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The rise of digital acoustic monitoring is having transformative effects within forest conservation geographies and practices. By featuring divergent acoustic signals (a gunshot, a bird call) as its evidentiary basis for targeted acts of spatial intervention, digital acoustic monitoring promises to address myriad forest crises, from escalating poaching threats to biodiversity loss. More than a conservation tool, we assert that digital acoustic monitoring facilitates diverse manifestations of spatial governance that align with what Foucault (2008) termed “environmentality.” Our central objective is to analyze how digital acoustic monitoring gives rise to new spatial formations of power in forest conservation landscapes--and by extension, other acoustically monitored environments. While acknowledging the potential of digital acoustic monitoring to enhance forest conservation practices, we also find evidence that links its promise of algorithmically derived efficiency to expanded forms of scientific abstraction, militarized surveillance, and capitalist speculation that are propagating in multiple environments worldwide. By analyzing these developments as operations within digital environmentality, we offer a theoretical framework for engaging with these technologies and environments as they are now proliferating worldwide.

Abstract Deep neural network algorithms are becoming intimately involved in the politics of the border, and are themselves bordering devices in that they classify, divide and demarcate boundaries in data. Deep learning involves much more than the deployment of technologies at the border, and is reordering what the border means, how the boundaries of political community can be imagined. Where the biometric border rendered the border mobile through its inscription in the body, the deep border generates the racialized body in novel forms that extend the reach of state violence. The deep border is written through the machine learning models that make the world in their own image – as clusters of attributes and feature spaces from which data examples can be drawn. The ‘depth’ that becomes imaginable in computer science models of the indefinite multiplication of layers in a neural network begins to resonate with state desires for a reach into the attributes of population. The border is spatially reimagined as a set of always possible functions, features, and clusters – as a ‘line of best fit’ where the fraught politics of the border can be condensed and resolved.

Abstract Starting from the early 1930s, structural changes in the Bulgarian tobacco industry, prompted by the advent of the world economic crisis and German economic expansionism into Southeastern Europe, led to a deep restructuring of the labor processes, known in the terminology of the time as rationalization, in the Bulgarian tobacco industry. The introduction of the tonga rationalization technology had a deskilling and deeply gendered effect on the industry, making a significant number of skilled male workers redundant, disproportionately decreasing average male wages and leading, in turn, to a further feminization of an already majority-female workforce. The introduction of the new system provoked a strong response from the organized labor movement, which used a variety of tactics to fight against the new technology: from strikes to petitions to tripartite negotiations. Organized labor's reaction was deeply gendered, an aspect that only becomes truly visible if, in addition to gender and skill, we employ the analytical lens of scale. By following trade union policies on the local, national, and international levels, the article goes beyond the carefully crafted gender-neutral language in official documents to reveal tensions between the conservative attitudes of rank-and-file activists and the official trade union agenda. This is especially evident in communist labor politics, where Bulgarian trade union policies on the local and national levels provoked an intervention on the part of the Profintern between 1930 and 1931. The movement's internal contradictions resulted in a polyvalent, ambiguous, and non-linear trade union policy formed through the clash of and negotiations between local activists’ conservative notions of gendered work and family roles and the radical gender program of international communism.

AbstractIn the last decade, future thinking has rapidly gained importance as a topic of historical study. This article provides an overview of the existing historiographies of future thinking as well as the actions and practices that follow such thoughts. We trace the pedigree of histories of the future back to the German historian of ideas Reinhart Koselleck and show how his conceptual framework has been adopted and adapted by later scholars. We highlight the sources and methods that are typically used. A particularly fruitful approach that emerges from our meta study revolves around the concept of pluritemporality – the coexistence of different layers of time. The article also seeks to uncover some weaknesses and biases that are still present in the field. The most urgent issue being probably the lack of consensus on a conceptual apparatus; other blind spots concern the relationship between future thinking and its linguistic expression in historical sources, the question of whose future thinking we are talking about, how future thinking relates to human action in the past, and how short‐term futures interact with their long‐term futures equivalents. Overall, however, the aim of this survey is to emphasise the potential of this burgeoning field for future historical research. Much is to be gained from new theories of historical time which are themselves the consequence of ideas about climate change and the dangers of the Anthropocene, human extinction and trans‐ and post‐humanism and about artificial intelligence and the digital world.

Abstract Slavery and the slave trade were fundamental institutions in Ethiopian history. Their abolition was a protracted process that involved developing, debating, passing, and applying multiple anti-slavery and anti-slave trade edicts and decrees under successive rulers. While slavery existed in various societies that were later integrated in the Abyssinian empire since the second half of the nineteenth century and took different forms based on different legal traditions, this article focuses specifically on the Christian kingdom and its successor empire. It analyzes changes and continuities in legal approaches to slavery and its suppression through consecutive Ethiopian governments starting with a discussion of slavery's regulation in the ancient Christian law code, the Fetha nagast (“The Law of the Kings”). The article then considers how successive Christian emperors developed anti-slavery policies in response to both local and global dynamics.

Este artículo se centra en examinar las fuentes que sirvieron para financiar la construcción de la segunda catedral románica de la Seu d’Urgell a lo largo del siglo XII. La información utilizada proviene de los donativos ad opera, cuyo estudio ha interesado a los historiadores del arte, pero no desde el punto de vista económico. Además de tener en cuenta la cronología y la identidad social de los donadores, analizamos la tipología de recursos transferidos así como la forma cómo se gestionaron a raíz de la aparición e institucionalización de la figura del obrero. La Seu d’Urgell es un buen ejemplo de lo que pudo ocurrir en otras catedrales catalanas que fueron construidas (o reconstruidas) en esa misma época, pero para las cuales existe mucha menos documentación del tipo que se analiza aquí.

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claimsabout the reduction or emergence of molecular structure cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our understanding of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics.