Technical Fix Research Articles

The Water-Energy-Food Nexus Beyond “Technical Quick Fix”: The Case of Hydro-Development in the Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia

This paper builds upon empirical material from a case study of two dam sites in Ethiopia to revisit nexus narratives from a political ecology perspective. The two dams on tributaries of the Upper Blue Nile are examples of the success of hydro-development in increasing food and energy production, but at the same time they are evidence of the controversial effects these developments have on local populations. The paper argues that conventional nexus thinking has often been too water- and economy-centric, and too much focussed on a “technical quick fix” instead of a holistic approach. The paper calls for a broadening of nexus perspectives in order to better acknowledge the social complexity of hydro-development in local contexts, to understand the political construction of scarcity, and to combine different knowledges at the science-practice interface.

The Technical Fix

This essay examines Bitcoin enthusiasts’ abstract and material arguments about the viability of bitcoin in El Salvador through historical and political-economic frameworks. In June 2021, with legislators in tow, President Nayib Bukele declared that the adoption of Bitcoin would encourage flows of capital into El Salvador’s crisis-addled economy—flows that would lift all boats. In a sense, riding on Bitcoin’s success or failure in El Salvador is a test case for Bit-coin’s claim to be the future of money and for other such “technical fixes” of capitalism’s shortfalls in the developing world. By comparing Bukele’s move with El Salvador’s push to dollarize in 2001, this essay traces a comparable strategy of El Salvador’s economic and political elites where the swap of currencies becomes a vehicle for massive accumulation at the top, while popular classes suffer. Consequently, this essay argues that Bukele’s “technical fix” on his nation’s economy is a mere pretext. By leveraging the assets of the broader populace, he pursues the class interests of El Salvador’s new oligarchy.

Pills for Prejudice: Implicit Bias and Technical Fix for Racism.

Pills for Prejudice: Implicit Bias and Technical Fix for Racism.

The political economy of technical fixes: The (mis)alignment of clean fossil and political regimes

This paper argues that existing critiques of technical fixes are unable to explain our simultaneous enamourment and distrust with technical fixes, and that to do so, we need a political economy analysis. We develop a critical, theoretically grounded conceptualisation of technical fixes as imagined defensive spatio-temporal fixes of specific political economic regimes, and apply it to the case of geoengineering, or ‘clean fossil’, as an attempted technical fix of the climate change problem. We map the promises of clean fossil as a proposed solution to the problem of climate change in discrete episodes since the 1960s.The paper shows that clean fossil promises have been surprisingly poorly aligned with the neoliberal regime, and explains how they have been moderately stable due to those misalignments. We also show that different liberal capitalisms could be supported by different clean fossil technologies, but also that illiberal or more egalitarian regimes remain possible alongside particular, perhaps radically re-envisioned, versions of clean fossil. Ambivalence towards clean fossil technical fix promises is intelligible, given the inherent instability of their co-evolution with neoliberalism and future political regimes.

Collision with China: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis, Somatic Marking, and the EP-3 Incident

Recent research suggests that cultural differences in Chinese and Western modes of conceptual reasoning play a significant role in political discourse and relations between the United States and China. In contrast, our analysis of the discourse surrounding the 2001 collision of an American surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet over international waters reveals a surprisingly high degree of similarity in conceptual metaphors used across the two cultures. Using tools from cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, we compare U.S. and Chinese conceptual metaphors used to frame the incident over a 13-day period, ultimately distinguishing between shared metaphorical conceptualizations (War, Journey, and Economic) and competing metaphorical conceptualizations (Game, Technical Fix, Victim, and Civil Relations). Our analysis allows us to make empirically grounded claims about Chinese–American relations that avoid cultural stereotypes and suggest possibilities for further integration of interpretive and scientific approaches for understanding intercultural discourse.

No Technical Fix - Murray Jardine: The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself. (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004. Pp. 304. $24.99.)

No Technical Fix - Murray Jardine: The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself. (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004. Pp. 304. $24.99.) - Volume 67 Issue 3

A Technical Fix For an Ethical Bind?

CELL BIOLOGYScientists and ethicists are taking a closer look at ways to create pluripotent human stem cells without involving embryos. But how close are such ideas to reality?

Racism: A Mental Illness?

Racism: A Mental Illness?

Hollowing out Keynesian norms: how the search for a technical fix undermined the Bretton Woods regime

After a decade of financial crises, international economic leaders have begun to talk about the need for reform. Yet, while they speak in dramatic terms of a ‘new financial architecture’, in practice, they seem more interested in more limited renovations to the international monetary system. Arguing that ‘A lack of reliable data . . . was critical to [recent] crises’, the International Monetary Fund has, for example, emphasised the importance of better data-gathering systems and greater surveillance. By defining the cause of the crises as informational rather than systemic, Fund leaders thus justify a limited solution: in Michel Camdessus' words, what is needed is ‘no new machinery, no new heavy public intervention’, but rather a series of limited technical fixes. This is not the first time that international financial leaders have succumbed to the seduction of technique. Four decades ago, as the Bretton Woods system struggled through an escalating series of monetary crises, state and global policymakers chose a similar path of technical expediency, opting for limited reforms. As we now know, those strategies ultimately proved to be inadequate to the task of rescuing the postwar monetary order. In this article, I revisit that regime and its collapse, examining the roots of the contemporary search for technical fixes.

Book Review: The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry

Book Review: The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

A Technical Fix for the Greenhouse

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this articleComputers in the Human ContextThe Technical Fix: Education, Computers and IndustryOffice Automation: The Labour Process and Women's Work in BritainManagerial Strategy for New TechnologyTelecommunications Policy and Management

Reviews

Handbook of Human‐Computer Interaction, M Helander. The Electronic Text, William Costanzo. The Artificial Intelligence Debate, Stephen R Graubard. The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster. Interactivity: Designing and Using Interactive Video, M Picciotto, I Robertson and R Colley. Using Television in the Primary School, Ernest Choat and Harry Griffin. Evaluating Educational Software‐A Guide for Teachers, Howard N Sloane et al. Multi‐Media Computer Assisted Learning, Philip Barker (ed). Higher Education and New Technologies, Hans Oosthoek and Ton Vroeijenstijn (ed). Improving Teaching and Courses: a Guide to Evaluation, Paul Ramsden and Agnes Dodds. How to Develop and Present Staff Training Courses, Peter R Sheal. Making Sense of Experiential Learning: Diversity in Theory and Practice, Susan Warner Weil and Ian McGill (ed).

The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry

Part 1 The myth of the machine: technological futures and the technical fix the origins of the information society recession and restructuring. Part 2 The industrialisation of education: education, Utopia and crisis the English disease? education for what jobs? the new disciplines. Part 3 Beyond technocracy?: the military project the technocratic condition, or schools cannot teach what society does not know.

From Laissez Faire to a Fair Wage for Women's Work: A Technical Fix to the Labor Contract

From Laissez Faire to a Fair Wage for Women's Work: A Technical Fix to the Labor Contract