Mulheres, flores e suas prisões: reflexões sobre botânica, gênero e ciência com alunas privadas de liberdade

Este artigo apresenta uma pesquisa realizada em aulas de ciências desenvolvidas com base na vertente da História Cultural da Ciência com foco nas práticas botânicas durante os séculos XVIII e XIX. A investigação ocorreu junto ao grupo de pesquisa NIEHCC e com alunas privadas de liberdade, quando do estudo de temas do conteúdo de Biologia na Educação de Jovens e Adultos (ecologia, nomenclatura científica, botânica). O recorte histórico suscitou discussões sobre as relações entre gênero e ciência, a partir da discussão da participação feminina na Botânica no recorte histórico selecionado. A pesquisa histórica indicou que as práticas científicas em que as mulheres se envolveram, em geral, eram restritas ao espaço privado e derivaram de um interesse do contato das mulheres com a ciência. O método etnográfico foi escolhido para análise das intervenções em sala de aula. As alunas trouxeram para as aulas temáticas como homossexualidade, machismo, maternidade na adolescência, papel da mulher, diferenças entre os gêneros, opressões, violência masculina no seio familiar e barreiras no acesso da mulher à escola e ao trabalho, apontando que a abordagem da História Cultural da Ciência possibilitou conectar discussões sobre práticas científicas com o contexto das alunas.Women, flower and their prisons: reflections about botany, gender, science and the social condition of women with female students inmatesAbstractThe paper reports the results of a study carried out in science classes from the Cultural History of Science approach, focusing on Botanical practices during the 18th and 19th centuries. The investigation was carried out with the NIEHCC research group and with students deprived of liberty when studying topics of Biology in Youth and Adult Education's mandatory curriculum (ecology, the scientific terminology, botany). The historical episode aimed to raise discussions about the relations between gender and science with the students, as many women participated in Botany in the selected historical section. The historical research indicated that the scientific practices in which women were involved, in general, were restricted to the private space and derived from an interest in women's contact with science. The ethnographic method was chosen to give voice to the speech of the participating students. Themes as homosexuality, sexism, adolescent motherhood, women's role, gender differences, oppression, male violence within the family, and barriers to women's access to school and work emerged in class, which indicates that the historical discussions were related to the students' context. Keywords: Science Education; Gender and Science; Cultural History of Science; Prison Education.

Computing views, remodeling environments

This article traces the development and expansion of early computer systems for analyzing views at three state-owned agencies in the United States and Great Britain: the US Forest Service, the Central Electricity Generating Board of England and Wales, and the Greater London Authority. Following the technology over four decades, from 1968 to 2012, the article traces assumptions incorporated into initial programs and propagated through to the present. These programs were designed to address questions about visual environments and proximities by numerical calculations alone, without the need for field observations. Each historical episode provides unique insights into the role of abstraction and calculation in the production of landscapes and the built environment, and shows how computer-generated view data became an important currency in planning control, not primarily for aesthetic but for financial and political reasons.

Arcana and Ambiguity in Intellectual History

As history became a narrative of contexts as well as of actions, the moral and exemplary character of the actions related was affected … The narrative of action became a narrative of mystery, meaning not only the mystery of random contingency, but the mystery of how decision and action were framed in the face of contingency. Whether action had proved successful or disastrous, that which was exemplary about it was at the same time that which was arcane, formed in the depths of the human heart as it interacted with fortune. The epigraph comes from the “prelude” to the second volume of Barbarism and Religion, J. G. A. Pocock's masterpiece devoted to reconstructing the manifold contexts for understanding Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In this passage, Pocock is addressing the transformation of historical understanding in the wake of the Pyrrhonian controversy that dominated early modern learning. Reconstruction of contexts, Pocock argued, was one answer to skepticism about our knowledge of the past, but it could not come at the expense of an understanding of action and motivations. For his part, Gibbon sought a neoclassical synthesis designed to generate “narrative at the point where the exemplary became the arcane.” Such is the paradox of historiography as a modern craft. That which gives a historical episode its value (its exemplarity) is typically that which escapes the explanatory frameworks we bring to it (its arcana).

Can the Federal Reserve Effectively Target Main Street? Evidence from the 1970s Recession

Modern central bankers confront a challenge of providing economic stimulus even when the policy rate is constrained by a lower bound. This challenge has led to substantial innovation by policymakers and a proliferation of new policy tools. In this paper, I offer evidence on the efficacy of a new tool known as funding for lending, which provides banks with subsidized funding to make additional loans. I focus on a historical episode from the United States in which the Federal Reserve provided banks with steeply subsidized loans to promote the expansion of credit within their local communities. I show that the cheap funding succeeded in generating more lending by countering banks' excessive liquidity preference. The additional credit benefited the real economy. Local areas enjoyed higher rates of small business formation and more rapid employment growth. Finally, I show that the cost of the subsidy provided by the government was more than offset by the additional payroll taxes paid out of higher wages and salaries. These results suggest that funding for lending programs deserve consideration for the modern central banker's toolkit and demonstrate that certain unconventional tools can offer monetary policymakers the means to pursue more targeted objectives.

Drugi Beograd ili drugi Bandung? Jugoslavija i borba za prevlast unutar Trećeg sveta (1962–1965)

This paper deals with a largely forgotten historical episode when, in the early 1960s, two groups of nations, one headed by Yugoslavia and India and the other by Indonesia and China, bitterly fought for supremacy in the Third World. This intensive competition for leadership was most visible in numerous diplomatic activities directed at convening, at the earliest possible time, a non-aligned or an Afro-Asian conference, the so-called Second Belgrade or Second Bandung. Each in its own manner, these two conferences represented the ideological and political strivings of the countries embedded in these two camps, i.e. embodied their respective visions of the role and future of the world standing between the two superpower blocs.

POSSIBLE FUTURES: COVID-19 AS HISTORICAL TURNING POINT

ABSTRACT This article surveys the ways that the global COVID-19 pandemic has effected higher education in the United States. After reviewing the effects of this critically important historical episode on colleges, particularly as it pertains to the humanities, I outline potential paths forward in the years to come. The fundamental tension I highlight is that between returning to a pre-COVID status quo or imagining an alternative model that is ultimately more sustainable for students and academics alike.

Belt v Lawes and the Meaning of Authorship

The 1882 Belt v. Lawes libel trial centered around aesthetic questions, of precisely the kind that judges usually seek to avoid. The occasion for the dispute was an article in Vanity Fair by Charles Lawes, asserting that Richard Belt, a sculptor and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, relied on his assistants to do his work. At trial, Lawes proposed an artistic skills test of sorts, suggesting that Belt verify his abilities by executing a sculpture in the courtroom. This evidentiary drama, and the aesthetically freighted-arguments mustered by the parties at trial, make it a fruitful historical episode to study conceptions of authorship and the artistic process, the development of modern copyright doctrine, and the status of expert artistic testimony in the law.

The Language of Partition: A Study of the Narrative Structures of Selected Stories

The Partition of India in 1947 that resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people continues to inhabit the cognizance of the people of South Asia as a historical phenomenon laden with violence. Although the bequest of the Partition is palpable in episodes of religious tension, discourses on minority belonging, secularism, nation and nationalism in India, critical exploration of the phenomenon as a tension-ridden historical episode has largely been restricted. The present research paper deals with the stylistic aspects of a series of seven short fictional narratives from Bengal and Punjab. In this paper, the scholar talks about how the creative-imaginative representation of Partition has till date remained confined to the discussion of thematic aspects with the result that the elements of narration have remained insignificant in critical mediation. As such, the scholar addresses the gap in the genre of Partition studies by critically reading and stylistically scrutinizing the narrative elements of a series of selected Partition narratives to see how violence as a leitmotif in these seven selected fictional texts is documented.

St. Ciaran: a Punishing Hand?

The paper focuses on a historical episode occurring in a few Middle Irish Annals: the death of the Munster king Fedemid mac Crimthann: 844 (846?): “Saint Ciaran (dead in 549 - T.M.) gave him a thrust of his crozier, and he (Fedelmid) received an internal wound, so that he was not well until his death”. The compiler presumed his future addressees could understand this deed as a act of vengeance: king Fedelmid Feidlimid, king of Caisel, as Annals say, “put to death members of the community of Cluain Moccu Nóis and burned their church-lands to the very door of their church”. The paper aims at showing that the king was killed by a real person. The narrative structure follows the traditional folk one: S - V - O. The Subject and the Object may be replaced by supernatural beings. So, in our case the Subject (a real person) has been replaced by Saint Ciaran.

Rethinking the History of Peptic Ulcer Disease: from digital textual analysis to declining research programs

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease (PUD) is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis of PUD in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmers article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis of PUD had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmers paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature in integrated history and philosophy of science. First, we suggest that the received narrative on this historical episode, commonly used by philosophers, needs to be revised. Second, we introduce the notion of a declining research program and argue for its importance as a unit of socio-epistemic analysis, especially in combination with normative assessments, such as pursuitworthiness of scientific theories.