Each year, twice a year, musicians flock to the Catskill Mountain hamlet of East Durham, New York, transforming this otherwise sleepy town into a bustling site of music, dancing, and parties. East Durham is home to multiple Irish cultural festivals a year, but two stand out for their focus on Irish traditional music: the Catskills Irish Arts Week and the Northeast Tionól. These festivals, affectionately referred to collectively as “the Catskills,” are curious in their allure. Sprawled across a three-mile stretch of rural highway, most festival facilities are rundown and date to the heyday of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, when East Durham was an enclave of Irish American resort vacationers. Dotting the side of the road are more vacant and dilapidated buildings than there are in use. Yet, musicians attend each year with fervor, citing both the difficulties of the location and its pleasurable potentials as core to the “Catskills” experience. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and interviews, I examine this affective ambivalence and how it is structured by sensory qualities unique to the physical geography and infrastructure of the Catskill Mountains. Though these sensory experiences are characterized with a negative valence, they generate positive musical experiences, creative production, and deep sociality. I argue that this affective transformation occurs because the sensational features of the Catskills provoke reflexive encounters among musicians that resonate with and amplify values central to Irish traditional music making.

Since the emergence of the Thule culture (AD 1200), dog sledding has been perceived as a central means of transportation in traditional Inuit life in the Arctic. However, there is an absence of research concerning Inuit dog-sled technology and the tradition of the craft. This study investigates the Inuit dog-sled technocomplex using enskilment methodologiesby employing experimental and ethno-archaeological observations to explore the relationship between knowledge and technical practice. It involves the reconstruction of a historical West Greenlandic dog sled, shedding light on carpentry techniques and construction processes. This method emphasizes the interaction between humans, technology, and time, providing essential practical data for future archaeological and historical research, particularly for comprehending fragmented archaeological remains. By focusing on process rather than end product, this research provides insight into understanding Inuit dog sled technology and the complexity of the practice. The connection between artifacts and materially situated practice is demonstrated through the reconstruction of a dog sled, which illustrates the value of physicality in enskilment. It highlights how experimental archaeology can improve our insights into the historical and prehistoric Arctic societies’ technologies, economies, and practices.

Alfred Marshall used an evolutionary theory of race to ground individual psychology and explain economic behavior. The psychological theory, drawn from Herbert Spencer, explained British and US industrial leadership by the innate excellences of Anglo-Saxon workers and entrepreneurs, without invoking colonialism or other uses of state power. It also asserted the internal solidarity of Anglo-Saxons. Because they were inclined to help each other, argued Marshall, Anglo-Saxons could handle laissez-faire. The paper situates Marshall in conversation with Anglican liberals like F. D. Maurice, and argues that a shared racial consciousness worked as a common ground among Coleridgean Romantics and radicals like Mill and Spencer who needed a category of the nation that did not rely on the state.

Assessment of occupational exoskeletons should ideally include longitudinal and multistage studies in real working scenarios to prove their effectiveness and sustainability in real in-field contexts and to help generalize the findings for specific scenarios. This work presents a comprehensive assessment methodology implemented as a multistage experimental campaign for rail industry workers using a back-support exoskeleton (StreamEXO). This work demonstrates that a sector/task-specific exoskeleton developed to address work task-specific requirements generates beneficial performance and user experience results. The experimental work in this paper involves collecting data from nine workers over multiple days of testing. During this testing, workers did not report hindrances to their work operations, with an acceptance rate of 86%. In addition, worker fatigue was reduced by 16.9% as measured through metabolic consumption, and 51% when assessed by perceived effort. This work supports the hypothesis that sector/task-specific exoskeletons when tailored to meet the needs of workers and the work tasks can produce demonstrable benefits in real industrial sectors.

The commons are defined by non-excludability – the idea that none can exclude another from access or use. Likewise, space lawyers portray their discipline’s origin story as uniquely egalitarian and inclusive, in part because of how it was made. The 1963 Principles Declaration and 1967 Outer Space Treaty were drafted by a committee of 28 states that decided by consensus – the first permanent UN body to do so. They worked in the midst of significant colonial and Cold War tensions to form a body of law which implicated the interests of every state. This article argues that the lawmaking which made space ‘common’ was made possible by excluding the Third World. It uses historical sources from 18 archives to shed new light on the process of making space law from 1957 to 1967. Based on this, it explores various factors, from UN documentation practices to American racial segregation, that cumulatively prevented Third World representatives from meaningful participation in space lawmaking. These factors had broad impacts on the drafting committee’s membership, attendance, decision-making procedure, and final products. By seeking to understand this ‘small history’ of a niche field at a specific historical moment, this article also adds to ongoing work that questions the axioms by which international lawyers interpret treaties today.