, one that brings more focused attention on the relational modes of worldmaking, we are then tasked with reflecting on what it means to engage with rivers, and by extension nonhuman actors, as political agents.
I conclude with a question: can our reflection on the international order ever account for the river as the river – without objectifying it but rather embracing the vitality of the river, its visions, needs and life?
disorderedguests
Day four in the Disorder symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, where we are joined by Dr Ida Danewid, who has visited with us before.
Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ida’s research interests are in anticolonial political thought, Marxism, and intellectual history. Her work has previously appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and with the Black Mediterranean Collective.
Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau… would become an island.
In The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell writes about the history of colonialism in southern Africa and its global ripples in the present. Told as a story about three families (European, African, and Indian) and spanning three generations, the novel centers around the Zambezi river and the adjacent Kariba dam that transforms the currents of the river (its “drift”) into hydropower. Originally commissioned by the British controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) in the 1950s, the dam was built at a place well known to Dr. Livingstone and countless other colonial explorers. (As Serpell notes, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”) Throughout the novel, Serpell cleverly uses the dam as a symbol of empire, enclosure, and extraction. When the book finally ends, the dam has burst and flooded its surroundings. As the great Zambezi flows freely again, Victoria Falls in more than one way.
I was reminded of Serpell’s novel when I read Joanne Yao’s breathtaking new book The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order. Straddling historical sociology, international theory, and environmental politics, Yao explores the relationship between empire and the control of nature, or what some scholars have recently termed hydrocolonialism. Focusing on the 19th century projects to domesticate three different rivers—the Rhine, Danube, and Congo—Yao examines how the mastery of wilderness was central to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. The dream of the ideal river, it here turns out, drifts straight through the heart of empire.
Yao’s immediate focus is on how and why this desire to domesticate the wild became such a central tenet of the imperial standard of civilization. She frames this as a story about the Enlightenment and its commitment to ideas of linear progress, order, rationality, and science. By following the river upstream, she demonstrates how European empires saw the “failure” to conquer, improve, and control nature as a sign of “barbarism” and, thus, as “being too close to nature.” Colonialism, Yao explains, unfolded as a project of eliminating “the barbarity of swampy disuse.” Over time, this mission would come to engulf the globe, ranging from “the floodplains of the Arno River… to the wetlands of the Danube delta and the megadams of the Indian subcontinent and American West.” This desire to master nature has remained a central tenet of coloniality, despite the formal end of empire. In the mid mid-20th century, many newly independent states in the global South chose to showcase their rising power and status precisely through the control of rivers and construction of megadams. Today, the quest for green and renewable energy forms part of yet another attempt to plunder and domesticate the wild.
While The Ideal River is not a book about capitalism—the word is only mentioned a handful of times in the text—it can nonetheless be productively read alongside the growing black radical and anti-colonial Marxist literature on property and racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Brenna Bhandar, Rob Nichols, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have shown how the rise and development of the capitalist world-system was premised on the racialized transformation of nature into inert objects that can be possessed, extracted, used, exploited, and sold for profit. The destruction of indigenous cosmologies and the violent imposition of private property relations were both central to this reorganization of land into extractable and tradeable objects. At the heart of this project was (and remains) a mode of possessive ownership—what Moreton-Robinson calls the “white possessive”—that renders both land and its inhabitants as disposable, extractable, and in need of improvement. Read alongside this body of scholarship, The Ideal River is perhaps first and foremost a story about how rivers were governed, enclosed, and turned into economic highways as part of the global extension of this “racial regime of ownership.” In the same way that “useless” deserts, savannahs, and forests were to be transformed into productive lands, so rivers were converted into frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries.
The most compelling aspect of Yao’s book is perhaps that, through its emphasis on the river as a lifeform (tellingly, the book is dedicated to the Rhine, Danube, and Congo), it offers an instructive framework for thinking beyond such modes of possessive ownership. As Yao and Serpell both remind us, enclosure (be it by prisons, borders, dams, pipelines, or other types of violent infrastructure) produces slow death. Like humans, the river cannot breathe when it is confined. By drifting with the river, in and out of capital’s desire to master and subjugate, Yao thus pushes us to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world around us, beyond enclosures, extraction, and bourgeois property relations: what some scholars and organisers increasingly refer to as abolition ecology. Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara anarcho-feminist group based in Bolivia, give voice to this worldmaking project on one of the many graffiti walls with which they’ve covered the urban landscape of La Paz:
the land is not the property of masters
the land is not individual property;
nor collective property;
the land is mother to all living creatures
Elsewhere, Glen Coulthard invites us to think about these antipropertarian dreams as a struggle that is “oriented around the question of land… not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships… ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.” Another way to put this is to ask: What might it mean to become unpropertied and unownable? Perhaps the river can guide us here, because as Yao reminds us by reference to the water protectors at Standing Rock, water is kin: “She is alive. Nothing owns her.”
In her essay “Amniotechnics”, feminist Marxist Sophie Lewis makes a similar observation: all humans in history have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Lewis writes: water “is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman.” In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communized care, for human and non-human life alike. “It is”, Lewis writes, “protecting water and protecting people from water”: a practice of immersion rather than mastery, and what we may usefully think of as abolition ecology. Water—or should we say the river—is life. Let the dam burst.
disorderedguests
The third post in our series on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, today brought to you by Dr Kiran Phull. Kiran is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research centres on the politics of global knowledge production and the rise of opinion polling. She takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of public opinion, focusing on the ways that epistemic technologies (polls, surveys, population data) create and shape the conditions for governing social and political life. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she received her PhD in IR exploring the history of scientific inquiry into Middle Eastern publics and the emergence of local emancipatory methods practices.
What does it mean to know a river? In its investigation of the taming of nature in the service of the modern international order, Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River reveals how international history is coursed by rivers. Yao’s meticulous weaving of institutional and imperial histories of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo offers a view of global governance that is both novel and necessary. By underscoring the co-conspiratorial relationship between science and empire, we learn how the construction of the ideal river was sustained by imperial infrastructures acting in concert with western scientific knowledge and practices. In exploring the development and institutionalization of these complex European river commissions as the first international organizations, The Ideal River asks us to contend with the centrality of scientific knowledge in configuring modern hydrological power relations. With a focus on cartographic representations, investigative commissions, scientific measurements, and industrial techniques of control, Yao deftly traces the epistemic drive that propelled empire ever-further downstream.
A core tension explored in the book is the unsettled dualism between science and nature. Here, Yao shows how the disciplining of nature’s waterways was implicated in the architecting of a global standard of sovereign rule and political legitimacy from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the context of Europe’s colonial ambitions, to know the river was to tame and lay claim to it. This reductionist view of progress through conquest was rooted in a Baconian scientific understanding of the world that sanctioned domination over nature in the service of human development. The discursive moves that allowed for modern scientific techniques and practices “to ‘force’, ‘compel’, ‘shackle’, and ‘tame’ the river” in pursuit of civilizational superiority reshaped these waterways into conduits for political power. Through Yao’s careful study of the disciplining of the “disorderly” Rhine and civilizing of the “mighty” Danube, it becomes clear how the construction of “the ideal river” was anchored in forms of knowledge that drained the river of its agentic lifeforce.
But how can we know a river if a river is never one thing?
The hypnotic image of the meandering ancient courses of the Lower Mississippi River defies the civilizational ethos that seeks to claim, pacify, and control the river through history. Mapped and visualized by the American cartographer Harold Fisk (1944), it depicts the many lives of the Mississippi over the course of thousands of years; its changing banks, altered paths, and iterative engravings marked across the landscape. “If a map is a projection of the world”, writes Tori Bush, “Fisk acknowledged the totality of the river in time and space and the absurdity of man’s attempt to control it”. Fisk’s rendering shows the folly in claiming to know the river as a singular, essential thing.
In a similar way, The Ideal River lays bare the absurdity of Europe’s efforts to civilize the Congo basin. Tracing colonial visions of the Congo as an empty cartographic space to be filled with European practices, institutions, commerce, and values, Yao simultaneously shows that it was the unknown Congo—i.e., what could not be mapped with western epistemic authority—that remained a source of fear for Europe. At the same time, the spurious assumptions that underpinned the construction of the colonial Congo constrained the possibilities for constructing what Yao sees as a more holistic understanding of the river.
For Yao, the holistic river acknowledges its inextricable natural and social entanglements, along with the indivisibility of the human and more-than-human. In this way, the ideal river becomes more than a geographic and political imaginary. We might think of it as a hydro-assemblage of human and nonhuman actants: water, colonial governance, energy, techniques of measurement, diplomatic meetings, cartographic innovations, vessels, rationality, commercial cargo, pollution, official treaties, dams, trade routes, floods and falls, engineers and explorers, kinetic force, myths and frontiers, bound together in a complex configuration of animate power. Their fluid dynamics compel us to think of the river as multiple and ever-changing.
Reflecting on the changing nature of the river coursing through history, I was reminded of the river of my hometown. A particular viaduct that passes over the urban Don River in Toronto reads: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. This idea is attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BCE), who tells us that everything in its essence is change, and that change is the only constant. The same river cannot be stepped in twice, for it is always organically in motion. Knowledge of the river is never guaranteed. The unfortunate story of the Don River, like so many others, is indeed one of change.
Once home to the Indigenous Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron Wendat communities, the Wonscotanach was captured by British settlers in a colonial landgrab that saw the river and its dependents suffer the afflictions of settler modernity. Castigated by its industrial proprietors, the river was branded both defiant and unimpressive, lacking the power-generating capacities that would render it profitable, and thus useful. As the city grew, its river died. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the river was repeatedly reimagined as a better one by way of reengineering plans to straighten, reroute, fill, bury, or otherwise change its nature. Indeed, it was believed that the river’s true potential could only be unlocked when “the right men appeared, possessed of the intelligence, the vigour and the wealth equal to the task of bettering nature by art on a considerable scale”. In return for its perceived disobedience, the river and its accompanying valley became a site of refuse; home to pollutants, vagrants, wartime labour camps, disease, prisoners, and social outcasts. In the 1960s, the river was eclipsed by the construction of an adjacent superhighway—an arterial stretch of asphalt, concrete, industrial lighting, and the incessant din of ultra-fast traffic skirting the edge of the Don. In this way, the highway became a better river—one that serviced the urban heartspace with more speed, efficiency, and power.
Contemporary ambitions to re-vitalize and re-naturalize the ecology of the Don—to return to it the life that was taken—are again changing its shape and trajectory. But Heraclitus’ river motif bears revisiting: it is the pristine image of a river’s natural and organic flowing waters, securing everything in a state of change, that conceals the tireless pulse of human intervention driving and disturbing this flow.
Can we know a river in new ways? There’s a kind of river termed a braided river, where currents course through channels layered upon channels, creating fluvial networks of entwined waterways that form and flow independently yet as one. This energetic weaving of streams and brooks takes shape instinctively over time, inscribing the earth’s surface with the best possible combination of vectors towards a lower elevation. En route, they split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways, creating impermanent islands of sediment, leaving behind an ephemeral plaited pattern. The metaphor of the braided river complements Yao’s vision of a world that one day embraces the multiple ontologies of the river. Untethered from “the spell of European Enlightenment thinking” and its associated values of scientific rationality and civilizational standards, multiple forms of knowledge might coexist, converge, and diverge with an awareness of the oneness of their collective motions. Amidst the looming ecological and governance challenges of the Anthropocene, this braiding of knowledge and experience becomes a crucial step toward any possibility of collective living. This calls to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poignant Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), where the possibilities of deep reciprocity between indigenous ways of knowing and scientific knowledge raise hopes for a better world, one less intent on claiming to know the world objectively, and more on relational knowing in and with the world. In challenging the epistemic disciplining of the river in modernity, The Ideal River restores an untold history to the study of global governance and international organizations, opening space for a more relational and compassionate politics. Ultimately, Yao entreats us to dim the relentless beat of modern progress “that drives us to derangement”, and to instead listen for the latent polyrhythms, contingent histories, and kaleidoscopic changes that constitute a river in motion.
disorderedguests
The second post in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This one is from Dr. Cameron Harrington, an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His research centres on the shifting contours of security in the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on the concept and practices of water security. His work has appeared in journals such as Millennium, Global Environmental Politics, Environment and Planning E, Critical Studies on Security, and Water International. He is the co-author of Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care (2017, Transcript), and is a co-editor of Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Exploring the Approaches of United Nations Security Council Member-States (forthcoming 2023, Springer).
While studying at my alma mater, Western University, in Canada, I would frequently run into the same graffiti scribbled across bathrooms, classroom desks, library walls, and study spaces.
ERTW.
It wasn’t a secret code or the mark of an exclusive academic society. In fact, you could see it emblazoned on the back of t-shirts handed out to hundreds of freshman students every year.
Engineers Rule the World.
The idea that engineers – and by extension engineering – are, in fact, responsible for holding society together, is a powerful boast. It certainly helped young undergraduate engineering students construct an image of their studies as immensely important. While the rest of us spent our days studying the words of long-dead philosophers or burrowing deeper into arcane debates about “the international order,” these intrepid future engineers would learn to do the real work of building the world that we all inhabit. No engineers, no world.
I was reminded of this slogan – ERTW – as I read through Joanne Yao’s book, The Ideal River: how control of nature shaped the international order. Yao’s book is a richly detailed examination of the various imaginaries, schemes, and tools that propelled European efforts across the nineteenth century to tame – to engineer – nature. Yao argues that the desire to control nature reflected and refracted a larger modernist “faith in science and rationality to conquer the messiness of entwined social and natural worlds…” (pg. 36). This ability to control a wild and unpredictable nature was one key standard by which civilization could be judged. Her account focuses on the social and material construction of three specific rivers: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. Though each river was imagined uniquely, they all became embedded within a larger modernist political project of world-building. From these rivers emerged the first modern manifestations of what we now term international organizations.
This is, then, another story of Enlightenment-bred confidence in the ability to overcome nature’s “limits”.
Yet Yao’s nuanced account pushes further. She shows how geographical imaginaries of nature and civilization propelled Europeans and their allies to not only bend the rivers to their needs but also shaped the ideas of what a civilization’s needs were in the first place. The effects of this interplay are now deeply rooted within key IR concepts and institutions. They frame a dominant understanding of political purpose and state legitimacy as the fixing, controlling, and defending of territorial boundaries (cf. Ruggie 1993). The cases also show how a vision of political authority legitimated through the control of nature became universalized at the same moment it was dispersed unequally around the world through a hierarchical relationship between core and periphery. Yao’s archival research, which she combines with gothic literary criticism (yes, really), shows how imaginaries of the ideal river – wild entities tamed through science and engineering to serve human progress and economic development – drove the formation of the first modern international organizations. While Yao is careful not to draw a straight line from the 1815 Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine to the creation of the United Nations, the international agreements and Commissions which formed along these rivers do expand our understanding of the history of global governance. Yao concludes her book by connecting these stories to the contemporary shape of water security and ecological sustainability as objects of contemporary global governance.
This last point is perhaps the book’s most ambitious and compelling. Today, frequent alarms are raised about the perilous state of global water resources and the inherent risks to human, national, and international security which emanate from this. The dominant governance discourse surrounding water, despite a number of alternative interventions, continues to emphasise its potential as a driver of either conflict or cooperation in a world of worsening scarcity. We are frequently warned that water’s volatile mixture – its importance, scarcity, and its failure to respect political boundaries – means conflict will inevitably emerge. That, or humanity’s shared reliance on water can lead to the interdependent peace we’ve been promised again and again. All we need to do is get the right institutions in place or start valuing water properly. In both cases, water – whether it is to be fought over or shared via institutions, laws, and balanced economic valuation – is rendered as timeless, natural, and inert. There is an ontological stickiness to water and waterways which holds them as distinctly modern entities.
The concept of “modern water” has been developed by critical geographers over the last two decades. It explains how our contemporary understanding of what water is represents only one, albeit hegemonic, way of knowing and relating to water. According to Jamie Linton modern water is a “pure hydrologic process” (2014, 113), which has roots “originating in Western Europe and North America, and operating on a global scale by the later part of the 20th century” (2014, 112). Modern water is divorced from any social or ecological context, existing as a singular, pure resource that is available to be exploited.
Much of the recent western academic interest in the ontology of water can be traced back to an influential article published in 2000 by the science historian Christopher Hamlin. In it, Hamlin showed how this master narrative of modern water emerged at a specific time and place, namely in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. “Premodern waters” were diverse, heterogeneous entities which could never be found pure in nature. They displayed infinite “aspects of the histories of places” (Hamlin 2000, 315). One need not read deeply across classical and medieval history or religious texts before coming across references to the varied properties of different waters found in rivers, streams, mountains, wells, etc.
Two key events mark the emergence of modern water. The first came in the 1770s when work by scientists such as Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley showed that all waters were in fact derived from a single compound of oxygen and hydrogen. The second moment arose when John Snow famously discovered he could arrest the spread of cholera in London in 1855 by removing the handle of the water pump on Broad Street. In so doing, water became a simple substance, “whose most interesting quality was its pathogenic potential” (Hamlin 314).
These two moments alone are, of course, insufficient for explaining the shift to modern water and should be situated within the larger geohistorical context. Yet, in Europe by the end of the 19th century, the premodern idea that waters were many had clearly been supplanted by a new type of water: singular, knowable, manageable. This shift was propelled by a larger Enlightenment ethos that placed its faith in science to overcome a messy and irrational world. As Jeremy J. Schmidt describes it, “out went water sprites and multiple ontological kinds of water, and in came chemistry, physics, and engineering” (2017, 28).
The contours of this paradigm shift drive Yao’s narrative. She draws from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State, to show how the emergence of the modern state arose through techniques that made irrational nature legible to new forms of governance. The Rhine, Danube, and the Congo rivers were each brought under the calculating eye of the state (and empire) through various bureaucratic and engineering practices. The engineers straightened the Rhine to improve its commercial potential. The geography of the Danube offered the opportunity to expand western European civilization to its near-periphery, taming the physical danger of flooding while also securing it from the moral dangers emanating from the distorted, semi-familiar frontiers to the east. Finally, European bureaucrats and diplomats thought it their moral duty to impose a colonial system of control over the Congo that would enable free navigation and trade. This depended upon infrastructural projects like ports, roads, and railways that would transform the Congo (and Africa) from a conceptually empty space into one bursting with European free trade and civilization. Together the cases show how water became modern and the modern state (of IR) became riverine.
While not using the concept explicitly, Yao’s book is a rich historical account of the formation of what critical geographers call hydrosocial territories. According to Boelens et al (2016) these are the spatially-bound, multi-scalar, socio-ecological networks of humans and water flows. The consolidation of a hydrosocial territory is mediated by a complex interplay between social imaginaries, political hierarchies, and technological infrastructure. Hydrosocial territories consolidate a particular order of things. In 19th Century Europe, they emerged from various techniques, including the deployment of specific geographical imaginaries and vast engineering projects to position and order humans, nature and thought within a global network of modern water. From this process emerges the early forms of global governance.
One of Yao’s key arguments is that this process of hydroterritorialization was deeply contingent upon the political activation of specific geographical imaginaries. This is because a river’s geography must be imagined before it can be governed.
Yet, at the risk of contradicting myself, the reliance on imaginaries is troublesome. Conceptually, imaginaries are often left underdeveloped and the power attributed to them overstated. They are relied upon to account for an awful lot. This may be the point. The sociologist Johann Arnason (2022, 13) has called them “a crossroads concept”, able to tie together and anchor a variety of metaphysical and political concerns. Charles Taylor famously developed the idea of social imaginaries as an answer to the problem of explaining “that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of the whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have” (2007, 173).
Imaginaries are increasingly used by IR and politics scholars to explain diverse phenomena and across vastly different contexts. Their power and influence almost limitless, imaginaries can travel back and forth across time and space, moving in almost quantum-like ways to mimic or create different realities. The Rhine was imagined as economic highway, the Congo as an abstract, empty colonial space. Yet, these seemingly vastly different imaginaries led to similar political projects and the first attempts at establishing modern international organizations. If imaginaries truly play such a decisive role in the political processes of institutionalization, then more explicit theoretical and empirical work is needed that shows how and why. Or, put another way, a key puzzle presented in The Ideal River is how the endless creative potential of the imagination was so narrowly expressed through political, institutional, and infrastructural expressions of modernity. Thus, further work might explore how the imaginaries themselves are transformed, oppressed, modified, or contested through the genesis of specific political and material projects.
As it stands, in all cases and across time periods, imaginaries make everything possible, including every subsequent practice and process. Their malleability is alluring but that same flexibility risks conflating a number of other dimensions of social and political life. They all get ensnared in the net of the imaginary. Do these engineers, artists, policymakers, and colonial bureaucrats always, necessarily require a geographical imaginary to get on with other things like practice, habit, prejudice? There is a distinct risk from scholars fixing an ontological permanence to imaginaries as a constitutive energy and thereby inadvertently reinscribing the same totalizing logics of modernity.
Near the end of The Ideal River, Yao (207) quotes the German engineer, Otto Intze, who proclaimed in 1902 that the key to taming a river was presenting “water with a battleground so chosen that the human comes out the victor.” The battleground would be large dams, built to discipline the river and physically bend it to the will of civilization. From this martial framing sprung the still-dominant approach to modern water management. All the dams subsequently constructed around the world thus represent the apotheosis of modern water and its conquering of alternative water ontologies. These hydraulic infrastructures are the “technological shrines” (Kaika, 2006) to modernisation and scientific progress. But one need not gaze upon these massive infrastructural shrines to understand the creation, spread, and influence of modern water. Instead, you need only look at the scribblings on creaky desk at the back of a university classroom.
ERTW.
They say that no river ever really ends. The engineers probably agree.
Bibliography:
Adams, S., & Arnason, J. P. (2022). A Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Culture, Power, Action, World. International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 1(1), 129-147.
Boelens, R., Hoogesteger, J., Swyngedouw, E., Vos, J., & Wester, P. (2016). Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective. Water international, 41(1), 1-14.
Hamlin, C. (2000). ‘Waters’ or ‘Water’?—master narratives in water history and their implications for contemporary water policy. Water Policy, 2(4-5), 313-325.
Kaika, M. (2006). Dams as symbols of modernization: The urbanization of nature between geographical imagination and materiality. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 276-301.
Ruggie, J. G. (1993). Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations. International organization, 47(1), 139-174.
Schmidt, J.J. (2017). Water: abundance, scarcity, and security in the age of humanity. New York University Press
Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.
disorderedguests
The Disorder of Things is back, and with a symposium too. Over the next week we’ll feature a succession of posts on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order, followed by a rejoinder from Joanne herself (the full set of posts will be available in one easy spot here). The first post is an introduction to the book and commentaries from George Lawson. George is Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. He is a global historical sociologist who works primarily on revolutions. His most recent books are: On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter) (Oxford, 2022), and Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge, 2019).
Writing from the frontline of anthropogenic climate change, in Australia, I don’t need any convincing about the co-implication of nature and politics. I live in Canberra – Australia’s ‘Bush Capital’ – a planned city in the Scottian mould, nestled amidst nature reserves, organised around an artificial lake supported by a major dam project, and home to a large number of predators, both human and otherwise. When I moved to Canberra nearly three years ago, the major (non-artificial) lake that welcomes visitors to and from Sydney, Lake George, was empty – the result of decades of low rainfall generated by human-induced climate change. Following three years of La Nina weather patterns, which has brought persistent rain that locals never tire of telling our family we brought with us from Britain, Lake George looks more like an inland sea. But not for long, it seems. Models suggest that this year will see a return to dry conditions, perhaps even a drought. So: no more Lake George.
Outside Canberra’s old Parliament House, which was replaced by a snazzy, environmentally friendly upgrade in 1988, can be found the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the oldest continuous protest site in the world. Some of the demands made by aboriginal Australian groups, including those who people the Embassy, as well as those involved in discussions around the Uluru Statement from the Heart and current debates about a First Nations Voice to Parliament, begin by acknowledging the co-implication of land, custodianship and sovereignty. Understandings of citizenship in Australia are intimately tied up with claims about the relationship between nature and political authority.
These entanglements between nature and politics are found not only in Australia, of course. As Giulia Carabelli points out in her essay in this symposium, they animate protests in North Dakota and India, have been part of legal debates in Ecuador and Bolivia, and can be found in disputes over the rights of natural objects, including rivers.
Rivers are the subject of Joanne Yao’s wonderful The Ideal River, a book that is – as each of the contributors to this symposium acknowledge – expansive in scope, richly researched and judiciously curated. But Yao’s book is not just about rivers, it is also about the wider relationship between nature and politics and, in particular, the ways in which Enlightenment understandings of science and rationality underpinned international ordering projects over the past two centuries. These projects to ‘tame nature’, Yao argues, were foundational to the construction of a standard of civilisation through which Western polities ordered relations between each other and the peoples they subjugated through imperialism and colonialism: The Rhine was the ‘internal European highway’, the Danube the ‘connecting river from Europe to the near periphery’, and the Congo ‘the imperial river of commerce’. Enlightenment principles of mastery over nature were tied to scientific techniques and ideas of progress in projects that stratified peoples and places around the world. In this way, rivers serve as the elemental source of global governance. For Yao, the taming of nature is a distinctly modern project, one bound up with ideas of mastery and ordering, power and civilisation, rationality and progress.
If rivers and forums of global governance are conjoined twins of the Enlightenment, one modern family member that receives less attention in The Ideal River is capitalism. As Ida Danewid points out in her essay, and as Yao recognises in her response, rivers were imagined as ‘frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries’. Despite noting the commercial features of hydro-ordering, and their necessarily extractive, dispossessive properties, capitalism plays a muted role in Yao’s narrative. Sorting peoples into civilized and uncivilized quotients had many dimensions: racial, religious, and more. But a crucial element concerned levels of ‘development’. In Australia, for example, claims of aboriginal sovereignty were often denied on the basis that aboriginal nations were insufficiently ‘developed’ – in other words, they did not support individual property rights or sufficiently ‘advanced’ commercial practices. Here, as in other parts of the world, the standard of civilisation was organised, in significant measure, through capitalist logics – and egregiously misapplied to experiences on the ground in order to dispossess and subjugate First Nations peoples.
A further issue raised by Yao’s interlocutors arises from her interest in the distinctly modern co-location of science, nature and political authority. To contemporary eyes, Wittfogel’s notion of ‘hydraulic empires’ contains deeply problematic Eurocentric associations with ‘oriental despotism’. And rightly so. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the age-old harnessing of water for political claims-making, and the development of scientific advances to do so. No doubt these dynamics have taken novel forms in modernity. But the binding together of science, nature, polity formation and extraction is a long-running entanglement. This raises a linked question about whether the modern standard of civilisation itself changed over time. I wonder whether the ordering of the Rhine in the early part of the 19th century was as severe as the ordering of the Danube in mid-century and, even more so, the Congo in the 1880s? During the course of the century, as modern capitalism became more extensive and ideas of ‘scientific’ racism hardened, so global hierarchies themselves shifted. Not all ordering projects sorted peoples with the same intensity or through the same logics. And not all wildernesses were considered to be equally wild.
The relationship between imaginaries and political projects forms the basis for Cameron Harrington’s contribution to the symposium. Harrington raises the question of why the ‘endless creative potential of the imagination’ became ‘narrowly expressed’ in particular political projects. After all, there was not one ‘modern imaginary’. As Ida Birkvad persuasively argues in her essay, not only was the Enlightenment not a single thing, but modernity also reconfigured a brand of romanticism that venerated nature. In this sense, ‘the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality’. Today, the sanctification of nature is often associated with protest movements, particularly those by indigenous peoples. Yet, as Birkvad notes, the romanticisation of the past can itself be a political project that maintains and reinforces existing hierarchies and exclusions. Here anti-developmentalism stands as a form of, rather than in opposition to, ordering projects that meld science, nature and political authority.
This speaks to a more complex association between nature and politics than is sometimes apparent. In her essay, Kiran Phull captures this complexity through the notion of the ‘braided river’ – an assemblage of interweaving waterways that ‘split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways’ and, in the process, generate a ‘plaited pattern’. This unruly, yet patterned, formation is one that resonates with contemporary concerns over the entanglement of nature and politics, constituted as it is through a complex, multi-scalar tapestry of the global, the transnational, the regional, the national, and the local. Contemporary global governance too is a dense web of overlapping administrative forums. One of the achievements of Yao’s book is to see this dense web as bound up with hydraulic infrastructures. This leaves open the question of what political projects will emerge from the various, often contradictory, imaginaries that bind together science, nature and international politics. Far from occupying spaces of ‘technocratic dullness’, Yao points – quite rightly – to their ‘poetry and imaginaries that animate our dreams and nightmares of the future’. What would happen, she asks, if we stop to ‘listen, observe, and learn from the infinite varieties of collective solidarities that have always already populated the international without a desire to fix, control, and master’? What indeed …
disorderedguests
I want to get this out of my head and on to the blog because I had this idea while in conversation with Reclaim’s Pilot Irwin and Occidental College’s Jacob Alden Sargent yesterday, and after sitting on it for more than 12 hours I think it could be interesting. The idea is pretty simple: channel my best Terry Greene and talk to folks about their edtech pandemic stories, and the subsequent fallout. This is a topic that came up again and again while traveling with Brian in February, and it’s no secret the sector was hit particularly hard, and seems many are still shell-shocked professionally (not to mention the broader personal toll). This was already one of the themes I planned on writing about from the road trip given there was a tentative sense of trying to move on.
And yesterday while talking with Pilot and Jacob, the impact COVID had on Jacob’s edtech group came up once again and the stories are powerful and important. Sounds very much to me like folks are still trying to make sense of what happened. So, in that spirit, I would be interested in just talking to people about the the impact of COVID on their edtech affiliated group(s). How did it play out? What was the aftermath?
In other words, “Jim Groom, what happened?” said in my best Dr. Oblivion voice. I understand folks may want to avoid this topic like the plague (pun intended). I also understand this may be a terrible idea. What’s more, someone may already be doing it, or want to do it, and in that case go for it. But if not, and folks are interested, I would love to have some conversations with any interested parties about their edtech group’s institutional story during COVID, as well as get a sense of where they are now. Maybe I’ll have a couple of folks interested from OER23, and I would love to put together a bit of an archive to capture these stories before they get lost in oblivion.
How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar.
That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with the annual celebration of and awareness raising for Open Education Week.
As it has been done every year since like 2014, OEWeek promotes institutions, organizations, inspired individuals, to plan events/activities during the first year of March that are organized into a single calendar (255 total this year). The goal is to make visible a world wide attention to open education through events and it also collects assets (aka resources, 173 of them this year) to it’s library.
So it’s a completely distributed event. There is always of course too many things to take in, but that’s okay. I’ve tried a few things to encourage people to share back what they experienced in our OEG Connect community, even offering open badges for sharing.
In thinking of some ideas for generating more excitement, connection between events, I naturally fell back to previous experiences, and as often it goes, I draw upon my DS106 experience.
What comes back again and again, is the voice of Jim Groom in that very first year of the open DS106 course and likely around the concept of DS106 radio, or maybe it was just the exuberant days of early twitter as a fresh concept- what Jim described as trying to create a sense of “eventness.” This is when there is a hub of excited energy, be it a group of people in a conference hall lobby, or a hashtag on twitter, that emanates outward, that there was something exciting going on. That others would notice it and say to themselves,”I want to be part of that.”
To me, I find it energizing to do unscripted live broadcasts, be it for DS106 but also later doing it for Virtually Connecting.
So I came up with a crazy idea- to do twice a day live webcasts during Open Education Week. Partly to give updates and highlight what was happening, but more so, to ask people to enter a virtual studio and be more or less like a live radio show. On the web.
My colleagues were very supportive of the idea (as they seem to be for a long list of previous ones) though I sense they did not understand the concept. Likely I had it more in my head than I could put into meeting notes.
So I just did it, I created a web-based show– OEWeek Live! Without writing out all the details few care to read, I plotted a schedule, created a google signup form, sent out requests, and responded with calendar invites. The production was done using Streamyard which provides a studio space for participants; viewers watch on YouTube, but can send comments/questions to the studio, which can be put on screen. The livestream URL becomes the recorded archive, automatically. I really like what you can do during a live stream to switch layouts, put other messages on screen, and anyone in the studio can screen share.
It’s rather refreshing in feel and form than the dreaded wall of zoom bricks.
Okay, enough, blather, on to the conversations.
The full slate was posted in our OEG Connect Community space (a big bonus of Discourse is that event times can can beentered to display in the viewer’s local time). A quick recap (is quick possible with me?)
But the real joy was so many open, in all ways, conversations that happened in the sessions. After people shared projects/activities, we ended up getting into conversations that crossed between what might seem as separate focuses. We got to topics like finding the joy in learning, the ever present hanging cloud of unknown about AI, and also wha emerged maybe Thursday from a tweeted question, a fantastic round of sharing of what gives people hope.
Even as I write this, I am falling short of really describing what these were like. Perhaps you can get a sense from the recordings, all available linked from the main event list, but also as a playlist.
But wait there were more open conversations!
Another element I have added to Open Education Week is doing two recording sessions during the week for the OEG Voices podcast. The open part is extending invitations to any interested in sitting in to listen or participate, keeping seats open for 8-10 extras in the zoom studio. In many ways it’s not much different from the way these podcasts are run year round, but I feel like the idea of having more people present maybe changes the atmosphere?
I aim for all of the OEG Voices podcasts to be conversational, but the topics do revolve of course around the work and interests of guests.
This year included two beyond outstanding sessions:
I honestly have been eager to meet/talk to Delmar Larsen, the dynamo behind LibreTexts for a long time. His human character comes through on cross twitter/OEG Connect exchanges, and even more in this conversation. The excuse was that LibreTexts won 2 OE Awards for Excellence, but what a joy to learn more about Delmar, the origin story of LibreTexts, how he manages to run a company while at the same time teaching as a full professor of Chemistry, and his humble plans of “world domination.”
I did not think it was possible to top that session, but one that we were able to arrange for Wednesday, that in full synchronicity coincided with International Women’s Day, was maybe the most inspiring conversation I have been lucky to be part of:
I was also eagerly waiting to record a podcast about the OE Award for Excellence in Open Resilience that recognized Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies for the efforts made just a year ago using open education resources and practices to support education under the war conditions of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
My idea to do this emerged maybe twos prior to Open Education week when I reached out to Paola Corti, the SPARC librarian who helped coordinate a stunning collaboration. The phrase “long shot” was in my subject line. Paola responded almost immediately. She volunteered to organize not only the participation of her European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) colleague Mira Buist-Zhuk, but also to arrange to have Tetiana herself in the conversation “if she has sufficient electricity.”
Read that line again? Look up resilience in my dictionary, and it links to Tetiana.
“Amazing” would be a major understatement for this open conversation, especially heroic was Mira’s deftness and translating between English and Ukrainian.
I apologize that you will have to wait for my slow podcast editing to bring you this recording, buti short,know first that Tetiana and her colleagues have been supporting and promoting Open Education at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies since 2009. But beyond that, after the bombing started in Dnipro in February 24, 2022, from their basements and bomb shelters, this University implemented the crisis plan already in place. And while courses were disrupted and students dispersed to safety, Tetiana was back in the library supporting educators just 3 weeks later.
This conversation was __________________ (fill in any synonym for amazing and then emphasize it much more).
Stay tuned to voices.oeglobal.org for both of these episodes.
As synchronicity happens, my long time friend and colleague Todd Conaway invited me to participate in another open conversation session that he runs to support faculty as part of the University of Washington-Bothell’s Teaching & Learning on the Open Web— specifically sessions called Epiphanies where he invite in– oh let him explain it:
At the start of the 2021/2022 school year our learning community decided to invite monthly guest speakers to share “epiphanies” they had experienced in the field of teaching and learning. It turns out that the epiphanies they had helped us have our own.
From December through May, we spend an hour each month with some really remarkable educators. We used a Google dic to write some reflections on the topics discussed and then posed them here on the website. The writings are filled with resources and examples that others can see and share. That is of course the ethos of our learning community. To be open in our work and to share our ideas. Is there anything more useful?
https://uwbopenweb.com/epiphanies/
Todd invited me and more importantly two of my former colleagues from Maricopa Community Colleges, Alisa Cooper (still innovating in teaching at Glendale Community College) and Shelley Rodrigo, currently the University of Arizona. The ask was to share with Todd’s colleagues the story of Shelley’s creation while we all were at Maricopa of the “CyberSalon.”
This happened in a time after the end of a key system wide effort at Maricopa to coordinate faculty and technology staff to brainstorm and collaborate on educational technology (the thing once called Ocotillo, hey look and seem Martin Weller, an old metaphor). Mmissing this means of convening and sharing, Shelley proposed to her network to go outside the system, and meet once a month in a local restaurant or bar that had wireless, and anyone interested would come with their laptops (this was the era pre-smart phones) and “geek out.”
It was one of these sessions that Todd, who worked at a different community college 2 hours north of us, showed up, and eventually became a life-long friend.
This (open, unstructured) conversation seems timely for what Todd has been trying to organize at UWB, as official support for what was a university learning community, has been removed. But they are looking to keep going, unofficially (I hope I am getting the story right).
As much as this (unrecorded) conversation was looking back, it really meant to get at what a participant driven/organized community could do simply by convening (maybe around food?)
Todd agreed in turn to appear on the OEWeek show the day before his session, where he shared this concept. I reminded Todd of his description of the Yavapai College 9x9x25 Writing Challenge (which was replicated in the other formulations, e.g. Write 6×6 active now at Glendale Community College)– as a response to observing that faculty have so few opportunities just to sit down and have open conversations about pedagogy. His concept was to aim for that through networked open reflections in blogs, with a formula geared to provide prompts for regular writing.
Again, it is refreshing to have unstructured open conversations. But the flame is on at University of Washington-Bothell.
But, wait there was one more conversational gathering last week… an impromptu serving of #educoffee.
Here was another version of unstructured gatherings for conversations spawned during the pandemic by another good friend and colleague, Ken Bauer, professor of computer science at Tec de Monterey in Guadalajara. He opened for a long time weekly drop in sessions for local colleagues and students plus distant ones to an open zoom room shared as #educoffee.
Hey, I just remembered that I asked Ken and participants to record a session in 2021 to be used as an OEG Voices podcast:
When Ken posted in Mastodon how busy he has been (his teaching load is unreal) and how much he misses community
I of course could not resist replying with my Google Translated Spanish suggesting an educoffee session. And he opened one up, on Friday of Open Education Week.
Often these are small groups, but what a joy to open to a screen of 9 others in the room! Here is a peek in featuring people from Mexico to Oklahoma to me in Saskatchewan to Windsor and even to the U.K.
Nothing more than an hour of coffee and conversation. How simple is that?
The answer is much more than 14. I am hopeful to continue more of these live “shows” at OEGlobal (my colleagues may be shaking their heads).
And it goes back to Jim’s idea of live energy and “eventness” mattering even more in 2023 with the added noise of social media (which looks like conversations, but it’s a poor substitute) and schedule saturation of structured video meetings.
This photo I used below was a very early live bit when Jim, myself, and Martha Burtis were attending an EDUCAUSE conference in Washington DC, and he went live on DS106 radio for a conversation in his open DS106 class.
Where does all this land for you? Is unstructured conversation time valuable? Or is it madness? I add up 14 and 2 and 2 and get a “hell yes”.
Featured Image: The “madness” of going live for Open Education Week!
Netflix took home six Oscars tonight besting all other streaming services, largely thanks to All Quiet on the Western Front, with only Apple TV+ in the mix taking a single award. However, the ceremony was dominated by Everything, Everywhere All at Once (A24) which took home no less than seven statues including three of four for acting, along with Best Director and Best Picture.
A German language take on the classic WWI book, All Quiet on the Western Front won Oscars for Best International Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and yes, Best Original Score (despite some critics' complaints about said score).
Netflix also took home the Best Animated Feature trophy for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a strong feather in its cap considering competition from established studios like DreamWorks, Sony Pictures and Pixar. Apple TV+, meanwhile, made it a streaming animation sweep, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.
Everything Everwhere All at Once took home most major Oscars, even though it was handicapped by its early 2022 release. Its haul included Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Director (the Daniels) and Best Picture. The highlights of the night were perhaps the emotional speeches by Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh, who was the first Asian person to win Best Actress. "For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities," she said on the stage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-leads-streaming-services-with-six-oscars-071026666.html?src=rss
95th Academy Awards - Backstage
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 12: Oscar statues, backstage at the 95th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
From adorable pets to exotic safaris, the Pokémon universe offers a sprawling jungle gym for players. Writer and gamer Nate Carlin gives a guided tour of what he calls the franchise's naive ecotopia.
The post Into the Not-So-Wild World of Pokémon appeared first on Edge Effects.
Deep Brain Stimulation therapies have proven an invaluable treatment option for patients suffering from otherwise debilitating diseases like Parkinson's. However, it — and its sibling tech, brain computer interfaces — currently suffer a critical shortcoming: the electrodes that convert electron pulses into bioelectric signals don't sit well with the surrounding brain tissue. And that's where folks with the lab coats and holding squids come in! InWe Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds, author Sally Adee delves into two centuries of research into an often misunderstood and maligned branch of scientific discovery, guiding readers from the pioneering works of Alessandro Volta to the life-saving applications that might become possible once doctors learn to communicate directly with our body's cells.
Excerpted from We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
“There’s a fundamental asymmetry between the devices that drive our information economy and the tissues in the nervous system,” Bettinger told The Verge in 2018. “Your cell phone and your computer use electrons and pass them back and forth as the fundamental unit of information. Neurons, though, use ions like sodium and potassium. This matters because, to make a simple analogy, that means you need to translate the language.”
“One of the misnomers within the field actually is that I’m injecting current through these electrodes,” explains Kip Ludwig. “Not if I’m doing it right, I don’t.” The electrons that travel down a platinum or titanium wire to the implant never make it into your brain tissue. Instead, they line up on the electrode. This produces a negative charge, which pulls ions from the neurons around it. “If I pull enough ions away from the tissue, I cause voltage-gated ion channels to open,” says Ludwig. That can — but doesn’t always — make a nerve fire an action potential. Get nerves to fire. That’s it — that’s your only move.
It may seem counterintuitive: the nervous system runs on action potentials, so why wouldn’t it work to just try to write our own action potentials on top of the brain’s own ones? The problem is that our attempts to write action potentials can be incredibly ham-fisted, says Ludwig. They don’t always do what we think they do. For one thing, our tools are nowhere near precise enough to hit only the exact neurons we are trying to stimulate. So the implant sits in the middle of a bunch of different cells, sweeping up and activating unrelated neurons with its electric field. Remember how I said glia were traditionally considered the brain’s janitorial staff? Well, more recently it emerged that they also do some information processing—and our clumsy electrodes will fire them too, to unknown effects. “It’s like pulling the stopper on your bathtub and only trying to move one of three toy boats in the bathwater,” says Ludwig. And even if we do manage to hit the neurons we’re trying to, there’s no guarantee that the stimulation is hitting it in the correct location.
To bring electroceuticals into medicine, we really need better techniques to talk to cells. If the electron-to-ion language barrier is an obstacle to talking to neurons, it’s an absolute non-starter for cells that don’t use action potentials, like the ones that we are trying to target with next-generation electrical interventions, including skin cells, bone cells, and the rest. If we want to control the membrane voltage of cancer cells to coax them back to normal behavior; if we want to nudge the wound current in skin or bone cells; if we want to control the fate of a stem cell—none of that is achievable with our one and only tool of making a nerve fire an action potential. We need a bigger toolkit. Luckily, this is the objective for a fast-growing area of research looking to make devices, computing elements, and wiring that can talk to ions in their native tongue.
Several research groups are working on “mixed conduction,” a project whose goal is devices that can speak bioelectricity. It relies heavily on plastics and advanced polymers with long names that often include punctuation and numbers. If the goal is a DBS electrode you can keep in the brain for more than ten years, these materials will need to safely interact with the body’s native tissues for much longer than they do now. And that search is far from over. People are understandably beginning to wonder: why not just skip the middle man and actually make this stuff out of biological materials instead of manufacturing polymers? Why not learn how nature does it?
It’s been tried before. In the 1970s, there was a flurry of interest in using coral for bone grafts instead of autografts. Instead of a traumatic double-surgery to harvest the necessary bone tissue from a different part of the body, coral implants acted as a scaffold to let the body’s new bone cells grow into and form the new bone. Coral is naturally osteoconductive, which means new bone cells happily slide onto it and find it an agreeable place to proliferate. It’s also biodegradable: after the bone grew onto it, the coral was gradually absorbed, metabolized, and then excreted by the body. Steady improvements have produced few inflammatory responses or complications. Now there are several companies growing specialized coral for bone grafts and implants.
After the success of coral, people began to take a closer look at marine sources for biomaterials. This field is now rapidly evolving — thanks to new processing methods which have made it possible to harvest a lot of useful materials from what used to be just marine waste, the last decade has seen an increasing number of biomaterials that originate from marine organisms. These include replacement sources for gelatin (snails), collagen (jellyfish), and keratin (sponges), marine sources of which are plentiful, biocompatible, and biodegradable. And not just inside the body — one reason interest in these has spiked is the effort to move away from polluting synthetic plastic materials.
Apart from all the other benefits of marine-derived dupes, they’re also able to conduct an ion current. That was what Marco Rolandi was thinking about in 2010 when he and his colleagues at the University of Washington built a transistor out of a piece of squid.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-we-are-electric-sally-adee-hachette-books-153003295.html?src=rss
Brain on blue wired up
A pink brain simply connects to several wires of multi colours on a blue background
Meta has responded to the dozens of recommendations from the Oversight Board regarding its controversial cross-check program, which shields high-profile users from the company’s automated content moderation systems. In its response, Meta agreed to adopt many of the board’s suggestions, but declined to implement changes that would have increased transparency around who is in the program.
Meta’s response comes after the board had criticized the program for prioritizing “business concerns” over human rights. While the company had characterized the program as a “second layer of review” to help it avoid mistakes, the Oversight Board noted that cross-check cases are often so backlogged that harmful content is left up far longer than it otherwise would be.
In total, Meta agreed to adopt 26 of the 32 recommendations at least partially. These include changes around how cross-check cases are handled internally at the company, as well as promises to disclose more information to the Oversight Board about the program. The company also pledged to reduce the backlog of cases.
But, notably, Meta declined to take the Oversight Board up on its recommendation that it publicly disclose politicians, state actors, businesses and other public figures who benefit from the protections of cross-check. The company said publicly disclosing details about the program “could lead to myriad unintended consequences making it both unfeasible and unsustainable” and said that it would open cross-check to being “game(d)” by bad actors.
Likewise, the company declined, or didn’t commit, to recommendations that may alert people that they are subject to cross-check. Meta declined a recommendation that it require users who are part of cross-check make “an additional, explicit, commitment” to follow the company’s rules. And Meta said it was “assessing the feasibility” of a recommendation that it allow people to opt out of cross-check (which would also, naturally, notify them that they are part of the program). “We will collaborate with our Human Rights and Civil Rights teams to assess options to address this issue, in an effort to enhance user autonomy regarding cross-check,” the company wrote.
While Meta’s response shows that the company is willing to make changes to one of its most controversial programs, it also underscores the company’s reluctance to make key details about cross-check public. That also aligns with the Oversight Board’s previous criticism, which last year accused the company of not being “fully forthcoming” about cross-check.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-agrees-to-change-vip-cross-check-program-but-wont-disclose-who-is-in-it-181140075.html?src=rss
META-LAYOFFS/
Commute traffic streams past the Meta sign outside the headquarters of Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc in Mountain View, California, U.S. November 9, 2022. REUTERS/Peter DaSilva
I’m a huge fan of old music from 30-50-s. In my channel I’ll post the music I listen to. If old tangos, foxtrots and other music from the era of Parker 51 and Waterman Ideal speak to you, you are welcome to join.
It’s now going to be harder to land in “Facebook jail.” Meta says it’s reforming its penalty system so that people are less likely to have their accounts restricted for less serious violations of the company’s rules.
“Under the new system, we will focus on helping people understand why we have removed their content, which is shown to be more effective at preventing re-offending, rather than so quickly restricting their ability to post,” Meta explains in a blog post. “We will still apply account restrictions to persistent violators, typically beginning at the seventh violation, after we’ve given sufficient warnings and explanations to help the person understand why we removed their content.”
Previously, users could land in “Facebook jail,” which could prevent them from posting on the platform for 30 days at a time, for relatively minor infractions. Meta says that it sometimes imposed these types of penalties mistakenly due to “missed context.” For example, someone who jokingly told a friend they would “kidnap” them, or posted a friend’s address in order to invite others to an event, may have been wrongly penalized. These punishments were not just unfair for “well-intentioned” users, but in some cases actually made it more difficult for the company to identify actual bad actors.
With the new system, users may still be restricted from certain features, like posting in groups, following a strike, but will still be able to post elsewhere on the service. Longer, thirty-day restrictions will be reserved for a user’s tenth strike, though the company may impose more restrictions for “severe” rule violations. Facebook users will be able to to view their past violations and details about account restrictions in the “Account Status” section of the app.
Meta notes that the overhaul comes as a result of feedback from the Oversight Board, which has repeatedly criticized Meta for not providing users with information about why their posts were removed. In a statement following Meta’s new policy, the board said the changes were “a welcome step in the right direction,” but that “room for improvement remains.”
The board notes that the latest changes don’t do anything to address “severe strikes,” which can have an outsize impact on activists and journalists, especially when the company makes a mistake. The Oversight Board also said that Meta should provide users the opportunity to add context to their appeals, and that the information should be available to its moderators.
RUSSIA-US-INTERNET-FACEBOOK
Photo taken on October 28, 2022, shows the US online social media and social networking service Facebook's logo on a smartphone screen in Moscow. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)
Listening to an interview with artist William Kentridge, he explained the origins of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an “interdisciplinary incubator space” he started in Johannesburg.
The name comes from a Twsana proverb: “When the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”
From the Centre’s website:
Often, you start with a good idea, It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.
The Centre hosts all sorts of events, in person and online. I was unaware, for example, that Kentridge and Walter Murch had collaborated. Here’s their recent conversation:
Annie Proulx's 2022 book Fen, Bog, and Swamp is a melancholy love letter to wetland ecosystems. But missing from this lament, Nino McQuown argues, are hopeful histories of resistance.
The post Swamp Feelings appeared first on Edge Effects.
FreshRSS 
