This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.
In 2004, the remains of two First World War US soldiers from France were delivered to the US Government for identification and burial. One set of remains was identified and buried, and the other went into a cold-case status. In 2019, the second individual was identified using multiple lines of evidence. The possible individuals that could be associated with the remains were reduced based on material evidence recovered with the remains and the spatiotemporal historical context of the remains. The First World War personnel records then offered sufficient biometric criteria to narrow the possible individuals associated with the second recovered individual to one person, Pfc. Charles McAllister. A family reference DNA sample from a direct matrilineal descendant of the individual added statistical weight to the identification, although the mtDNA was not a decisive or necessary factor in the identification. Due to bureaucratic reasons, the legal identification of Pfc. Charles McAllister is still pending.
-scaled, and which, in unmasking the distractions of instantaneous creative images, offers unsentimental reference points for locating our own spatio-temporal condition. 136 Stitching memories Notes 1 Aspects of this chapter were published in Wells (2013b). 2 Nanna Verhoeff has suggested that mobile digital cartography enables a shift from the representation to the performance of space. She notes that in the process, the potential pitfalls of representation are avoided, and the viewer is repositioned as central (Bounegru, 2009). 3 Weileder’s interest in working to a 1
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
that the relation between digital mapping and its temporalities should be conceived as plural, dynamic and situated. Also, as digital mappings are approached in this book from an interdisciplinary angle – as medial, cartographic and technological practices – d ifferent scholarly perspectives reveal different understandings of temporalities. These twin concerns with dynamism, and plural responses to dynamism, are the central foci of this volume. The chapters in this book reflect this multiplicity of tempo-spatialities rather than spatio-temporalities.1 Many of the
story that hangs, counter-intuitively, on the disorientation of mapping, but which finds concomitant re-orientations through nodes, ways and relations. It is a story of cartographic bricolage – of making do (de Certeau, 1984); of mapping subjectivities and time-travelling. There is some degree of cartographic orientation on-hand for guidance; these orientations come in the form of GPS traces and geodesic coordinates. The GPS traces are spatio-temporal riffs, the lived, living and to-be-lived traces of walks, bus and train journeys taken in or near the accompanying
that new media introduce specific spatio-temporal frames for our perception of time draws on a line of thought pointing back at least to Walter Benjamin’s (1969) famous essay, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. Benjamin points out that not only nature but also historical circumstances – including media development – organise and reorganise human perception. New modes of production can lead to new modes of cultural reproduction and introduce new modes of perception (Benjamin, 1969: 222). Benjamin sees the big shift in modernity in the possibility
) suggests it is imperative to reconsider places, not as a bounded and defined, but as spaces with histories. This is particularly salient at a time ‘when things are speeding up’ due to time-space compression and when the global and the local become ever more intimately intertwined. It is a time when ‘history itself is imagined as the product of layer-upon-layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world’ (Massey, 1991: 29). But if we were to invert that assertion, as we have tried to do throughout this volume, to focus not on spatio-temporality, but
a derelict factory into a street theatre production centre modifies the spatial repertoires of the surrounding area even for those who never see the company perform. In this book, street theatre consists of both a set of institutions that form publics and a series of events that engage with spectators. The events in question might not involve plot or character, but I call them theatre because they facilitate modes of spatio-temporal perception that are fundamentally theatrical. Theatre excels at transforming one space into another. Purpose-built stages become
sense, the ‘circle of representation’ entails the imaginative process of combining the manifold of sense data and intuitions into the phenomenal experience of a single consciousness, which culminates in the ability to apply concepts to objects and thereby to identify, recognize and distinguish between them. This process unifies sensibility, understanding and judgement in relation to the spatiotemporal condition