This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation created new entrepreneurial business models. While…[Read more]

An essay written for the catalog for the exhibition, “Benga: Kenyan Kaleidoscope” (Bureau Sepän). Originally written in English; French translation by Gabriella Seemann.

Abstract from the catalog:
Se référant à une performance musicale à laquelle il a assisté et impliquant l’un des musiciens les plus en vue du Kenya, Dan Aceda, dans cet ess…[Read more]

This paper examines the agency of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme by considering what the dogs did as experimental subjects, as dog technologies, and as individual dogs in the context of the historically conditioned practices of Soviet science. Looking at how Soviet space researchers refined Pavlovian behaviourism…[Read more]

In this paper we attempt the beginning of a critical study of Amir Khusrau’s contributions to Indian music. A very important book Hazrat Amīr Khusro kā ‘ilm-e-musīqī (The Music of Amir Khusrau), by Rashid Malik, exists in Urdu, which deals extensively with this subject. Unfortunately it is still unavailable in English. This paper draws heavily…[Read more]

In this article we propose to reignite a debate regarding the origin shawm (śahnāī or surnā) that had been started by Nazir Jairazbhoy in 1970 , and taken up by him again in 1980, in response to interesting suggestions by Deva and Dick.

A review of the Bill Viola exhibition at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum including Man Searching For Immortality / Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) and Tristan’s Ascension (2005) in conversation.

Quarter Horses are considered one of the earliest and most enduringly popular breeds of horse that is “native” to the United States.

The American Quarter Horse Association formed as a breed registry in 1940, and set clear rules for what horses could be called Quarter Horses in its stud book. Recently, after several years of legal bac…[Read more]

C. Lloyd Morgan is mostly known for Morgan’s canon (1894), still a popular and frequently quoted principle in comparative psychology and ethology. There has been a fair amount of debate on the canon’s interpretation, function, and value regarding the research on animal minds, usually referring to it as an isolated principle. In this paper we…[Read more]

Recently, international media outlets have celebrated São Paulo for its cosmopolitan musical output and its vibrant street art scenes. That discourse connected the city other generative periods in the histories of so-called “global cities,” such as New York of the 1970s. In those cities, the simultaneous developments of multiple creative scenes…[Read more]

A discussion of whether it makes sense to say that “lab animals” are engaged in a form of labor.

an overview of military research involving pigs, rats, and rabbits at DRDC Downsview [Toronto], from 2004 -2007.

appendix includes military docs secured thru an ATIP request by Animal Alliance Canada.

gender & Judaism in A Serious Man [Coen Bros, 2009], An American Dream [Norman Mailer, 1965] and the Pericope Adulterae.

Die Tierphilosophie ist eines der lebendigsten Felder der Gegenwartsphilosophie. Im Mittelpunkt stehen bislang die Frage nach dem Geist der Tiere, das Problem des Tier-Mensch-Unterschiedes und die Themenfelder der Tierethik. Die auf drei Bände angelegte »Philosophie der Tierforschung« wirft einen neuen Blick auf dieses Gebiet und ergänzt es dur…[Read more]

carnism & consumerism; eco-apocalypse; product placement; copyright

Singing while working and working while singing have appeared to be, throughout history, the same social activity without a clear or categorical distinction. In this paper we explore this field in the industrial shoemaking environment in Menorca (Balearic Islands), regarding it as a social process of adaptation and resistance against contemporary…[Read more]

In the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads, who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, Prudencia’s perspective is challenged by her late-night encounter with the sinister Nick, whose own passion for collecting forces Pru…[Read more]

During the 1920s, the Philadelphia-based American Antivivisection Society turned to racialized metaphors in its circulating periodical, the Starry Cross, to excoriate the expanding practice of vaccination. Since vaccines were then made from animal-derived serums, the involvement of antivivisectionists in antivaccine arguments is not surprising.…[Read more]