School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemA toolkit for open and pluralistic conservation science(WILEY, 2022-09-30)
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ItemIsrael’s Shakespeare- The Literary Canvass of S.Y Agnon(Outrigger, 2022-10-20)The essay examines the vast literary corpus of f Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the 1966 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first granted to a Hebrew writer. The essay examines his seminal short stories and novels that raised Hebrew literature to a global plane, blending authentic Jewish heritage with European sources to present instructive tales that posit a moral and legal conundrum reflective of the modern condition.
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ItemAlternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-07-01)Recent research has highlighted the emergence of “alternative social media” platforms. Developed by open source communities with non-commercial goals, these platforms can offer more expansive participatory cultures than corporate platforms. However, such platforms also involve new kinds of participatory challenges, such as requiring high technological literacy. This article examines the complexity of enacting participatory cultures by drawing on an ethnographic study of Scuttlebutt, a decentralized social media platform being developed by an open source community. This examination focuses on three key features of participatory culture as enacted on Scuttlebutt: varying modes and sites of participation; reflexivity about who is participating and how; and an evaluation of limits to participation. It also considers the challenges that arise from Scuttlebutt’s approach and how these highlight the profound difficulty of trying to enact fuller models of participatory culture. From these findings, we argue that Scuttlebutt provides an important example of the experimentation that alternative social media platforms are conducting around open, democratic modes of socio-technical organizing, and note that this experimentation raises important questions about how we conceptualize participation and the future of social media.
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ItemFlorrie Hodges: On Being Brave(Royal Historical Society of Victoria, 2020-06-01)In 1926, a teenage girl from Powelltown named Florrie Hodges became a national celebrity owing to her bravery in the face of extreme bushfire danger. She was awarded a medal by the Royal Humane Society of Australasia for the selfless act of courage that saved the lives of her three younger siblings, but she suffered terrible physical and mental injuries in the process. With the help of the descendants of Florrie's extended family, who shared their memories of Florrie after the fires, this historical note reflects upon the relationship between celebrity and heroics and the intergenerational impact of untreated trauma.
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ItemChildren in the Roman Farming Economy: Evidence, Problems and Possibilities(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)Children’s roles within Roman farming have been little explored, despite a flood of recent work on many aspects of childhood in Roman society. Children were an important economic cohort, however, and would have made up a large group within the potential labour force of any farm. Close examination of textual and visual sources suggests that children played specific economic roles. Further, ethnographic studies on children’s farm work in the Mediterranean and beyond in more recent times reveal considerable correspondence with ancient practices. The allocation of certain categories of tasks to children appears highly consistent across time and geographic location. By combining these groups of evidence, we can consider the extent to which children’s labour would have contributed to the Roman farming economy. Children’s work should not be seen as insignificant or marginal: rather, it played an essential part, as in later times, within the economics of farm work.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTamara’s secrets( 2021)As the historical researcher for The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, I felt a buzz of excitement every time my phone beeped with another question from Anna. How could I discover the answer for her to use in the story? Would there be a clue hidden in an ancient painting, a poem, or a Roman rubbish tip? Here, I have written down where I hunted, and what I discovered.
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ItemOn Mr Truetemp's Lack of Virtue(Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brasil, 2022)Keith Lehrer’s case of Mr Truetemp, whose reliably formed true beliefs about the temperature are the result of a tempucomp implanted in his head, is designed as a counter-example to process reliabilism. In this short note, the example is explored from the point of view of the two main forms of virtue epistemology. It is suggested that Truetemp’s reliably formed true beliefs about the temperature fail to be virtuously formed in either the sense of the virtue reliabilist or the virtue responsibilist. Hence, virtue epistemology is able to handle the case of Mr Truetemp.
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ItemOrthodoxy and heterodoxy in the Post-war Era(Oxford University Press, 2022-03-07)This chapter focuses on the responses of physicists such as Heisenberg, Pauli, von Neumann, Born, Dirac and Jordan, to the new wave of criticisms of quantum mechanics that emerged after the Second World War. The various attempts to defend the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ took the form of a series of retrospective reconstructions that often went beyond anything we can find in the writings of the late 1920s or 30s. Various interpretational commitments were appropriated, reinterpreted, and, in some cases, even revised. The postwar orthodoxy was a dialectical response to the new challenges it faced in the early 1950s. Yet this dialectic did not lead to a uniform ‘orthodox’ position. It was therefore never an orthodoxy in the true sense of the word. Far from creating a unitary Copenhagen interpretation, the postwar debates had the effect of dramatically expanding the range of interpretations that bore the label “orthodox” or “Copenhagen”.
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ItemH. Dieter Zeh and the History of the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics(Springer International Publishing, 2022-01-01)H. D. Zeh’s early work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his struggle for recognition provides an instructive case study in the history of the re-emergence of the foundations of quantum mechanics in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter I examine Zeh’s early work on decoherence and the obstacles he faced in Heidelberg in winning support for his controversial ideas. Zeh’s commitment to the Everett interpretation undoubtedly served as a major obstacle to the wider recognition of his early theoretical contributions to the understanding of decoherence. It was only through the divorcing of interpretation from the study of the dynamics of environment-induced decoherence in the 1980s that Zeh’s work began to attract renewed attention from a number of physicists. This occurred largely through the work of Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s and 90s. However, Zeh’s struggles were not simply the result of his unorthodox views on interpretation. Unlike Zurek, Zeh did not enjoy the luxury of the backing and support of senior colleagues who were sympathetic to his theoretical interests. Whereas Zurek befitted immensely from his association with John Wheeler, whose reputation gave him the freedom to pursue foundational questions, Zeh found himself increasingly marginalized in Heidelberg with little prospect of professional advancement. The story of Zeh’s early struggles thus constitute an important chapter in the history of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
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ItemQuantum mechanics comes of age(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-07)