Matthew Kelly – författare

Granite, a tough composite of quartz, feldspar and mica, is the stuff of Dartmoor, the most formidable of the five granite bosses punctuating Britain’s southwest peninsula. A miserable place of rain and bog or a sunny upland of exquisite natural beauty, here the elements are raw, the sky huge and nature seems ascendant.But it is no less a place made by human beings. Stone circles, crosses, dwellings and boundaries speak of the ancient, medieval and modern people that extracted a living from the moorscape and created what it is today. Where convicts are incarcerated, backpackers roam freely; where commoners graze livestock, the army is trained; where the National Park Authority exercises control, the Duchy of Cornwall claims ownership. And Dartmoor remains a place that provides. Reservoirs hold the water drunk by local people. China clay is extracted from its mineral reserves. Not long ago granite was quarried from its hillsides. What is modern Dartmoor and what should it be? Did druids officiate here? Can the bog be drained and crops grown? Is it the place for a prison? And what of its people’s future, and the fate of its ponies, cows and sheep? For three hundred years such questions have been asked of the moor. Quartz and Feldspar does not so much provide answers as unearth those who did and the arguments they provoked.

In 1970, the Architectural Press published New Lives, New Landscapes, Nan Fairbrother's optimistic account of how the British landscape was materially transformed in the post-war decades. Reservoirs, power stations, television and radio-transmitter masts, electricity and telephone pylons, as well as local authority housing and new or improved roads, produced a new rurality. So too did state-subsidised agricultural intensification, wider public access to the countryside, and environmentally protective measures. These included landscape designations such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Central to Fairbrother's approach was the concomitant transformation in how British people interacted with these new landscapes in an age of increased mobility. This new edited collection of essays, New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain brings a fresh historical perspective to bear on Fairbrother's concerns. It examines how the changing relationship between government, state, and citizen gave rise to a distinct rural modernity during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

A vibrant history of English landscape preservation over the last 150 years, told through the lives of four remarkable women  In Britain today, a mosaic of regulations protects the natural environment and guarantees public access to green spaces. But this was not always so. Over the last 150 years, activists have campaigned tirelessly for the right to roam through the countryside and the vital importance of preserving Britain’s natural beauty.  Matthew Kelly traces the history of landscape preservation through the lives of four remarkable women: Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Pauline Dower, and Sylvia Sayer. From the commons of London to the Lake District, Northumberland, and Dartmoor, these women protected the English landscape at a crucial period through a mixture of environmental activism, networking, and sheer determination.  They grappled with the challenges that urbanization and industrial modernity posed to human well-being as well as the natural environment. By tirelessly seeking to reconcile the needs of particular places to the broader public interest they helped reimagine the purpose of the English countryside for the democratic age.

This volume brings together case studies from around the globe (including China, Latin America, the Philippines, Namibia, India and Europe) to explore the history of nature conservation in the twentieth century. It seeks to highlight the state, a central actor in these efforts, which is often taken for granted, and establishes a novel concept – the nature state – as a means for exploring the historical formation of that portion of the state dedicated to managing and protecting nature.Following the Industrial Revolution and post-war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which sociopolitical regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states. This innovative work marks an early intervention in the tentative turn towards the state in environmental history and will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history, social anthropology and conservation studies.

This volume brings together case studies from around the globe (including China, Latin America, the Philippines, Namibia, India and Europe) to explore the history of nature conservation in the twentieth century. It seeks to highlight the state, a central actor in these efforts, which is often taken for granted, and establishes a novel concept – the nature state – as a means for exploring the historical formation of that portion of the state dedicated to managing and protecting nature.Following the Industrial Revolution and post-war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which sociopolitical regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states. This innovative work marks an early intervention in the tentative turn towards the state in environmental history and will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history, social anthropology and conservation studies.

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history.  Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.List of contributors: Matthew Kelly, Helen O’Connell, David Brown, Colin W. Reid, Huston Gilmore, Ronan Foley, Juliana Adelman, Mary Orr, Patrick Maume and Seán Hewitt.

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history.  Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.List of contributors: Matthew Kelly, Helen O’Connell, David Brown, Colin W. Reid, Huston Gilmore, Ronan Foley, Juliana Adelman, Mary Orr, Patrick Maume and Seán Hewitt.

Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.” And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the twenty-first century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.” And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the twenty-first century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice is an interdisciplinary inquiry focusing on four decades of work by the South African information scientist, Emeritus Professor Archie Dick. The edited volume brings together library, information and history specialists to engage with a number of Professor Dick’s areas of research focus: the culture and philosophy of information (especially with regard to questions of epistemology); information freedom (how censorship and media concentration affects political agency); reading and publishing cultures (especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts) and focuses on how these affect information education for diverse, multicultural and cosmopolitan communities. How our understanding of true belief is justified at the level of classification, indexation, curation and publishing have become significant issues in the transition to digital environments. This work seeks to harness a range of insights relating to the modes of knowledge representation in information spaces and to uncover how these impact globally significant repertoires of agency, with a special focus on how the mediation of reading and access to public knowledge is both a site of resistance and appropriation.

For several decades Rafael Capurro has been at the forefront of defining the relationship between information and modernity through both phenomenological and ethical formulations. In exploring both of these themes Capurro has re-vivified the transcultural and intercultural expressions of how we bring an understanding of information to bear on scientific knowledge production and intermediation. Capurro has long stressed the need to look deeply into how we contextualize the information problems that scientific society creates for us and to re-incorporate a pragmatic dimension into our response that provides a balance to the cognitive turn in information science.With contributions from 35 scholars from 15 countries, Information Cultures in the Digital Age focuses on the culture and philosophy of information, information ethics, the relationship of information to message, the historic and semiotic understanding of information, the relationship of information to power and the future of information education. This Festschrift seeks to celebrate Rafael Capurro’s important contribution to a global dialogue on how information conceptualisation, use and technology impact human culture and the ethical questions that arise from this dynamic relationship.