NTM最新文献

In 1975, the death of dictator Francisco Franco opened the door to a turbulent period known as the "Spanish Transition." In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, national politics, political violence and social demands were interwoven with international shifts in science and technology and global debates on "energy transitions." In close dialogue with foreign environmental groups, the anti-nuclear movement in Spain deployed a large repertoire of collective action; it ranged from pleasant activities to violent direct actions against nuclear technologies, but also included the making of technological alternatives. Counter-culture activists and counter-experts opposed nuclear energy and promoted renewable energy as two sides of the same coin.This paper explores the pioneering (and networked) initiatives of an anarchist-oriented group called Self-Managed Radical Alternative Technologies, created in 1976, and a group of young engineers who founded the cooperative Ecotècnia, which was behind the construction of the first commercial wind turbine in Catalonia in 1984. The paper focuses on the transnational circulation of grassroots knowledge, the epistemics of resistance, and the development of wind energy technologies as "technologies of protest." Technologies of protest illuminate how the social construction of technology is intertwined with what I call the "social destruction of technology."

Cruise ships are at the same time among the most popular and most controversial means of travel. Photos of oversized ships, passing through the historic center of Venice, have become iconic. This paper explores the background of the debate over cruise ships in Venice. Using research at the intersection of culture and technology, the history of technology, urban anthropology, and social movement theory, it sheds light on how the spatialization of the cruise industry through infrastructures affects Venice and the lagoon. In this paper, I will retrace the development of these interdependencies to show how activists, associations, and citizen campaigners address and perform these entanglements. Protest has turned the ship into a powerful symbol for the infrastructural appropriation and transformation of natural and urban space. Since transportation and traffic routes influence people's everyday lives, it is important to consider their impacts on practices, spaces, and relations, especially in a city like Venice, where footpaths and waterways form an important element of the identity of both the city and its inhabitants. Through its actions, its tacit knowledge of local space, and the explicit knowledge the protest network produces, it both opposes and adds to hegemonic discourses. I argue that the cruise ship has been transformed into a metaphor of global capitalism, which in turn renders it a symbol with transnational impact.

Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of "energy citizenship," a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues. This paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the co-production of counter-expertise and energy citizenship in the two European countries endowed with the largest shale gas reserves: Poland and France. In my analysis, concerns over the disruption of the food-water-energy nexus due to possible pollution emerge as particularly important. I argue that the exchange of information between activist groups and NGOs, as well as between activist groups from distant European locations, allowed for the creation of a genuinely transnational and science-based anti-fracking movement.

United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) and UN agencies utilized techniques of power and negotiation to implement radiation exposure regulations. USAEC affiliated scientists' expertise was cultivated while establishing a radiation protection regime based on classified experiments. World Health Organization (WHO) leadership sought to manifest a human right to health, including a right to protection from radiation contamination. The careers of a few technical experts and interagency UN correspondence shows how American risk models of radiation regulation traveled and ultimately inhibited WHO attempts to frame radiation as a public health threat. The USAEC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) navigated WHO's way of perceiving radiation with technical experts and bureaucratic and legislative means. This paper shows the underpinning at the UN of competing models of radiation regulation, one state centric and the other, an individual right to health. This narrative provides insights into the nature of the UN's current conceptualization of radiation regulation and argues for further research into UN, radiation, and human rights history.

The acquisition of a nuclear power reactor from the North American company Westinghouse in 1964 not only brought atomic practices and knowledge to Spain but also introduced new methods of industrial organization and management, as well as regulations created by organizations such as the US Atomic Energy Commission (US AEC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This article analyzes the history of the knowledge, regulations and experimental practices relating to radiation safety and protection that traveled with this reactor to an industrial space: the Zorita nuclear power plant. Within this space, the appropriation, use, and coproduction of knowledge and practices were conditioned by political, economic, industrial and social factors, and by the engineers, researchers and other professionals who contributed expert knowledge. Material held in the Tecnatom Historical Archive-the engineering company that coordinated construction of the plant-is the main source for this work, which delves into the history of knowledge and atomic technologies and adds to the historiography of radiological protection in Spain.

This paper draws attention to the role of the IAEA in shaping radiation dosimetry practices, instrumentation, and standards in the late 1950s and 1960s. It traces the beginnings of the IAEA's radiation dose intercomparison program which targeted all member states and involved the WHO so as to standardize dosimetry on a global level. To standardize dosimetric measurement methods, techniques, and instruments, however, one had to devise a method of comparing absorbed dose measurements in one laboratory with those performed in others with a high degree of accuracy. In 1964 the IAEA thus started to build up what I call the "global experiment," an intercomparison of radiation doses with participating laboratories from many of its member states. To carry out the process of worldwide standardization in radiation dosimetry, I argue, an organization with the diplomatic power and global reach of the IAEA was absolutely necessary. Thus, "global experiment" indicates a novel understanding of the experimental process. What counts as an experiment became governed by a process that was designed and strictly regulated by an international organization; it took place simultaneously in several laboratories across the globe, while experimental data became centrally owned and alienated from those that produced it.