Multiple Entanglements Research Articles

Dwelling as Method

This article proposes and delineates “digital dwelling” as one method of grappling with a central methodological challenge that we, as feminist researchers, face of how researchers might account for the multiple entanglements of affect, history, culture, politics, and resistance within feminist digital media artifacts. Using our method of digital dwelling, we analyze three sets of carousel posts on Instagram from three different accounts: Intersectional Environmentalist Collective, For the Wild, and Richa Kaul Padte. We explore how the inter, para, and meta-textual arguments curated through these carousel posts change the ways audiences relate to one another and to the current political moment, and how audiences, including individual researchers, are situated in affective and embodied ways within the research scene. By demarcating small, embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, we suggest that the personal relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully through their emergent intertextualities, especially for those invested in contemporary social media, protest, and visual cultures.

Multiple Entanglements between Two Chains in Polymer Melts: An Analysis of Primitive Paths Based on Frenet Trihedron

Multiple Entanglements between Two Chains in Polymer Melts: An Analysis of Primitive Paths Based on Frenet Trihedron

Intime Infrastrukturen: Feministisch-geographische Perspektiven auf Energie

Abstract. Facing multiple and embodied inequalities inscribed in the energy system, this intervention argues for a feminist perspective on energy geographies. Extending critical research on urban infrastructure with concepts of care, it seeks to contribute to more just energy relations. In a first step, the article examines two energy fields: The home, where gender identities are produced and challenged, and the urban, where practices of solidarity oppose the conditions of care work in the context of neoliberal service provision. Shedding light on those „labourious spaces“, where urban materialities and its subjects are closely interconnected (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016), I reveal how heterogeneous infrastructural experiences are constantly contested within multiple entanglements of energy flows, gendered labour and care practices. In a second step, I provide three impulses for a relational perspective on energy. I argue for taking the intimate aspects of urban infrastructure as a starting point for feminist scholarship; for tracing a crisis of social reproduction along embodied energetic experiences; and for creating a collective vision of caring infrastructures.

Literature, mobility, and the archive

In 2019 Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli penned Lost Children Archive, which inaugurates her writing in English, and tells the interwoven stories of a blended family, as they take a road trip across America, and of the hardships of children travelling on foot to the US border.
 The narrative is a poetic representation of lives in transit, and mobility informs it semantically and structurally: it is organized in four parts, each divided up in small sections, and includes manifold documents. In the narrative, the notion and the experience of the archive are of great importance, emerging out of multiple displacements. This being-in-transit conjures up a literal – it discusses the movement of people –, and figurative – it embraces multiple entanglements, renouncing completeness – translatedness.
 While Lost Children Archive is a tour the force, and adds a layer of complexity her writing, Luiselli’s oeuvre, in Spanish and English, has always been characterized by an interpenetration of languages, texts, places, people – a close-knit interweaving of trajectories and memories. This results in an understanding of literature as assemblage, a ground in which to tentatively document existence. As such, it lends itself to an examination of the ways translation shapes the literary in a post-colonial, global(ized) world.

Ultrasound Doppler Findings in Fetal Vascular Malperfusion Due to Umbilical Cord Abnormalities: A Pilot Case Predictive for Cerebral Palsy.

Fetal Vascular Malperfusion (FVM), a pathologic condition in the feto-placental circulation, is a chronic vaso-occlusive disorder in the umbilical venous blood flow. Microthrombi are caused by the umbilical cord's blood flow deficiency in a congested umbilical vein, which also causes microvascular damage to fetal organs, especially the brain, resulting in cerebral palsy. Thrombo-occlusive events also adversely affect the upstream chorionic or stem vessels in the placenta, resulting in fetal growth restriction and fetal hypoxia. An umbilical cord structural anomaly or multiple entanglements may involve FVM. In the present report, we demonstrate a case of FVM caused by multiple umbilical cord abnormalities obtained from antenatal ultrasound Doppler findings, and we also discuss FVM, which is chronically associated with CP, comparing the ultrasonographic findings to the pathologic findings.

Individual and population effects of entanglement mortality on ospreys from plastic baling twine in nests

The global production of plastics continues to increase, and most of our knowledge about the negative effects of plastics pollution comes from marine environments. The presence of plastics in nests of terrestrial birds has increased the last century, which can cause adult and nestling mortality through entanglement. Volunteers and I surveyed 600 km of the Yellowstone River, Montana, USA for breeding ospreys and we recorded the presence and amount of polypropylene baling twine in nests, and the number and outcome of nestling and adult entanglements from 2014 to 2022. Each year a mean 44.2 % of nests contained twine and a mean 3.4 % of nestlings became entangled. Entanglement mortality appeared compensatory rather than additive because the local breeding population increased each year and because annual reproductive success exceeded estimates to maintain a stable population. The amount of twine in 35 nests that were either destroyed by weather or removed by electric companies from energized power poles varied substantially (0–227 m). Entanglements occurred at 19 different nests, of which seven (36.8 %) were responsible for multiple entanglements (61.3% of all entanglements). Reducing osprey mortalities and baling twine litter in the environment will take short-term (intensive nest monitoring, bird rescues) and long-term actions (community education, cleanup, recycling).

On Peace Activists and Skilled Survivors

Abstract This article examines multiple entanglements of Afghan exiles’ biographies in West Germany with Cold War- and contemporary history. The life stories of six men who have been residing in Germany since the 1970s but were physically and cognitively highly mobile in their engagement for change in Afghanistan highlight the role of human agency in transnational history-making. The analysis shows that during the time of intense engagement connecting West Germany and Afghanistan, their lives became truly transnational, and the vernacular cosmopolitanism they practised has shaped transnational history from below. While all six life stories mirror transgressive biographies in connection with wartime events and differ from the global cosmopolitanism of elites, these life courses are neither standardised nor linear. The findings point to three types of transgressive biographies—skilled survivors, quietists and masters of crossover—that have preserved the transnational dimension that had been so significant earlier in the exiles’ lives to varying degrees and differed regarding related perceptions of failure, loss and regret.

Representations of Baja California Indians as ethnographic art

ABSTRACT The few existing pictures of Indigenous peoples of Baja California before the age of photography offer a precious window into the peninsula’s past inhabitants. The synoptic analysis of the material culture depicted in this imagery, from both religious and secular sources, reveals that the credibility of the pictures is based on highly contingent notions of truth that emerge from contextual relationships between images and texts. The essay maintains that representational differences mirror distinct ways of thinking about the depiction of ethnographic subjects. Although variability in style may depend on artistic ability and skill, diversity in subject and mode of representation are as much the product of multiple intermedial entanglements as they are the result of implicit aims and purposes. This unprecedented comparative exercise, while eliciting questions about what counts as accuracy in distinctive artistic and literary genres, encourages a reflection on the nature and role of images whose lives straddle between art and anthropology.

Coiled Colonialities: Pianos and Place Signification in Shanghai’s Treaty Port History

Pianos find resonance in Shanghai’s treaty port history through their constant and changing inflections of coloniality, here understood as a deep-rooted historical condition replaying itself in strange, latent ways. Accordingly, this article explores the piano’s role as subject, enmeshed as it is within the treaty port as a peculiar plural setting, within the treaty port’s workings of music, power and place, and within the treaty port’s multiple entanglements with coloniality – in situ and over time. The piano, in a sense, lives vicariously through its allusions to colonialism’s hangover codes and structures. In turn, I conceptualise and investigate the piano (as) subject by cross-examining colonialities in and across French Shanghai of the 1930s and Chinese Nationalist Shanghai of the 1940s. Significantly, this discussion extends through temporal significations of place, revealing inner paradoxes of enclosure and experience, for one thing, and their regulatory manifestations across Shanghai’s treaty[1]port and post-treaty-port years, for another. Indeed, Shanghai’s French Concession in the 1930s, along with its incorporation back into the city’s Chinese Nationalist municipality from the mid to the late 1940s, are especially pertinent moments of inquiry, for these identified areas expose an underlying process of continuity-in[1]change, amid and despite the post-war resumption of sovereignty. Further such particularities help to eschew the rigidity of a foreign/indigenous dichotomy. Through observations of social order and ordering, as derived from the piano subject and its place signification, I explore the coiled workings of coloniality in Shanghai’s treaty port history, as well as interlocked meanings of power and perplexity, territory and ambience across licensed and taxable venues in the French Concession and the Chinese Nationalist municipality. Finally, from the treaty port setting, wider reflections follow on what I term ‘colonialities without recourse’, by which colonialities in the plural beget non-conclusive colonialities – in themselves awkward, yet telling, narratives of musical lives.

Two houses, one family, and the battlefield of home: A housing story of home unmaking in rural Punjab

This article investigates the lived experience of a family house as a battlefield between contrasting views, emotions, cultures and practices of home. It aims to make sense of the underlying tensions as a matter of home unmaking – a process of disruption of the normative, relational or physical bases of home – within the housing pathway of an extended family in semi-rural Punjab, India. Building on in-depth interviews with family members and on participant observation of their dwellings, we explore the causes and consequences of home unmaking from without (due to environmental factors) and from within (after deep-rooted intergenerational tensions). By looking at people’s ongoing relations with particular domestic spaces and objects within a traditional house(hold), we highlight the negotiation of gender and generational roles and the attendant family transformations. Home unmaking, as a process with multiple sources, temporalities, and entanglements, provokes a range of reactions and counter-reactions in such settings. We capture them, and propose a framework for their comparative analysis and understanding, by embedding people’s narratives in their family and housing circumstances. This is necessary to advance further, and beyond the scope of Western countries, research into the unmaking of home, both in and out of one’s dwelling.

Between Lines and Beyond Boundaries: Alootook Ipellie’s Entanglements of Space

Manifold representations of the dwelling are expressed in the work of artist, poet, writer, editor, and activist Alootook Ipellie in the bi-monthly publicationInuit Todayin the 1970s and 1980s, as a cross-section through key moments in Inuit Nunangat history. This essay thus examines Ipellie’s representations of space—not as an attempt to theorize Inuit space but rather to offer reflections on how these representations challenged ways of knowing and interpreting Arctic communities. We first address the Arctic representation in Ipellie’s work, which emphasizes the existing richness of the land according to Inuit perspectives as opposed to Qallunaat (non-Inuit) interpretations. His drawings also offer political comments on land disputes and the exploitation of territory. We then explore the representation of buildings, as Ipellie witnessed the transition from traditional to government housing. Ipellie’s humour-based approach constituted a strong social and political critique of housing issues and settler-colonial building practices. This artist acknowledged Inuit ingenuity when speaking of traditional housing, thus advocating for Inuit knowledge, invention, and built heritage. Lastly, we discuss the representation of multiple voices in the struggles over space, including Inuit communities and non-human agents, such as animals and land. Dwelling on the notion of “lines” and “the in-between”, we consider the thickness of Ipellie’s drawn lines and attend to the multiple entanglements between the artist’s political cartoons and the many lines of settler-colonialism, such as boundaries, frontiers, roads, pipelines, spatial construction, buildings, and planning.

Pressing “rewind” and “forward” to negotiate a transcultural position

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.

‘Look on my works ye mighty…’: Iconoclasm, education and the fate of statues

Abstract In pursuit of an alternative perspective on the so-called ‘statues controversy’, this essay brings recent interpretations of the enduring ‘power’, ‘gaze’ and ‘magic’ of statues into alignment with critical histories of iconoclasm, sacred and secular, and New Materialist accounts of our multiple entanglements with the object histories of inherited monuments. Opening with a close reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's renowned 1818 sonnet, ‘Ozymandias’, the essay applies the resultant theoretical synthesis to argue for the general restraint of popular iconoclastic and demolitionary acts and largely to caution against the mimetic violence of statue removal in favour of fresh, educative and iconotropic ways of ‘making legible’, and ‘re-reading’, statues, pedestals, inscriptions and their diverse contexts past and present.

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Latin America and the Global Cold War

The invisible made visible through technologies’ agency: a sociomaterial inquiry on emergency remote teaching in higher education

ABSTRACT We are used to considering human agency as the most important aspect of the educational process. Technologies are seen as inert matter, subordinated to human intention and design, as if they did not have a role in the eclectic combination of teaching, learning, and knowing about the world. Their agency is invisible until a breakdown occurs, a material moment which shows their doing. In this paper, we make digital action visible by focusing on emergency remote teaching in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic breakdown. Data were collected/co-created in a graduate course in Education in the first three months of lockdown in Brazil. Through a queer assemblage of teaching-researching-writing, we present a sociomaterial analysis that shows multiple entanglements of bodies, material things, and pedagogic time-spaces. In this exercise, social inequality issues, power structures and ethical problems come to the surface, while students struggle for quality participation in the digitised classes.

Imperialism, internationalism, and education in Africa: connected histories

ABSTRACT This text introduces the themed issue “Imperialism, Internationalism and Education in Africa: Connected Histories”. It provides an overview of the history of education in twentieth-century Africa, highlighting its major problems, themes, and actors. Arguing for a transnational and connected approach to this field of research, it also explains how the four papers included in the issue allow to address the multiple entanglements between educational internationalism and imperialism in the late colonial and early postcolonial period.

Sand geographies: Disentangling the material foundations of the built environment

AbstractSand is the world's most used construction material forming the physical backbone of the built environment, while its extraction is causing severe socioecological damages and political–economic frictions. This paper answers the need for more scientific attention, by tracing sand and the geographies of its multiple entanglements from the global economy to the local socioecological effects of its exploitation. First, the article reviews existing literature, providing an introduction into sand's political relevance, economic use, geophysical dynamics and socioenvironmental effects of its extraction. Second, it proposes a sociomaterial geography of sand centred around resource geographies, calling for a stronger engagement with the material foundations of urbanisation and its spatiotemporal effects. Overall, the article calls for more sociomaterial analyses of sand in order to challenge its normalisation as a universal, readily available, cheap and conflict‐free construction material.

Data and Organization Studies: Aesthetics, emotions, discourse and our everyday encounters with data

Despite the growing “data imperative” and “fetishization of data” across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are “captured”, interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.

Experimenting with the Social Life of Homes: Sensor Governmentality and Its Frictions

ABSTRACT Smart devices are invading everyday spaces like our bedrooms and living rooms, making it possible to conduct new participatory experimentations in the ‘real world’. An example is the National Housing Monitoring Network (Red Nacional de Monitoreo, ReNaM). By installing networked sensors in homes in different cities in Chile, ReNaM seeks to generate a large public database on the environmental behaviour of homes in real life conditions and throughout their life cycle, in order to make data-driven policies and regulations on sustainable building. In this article, we argue that experiments with digital innovations like ReNaM are moving towards a ‘sensor governmentality’ or a mode of sensitive regulation of household behaviour at a distance, recomposing the relationship that the State establishes with its population. However, we find that this sensor governmentality is multivalent, fragile and friction-loaded. We analyse different scripts present in ReNaM and the frictions that emerge between divergent ways of materialising this sensor network from above and below. Moreover, the real environmental conditions and behaviours that the experiment seeks to capture through sensors are always challenged by the multiple entanglements that sensor devices unfold in domestic spaces, suggesting that affective and collective possibilities in these real-world experiments should be considered.

Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic

This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad’s intra-active agential ontology and Foucault’s microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power.