Reel-to-reel recordings and 15 kilocycle telelinks converge in Maryanne Amacher's telematic installation series City-Links (1967–81). As long-duration recordings of urban sites, City-Links queries the musicality of ambient sound on tape, a question of critical importance to many composers of the period. But as expressly telematic tape, City-Links embeds these recordings within a transforming US telecommunications industry where expanded long-distance dialing relied on the high-tech labour and gendered discipline of telephone operators, enrolling tapes’ ambient sounding in broader questions about the technological mediation of gender, listening and long-distance embodiment during City-Links late 1960s and 1970s span. An extended reconstruction of one City-Links's tape's tactile qualities interprets this complex interimplication as a kind of telematic ‘weave’, with a spatiotemporal warp shuttling between the weft of environmental sounds and their technical traces.

Listeners of a certain age tend to think that the cassette tape fell out of favour sometime during the 1990s, but is experiencing a revival of sorts as curious Millennials discover the pleasures of mixtapes and decaying media. But cassette tapes have been in constant use since their invention in 1963. Outside of North America and Western Europe, the tape is still the predominant phonographic medium, and is unseating hard drives as the preferred medium for data storage. For whom, then, is this a revival? My article argues that the tape revival is less an attempt at neutral recuperation of the past than a purposeful rewriting of history. Cassettes are particularly potent because they signify death and decay more forcefully even than vinyl. Their acoustic imperfections and mechanical frailties are now aestheticized in novels and contemporary popular music. Even curated listening experiences, from podcasts to streaming services, are designed to replicate the mixtape. The second era of the cassette tape represents another example of Simon Reynolds’ concept of retromania, and can be fruitfully understood as a chapter in the evolving story of phonographic waste.

Precarious labour has been on the rise globally since the 1970s and 1980s. Changing labour relations in the cleaning industry are an example of these developments. From the 1970s onwards, outsourcing changed the position of industrial cleaners fundamentally: subcontracting companies were able to reduce labour costs by recruiting mainly women and immigrants with a weak position in the labour market. For trade unions, it was hard to find a way to counteract this tendency and to organize these workers until the Justice for Janitors (J4J) campaigns, set up by the US-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from the late 1980s, showed that an adequate trade union response was possible. From the mid-2000s, the SEIU launched a strategy to form international coalitions outside the US. It met a favourable response in several countries. In the Netherlands, a campaign modelled on the J4J repertoire proved extraordinarily successful. In this article, transnational trade unionism in the cleaning industry based on the J4J model will be analysed with a special focus on the Dutch case. How were local labour markets and trade union actions related to the transnational connections apparent in the rise of multinational cleaning companies, the immigrant workforce, and the role of the SEIU in promoting international cooperation between unions?

On 16 September 1976, in the neighbourhood of Cite du Havre in Montréal, Québec, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter named Christina ‘Tia’ Blake recorded a demo tape in Studio A of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Tia had responded to a general request from CBC Radio looking for original songs written by local artists. She recorded three original songs that Thursday, including one song about her father and another written for an old boyfriend. She and the CBC producer listened to the playback together. The producer shook his head. There was nothing there he could use. He gave Tia the tape to keep.

Facilitating access to asylum and other forms of refugee protection for the millions displaced by mass atrocities in Syria and Iraq is essential to the implementation of the international norm of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). This responsibility, however, has been disproportionately shouldered by several states in the Middle East and Europe. This article explores the challenges associated with refugee responsibility-sharing in the context of RtoP and draws on work in climate justice and political realism to articulate a framework for integrating culpability as a key criterion in allocating states’ responsibilities to protect refugees. An empirical and normative assessment of U.S. responsibilities to protect refugees in the cases of conflict-induced displacement in Syria and Iraq outlines several potential paths of culpability. The article ultimately argues for greater attention to culpability, equity, and legitimacy within the discourse surrounding RtoP and refugee protection. The article also advocates linking the benefits of refugee responsibility-sharing with states’ national interests and highlights several such links with regard to U.S. responsibilities in Syria and Iraq.

Visual documenters made a major contribution to the recording of the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration. By far the best known were the professional photographers, Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, hired to photograph British and Australasian expeditions. But a great number of images – photographs and artworks – were also produced by amateurs on lesser known European expeditions and a Japanese one. These amateurs were sometimes designated official illustrators, often scientists recording their research. This paper offers a discursive examination of illustrations from the Belgian Antarctic Expedition (1897–1899), German Deep Sea Expedition (1898–1899), German South Polar Expedition (1901–1903), Swedish South Polar Expedition (1901–1903), French Antarctic Expedition (1903–1905) and Japanese Antarctic Expedition (1910–1912), assessing their representations of exploration in Antarctica in terms of the tension between emotive/aesthetic and systematic analytic/scientific motifs. Their depictions were influenced by their illustrative skills and their ‘ways of seeing’, produced from their backgrounds and the sponsorship needs of the expedition.

On examine les étapes par lesquelles en français le sujet non exprimé (S0) et le sujet postposé au verbe (VS) ont régressé, sans disparaître, jusqu’à l’état moderne, entre le 9e s. et le premier tiers du 17e s. Dès le milieu du 16e s., les taux d'expression et d'antéposition du sujet au verbe sont comparables à ceux du français moderne, la syntaxe du sujet conservant par ailleurs des constructions archaïques. Sur un corpus de dix-sept extraits de textes diversifiés (11e–20e s.), on analyse dans quel ordre et selon quelle chronologie les facteurs corrélés à S0 ou VS depuis l'ancien français ont disparu, à quel moment les traits régressifs S0 et VS sont devenus des traits distinctifs caractérisant des constructions spécifiques, à quel moment et dans quelles constructions se situent les derniers développements de ce changement, et à partir de quelle période se trouvent des textes offrant – et n'offrant que – la syntaxe du sujet moderne.

Theological explorations of law have sometimes followed a “prophetic” model in which scripture or theological ethics serves as the primary norm for human law. After all, if God has spoken his Law into the world, especially a world beset by sin and oppression, should not human law answer to that Law? Moreover, is not law more authoritative when it is “found” or “discovered” within the framework of divine revelation than when it is “made” autonomously by fallen human beings?

Research partnerships with northern communities hold promise for capacity and resilience against environmental changes. Given their historical ecological and cultural relationship with and, thus, ongoing concern for polar bears, Inuit communities are keen to participate in monitoring programmes. In spite of this, northern communities continue to meet polar bear research and collaborations with some resistance. Here, we summarise and report interviews with Nunavummiut from four communities on Inuit experiences with polar bears and research perspectives. Research interactions reveal ongoing cultural, socio-ecological and ethical barriers to polar bear research projects. Research licenses and standardised ethics procedures do not always guarantee collaborations. Adaptable research methods, mutual understanding and open dialogue are essential to form strong research partnerships with northern communities.

The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) is a unique institution with a history that is closely related to Norwegian policy regarding Svalbard, and to clever development of a highly specialised Arctic university institution by all the Norwegian universities. In practical terms, Norwegian sovereignty on the archipelago as confirmed by the Treaty of Svalbard of 1920 and regulated by the Svalbard Law of 1925, is maintained by the presence of Norwegian civil authorities and communities. Today, the “capital” Longyearbyen with its 2100 inhabitants is a modern hub for industry, education, research, logistics and tourism. Founded in 1993, UNIS has become a main contributor to this community, generating some 20% of the total economic activity. A prime motivation for establishing UNIS was to provide a supplement and alternative to the unprofitable, heavily subsidized coal mining industry, by using the location for research based education. In 2015, the mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullkompani (SNSK) met with deep crisis again and significantly downscaled its coal production and work force. Thus, UNIS may play an even more important role as a cornerstone of the local community in the future. This paper discusses the establishment and development of UNIS, its organisation, capacity, and academic production in terms of student graduation and its scientific output, just as its future potential for growth is evaluated. Finally, we discuss the increasingly important role of science and education in Norwegian Svalbard policy.