While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

Failures of environmental law to preserve, protect and improve the environment are caused by law’s contingency and constitutional presumptions of supremacy over the self-regulatory agency of nature. Contingency problems are intrinsic to law and, therefore, invite deployment of technologies. Constitutional presumptions can be corrected through geo-constitutional reform. The latter requires the elaboration of geo-constitutional principles bestowing authority on nature’s self-regulatory agency. It is suggested that principles of autonomy, loyalty, pre-emption, supremacy and rights have potential to serve that aim and imply proactive roles for technologies in environmental governance. Geo-constitutional reform is necessary to prevent the fatal collapse of the natural regulatory infrastructure enabling life and a future of environmental governance by design. Once environmental catastrophe has materialized, however, geo-constitutionalism loses its raison d’être.

More than ever before, we are surrounded by many forms of media technologies, including film, television, the internet, games, print and audio. The Australian Curriculum focuses on media arts, which incorporates the creative use of these technologies as an art form. The aims, according to ACARA, are that students develop: enjoyment and confidence to participate in, experiment with and interpret the media-rich culture and communications practices that surround them; creative and critical thinking skills through engagement as producers and consumers of media; aesthetic knowledge and a sense of curiosity and discovery as they explore images, text and sound to express ideas, concepts and stories for different audiences; and knowledge and understanding of their active participation in existing and evolving local and global media cultures. In Media Arts, students use images, sound, text, interactive elements and technologies to creatively explore, produce and interpret stories about people, ideas and the world around them. They explore the diverse cultural, social and organisational influences on media practices, and draw on this understanding when producing and responding to media arts works.

This chapter surveys the introduction of new technologies, regional centers of industry, development of business organization, and the broad cultural consequences.

This chapter focuses on the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), Health and Physical Education, Science, Technologies and Languages and we approach these areas using the critical framework of the Ten Teacher Questions. We hope that you may revisit Chapter 6 to refresh your understanding of the ACARA Cross-curriculum Priorities, and as you progress into the Teaching Ideas of this chapter.

The world is undergoing unprecedented change as a result of global population increases, rapid urbanization, and the acceleration of affluence in developing countries, which leads to increased consumption of resources and impactful emissions.

This chapter explores the notion of ‘technologies’ in the Australian Primary Curriculum in the Learning Areas of Design and Technologies, and Digital Technologies, and in the General Capability area of Digital Literacy, and the ways in which they can be used to enhance the learning of science. You will be introduced to contexts that provide opportunities to harness the synergistic relationship between the processes of thinking and working scientifically, and design and production skills, to solve authentic problems or issues. Examples of effective Design Challenges will be presented as ‘hooks’ to gain student interest and to purposefully address required concepts in Science, and Design and Technologies in the Australian Curriculum. Opportunities for including links to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures through a Design and Technologies approach will be included, with links to a range of useful resources.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Black resistance movements are among the most surveilled social movements in American history. From slave insurrections to Jim Crow and Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the government and its accomplices have long worked to monitor and control these movements. This chapter explores the history of Black surveillance and control, elaborating on the impact new technologies and shifting demographics have had on Black resistance movements and their strategies to counter this surveillance and control.

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

Can physics be beneficial for bringing about human moral and spiritual goods? Modern physics is perpetually in search for grand unification of our world-pictures, but its method is arbitrarily self-limiting in ruling out any place in its conception of nature for the human as spiritual and moral beings. But this estrangement between nature and the human has not always been the case. Drawing from Pierre Hadot’s pioneering work, this essay retrieves the notion of physics as ‘spiritual exercise’ from ancient philosophy and early Christianity for reimagining the enterprise of physics today. Envisaged as spiritual exercise, ancient physics goes beyond a mere acquisition of ‘objective’ knowledge of nature towards the fashioning of human moral and spiritual transformation. Illustrating from Origen of Alexandria, I show that this vision of physics is principally grounded upon a metaphysics that unites all parts of nature, including human nature, into a single whole. This chapter argues that it is desirable to retrieve the ancient vision today not as a displacement of modern physics but through the re-invention of natural philosophy alongside it. This retrieval should give urgency to the task of rethinking the desirability of a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of nature for today.

Notwithstanding their specificities, different network infrastructures share a fundamental property: they are embedded in and part of general institutional settings. In this chapter, we focus on this institutional dimension. The main point we make is that institutions are composed of different layers. Identifying and characterizing these layers is both challenging and essential for better understanding the alignment (or misalignment) between institutions and technologies that conditions the performance of specific infrastructures. It is challenging because the usual representations of institutions tend to aggregate and mix or even revise many distinct components such as firms, parliaments, courts, etc. It is essential because it is through the different layers that rights are defined, allocated, implemented, and monitored, thus providing the scaffolding of network infrastructures. A central hypothesis underlying the analysis provided in this chapter is that these infrastructures are socio-technological systems; although subject to physical laws through their technological dimension, their development and usage are framed by human-made rules and rights.

This chapter presents an easily followed overview of computational linguistics and where Arabic fits into it. Computational linguistics, often referred to interchangeably as natural language processing (NLP) or human language technologies, is a large and growing interdisciplinary field of research that lies at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, electrical engineering, cognitive science, psychology, pedagogy, and mathematics, among other fields. Research and work on Arabic computational linguistics has lagged behind English and other languages. This is despite a tremendous increase in the relative growth of Arabic NLP in the period between 2012 and 2016. The reason for its slow start is that Arabic presents a series of difficulties to programmers, those being morphological richness, orthographic ambiguity, dialectal variations, orthographic noise, and resource poverty. Those problems have been or are being overcome, and a new generation of researchers has made great strides in the field. This has partly to do with the growing interest in language technologies for opinion mining and translation in social media, which features dialectal Arabic more than MSA. Another motivation is that commercial giants like Apple and Google are interested in applications of Arabic as it is spoken.

The chapter presents temporal and spatial trends of main water indicators. Attention is given to the interaction between water resources and society over time in various parts of the world, the effects of climate change on the available water supplies, the technological means available to cope with water scarcity and deteriorated quality, the institutional and legal means developed in different countries, and the types of decisions needed to manage water resources. As such, the chapter motivates the book’s structure and contents.