‘For the Sciences Migrate, Just Like People’: The Case of Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Iberian Empires

In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas and Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged, and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole.

Introducing the Napo Archive

This comment piece outlines the genesis of the Napo Archive and the process of its establishment at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. It outlines the scope that these resources offer for researchers, students, and for those with a more general interest in probation. It also points to the unique vantage points that these materials could offer in relation to investigations into the historical development of probation policy and practice, and the emergence of Napo as a professional organisation and subsequently as a trade union.

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso is an account of an extraordinary nineteenth-century American life. A schoolteacher and Methodist preacher in Missouri, in the Civil War Kelso earned fame fighting rebel guerrillas. Seeking personal revenge as well as defending the Union, he vowed to slay twenty-five rebels with his own hand, and when he did so he was elected to Congress. In the House of Representatives during Reconstruction, he was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. After his term in Congress, personal tragedy drove him west, where he became a freethinking lecturer and author, an atheist, a spiritualist, and, before his death in 1891, an anarchist. John R. Kelso was many things. He was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. The Civil War remained central to his life, challenging his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. Throughout his life, too, he fought private wars—not only against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. His life story, moreover, offers a unique vantage upon dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West.

Computational Nanosatellite Constellations

As rocket launch cadences increase, access to space rises dramatically - setting the stage for the next space industry surge. New, smaller, and less expensive satellites - now "nanosatellites" - can be deployed en masse to form constellations of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of devices [27, 40, 41, 16, 17, 18, 43]. A constellation of nanosatellites equipped with sensors (e.g., visual or hyperspectral cameras, particle detectors, or magnetometers) and radios provides a first-time opportunity for orbital swarm sensing to synthesize data from the unique vantage point of low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Performative Retrieving of Tradition for Socio-Political Intervention: A Study of the Protest Theatre of Dario Fo

Theatre provides Dario Fo with a unique vantage point through which he vents out his thoughts on issues of class, justice, equality and lays bare in his performances that are comic, derisive, and outspoken people’s discomfort with the prevailing order. They are an indictment of the establishment’s perceived apathy and neglect of the oppressed groups. He does not let the zany spirit of his performances to overshadow his art but redirects it in a constructive and meaningful way.

Joshua Marshman and the Study of Spoken Chinese

Joshua Marshman, English Baptist missionary in India, spent the decade between 1805 and 1814 studying the Chinese language. Marshman’s unique vantage point in India makes him stand out among European Sinologists of his time. Marshman’s familiarity with Indian languages and the local traditions of studying them informed his speculative publications on Chinese. Learning Chinese from a native informant was not enough for him. He thought that only through a mastery of both Sanskrit and Mandarin could the Chinese language be really comprehended and put to use by foreign missionaries and scholars alike. This article examines Marsh­man’s course of study and his publications on the Chinese language. It argues that although Marshman’s hope to forge a hybrid, Sanskrit-infused Sinology appeared as a dead end in his time, he was right to focus on the importance of foreign contacts in the formation of the modern Chinese language.

Revealing New Reality

The introduction chapter presents the lens of the book, providing the author’s unique vantage point as documentary producer, strategist, and scholar. It opens with a first-person narrative reflection from 2005, launching the book from her experience co-producing the advocacy documentary film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, with Brave New Films, which premiered alongside a national grassroots mobilization campaign. This chapter provides foundational definitions of documentary and an original articulation of shared characteristics of social-issue documentary storytelling in the networked era: editorial independence, commitment to truth, civic motivation, and entertainment value. This introductory chapter locates documentary within the contemporary networked media era, the backdrop of community-based activism and public engagement that happens in concert with many nonfiction stories. It culminates with a roadmap overview of the book, chapter by chapter.

Memories of Martyrs

In this chapter, Amina Zarrugh investigates the legacy of family-based mobilizations on behalf of forcibly disappeared relatives from the unique vantage point of several interviews with Meryam Shkiwa, the sister to one of the prison killing’s victims, Rafiq Shkiwa. Meryam’s narrative traces her family’s early engagement with security forces following her brother’s disappearance to her own involvement in the family association in the Tripoli branch. Her story reveals the significant impact the loss of Rafiq had on the family and how the Shkiwa family’s persistent efforts to learn about his whereabouts constituted a significant form of resistance to the state. This essay connects the persistence of families in remembering and commemorating the loss of loved ones in the Abu Salim Prison killing to the emerging resistance to the Gaddafi regime in the years before its fall in 2011.

Jupiter As Seen By The Juno Microwave Radiometer: A Progress Report

<p>Juno is a spin-stabilized, solar-powered spacecraft in a highly eccentric 53.5-day polar orbit about Jupiter, with perijoves at about 5000 km above the cloud tops. From this unique vantage point, the Juno Microwave Radiometer (MWR) measures the radio emission in 6 channels, at wavelengths ranging from 1.4 to 50 cm, with 100 mS sampling throughout each spin of the spacecraft.  This data set covers the Jovian atmosphere over a wide range of latitudes, longitudes and emission angles, resulting in discoveries, puzzles, and fresh insights related to the distribution and concentration of ammonia and water, atmospheric dynamics, lightning, and other aspects of the atmosphere at depths as deep as 100 bars or more. We will present an overview of MWR results to date, incorporating data from 22 perijove passes.</p>

Camming

Camming is based on a five-year mixed-methods study of the erotic webcam industry, and tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry colloquially called “camming.” Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This deeply rich book is filled with the stories of a diverse sample of cam models from around the world. This book is not a utopian tale. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones is attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in this new global sex industry. This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.