Everyday Materials Research Articles

El problema de las subsistencias y las condiciones de vida de los sectores populares urbanos en El Salvador: consumo, ingresos y escasez, 1914-1944.

El presente artículo analiza las condiciones de vida de los sectores populares urbanos de El Salvador, a partir del problema de aprovisionamiento de los bienes de consumo básicos durante el período de guerras y entreguerras. A través del contraste entre las estadísticas disponibles y fuentes de la época, se reconstruye el comportamiento de los precios de los alimentos y otros bienes, se contrastan con los ingresos de estos grupos populares citadinos y se describe la dinámica conflictiva de las alzas de precios y la escasez. Aunque fragmentaria, la imagen que resulta permite profundizar otras contradicciones y problemáticas del modelo de desarrollo hacia afuera desde la agroexportación. En concreto, en la precariedad e incertidumbre cotidiana de los heterogéneos sectores que habitaban las ciudades salvadoreñas y en las presiones resultantes sobre el Estado y las clases dominantes, así como sobre los principios de liberalismo económico del proyecto societal vigente.Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, n° 9, enero-junio 2017: 95-145

Cultura material e higiene cotidiana en la Córdoba del Ochocientos

Desde la historia de vida cotidiana y los estudios de cultura material, en este trabajo describimos y analizamos las prácticas domésticas de limpieza en la ciudad de Córdoba (Argentina), a partir de la presencia (o ausencia) en los inventarios post mortem de objetos materiales y espacios de la vivienda destinados al aseo. Los cambios en la cultura material y en el espacio construido nos permiten reconocer tanto modificaciones como permanencias en las sensibilidades y en las ideas de limpieza/suciedad.

Sticks and straws galore

The third in a series that will explore practical activities for introducing mathematical learning and language using everyday resources and junk materials – this month, we will be using sticks and straws.

Explore tubular imaginations

The second in a series that will explore practical activities for introducing mathematical learning and language using everyday resources and junk materials – this month, we use cardboard tubes.

Determining magnetic susceptibilities of everyday materials using an electronic balance

The magnetic properties of an object and its interaction with an external magnetic field can be described through the magnetic (volume) susceptibility χV, which divides nearly all kinds of matter into diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ferromagnetic substances. Quantitative measurements of χV are usually technically sophisticated or require the investigation of substances with high values of χV to reveal meaningful results. Here, we show that both diamagnetic and paramagnetic effects in everyday materials can be measured using only an electronic balance and a neodymium magnet, both of which are within the reach of typical introductory college and high school physics classrooms. The experimental results match related literature values remarkably well.

P‐69: Leaked Light Field: The Design Method for Natural Material to Display Surface

In this paper, we will take a section on the design method for blending the display into everyday materials that could not be realized with conventional displays. Due to popularization of IoT in recent years, the use scene of display has been greatly expanded. Meanwhile, as for the material of the surface of the display, transparency and smooth things such as glass and plastic have been limited for a long time. In this paper, we aimed to improve weak points in the design aspect of display.

Making a Home in Gold-rush Victoria: Plain Sewing and the Genteel Woman

In the rush to be rich, contemporary commentators warned that not everyone was suited to life on Victoria’s goldfields. Women unfamiliar with household labour or exertion were cautioned to remain at ‘home’. This article explores the genteel women who migrated to Victoria during the first two decades of the gold rush, and how they negotiated the British ideal of genteel leisure against the demands for domestic labour in the colony. In particular, it interrogates the often-mundane plain sewing practices necessary to make a new home alongside the push for a colonial genteel industriousness, demonstrating how women manipulated standards of living through everyday material practices.

A box full of your thoughts

The first in a new series that will explore practical activities for introducing mathematical learning and language in your setting using everyday resources and junk materials – this month, we use boxes.

Reasoning Strategies in the Context of Engineering Design with Everyday Materials

Reasoning Strategies in the Context of Engineering Design with Everyday Materials

The materiality of international law: violence, history and Joe Sacco’s The Great War

Thinking through Joe Sacco’s The Great War (2013) and adopting a materialist approach to the international legal order and its history, this article re-maps both the temporal scope and the actual location of the violence endured in the First World War and calls attention to its ongoing everyday material manifestations.

Is an Apple Magnetic: Magnetic Response of Everyday Materials Supporting Views About the Nature of Science

Magnetism and its various applications are essential for our daily life and for many technological developments. The term magnetism is almost always used as a synonym for ferromagnetism. However, the magnetic properties of the elements of the periodic table indicate that the vast majority of elements are not ferromagnetic, but rather, diamagnetic or paramagnetic. Typically, only ferromagnetism is discussed in classrooms, which can create a distorted picture. This article supplies the further development of an experiment demonstrating the dia- and paramagnetic properties with an electronic balance and a neodymium magnet. It focuses on an investigation of ordinary materials that occur in pupils’ everyday environment. The experiment is applicable both for a quantitative measurement of the magnetic (volume) susceptibility χV and can serve as a phenomenological approach to dia- and paramagnetism. Moreover, it encourages a discussion about typical beliefs regarding the nature of science, comparing the behavior of common objects in weak and in strong magnetic fields.

Qualia as Value and Knowledge: Histories of European Porcelain

AbstractPorcelain is, today, a familiar material of dishes, figurines, vases, and tiles. As commodities, they are enregistered social indexicals, so that the aphorism fits: you are what you drink, eat, or in this case eat on—or know how to admire as collector or connoisseur. This does not yet tell us, however, what qualities are picked out as shared by object and user, on what axis of social distinction. I argue that this everyday material, exactly because of the varied qualities it has been presumed to embody, has been swept up in changing regimes of knowledge, in economic strategies, and in making political and ethical discourses persuasive. In European history over the last few centuries, it has been embedded in diverse axes of differentiation, enlisted and changed not only as sign but also as material in strikingly different ontological projects.

From bauxite to cooking pots: Aluminum, chemistry, and West African artisanal production.

The history of aluminum's transformation from a precious to a commonplace metal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has frequently been told as a narrative about intrepid western chemists, whose discoveries made it possible for industrialized manufacturers to make the metal global. This paper questions both the singularity of that discovery and the inevitability of aluminum's global dominance as a 'modern' material of manufacture. It does so by considering the history of aluminum in West Africa and the ways in which artisans in that region domesticated the substance to an artisanal mode of production and developed quotidian chemical knowledge of it in the process. Considering aluminum from the perspective of West Africa suggests that aluminum may not have been discovered once, but many times, and that everyday material engagements can inspire forms of chemical knowhow that operate well beyond the bounds of the laboratory and industrial manufacturing plant.

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

In Complexity and Contradiction Robert Venturi presents a critique of modernism, with its rigid systems and fetishization of the functional. Mining the past and utilizing examples as diverse as Borromini's churches and Frank Furness's houses, Venturi addresses the complexity of architectural form, made visible through unexpected juxtapositions and scalar manipulations. He considers intricate baroque ornament and heavy Egyptian columns alongside Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to impress upon the reader that the study of architecture requires close analysis and historical breadth. The perspective is that of a designer, however, not a historian, a point Venturi makes clear from the outset. The book ends with twelve of the architect's own projects, seven of which were unrealized. The same black-and-white photography that caresses the facades of Roman churches documents Venturi's Guild House housing project for the elderly in Philadelphia. The implicit connection is that of form and memory, and a blending of everyday materiality with historical reference. The polemic thus calls for an architecture of remembrance, the images composed like a dream sequence of memories long internalized. However, the past is not a passive imprint but a reflection of “society's inverted scale of values” (43).1 The central issue is that of representation, of architecture itself as well as the multiple discursive positions that it may enable.2 The book is provocative and visually sophisticated, and its influence in the fifty years since its publication cannot be overestimated. The power of Venturi's argument for historicism lies in its flexibility. Although answers to the questions “Whose history?” and “Which moment in time?” are alluded to in Complexity and Contradiction , they are also left somewhat ambiguous (for example, even though Venturi provides no dates and makes no attempt at geographic specificity, his bias toward Italian baroque comes through). Venturi's claim for using traditional building …

Paper-based origami flexible and foldable thermoelectric nanogenerator

Paper has been an essential material in our daily life since ancient times. Its affordability, accessibility, adaptability, workability and its easiness of usage makes it an attractive structural material to develop many kind of technologies such as flexible electronics, and energy storage and harvesting devices. Additionally, the scientific community has increased its interest on waste heat as an environmentally friendly energy source to support the increasing energy demand. Therefore, in this paper we described two affordable and flexible thermoelectric nanogenerators (TEGs) developed on paper substrates by the usage of simple micromachining and microfabrication techniques. Moreover, they exhibit mechanical stability and adaptability (through folding and cutting techniques) for a diverse set of scenarios where vertical or horizontal schemes can be conveniently used depending on the final application. The first TEG device, implemented on standard paper, generated a power of 0.5nW (ΔT=50K). By changing the substrate to a tearless and extra-smooth polyester paper, the TEG performance was optimized achieving less internal resistance and a greater power of ~80nW (ΔT=75K), at the cost of more rigidity in the substrate. This power represented over three times higher power production than the standard paper–based TEG with same dimensions, number of thermoelectric pairs and temperature difference. Another interesting aspect of paper based TEG is due to its foldability, one can control the temperature difference by unfolding (larger separation between hot and cold ends) and folding (smaller separation). Finally, one of the underlying objectives of this work is to spread the availability of essential technologies to the broad population by inclusion of everyday materials and simple processes.

“That's ratchet”: A Chicana Feminist Rasquache Pedagogy as Entryway to Understanding the Material Realities of Contemporary Latinx Elementary-Aged Youth

ABSTRACTIn line with this special issue's examination of theories of teaching and learning that are neither determined by nor isolated from restrictive spaces of learning, this essay introduces a Chicana feminist rasquache pedagogy. A Chicana feminist rasquache pedagogy is rooted in the everyday experiences and material realities of Latinx elementary-aged youth, and thus serves as a contribution to educational research and praxis for all students, but particularly students of color. A Chicana feminist rasquache pedagogy emerges from the theories in the flesh of Latinx students, and as such, functions from their embodied knowledges and sensibilities rather than operating in collusion with the practices, approaches and ideologies of historically colonizing schooling institutions. The incorporation of a Chicana feminist rasquache praxis into K-12 schooling institutions provides humanizing approaches for education as well as for engaging with elementary-aged youth of color as it identifies and validates the radical sensibilities of youth intimately tied to their lived experiences, rather than reprimanding them for their embodied knowledges and creative forms of self-expression.

Reabsorbable Wire Use for Fixing Membrane on Bone Graft Surgery

The ability to minimize or simplify the surgical procedure is a differential item for time and biological gain for patients, and often reduces the cost operative end. Added to this the use of common everyday materials in surgical and transport, which contribute to reducing the training time, also known as “learning curve” to master a surgical technique. Based on those principles, and the apparent lack of scientific literature related to patch clamp methods, this paper presents a simple and practical technique for stabilizing the same intra-oral surgery through the use of resorbable yarns stabilized in their own bone of the patient.

Figuring identity in everyday life

This article explores how everyday material culture participates in processes of identity negotiation. It focuses more specifically on the role of figurines in embodying, constructing, and transforming Moche identities, in particular gender and collective identities, among communities of the north coast of Peru during the first millennium CE. The mobilization of figurines in social relations is studied through an approach which takes into consideration how stylistic and iconographic choices, the materiality of objects, and practices of production and consumption intersect in specific contexts. Results demonstrate that figurines materialized ideas about religion and gender which differed from those materialized by other media, were ubiquitous in the daily life of all Moche people, and contributed to constructing a cohesive and culturally Moche colonial identity among colonists settling in the Santa Valley. Moche figurines, and everyday material culture in general, therefore played a pivotal role in mediating personal experiences, social identities, and wider sociopolitical phenomena such as colonization.

The afterlives of communist things: Archiving feeling in post-communist Romania

This article explores the afterlives of communist everyday material culture by pitting grassroots heritage practices against officially sanctioned museum narratives in post-communist Romania. More specifically, it engages with the divergent affective attachments imposed on and contained by communist things. I focus on three different instances of engagement with everyday material culture from communism: the Sighet Memorial Museum, the online musealization of communist memorabilia in two blogs and the investigation of the social afterlives of bygone communist brands in the documentary Metrobranding (2010). My interest lies with disentangling the protocols of affective attachment to and detachment from the communist past as revealed by the shifting framing of communist things as either junk or redeemed biographical objects. These competing emotional regimes around communist materiality are, I argue, symptomatic of broader changes in mnemonic practices and provide valuable insights into the generationality of post-communist remembrances.

Nanophotonics-enabled smart windows, buildings and wearables

AbstractDesign and production of spectrally smart windows, walls, roofs and fabrics has a long history, which includes early examples of applied nanophotonics. Evolving nanoscience has a special role to play as it provides the means to improve the functionality of these everyday materials. Improvement in the quality of human experience in any location at any time of year is the goal. Energy savings, thermal and visual comfort indoors and outdoors, visual experience, air quality and better health are all made possible by materials, whose “smartness” is aimed at designed responses to environmental energy flows. The spectral and angle of incidence responses of these nanomaterials must thus take account of the spectral and directional aspects of solar energy and of atmospheric thermal radiation plus the visible and color sensitivity of the human eye. The structures required may use resonant absorption, multilayer stacks, optical anisotropy and scattering to achieve their functionality. These structures are, in turn, constructed out of particles, columns, ultrathin layers, voids, wires, pure and doped oxides, metals, polymers or transparent conductors (TCs). The need to cater for wavelengths stretching from 0.3 to 35 μm including ultraviolet-visible, near-infrared (IR) and thermal or Planck radiation, with a spectrally and directionally complex atmosphere, and both being dynamic, means that hierarchical and graded nanostructures often feature. Nature has evolved to deal with the same energy flows, so biomimicry is sometimes a useful guide.