How civil engineers can survive and thrive in the twenty-first century

This is an abridged transcript of the inaugural address of Ed McCann, who became the 157th President of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 2 November 2020. His online address consisted of a series of video presentations and interviews, and is available on the ICE website.

Heterotopian Disorientation: Intersectionality in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.

The story of nitrogen

For centuries, farmers have needed fertilizers rich in nitrogen to increase crop yields. This need led to one of the most unusual wars in history: a war over fossilized bird droppings. Twentieth century chemists solved the problem of mass-producing nitrogen fertilizer, but their solution required enormous amounts of energy. Twenty-first century chemists now face the challenge of producing nitrogen fertilizer without the need for energy provided by fossil fuels.