scholarly journals Queer Epidemics

Author(s):  
Tomasz Sikora

This chapter of my book Bodies Out of Rule (2014) considers John Greyson's Zero Patience – a 1993 musical satire on the early days of the AIDS epidemic – in the context of the epidemiological and immunity discourses inherent in neoliberal biopolitics. Greyson's film can be read as a queer critique of the broadly understood epidemiological operations of biopower, especially its authoritarian systematizations and taxonomizations that establish a certain "regime of truth" and are a necessary condition for the effective regulation of social practices and subjects. Through my reading of Greyson's film, I argue for a queer reclamation of the feared figure of the virus as a thoroughly transversal figure that transcends existing boundaries, identities, and cognitive categories.

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Zlatyslav Oleksandrovych Dubniak

The aim of this article is to find out the logic of modern sociocultural environment within a historical process (in the context of A. Giddens’, U. Beck’s, P. Sztompka’s and Z. Bauman’s researches). The article deals with a history as a process of permanent learning, and the era of modernity is interpreted as the radicalization of this process. A history of the human community constitutes itself through the constant reproduction and changing of social practices. Each society should be understood as a process, which models of social life are being internalizing, externalizing and changing. So the learning could be described as a fundamental mechanism of social history. The phenomenon of learning means the practice of productive sociocultural creativity. The learning solves the social life problems: it tends to overcome unfeasibility, incoherence and imperfection of social life. Thereby a history as the learning process is directed to increase the human control over the natural and mental environments. Therefore discovering of the modern epoch's specificity as a situation of dynamicity, changeability, plurality, globality of social practices allows to assert that the learning is the engine of social life in contemporaneity. Moreover the life in the era of modernity should be understood as a radical learning. The situation of posttraditionalization and loss of identity requires sociocultural activity so that a society could stably keep the historical course. Such a radical learning, activity could be understood in the modernity as «colonization of the future», in other words as the social trust and the rationalization. Problems of social life in the era of modernity are overcoming by means of the trust and rationalization. In order to ensure control over the natural and the mental environments, an active modern humanity must always deal with the open future. That is to say with the risk and the uncertainty. The ontological security of posttraditional human could be restored only by «colonization of the future», as a necessary condition for further sociocultural construction of reality. In this way contemporary human's understanding of history and the era of modernity is a principal peculiarity of one's social life. It means that the continuity of contemporary social existence is made possible by pointed understanding.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Montmerle

AbstractFor life to develop, planets are a necessary condition. Likewise, for planets to form, stars must be surrounded by circumstellar disks, at least some time during their pre-main sequence evolution. Much progress has been made recently in the study of young solar-like stars. In the optical domain, these stars are known as «T Tauri stars». A significant number show IR excess, and other phenomena indirectly suggesting the presence of circumstellar disks. The current wisdom is that there is an evolutionary sequence from protostars to T Tauri stars. This sequence is characterized by the initial presence of disks, with lifetimes ~ 1-10 Myr after the intial collapse of a dense envelope having given birth to a star. While they are present, about 30% of the disks have masses larger than the minimum solar nebula. Their disappearance may correspond to the growth of dust grains, followed by planetesimal and planet formation, but this is not yet demonstrated.


Author(s):  
G.D. Danilatos

The environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) has evolved as the natural extension of the scanning electron microscope (SEM), both historically and technologically. ESEM allows the introduction of a gaseous environment in the specimen chamber, whereas SEM operates in vacuum. One of the detection systems in ESEM, namely, the gaseous detection device (GDD) is based on the presence of gas as a detection medium. This might be interpreted as a necessary condition for the ESEM to remain operational and, hence, one might have to change instruments for operation at low or high vacuum. Initially, we may maintain the presence of a conventional secondary electron (E-T) detector in a "stand-by" position to switch on when the vacuum becomes satisfactory for its operation. However, the "rough" or "low vacuum" range of pressure may still be considered as inaccessible by both the GDD and the E-T detector, because the former has presumably very small gain and the latter still breaks down.


2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (9) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
SHARON WORCESTER
Keyword(s):  

1988 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don C. des Jarlais ◽  
Samuel R. Friedman ◽  
Jo L. Sotheran ◽  
Rand Stoneburner

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