Do-it-yourself heritage: heritage as a process (designing for the Stoke ‘Ping’)

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Karen Brookfield ◽  
Danny Callaghan ◽  
Helen Graham ◽  
Jayne Fair ◽  
Jan Roberts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Funding Policy ◽  
Do It Yourself

This chapter discusses the idea of do-it-yourself (DIY) heritage, that is, heritage as it is produced through people's actions, conversations, and relationships. The chapter looks at the Do-It-Yourself Heritage Day event and how it worked to create moments of connection — what the Ceramic City Stories team call the ‘Stoke Ping’. It draws on wider DIY traditions ‘to describe an ethos of horizontal community action, of mutual aid and of making alternatives now’. DIY approaches challenge models of exponential growth that often exist in funding, policy, and activism, and instead favour the magic of small moments and connections. Yet, they also show — through a recent innovative Heritage Lottery Fund initiative — how funding can be deployed to enable rather than constrain DIY horizontal, small-scale, and action-led approaches.

The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies

2020 ◽  
pp. 412-430
Author(s):  
Anthony Ryan Hatch ◽  
Julia T. Gordon ◽  
Sonya R. Sternlieb
Keyword(s):  
Glucose Sensor ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Infusion Pump ◽  
Artificial Pancreas ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Glucose Levels ◽  
Loop Design ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
And Control

The new artificial pancreas system includes a body-attached blood glucose sensor that tracks glucose levels, a worn insulin infusion pump that communicates with the sensor, and features new software that integrates the two systems. The artificial pancreas is purportedly revolutionary because of its closed-loop design, which means that the machine can give insulin without direct patient intervention. It can read a blood sugar and administer insulin based on an algorithm. But, the hardware for the corporate artificial pancreas is expensive and its software code is closed-access. Yet, well-educated, tech-savvy diabetics have been fashioning their own fully automated do-it-yourself (DIY) artificial pancreases for years, relying on small-scale manufacturing, open-source software, and inventive repurposing of corporate hardware. In this chapter, we trace the corporate and DIY artificial pancreases as they grapple with issues of design and accessibility in a content where not everyone can become a diabetic cyborg. The corporate artificial pancreas offers the cyborg low levels of agency and no ownership and control over his or her own data; it also requires access to health insurance in order to procure and use the technology. The DIY artificial pancreas offers patients a more robust of agency but also requires high levels of intellectual capital to hack the devices and make the system work safely. We argue that efforts to increase agency, radically democratize biotechnology, and expand information ownership in the DIY movement are characterized by ideologies and social inequalities that also define corporate pathways.

Eyes Down

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-87
Author(s):  
Kate Bedford
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Gambling Regulation ◽  
History Of ◽  
One Step ◽  
National Life ◽  
Friendly Societies ◽  
The 1960S

Using legislation, case law, and official records (including Hansard), Chapter 2 outlines the early history of state intervention into bingo in England and Wales. The chapter traces the gradual liberalization of restrictions on small-scale gambling, and the subsequent backlash against bingo in the 1960s. It also tells a new story about gambling regulation and political economy. In particular, it excavates the key role of mutual aid to elite debates about the proper place of gambling in national life. Although many authors have argued that disavowal of gambling helped legitimize the forms of collective insurance developed by early friendly societies and similar associations, the chapter shows that gambling played a key role—as entertainment and mutual aid—within working men’s clubs, and that it was promoted by the state. This mutual aid dimension of gambling was heavily conflicted in gendered terms. Lawmakers were lobbied by bingo-organizing men, with women’s interests at least one step removed from Hansard. Unequal gender roles were hereby woven into dominant understandings of small-scale gambling.

scholarly journals Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (39) ◽  
pp. 9702-9707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sznycer ◽  
Dimitris Xygalatas ◽  
Elizabeth Agey ◽  
Sarah Alami ◽  
Xiao-Fen An ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Design Feature ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Remote Communities ◽  
Basic Part ◽  
Report Data ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Adaptive Problem

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species’ social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action’s direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

scholarly journals DIY Urbanism: Influences & Impacts on Community Planning

Topophilia ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 67-71
Author(s):  
Steven Shuttle
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Community Planning ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Do It Yourself

‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) urbanism is usually initiated by community members using a grassroots approach to change urban areas. Community planning involves making decisions about urban areas. This paper examines topics regarding DIY urbanism and community planning. Community engagement, neoliberalism and municipal support are key influences of DIY urbanism related to planning. DIY urbanism impacts the planner’s role as well as the relationships between planners, communities and municipalities. Three Canadian examples of DIY urbanism are introduced, including the Urban Repair Squad, PARK(ing) Day, and CITYlab. Discussion focuses on the opportunities and potential challenges of DIY urbanism for planners to consider. Potential challenges include public safety and municipal liability. Recommendations for planners regarding DIY urbanism are provided. DIY urbanism can be beneficial if planners work collaboratively and focus on small scale, low cost improvements.

scholarly journals What Is COVID-19 Teaching Us About Community Health Systems? A Reflection From a Rapid Community-Led Mutual Aid Response in Cape Town, South Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manya van Ryneveld ◽  
Eleanor Whyle ◽  
Leanne Brady
Keyword(s):  
Community Health ◽  
Health Systems ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Community Response ◽  
The State ◽  
System Response ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Community Health Systems

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has exposed the wide gaps in South Africa’s formal social safety net, with the country’s high levels of inequality, unemployment and poor public infrastructure combining to produce devastating consequences for a vast majority in the country living through lockdown. In Cape Town, a movement of self-organising, neighbourhood-level community action networks (CANs) has contributed significantly to the community-based response to COVID-19 and the ensuing epidemiological and social challenges it has wrought. This article describes and explains the organising principles that inform this community response, with the view to reflect on the possibilities and limits of such movements as they interface with the state and its top-down ways of working, often producing contradictions and complexities. This presents an opportunity for recognising and understanding the power of informal networks and collective action in community health systems in times of unprecedented crisis, and brings into focus the importance of finding ways to engage with the state and its formal health system response that do not jeopardise this potential.

Arab Labor Migration in the Americas, 1880–1930

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
New Research ◽  
Industrial Textiles

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial textiles, small-scale commerce (peddling), heavy machining, and migrant services associated with continued immigration from the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire enacted few policies to halt emigration from Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine, instead facilitating a remittance economy that enhanced the emerging cash economies of the Arab world. After 1920, the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon moved to limit new migration to the Americas, working together with increasingly restrictive immigration regimes in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil to halt Arab labor immigration. Using informal archives, the Arab American press, and the records of diasporic mutual aid and philanthropic societies, new research in Arab American migration illustrates how migrants managed a transnational labor economy and confronted challenges presented by American nativism, travel restriction, and interwar deportations.

‘Never more needed’ yet never more stretched: reflections on the role of the voluntary sector during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Thiery ◽  
Joanne Cook ◽  
Jon Burchell ◽  
Erica Ballantyne ◽  
Fiona Walkley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Community Action ◽  
Uncertain Demand ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Strategic Responses ◽  
Critical Juncture ◽  
Social Recovery ◽  
Community Sector ◽  
Voluntary Organisations

This research note presents the preliminary findings from a study into the mobilisation of volunteers during the coronavirus pandemic. Data gathered from 49 semi-structured interviews with representatives from local authorities (LAs), voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations and mutual aid coordinators offer important insights into the state of the sector at this critical juncture, as we find ourselves in a third national lockdown. The role of the VCS in both strategic responses and on-the-ground community action has accorded it renewed respect and credibility. At the same time, the funding landscape for voluntary organisations is uncertain, demand for services is overwhelming, and staff and volunteers are suffering from fatigue. Our findings highlight the imperative of embedding the lessons of the first national lockdown in 2020 by valuing the sector’s contribution to the emergency effort and retaining its seat at the table, ensuring its role in economic and social recovery.

Small is Quite Beautiful: Tarasque Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Small Press ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Broad Overview

The 1960s saw an explosion of mimeographed poetry magazines and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter four provides a broad overview of this ‘mimeo revolution,’ tracing its origins back to the do-it-yourself ethos of Black Mountain and the burgeoning of the ‘New American Poetry.’ As chapter 4 discusses, with this explosion of small-scale publishing, however, came more problematic issues of quality, both with regard to the production standards of the publications and the poetry they published. Chapter 4 examines how the British little magazine Tarasque and the eponymous small press established by Stuart Mills and Simon Cutts responded to this side of the mimeo revolution with a potent mix of trenchant irony and a championing of the small poem—as practiced by Finlay and Williams—that emphasized impersonal, constructed formal objectivity in answer to the expressive solipsism of the time.

Community Groups in Context

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Policy ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Community Groups ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
How People Learn ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Voluntary Organisations

Whilst there is a growing body of literature on formal voluntary organisations, relatively little research has been undertaken into the roles and functioning of small, informal, below the radar community groups and actions. ‘Community groups in context: Local activities and actions’ brings together a decade of research with informal community groups and small scale civil society organisations. It explores the wealth and diversity of their forms and activities, their fragility, strategies for survival and their position in relation to a range of public policy objectives. In particular the book examines under-researched aspects of small scale community action: from voluntary arts through to Gypsy, Traveller and Roma groups through to how people learn through to how activists learn, the emotional investment in community action and the voice of below the radar groups in local and national policy contexts.

The rush to accelerate: Early stages of nuclear physics research in Australia

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. W. HOME
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Physics ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Particle Accelerators ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Stages Of Development ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Opening Up

ABSTRACT From the mid-1930s, Australian physicists, though few in number, sought to join the exciting new field of research then opening up in experimental nuclear physics. Such research was already, however, largely based on the use of particle accelerators, and to acquire one demanded money and resources on a scale unprecedented in Australian scientific experience. Australian attempts during the period 1935––1960 to build accelerators or to acquire them by other means are described. The difficulties that Australian physicists faced in this connection and the strategies by which they sought to overcome them are considered. Three stages of development are identified: an initial period of small-scale initiatives in the 1930s, a postwar period of ““do-it-yourself”” accelerator building, and finally a growing practice of buying machines ““off the shelf”” from commercial suppliers.

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