Technical ReportPDF Available

Paragon: Winning Submission for the NASA Ames Research Center Space Settlement Design Contest

January 2011

DOI:10.13140/2.1.1348.8643

Affiliation: "Ovidius" High School, Romania

Authors:

Sergiu Petre Iliev

Imperial College London

University of Birmingham

Our team has analyzed the possible purpose of our colony ship in the future, by thinking of plausible futuristic scenarios. We designed our project for a relevant and clear representation of the colony and the life an inhabitant would have aboard it. By combining 3D graphics with scientific concepts we hoped to create a clear depiction of all issues that make up the station, from its creation to the social structure and they way it is sustained by life support systems. At the end of each chapter we imagined scenario in a short narration to illustrate how the proposed design affects inhabitants.

Content uploaded by Sergiu Petre Iliev

Content may be subject to copyright.

A preview of the PDF is not available

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology, and Interpellation

December 2000 · Configurations

John Law

Configurations 8.1 (2000) 1-29 Louis Althusser Donna Haraway I have been puzzling for some time about the problem of the public and the private, and the role of the personal in ethnography or history. Let's put "the personal" into quotes: I have been puzzling for some time about the problem of "the personal" in social science writing: how it works; what it does. My puzzle presents itself in my ... [Show full abstract] own writing. The question is whether I should rigorously try to keep the "personal" out. This would be the most common response. But supposing it were let in, then there are other questions: how should it be done? how might it be handled? and what kind of job should it be doing there anyway? These are the issues that I investigate in this paper. But let me make a context, or offer a second introduction: Donna Haraway and Sharon Traweek teach us that when we tell stories these are performative. This is because they also make a difference, or at any rate might make a difference, or hope to make a difference. Applied in technoscience, the argument goes further; in fact, it is quite radical. It is that there is no important difference between stories and materials. Or, to put it a little differently: stories, effective stories, perform themselves into the material world -- yes, in the form of social relations, but also in the form of machines, architectural arrangements, bodies, and all the rest. This means that one way of imagining the world is that it is a set of (pretty disorderly) stories that intersect and interfere with one another. It means also that these are, however, not simply narrations in the standard linguistic sense of the term. I want to hold the question of the "personal" together with the performative character of storytelling and its material embodiments. This paper is composed of stories -- performative stories -- about the "personal." The reason for this is that I want to make a difference to the way in which we imagine what we currently think of as the "personal," the "analytical," and indeed the "political." I want to interfere in some of the standard stories. This is because if we do it right then it turns out that the "personal" is not really personal any longer. Instead, it is an analytical and political tool for interfering and making a difference, one among many, that might allow us to defuse some of the bombs of what Donna Haraway tellingly calls the established disorder. Well, these are familiar tropes. They are to be found in feminist writing, in cultural studies. The novelty is the application of the personal to the material world. For I want to see what happens if we try it out in the domain of machines. This is a story about politics and an aircraft, an aircraft as seen by a young man. The young man was called John Law. But the past is at least in part a foreign country, and since they do things differently there, I will recount it in the third person.

Article

Kikuyu tales

March 1953 · African Studies

C. Cagnolo I.M.C

This is a small collection of Kikuyu folk tales which I have heard personally from different narrators of the Kikuyu tribe. Having lived with them for nearly thirty‐seven years, I have learned, not only their language and their customs, but much of the tradition and spirit of the people.The changes, which have taken place within the tribe in the last fifty years, are enough to baffle one's ... [Show full abstract] imagination. The contact with progress and civilization, changes of government, the possibility of free movement for trading and exchanging products, have greatly influenced the old traditions and their mode of life. The old generation is fast disappearing and with it the tribal folk‐lore, the customs and even the very characteristics of the country.Among their treasure of tradition the tribal tales used to reflect their primitive culture and interpretation of life. Nowadays, however, genuine narrators are very rare and those of the new generation are imbued with modern ideas. They prefer stories borrowed from the Swahili or from European literature, so that the old stories are not only neglected but even ignored for fear of being behind the times.In view of these peculiar circumstances, I hasten to record these genuine tribal tales before it is too late. I hope they will be of some interest to the student of Bantu culture. They may also be appreciated by those of the young Kikuyu generation who possesses true patriotism.C. C.

Article

Maryse Condé’s Victoire : Thinking Back through Her Mothers

December 2014 · Nottingham French Studies

Mary Jean Green

In Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999), Maryse Condé’s first admittedly autobiographical work, there appears a photograph of a grandmother, but the woman it pictures remains a mysterious presence. It is to the life of this unknown grandmother that Condé devotes her attention in her 2006 publication, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots. In understanding the life of this maternal grandmother, she ... [Show full abstract] hopes to learn more about her own enigmatic mother, and thus about herself. Condé’s text is a reconstitution of the life of Victoire Élodie Pridal, a household servant, and of the time in which she lived, when the black population of Guadeloupe was finally able to assert its right to education and political power. It is also a work of imagination, as the narrator imagines her unknown grandmother's life, comparing her own ability as a writer to the creative imagination displayed by Victoire in her legendary creole cuisine.

Article

Antropologia medica critica: sentieri di ricerca

September 2015 · Salute e Societa

Roberto Beneduce

Critical medical anthropology explores multiple domains of healing practices, suffering, as well as of the medical knowledge. This article takes in consideration two main issues. First, it examines the contradictions of medico-psychiatric diagnostic apparatus (diagnostic proliferation; the litany of psychological test and scales; the imagined objectivity of categories and methods whose "destiny ... [Show full abstract] effects" are evident when they contribute to label marginal and subaltern groups, such as the immigrants), as well as their colonial genealogy when applied to the field of migration. Secondly, the article emphasizes dimensions often forgotten in healing and suffering narratives. The author remembers the value of hope, once we assume it as a practice able to build "new communities of care" (Mattingly), able to resist both to institutional violence and aloneness often present in chronic suffering.