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- Burnett, Allan
(författare)
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Order in Ruins : British Society and the Media Assemblage of The World at War c. 1970-1975
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies a period of intense crisis and creativity in British media, society, and culture, when the settled outcome of the Second World War (WW2) was perceived to be disintegrating. The post-world-war order was becoming an ‘order in ruins’. The thesis centres on a far-reaching analysis of the making of The World at War (WAW) in the early 1970s. A hugely popular televised documentary series produced in London as the UK entered the European Community amid the Cold War, WAW was a seminal and celebrated attempt to produce a challenging ‘people’s history’ of WW2 with global scope.This is the first full-length academic study of WAW and the first fully comprehensive examination of the production’s key aims and intended outcomes. It shows how WAW was influenced by and sought to intervene in five era-defining developments that upset the presumed status quo: the emergence of media technology as a topic of mainstream intellectual and political debate; the supposed decline of class as a determinant of social relations; the ambivalent second wave of women’s resistance to gender hierarchies; the contradiction of globalist ambitions to surpass cultural barriers amid continuing post-world-war nationalism, post-colonial racism, and economic rivalries; and the sense of a profound gap between pre- and post-world-war generations that exposed an underlying crisis of faith in historical progress. Prior research has tended to concur with claims made on behalf of WAW with regard to these issues or leavekey areas overlooked. This study uses an innovative framework of ‘media assemblage’ derived from critical engagement with contemporary efforts by philosphers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to address the above issues under the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas also influenced the milieu of WAW. The framework provides a method for enumerating a multiplicity of media assemblages that constituted WAW and its roots in wider society far beyond reductive notions of ‘television’ or ‘film’. This approach is applied to extensive empirical research of the WAW production archive, the series as first broadcast from 1973 to 1975, independent interventions by its contributors in contemporary issues, and a range of contextual sources. This thesis concludes that WAW was not the landmark of democratised history its popular and scholarly reputation suggests. It fell short of its aims to challenge intended British and global audiences on matters of historical representation and memory, social hierarchy, cultural division, and their own behaviour as historical actors. Yet, the construction of those issues both behind the production scenes and on screen was often more complex, sophisticated, and significant than previous studies suggest. This thesis finds the question of how and why WAW took its eventual form was deeply entangled with anxieties, claims, and counter-claims about media, as well as being bound up with the emergence of Thatcherism amid debate over the merits of philosophical introspection versus ideological certainty in disordered times.
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| 2. |
- Moore, Jason W., 1971-
(författare)
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Environmental crises and the metabolic rift in world-historical perspective
- 2000
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Ingår i: Organization & environment. - 1086-0266 .- 1552-7417. ; 13:2, s. 123-157
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article proposes a new theoretical framework to study the dialectic of capital and nature over the longue durée of world capitalism. The author proposes that today’s global ecological crisis has its roots in the transition to capitalism during the long sixteenth century. The emergence of capitalism marked not only a decisive shift in the arenas of politics, economy, and society, but a fundamental reorganization of world ecology, characterized by a “metabolic rift,” a progressively deepening rupture in the nutrient cycling between the country and the city. Building upon the historical political economy of Marx, Foster, Arrighi, and Wallerstein, the author proposes a new research agenda organized around the concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation. This agenda aims at discerning the ways in which capitalism’s relationship to nature developed discontinuously over time as recurrent ecological crises have formed a decisive moment of world capitalist crisis, forcing successive waves of restructuring over long historical time.
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| 3. |
- Moore, Jason W., 1971-
(författare)
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'Amsterdam is Standing on Norway', Part I : The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648
- 2010
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Ingår i: Journal of Agrarian Change. - 1471-0358 .- 1471-0366. ; 10:1, s. 33-68
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historicalgeography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America)with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe’s overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographicalexpansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodityfrontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism,I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver.This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel’s ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero-American moment of this process in the present essay, Icontend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain’s real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans-Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historicallynecessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation andcommodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries thatfollowed.
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| 4. |
- Fjæstad, Maja, 1976-
(författare)
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Visionen om outtömlig energi : Bridreaktorn i svensk kärnkraftshistoria 1945–80
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The fast breeder is a type of nuclear reactor that aroused much attention in the 1950s and 60s. Its ability to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumes offered promises of cheap and reliable energy, and thereby connected it to utopian ideas about an eternal supply of energy. Furthermore, the ideas of breeder reactors were a vital part of the post-war visions about the nuclear future. This dissertation investigates the plans for breeder reactors in Sweden, connecting them to the contemporary development of nuclear power with heavy or light water and the discussions of nuclear weapons, as well as to the general visions of a prosperous technological future. The history of the Swedish breeder reactor is traced from high hopes in the beginning, via the fiasco of the Swedish heavy water program, partly focusing on the activities at the company AB Atomenergi and investigating how it planned and argued for its breeder program and how this was received by the politicians. The story continues into the intensive environmental movement in the 1970s, ending with the Swedish referendum on nuclear energy in 1980, which can be seen as the final point for the Swedish breeder. The thesis discusses how the nuclear breeder reactor was transformed from an argument for nuclear power to an argument against it. The breeder began as a part of the vision of a society with abundant energy, but was later seen as a threat against the new sustainable world. The nuclear breeder reactor is an example of a technological vision that did not meet its industrial expectations. But that does not prevent the fact that breeder was an influential technology in an age where import decisions about nuclear energy were made. The thesis argues that important decisions about the contemporary reactors were taken with the idea that they in a foreseeable future would be replaced with the efficient breeder. And the last word on the breeder reactor is not said – today, reactor engineers around the world are showing a renewed interest in this elusive reactor type.
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| 5. |
- Moore, Jason W., 1971-
(författare)
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The end of the road? : agricultural revolutions in the capitalist World-ecology, 1450-2010
- 2010
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Ingår i: Journal of Agrarian Change. - : Wiley - Blackwell. - 1471-0358 .- 1471-0366. ; 10:3, s. 389-413
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Does the present socio-ecological impasse – captured in popular discussions of the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil – represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of capitalist development has been paved with ‘cheap’ food. Beginning in the long sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions, yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism, possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that views capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, joining together the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.
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| 6. |
- Kardell, Örjan, 1963-, et al.
(författare)
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Skogsgödslingen i backspegeln : debatten om storskogsbrukets kvävegödsling i Sverige ca 1960-2009
- 2010
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the mid-1960s, fertilization (with nitrogen) had a breakthrough as a forest management method in Swedish company owned forests. The activity grew and peaked during the 1970s but then lost ground and stabilized on a low level in the 1990s and early 2000s. Over the last five years, however, interest in fertilizing Swedish forests has increased again. In this article factors that have shaped these fluctuations are explored. A specific task is to investigate to what extent the fluctuations correlate with debates on environmental issues. Furthermore, conflicting “fundamental ideas” within interest groups, representing forestry and the environmental movement respectively, are identified and analyzed. The study thus sheds some light on how the relationship between forestry and the environmental movement has evolved, from the 1960s until today.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Moore, Jason W., 1971-
(författare)
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Nature and the transition from feudalism to capitalism
- 2003
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Ingår i: Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center. - 0147-9032. ; 26:2, s. 97-172
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An epochal transformation of nature-society relations was inscribed in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This article advances three central propositions. First, the origins of today’s global ecological crisis are found in the emergence of the capitalist world-economy in the “long” sixteenth century - not in industrialization, population growth, or market expansion, as the conventional wisdom would have it. Secondly, the crisis of feudalism was a general crisis not only of medieval Europe’s political economy, but in equal measure an expression of feudalism’s underlying ecological contradictions. Thirdly, the rise of capitalism effected a radical recomposition of world ecology. As early as the sixteenth century, we can see how the emergent logic of capital, which at once implies endless expansion and seeks to flatten socio-ecological diversity, undermined the possibilities for a sustainable relation between nature and society. Capitalism thus differed radically from feudalism and all other precapitalist formations. Where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them. From this standpoint, the origins of capitalism may shed light on today’s ecological crises.
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| 10. |
- Lindkvist, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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Intensive Forestry as Progress or Decay? : An Analysis of the Debate about Forest Fertilization in Sweden, 1960–2010
- 2011
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Ingår i: Forests. - : MDPI Publishing. - 1999-4907 .- 1999-4907. ; 2:1, s. 112-146
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the mid-1960s, fertilization (with nitrogen) had a breakthrough as a promising forest management method in Swedish company owned forests. The activity grew and peaked during the 1970s but then lost ground and stabilized at a low level in the 1990s and early 2000s. Over the last five years, however, interest in fertilizing Swedish forests has increased again. In this article both the forestry industry’s, and the environmental movement’s, attitudes toward forest fertilization over time are investigated. Furthermore, conflicting persistent ideas about nature and future, i.e., “figures of thought”, within interest groups, representing forestry and the environmental movement respectively, are identified and analyzed in relation to the debate on fertilization. The analysis reveals mainly three figures of thought that have influenced this debate during the period, “the idea of progress”, “the idea of decay” and “the idea of the great chain of being”. The study thus sheds light on how the relationship between forestry and the environmental movement has evolved from the 1960s until today and uncovers thought patterns that have stood, and continue to stand, in opposition to one another.
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