Toxicants, entanglement, and mitigation in New England’s emerging circular economy for food waste

Drawing on research with food waste recycling facilities in New England, this paper explores a fundamental tension between the eco-modernist logics of the circular economy and the reality of contemporary waste streams. Composting and digestion are promoted as key solutions to food waste, due to their ability to return nutrients to agricultural soils. However, our work suggests that food waste processors increasingly find themselves responsible for policing boundaries between distinct “material” and “biological” systems as imagined by the architects of the circular economy—boundaries penetrable by toxicants. This responsibility creates significant problems for processors due to the regulatory, educational, and structural barriers documented in this research. This paper contributes to scholarship which suggests the need to rethink the modernist logics of the circular economy and to recognize the realities of entangled material and biological systems. More specifically, we argue that if circularity is the goal, policy needs to recognize the barriers food waste processors face and concentrate circularity efforts further upstream to ensure fair, just, and safe circular food systems.

Two representations of case: Evidence from numerals and relatives

This squib highlights a fundamental tension between the representations required for case syncretism versus the representations required for case priority. Case syncretism is captured with a feature decomposition based on the patterns established in Caha 2009. However, a different decomposition is required for case priority relations, which are instantiated in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) numeral constructions and in BCS and German relative constructions. The squib proposes that this conflict can be resolved by introducing two levels of representation into the case system, where priority is determined by set structures in the syntax, while syncretism is analyzed following post-syntactic set unification.

The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology

This article introduces the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that highlights the asymmetrical dynamics inherent to collaboration. I draw on (auto)ethnographic material from the making of Get By (2014), a film on worker-community solidarity, to explore collaboration across race, class, and gender in subject matter and method. I situate the multiply produced film within a genealogy that grafts ontological insights from the anthropology of exchange onto the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists committed to collaboration. I argue that as a method, collaborative filmmaking has the potential to challenge narrow Western conceptions of autonomy and authorship through shared authority and fluid roles that engender a cascading multivocality that shapes the resulting filmic form. As an analytic, the multiply produced film reveals how collaboration entails a fundamental tension between the gift-like exchanges of solidarity and the outwardly commoditized form (e.g., films, books) produced by such exchanges, raising questions about asymmetries of power, prestige, and accountability.

'I Can Tell You This Is a Fine Country': Identity Construction in the British-New Zealand Imperial Diaspora

<p>This thesis uses diaspora theory to analyse late-nineteenth-century texts written by women in New Zealand. The texts include a number of novels as well as non-fictional journals and memoirs. Robin Cohen's definition of diaspora provides a framework for understanding the British settler community in New Zealand as an imperial diaspora. My approach modifies Cohen's framework by also employing constructivist theories of diaspora, in particular by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford. These theorists see identity as continuously produced within representation and diaspora as furthering cultural crossover and hybrid identities. This view of the British diaspora reveals fissures within the teleological ideology of the nation-state, which underlies imperialism. Rather than focusing on a binary of imperial centre and colonial periphery, I understand the diasporic community in New Zealand as part of an international network in which mobility and a shared print culture provided manifold connections. The main research question asks how the texts participate in the construction of identity in the diasporic community in New Zealand and how they situate themselves within a wider context of diasporic print culture. It focuses both on the identity of women within the community and on the significance of notions of women‟s role, femininity and women's writing for the identity production of the community as a whole. The three sections, "Journey", "Settling" and "Community", trace the diaspora's narrative production of its collective identity through time and space. They consider the diaspora‟s textual imagining of its journey to New Zealand, its project of settling there, and its building of a distinct community. It emerges that the texts usually attempt to reconcile a number of contradictions and conflicting discourses, at the basis of which lies a fundamental tension between the diaspora's dispersal from the homeland and its need to produce a collective identity. This tension leads to an underlying instability within the texts and frequently causes them to deconstruct their own ostensible ideologies. However, at the same time the texts offer a number of powerful ideas and narratives which allow the diaspora to create a complex but meaningful collective identity.</p>

'I Can Tell You This Is a Fine Country': Identity Construction in the British-New Zealand Imperial Diaspora

<p>This thesis uses diaspora theory to analyse late-nineteenth-century texts written by women in New Zealand. The texts include a number of novels as well as non-fictional journals and memoirs. Robin Cohen's definition of diaspora provides a framework for understanding the British settler community in New Zealand as an imperial diaspora. My approach modifies Cohen's framework by also employing constructivist theories of diaspora, in particular by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford. These theorists see identity as continuously produced within representation and diaspora as furthering cultural crossover and hybrid identities. This view of the British diaspora reveals fissures within the teleological ideology of the nation-state, which underlies imperialism. Rather than focusing on a binary of imperial centre and colonial periphery, I understand the diasporic community in New Zealand as part of an international network in which mobility and a shared print culture provided manifold connections. The main research question asks how the texts participate in the construction of identity in the diasporic community in New Zealand and how they situate themselves within a wider context of diasporic print culture. It focuses both on the identity of women within the community and on the significance of notions of women‟s role, femininity and women's writing for the identity production of the community as a whole. The three sections, "Journey", "Settling" and "Community", trace the diaspora's narrative production of its collective identity through time and space. They consider the diaspora‟s textual imagining of its journey to New Zealand, its project of settling there, and its building of a distinct community. It emerges that the texts usually attempt to reconcile a number of contradictions and conflicting discourses, at the basis of which lies a fundamental tension between the diaspora's dispersal from the homeland and its need to produce a collective identity. This tension leads to an underlying instability within the texts and frequently causes them to deconstruct their own ostensible ideologies. However, at the same time the texts offer a number of powerful ideas and narratives which allow the diaspora to create a complex but meaningful collective identity.</p>

Nationalization and Ethnicization

The emerging world civil war is the subject of an extensive chapter on the interwar period and the Second World War. This phase was marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there was the systematic codification and substantive expansion of political and social civil rights in the emerging democracies and social welfare states of Europe. Legal inequality between the sexes diminished; a social security net began to spread across all of Europe. On the other hand, these expanding rights were increasingly reserved for a country’s own citizens and thereby nationalized. This restrictive tendency escalated to the extreme with the race and class-based exclusion and extermination policies of the dictatorships in Europe’s “bloodlands” (Timothy Snyder) prior to the Second World War and intensified during its course. Citizenship changed its function and went from being an institution of governmental protection to one of discriminatory selection and extermination policy.

Post-Genocide, Post-Apartheid: The Shifting Landscapes of African Philosophy, 1994–2019

This article traces the developments of African philosophy since 1994, a year marked by two events that profoundly impacted Africa: the fall of apartheid and the Rwandan genocide. The article projects a fundamental tension into the history of recent African philosophy: between optimism and idealism, showing in the development of normative concepts and a new philosophical vocabulary for Africa – a “conceptual mandelanization” (Edet 2015: 218), on the one hand, and a critical realism ensuing from the experience of African “simple, that is, flawed, humanity” (Nganang: 2007: 30), on the other. The article identifies prominent trends in African philosophy since 1994, including Ubuntu, the Calabar School of Philosophy, Afrikology, the Ateliers de la pensée, Francophone histories of African philosophy, and Lusophone political and cultural philosophy.

The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the “Other” in German and Dutch Protestant Thought

This article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its cultural liturgies were regarded as a token. In the context of the modern nation, German and Dutch Protestant thought entertained this typological othering of biblical nationhood to construct the modern Jew as “Gentile” to the modern nation. As “Gentile,” “the Jew” remains the embodiment of the ultimate other, yet as “nascent Christian,” modern Jews begin to face an unrelenting demand to assimilate. This conundrum contributed to a fundamental tension in the imaginary of the nation, namely between patterns of othering and structures of belonging, echoing far beyond antisemitism, and especially in patterns of othering that are inherent to racism and Islamophobia.

On Consensus-Optimality Trade-offs in Collaborative Deep Learning

In distributed machine learning, where agents collaboratively learn from diverse private data sets, there is a fundamental tension between consensus and optimality. In this paper, we build on recent algorithmic progresses in distributed deep learning to explore various consensus-optimality trade-offs over a fixed communication topology. First, we propose the incremental consensus-based distributed stochastic gradient descent (i-CDSGD) algorithm, which involves multiple consensus steps (where each agent communicates information with its neighbors) within each SGD iteration. Second, we propose the generalized consensus-based distributed SGD (g-CDSGD) algorithm that enables us to navigate the full spectrum from complete consensus (all agents agree) to complete disagreement (each agent converges to individual model parameters). We analytically establish convergence of the proposed algorithms for strongly convex and nonconvex objective functions; we also analyze the momentum variants of the algorithms for the strongly convex case. We support our algorithms via numerical experiments, and demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods for collaborative deep learning.