scholarly journals Destructive care

Author(s):  
Anna Varfolomeeva

There is a growing awareness of the essential similarities between care and maintenance notions in more-than-human settings. Whereas the concept of care is increasingly extended towards non-living organisms, research on maintenance and repair still focuses mainly on technologies and infrastructures. This article extends the realm of maintenance theorizing towards humans' caretaking activities and discusses the concepts' parallels. It focuses on the case study of Veps ethnic minority in Karelia, Northwestern Russia. Since the 18th century, Veps have been extracting rare ornamental stones: gabbro-diabase and raspberry quartzite. The article demonstrates that Veps workers engage in close bodily and material interactions with the mining industry. Whereas many of them enter into affective relations with the stone, their attitudes towards their bodies and health become estranged and detached. The article introduces the concept of "destructive care" to analyze the process of the workers' growing alienation from their bodily needs. Through the Veps' example, the article demonstrates that the logics of care and maintenance become entangled in the realm of human – material co-existence.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1357034X2199284
Author(s):  
Mickey Vallee

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that data modelling is becoming a crucial, if not dominant, vector for our understanding of animal populations and is consequential for how we study the affective relations between individual bodies and the communities to which they belong. It takes up the relationship between animal, body and data, following the datafication of starling murmurations, to explore the topological relationships between nature, culture and science. The case study thus embodies a data journey, invoking the tactics claimed by social or natural scientists, who generated recent discoveries in starling murmurations, including their topological expansions and contractions. The article concludes with thoughts and suggestions for further research on animal/data entanglement, and threads the concept of databodiment throughout, as a necessary dynamic for the formation and maintenance of communities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110267
Author(s):  
Karen Attar

This article addresses the challenge to make printed hidden collections known quickly without sacrificing ultimate quality. It takes as its starting point the archival mantra ‘More product, less process’ and explores its application to printed books, mindful of projects in the United States to catalogue 19th- and 20th-century printed books quickly and cheaply with the help of OCLC. A problem is lack of time or managerial inclination ever to return to ‘quick and dirty’ imports. This article is a case study concerning a collection of 18th-century English imprints, the Graveley Parish Library, at Senate House Library, University of London. Faced with the need to provide metadata as quickly as possible for digitisation purposes, Senate House Library decided, in contrast to its normal treatment of early printed books, to download records from the English Short Title Catalogue and amend them only very minimally before releasing them for public view, and to do this work from catalogue cards rather than the books themselves. The article describes the Graveley Parish collection, the project method’s rationale, and the advantages and disadvantages of sourcing the English Short Title Catalogue for metadata. It discusses the drawbacks of retrospective conversion (cataloguing from cards, not books): insufficient detail in some cases to identify the relevant book, and ignorance of the copy-specific elements of books which can constitute the main research interest. The method is compared against cataloguing similar books from photocopies of title pages, and retrospective conversion using English Short Title Catalogue is compared against retrospective conversion of early printed Continental books from cards using Library Hub Discover or OCLC. The control groups show our method’s effectiveness. The project succeeded by producing records fast that fulfilled their immediate purpose and simultaneously would obviously require revisiting. The uniform nature of the collection enabled the saving of time through global changes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 128085
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Danilecki ◽  
Jacek Eliasz ◽  
Piotr Smurawski ◽  
Wojciech Stanek ◽  
Andrzej Szlęk

2021 ◽  
Vol 251 ◽  
pp. 03023
Author(s):  
Jixuan Che ◽  
Peng Yang ◽  
Jiayue Wu ◽  
Yafei Gao

As a sudden public health event, the COVID-19 epidemic has brought a tremendous impact on the economic and social development of China. Its biggest and most direct impact is in the tertiary industry, especially the cultural tourism industry, which has a more far-reaching impact. This paper takes Guangxi as an example to study the current situation, problems, and future development direction of the cultural tourism industry in the post-epidemic era. The study found that the response to the epidemic in ethnic minority areas represented by Guangxi was timely and rapid, but due to their industrial resilience and the impact of the epidemic, the revitalization of the culture and tourism industry is still facing severe challenges. Therefore, this article put forward the key countermeasure to promote the cultural tourism industry revitalization of ethnic minority areas from list management, elements of development management, project construction, industry integration, and international cooperation, to provide policy recommendations and theoretical basis for the revitalization of the cultural tourism industry in ethnic minority areas.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Muhiuddin Haider ◽  
Milind Patel ◽  
Priyanka Bhattacharjee ◽  
Maariya Bassa

Biodiversity is the variability of between genetics, species, or ecosystems of living organisms within a specific region. Biodiversity is essential for sustaining healthy living networks and systems because it allows for a variety of food sources, medicine, and biological control, while also playing a significant role in atmospheric regulation, nutrient cycling, and pollination. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem change increases the risk of the emergence or spreading of infectious diseases and global pandemics such as the Avian Influenza (AI H5N1). Biotechnology is one solution for reducing, and ultimately eliminating, the transmission of avian influenza. Traditional methods of treating infected animals, such as common vaccines, are temporary solutions that have no effect on the biodiversity of an ecosystem. Methods in animal biotechnology such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and <em>in vitro </em>fertilization have led to developments of cheaper, safer, and more effective vaccines. Livestock that have been treated for H5N1, as well as those that are healthy and have never been infected have proven to increase the diversity, leading to the elimination of specific issues. Similar effects are attainable if these animal biotechnology methods were to be used on poultry infected with the avian influenza virus.


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