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An important theme in current studies of environmental representation is the inadequacy of many narratological and stylistic techniques for registering ecological complexity. This article argues that, in the case of cinema, water constitutes an especially vivid example of an allusive natural subject, and it examines the means by which one film, The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012), manages to confront that challenge. It pays particular attention to The Bay’s treatment of animal life, and its acknowledgement of water’s infrastructural currency. The article draws on the writings of ecocritical literary theorist Timothy Morton and media historian and theorist John Durham Peters.
Chapter 3 Infrastructure as financial extraction He goes on Sunday to the church to hear the Parson shout. He puts a penny in the plate and takes a pound note out And drops a conscience-stricken tear in case he is found out. (Parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Village Blacksmith, Anonymous) 3.1 Infrastructure through finance’s eyes Ask an ordinary person in the street in any large city in the industrialised world to react to the word ‘infrastructure’ and the reply (in so far as ordinary people even think about ‘infrastructure’) is likely to include ‘roads
3 Infrastructure and innovation: new limits to growth Infrastructure investment and innovation come up repeatedly in discussions of urban and economic growth. To state the obvious, infrastructure is concentrated in cities, and innovation is an urban activity par excellence. Less well known are (1) the gap between the funding needed to maintain and modernize infrastructures and the sums invested and (2) what the European Commission referred to as an “innovation emergency” in 2011: these new limits to growth increase the costs of congestion, add to the problems of
Infrastructure has long been described as a black box to users: it is the stuff that brings what people need and want. It makes lives easier, safer, and more comfortable. Scholars of infrastructure have long observed that users like it this way; they primarily attend to infrastructure when it does not work (Kaika, 2004 ; Kaika and Swyngedouw
Chapter 5 Infrastructure corridors, frontier finance and the vulnerabilities of capital The instability of infrastructure-as-asset-class and the reluctance of investors to back higher-risk, new, so-called ‘greenfield’ projects are creating a major problem for the smooth expansion of globalised capital. For infrastructure-as-asset-class is more than just a rent grab by finance or an opportunity for derivative traders to make a quick buck by constructing a superstructure of complex financial trades on the back of state-backed guarantees – though it is certainly
and clandestine. Johny Pitts, Afropean ( 2020 ), 19 Introduction This chapter exposes the roles various urban infrastructures play in reproducing racialised identities and patterns of segregation in postcolonial European cities. It contributes to new ways of knowing European cities (see Introduction) by reinscribing colonial histories into daily urban life. In so doing, it contributes to the effort to reinsert European cities into global histories marked by
105 4 US aid and the creation of an Irish scientific research infrastructure Introduction This chapter broadens out the focus from Irish sociology to examine Irish scientific research. Its central theme is the way in which resources provided or jointly controlled by US actors underpinned the development of a modern scientific research infrastructure within the state in the period after the Second World War. The scientific fields principally affected by these financial injections were applied research related to agriculture, industry and economics. Money flowed
graduate of TCD who had already been in Punjab for thirty years and was a superintending engineer, the second highest engineering rank, and there were also a number of Irish junior engineers. 61 The British, and the Irish employed by them, thus developed a series of major irrigation and communications works which would leave a legacy of a well-engineered physical infrastructure which
8 Infrastructures, borders, (im)mobility, or the material and social construction of new Europe The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to
development. Against the background that acknowledges effective and functional human rights infrastructure as a ‘sine qua non’ to the prevention of a re-colonization of a country through foreign flows of capital, this chapter probes the interface of foreign capital with human rights in Nigeria. It examines the extent to which the human rights system in Nigeria is being