Cybersex: Outercourse and the Enselfment of the Body

The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity—an age‐old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer‐mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex—fundamentally a bodily activity—provides an ideal situation for examining these kinds of potential transformations. In the disembodied context of on‐line interaction both bodies and selves are fluid symbolic constructs emergent in communication and are defined by sociocultural standards. Situations such as these are suggestive of issues related to contemporary transgressions of the empirical shell of the body, potentially reshaping body‐to‐self‐to‐social‐world relationships.     

Examining the historical and present energy metabolism of a Rust Belt City: Syracuse,NY 1840–2005

Early cities depended on local, solar-based energy resources for their metabolism. Over time, cities have become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly, as they facilitate exploitation of solar resources from much farther away. Alternatives to fossil fuels, typically generated locally, often provide lower surplus energy to society. As cities consider the transition back to solar-based energy resources, it becomes necessary to understand the capability of the solar-based economy to provide e.g. energy (including food) from nearby lands. To do so, we compared the energy metabolism (respiration) of a typical rust-belt city, Syracuse, NY, with the net primary production in the surrounding county (production) over its development (1840–2005). We calculated the ratio of respiration to production (R:P) and examined how this ratio changed during the periods of industrialization, shifts in major fuel types, and deindustrialization. We found that from 1840 to 1950 respiration became increasingly centralized in the urban core; since then it has become more diffused. Urban respiration exceeded production in the county by 9:1 in 1930, and it remains just under 2:1 today. Respiration reached an absolute (67 PJ) and a per capita (339 GJ) maximum in 1970, then fell by 40 % and 20 % respectively, due to deindustrialization and population losses. Conversely, production increased 480 % from its lows in 1930 because of reforestation and improved agricultural yields. What this means is that to achieve a higher P:R ratio requires either increased production of food and fuels in areas surrounding the city, or decreased per capita energy consumption.     

Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge1

Sociologists, philosophers, and historians of science tend to focus their attention on the production of knowledge. More recently, scholars have begun to investigate more fully the structures and processes that impede the production of knowledge. This article draws on interviews conducted with 41 academic researchers to present a phenomenological examination of “forbidden knowledge”—a phrase that refers to knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce. Forbidden knowledge has traditionally been understood as a set of formal controls on what ought not be known. We argue that the social processes that create forbidden knowledge are embedded in the everyday practices of working scientists. The narrative legacies of past controversies in science are of particular importance, as they serve as a tool that working scientists use to justify, construct, and hide their acceptance of forbidden knowledge. As a result, the precise contents of forbidden knowledge are fluid, fuzzy, essentially contested, specialty specific, locally created, and enforced.     

Stanisław Wyspiański as Proselytising Translator: National Directioning in his Polonisations of Hamlet and Le Cid

On the basis of largely neglected Hungarian sources and Austrian archival material, this article argues that, with the emergence of a “Hungarian factor” in Habsburg foreign policy after 1867, policy towards Serbia increasingly relied on the Monarchy’s personal hold over Prince Milan Obrenovi?. This strategy in turn can be seen as part of a Hungarian surrogate “imperialism,” through which the Habsburg Monarchy would enhance Hungary’s security through hegemony in the Danubian basin. The policy was eventually consolidated in 1880–1881 by a series of treaties which made Serbia an economic and political satellite of the Monarchy, but the linch-pin of the structure remained Milan Obrenovi?. Milan, however, proved an imperfect instrument since he loathed Serbia, was unpopular because of his obvious subservience to Austro-Hungarian interests, and longed for the fleshpots of Western Europe. The article suggests that such a “personal policy” was increasingly unlikely to succeed after the granting of a more liberal constitution to Serbia in 1869, and as the country became politically a more complex society. The article thus demonstrates the essentially futile nature of this exercise in personal diplomacy, and the inherent impossibility of controlling an entire society through the person of its ruler.