New Objects Of Study Research Articles

Media education goes digital: an introduction

This editorial introduction provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities presented to media educators by the advent of digital technologies. It argues that media education can provide an important critical dimension to the use of technology in education, that moves beyond a merely instrumental approach; and that it can help to bridge the ‘new digital divide’ between students' experiences of technology outside school and their experience in the classroom. The article then focuses on three ways in which media educators need to respond to new digital media: by applying and extending existing conceptual approaches to these new objects of study; by addressing the creative possibilities of digital technologies, and the pedagogic challenges they represent; and by exploring the potential of emerging forms of participatory media culture.

Antropologia visual, práticas antigas e novas perspectivas de investigação

A antropologia visual nasceu em meados do século XIX com a "era da reprodutibilidade técnica" e da expansão industrial. Como se reformula hoje, na era da globalização e da transformação digital, essa disciplina ou convergência disciplinar? Voltada inicialmente para a documentação e preservação de práticas culturais ameaçadas, a antropologia de urgência, como se transformou ao longo do tempo em formas narrativas visuais, sonoras, audiovisuais e, mais recentemente, digitais? Orientada em primeiros passos para alimentar e enriquecer as coleções dos museus, como passa hoje por meio de múltiplas formas e suportes para o espaço público à procura de novos espectadores/atores (ou públicos)? Inicialmente instrumentação que pareceria garantir a objetividade, atribuindo-se-lhe o estatuto de tecnologia de pesquisa ou mesmo de auxiliar de pesquisa, como se confrontou com novos paradigmas epistemológicos ou se antecipou a eles? Voltada sobretudo para o registo das técnicas materiais e rituais e depois para as palavras e as sonoridades, como se orienta hoje no âmbito de novos objetos de estudo como a antropologia da arte, a antropologia do design, a cultura visual em contextos de processos acelerados de transformação social e cultural? Acrescentamos ainda mais duas perguntas às inquietações que nos fazem refletir sobre essa temática: como se repensa atualmente a antropologia visual no âmbito da antropologia? O que fazer com a antropologia visual hoje? Procuraremos traçar algumas formas de práticas antigas que adquirem nova e maior pertinência na era atual (trabalho com os arquivos, a memória, a relação entre o passado e o projeto, os objetos, a cultura material) e perspectivar novas oportunidades, novas práticas, novos objetos de estudo.

Canonicity, Marginality, and the Celebration of the Minor

Victorian poetry as a field tends to be among those subdisciplines least affected by theoretical and historical developments in literary study. In the eighties and early nineties, our field was certainly changed by demands to "open up" the canon. 1 Particularly with women poets, these investigations had an effect; any roster of poets from the nineteenth century now includes Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Michael Field —both in pedagogical anthologies like the Longman, Norton, and the Broadview, and in scholarly attention. At the same time, for all the talk about opening up the canon, the canon has shifted rather than expanded; certain authors on the edges (say, Patmore and the poets of the nineties) have been quietly or nearly dropped to include new objects of study. In addition, the scholarly canon has changed far less than it could have; scholars are not necessarily writing about newly rediscovered work as about works familiar to them. In the last decade and a half there was an explosion of articles on Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, which was hardly in danger of being ignored.

Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety

Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety ARTHUR F. MCEVOY One of the many changes that environmentalism has brought to modern historiography is an emphasis on context and contingency. For historians, ecology offers both an object and a method of study. As a subject, it encompasses not only natural objects—plants, animals, the planet itself—but the many different ways in which human and natural systems interact with each other. As a mode of analysis, or what William Cronon called a “habit of thought,” environmental his­ tory describes change in terms of that interaction, paying attention to the simultaneous and reciprocal influences that work between the natural and the social orders.1 In both of its guises, ecology highlights the dynamic interrelatedness of things and undermines our efforts to order them neatly. It focuses our attention on the complex interac­ tions between subjects and contexts, on the systemic effects of obscure relationships and unforeseen events. A penchant for interdisciplinarity is one manifestation of this ten­ dency, as environmental historians harvest other disciplines for ideas and methods to help them highlight interactions between the natural and the cultural. “More than most of the other ‘new’ histories,” Cro­ non recently observed, “environmental history erodes the boundaries among traditional historical subfields . . . and suggests new ways of building bridges among them.”2 Ecologically inclined historians in other areas, meanwhile, have lately infused their work with the same kind of attention to context and interdependence that has distinDr . McEvoy is professor of law and history at the University of Wisconsin— Madison. Research for this article was supported in part by the American Bar Founda­ tion, National Endowment for the Humanities grant FT-34785, and National Science Foundation grant SES-9223512. Able research assistance was provided by Greg Lind and Ricki Shine; and helpful comments by Robert Friedel, Chris Sellers, Peter Siegelman, and the Technology and Culture referees. 'William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” EnvironmentalHistory Review 17 (1993): 1-22, esp. 12-16. 2Ibid., p. 5.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0012$01.00 S145 S146 Arthur F. McEvoy guished environmental historiography for some years now.3 Inevita­ bly, new methods and new points of view bring into focus new objects of study that earlier works passed by. In technological history, as in a number of other subfields, environ­ mentalism has reinforced the tendency of recent scholarship to unset­ tle the systematicity and teleology that characterized earlier work. In David Landes’s landmark study The Unbound Prometheus, for example, technological innovation proceeds according to its own logic, in ratio­ nal response to impersonal market forces.4 The same is true of Pro­ metheus'?, U.S. counterpart, Nathan Rosenberg’s Technology and Ameri­ can Economic Growth.5 Innovation in these works tends to be linear, orderly, and bloodless. More recent treatments, in contrast, have em­ phasized the roles of context and contingency in technological change. Joel Mokyr has criticized the “Whiggishness” of the literature in the field and emphasized the social and cultural environments from which innovations emerge. Following Eric Jones, Mokyr empha­ sizes the accidental or improbable character of technological prog­ ress; following StephenJay Gould, he highlights its spasmodic charac­ ter.6 A recent dissertation by Ken Alder epitomizes the field’s new direction in its analysis of how the Revolutionary-era French military experimented with and then discarded interchangeable-parts manu­ facture in artillery. Here, technology did not determine its own his­ tory but took second seat to political, social, and professional consid­ erations.7 A particularly significant locus ofcontingency in the history of tech­ nology is industrial health and safety. Like pollution, occupational 3For recent surveys of environmental historiography, see Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modem Environmental History (Cambridge, 1988), and “A Round Table: Environmental History,"Journal ofAmerican History 76 (1990): 1087— 1147. Recent environmental symposia published in other subfields include Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, eds., “The Environment and the City,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299-434. 4 David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Develop­ ment in Western Europefrom 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969). “Nathan...

Historical Studies of Legal Change

An international conference called Ethnohistorical Models for the Evolution of Law within Specific Societies was held August io-i8,I 985, in Milan and at the Bellagio Conference Center, Lake Como, Italy, with funding provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Rockefeller Foundation. June Starr and Jane F. Collier were the organizers, Elizabeth Colson (University of California, Berkeley) and William Twining (University College, London) were discussants, Jessica Kuper was editorial advisor, and Longina Jakubowska and Richard Maddox were rapporteurs. Twenty anthropologists, sociologists, and law professors from North America and Europe attended. Theory ranged from functionalism, Marxism, and deconstructionism to cultural analysis and interpretive approaches. Conference goals were to compare case studies of legal institutions changing over time in particular societies and to develop methodologies to direct future research. Because the anthropology of law was once a welldefined subfield within social anthropology, participants wished to make sense of the current diversity of approaches among them. In discussions they focused on the models and methods they were using to analyze the development, change, decay, integration, and articulation of legal systems within specific social units. Anthropological studies of law in the first half of the 2oth century had developed rich descriptions of how social order was maintained in tribal and peasant societies that lacked police, a Western-style judiciary, or prisons and jails (Barton I969 [I919], 1949; Malinowski I926; Llewellyn and Hoebel I94I). The anthropology of law was a clearly bounded subfield because most anthropologists studying conflict resolution relied on a lawyer's sense of what law was (Bohannan I957; Gluckman I955, I956, I965; Nader I969; Gulliver I963; Van Velsen I964). By I960 the evolutionary approach inherited from Maine (I879 [I86I]) and Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg (i 9I5) had culminated in two publications, one concerned with non-Western legal systems (Hoebel I954), the other with precapitalist legal forms in relation to economic systems (Fried I960). Although many anthropologists of law never became involved in evolutionary model building, by I970 it was clear that legal anthropology would go no farther in this direction for two reasons. First, evolutionary sequences could not capture the increasingly complex legal behavior and lawlike forms that had been recorded by legal ethnographers in different world areas for the last five decades. Secondly, the growing interest in conceptualizing law as fully embedded in society meant that to abstract and purify legal forms in order to fit them neatly into stages of sociocultural evolution did considerable damage to the data. The early I970S saw the blossoming of a plurality of approaches. Books in the anthropology of law shared the tradition of detailed description but differed in emphasis on boundaries between disputes and war (Koch I974:8i-82) and between law and nonlaw conflict resolution. Pospisil (I 97I:II3) found law in every social unit from the household to the state, while Starr (I978) found law only in state institutions, treating village lawways (Malinowski's term) as nonlaw conflict-resolving forms. Collier (I973) avoided this dilemma by focusing on litigant choice of a legal form. By the end of the I970S some researchers felt that a dominant focus on processes of resolving extended disputes had emerged (cf. Epstein I967, Gulliver I969, Moore I978, and Nader and Todd 1978). Others debated the advisability of rule-centered or process-centered studies (Gluckman I973, Hamnett I977). Yet, even as this debate was resolved by Comaroff and Roberts (1I98i), many researchers were abandoning the dispute paradigm as too normative and positivistic and turning to historical research as a way to understand legal change. The I985 conference brought together scholars using historical data from texts or their own ethnographic research to consider how dispute-airing forms and power relationships that changed over time were affecting legal behavior, legal processes, and other institutions. These ideas stemmed in part from the reading of Giddens (I976, I979) and Bourdieu (I977) and in part from the influence that political economy and Marxism had had on social anthropology in the I 970S. To focus directly on legal change meant using analytical strategies that differed from those of the earlier community or regional studies. Now, instead of focusing on disputes and attempts at settlement of problems, new objects of study surfaced: how culture mediated legal ideas, the legal strategies of a ruling or a minority group, the negotiation of a dispute across international boundaries, the creation by legislation of new redistributive networks, how I. ? I987 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved oOII-3204/87/2803-0005$I.oo.