ABSTRACT In 1928, botanist environmentalist Nishimura Makoto created Gakutensoku, a humanoid robot at odds with the Euro-American conceptualisation of humanoid robots as machine slaves and the modern discourse of technology as civilisational departure from nature. Nishimura’s scientific observations of the connectivities between plants, animals, algae, and microorganisms shaped the design and semiotic of Gakutensoku in line with a worldview that everything in the universe is interconnected through mutual aid and symbiosis. I describe this epistemology as ‘multispecies symbiotic cosmos’ to capture the key ideas forming Gakutensoku’s multiracial, multigender, stateless design: symbiosis, mutual aid, symbiogenesis, transnational relations, and indigeneity. Gakutensoku challenged state discourse of progress and evolution through (technological) competition for survival justifying militarism, colonialism, and racism. In contrast with social Darwinism, it conveyed a symbiotic trajectory for technological progress that benefits the earth and future artificial humans. Gakutensoku is symptomatic of a larger context in which scientists against the state politics and Western modernity attempted to redefine the world through science. Gakutensoku thus offers a unique understanding of ‘humanoid robot’ and techno-human relations in the modern and contemporary robotics and the intellectual history of twentieth-century Japan, opening up the idea and narrative of humanoid robots and technology to new understandings and interpretations.

ABSTRACT Madeira is often referred to as the birthplace of the modern plantation. In the fifteenth century, this newly settled North Atlantic subtropical island was the locus of a turning point in the economics, technology and social engineering of sugar production. Madeira hosted a brief yet transformative moment in sugarcane’s trajectory from its Mediterranean and Asian fields to the large-scale, capital- and labor- intensive plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. In that moment, a plant species, land, technology, capital and labor were assembled in ways that radically changed the world. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power accounts for the interconnection of production and consumption of the prized commodity. Along those lines and adding the cropscape approach, I will address in this article the co-production of plants and people in the context of sugar production, the persisting links between Madeirans and sugarcanes, and the plantation imaginaries that co-exist with them.

ABSTRACT The article discusses mobility in terms of sociotechnical normalization. A central hypothesis is that discipline and control are structural facets of mobility that create uneven mobilities. The article focuses on three examples of three-wheeled vehicle use in Greece from the 1940s to the present. These cases concern similar work-related purposes. In the first part, we present the methodological context of the study. The second part briefly introduces the history of three-wheelers in Greece during the Nazi occupation and in the course of the first post-war years. The third part deals with the use of idiosyncratic and partially hybrid tricycles by a community of farmers on the island of Chios who cultivate trees to produce mastic. The fourth part deals with the mobility of certain social groups, mainly migrants and Roma, who use improvised three-wheeled vehicles in contemporary Athens. The article concludes with a discussion on how such vehicles are a case of uneven mobilities, which allow for a better understanding of mobility in societies. The article aims to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding how sociotechnical normalization creates spaces of the norm via mobilities.

ABSTRACT In 1588, Pedro Cornejo de Estrella of Potosí (modern Bolivia) petitioned Spain’s Council of Indies for two licenses: a privilege for an invention to improve air quality in mines, and another authorizing the importation of 150 enslaved Africans as mining laborers. Historians of comparative slavery and of the history of technology have interpreted such licenses according to modern analytical frameworks of labor, economics, and profit. This contribution instead focuses on the form and function of such licenses as a genre of early modern Iberian administrative writing. Licenses, it argues, were understood in relation to royal sovereignty and service to the crown; they served as a means of ensuring good governance and demonstrating state power. By highlighting the distinctively premodern conceptual lens and administrative practices associated with early modern licenses, this argument enriches a growing body of scholarship on modern Latin American patent regimes. Its explicit attention to the relationship between enslaved labor and technical innovation contributes to an emerging dialogue between labor historians and historians of science and technology and to recent scholarship that has probed connections between the origins of modern science and European colonialism and slavery.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the production of discourses on the mobility practices of ‘the poor’ as a form social control in Portugal during the military dictatorship (1926–32) and the first decades of the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship (1933–74), namely on barefoot pedestrians, and on professional motorists. Built on safety discourses, they were not neutral, but produced norms, prescriptions on appropriate behaviour and power relations. These discourses had an impact upon two levels: regulations and representations. They were part of larger processes, such as: the legitimation efforts of the Estado Novo dictatorship indoors and outdoors (social and material ‘modernisation’ measures, the promotion of foreign tourism), and the redefinition of the street as a thoroughfare and the consequent increase of road ‘accidents’. This paper shows that the disciplining and moralisation discourses on both the bodies of pedestrians and professional motorists, as well as the control of their social behaviour, produced and were shaped by these larger processes.

ABSTRACT In 1959, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sent a mobile radioisotope laboratory to Athens, Greece, in the context of its Technical Assistance (TA) Missions to member states. To analyze the diplomatic aspects of the TA program, we conceptualize the mobile laboratory as a ‘diplomatic bag’ in transit that allowed the IAEA to negotiate its diplomatic power over nuclear issues on a global level and establish its regulatory presence. By focusing on the nexus of nuclear science and diplomacy, we explore how a mobile scientific laboratory was transformed to a sacrosanct diplomatic object – a diplomatic bag – with inviolability privileges and diplomatic status allowing it to travel unrestrained across the globe. This paper brings forward the fine-grained diplomatic negotiations and exchanges among novel diplomatic actors – beyond ambassadors and state diplomats – who made possible the transformation of a mobile laboratory from a mere technoscientific object to an artifact that was familiar to diplomatic circles.

ABSTRACT This auto-philosophical essay takes up Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment; the archival record of Mark and Phillis; and Derrida’s engagement with pharmakon as a means of working through the question of what is to be done with the poisons of white supremacy, which persist in present worldly environments as well as our bodies and histories. Engaging aesthetics, Black thought, and phenomenology of race, the work aims for an embodied therapeutic movement that might open the way for ethical receptivity within the white supremacist world. Eschewing a universalizing tone while recognizing the ahistoricities of white supremacist cultural techniques, the essay enlists autobiography and practices of the self to give voice to the reservoirs of white supremacist poison permeating a worldly body.

ABSTRACT In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir, as it has been deployed across various scientific and popular writing, articulates a distinctive logic of historical time. Rather than offer an intellectual history of the concept of reservoir, we focus specifically on the entailments of this concept for the ways in which we think and write about disease and epidemics. We argue that the concept of reservoir entails a particular bio-logic of history. That is, the reservoir is a complex biological entity that inflects historical accounts through a distinctive logic of change. This essay represents our effort to elucidate that logic.

ABSTRACT The Greenlandic ice sheet, made out through the relationships built up between it and the remote hydroelectric station Buksefjord, is an environmental phenomenon that under the conditions created by global warming is becoming a planetary reservoir of a number of states and materials: water, ice, sea level rise, melting ice, hydropower. My aim is to understand the Greenlandic ice sheet as a reservoir not just of melting ice and, by extension a source of sea level rise, but as a mobile entity that generates heat, energy, and a subsurface hydropower that is detrimental to its material constitution. What this shift in perception entails is a recognition of the effects of global warming that have made carbon dioxide and heat into entities that shape, contour and endow environmental phenomena with marks of technical, anthropogenic time. The shifting of the Greenlandic ice sheet out of its ‘solid’ phase of ice highlights its current condition as a heat-dependent reservoir of energy. Its melting through the effects of global warming is generating states of surplus, disposability, cyclicality, and accumulation that bind together and suspend the relationships between melting ice and hydropower.