A journey through the United Fruit Company’s photo archive and its documentation of corporate expansion into the Caribbean.

The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations was met with considerable resistance. Now the company’s photographic records are the focal point of Archive Matter as it examines photography’s historical and political impact through the argument that this overlooked, but important, archive made capitalist expansion into the Caribbean possible.

Author Liliana Gómez examines the images from within their “optical unconscious” and via the archive’s silences and omissions. The implication of these silences, Gómez argues, is the attempt to conceal the violence embedded within the realities of the plantations’ daily operations and corporate efforts to “modernize” the Caribbean.

A Laboratory of Her Own gathers diverse voices to address women's interaction with STEM fields in the context of Spanish cultural production. This volume focuses on the many ways the arts and humanities provide avenues for deepening the conversation about how women have been involved in, excluded from, and represented within the scientific realm.

While women's historic exclusion from STEM fields has been receiving increased scrutiny worldwide, women within the Spanish context have been perhaps even more peripheral given the complex sociocultural structures emanating from gender norms and political ideologies dominant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. Nonetheless, Spanish female cultural producers have long been engaged with science and technology, as expressed in literature, art, film, and other genres. Spanish arts and letters offer diverse representations of the relationships between women, gender, sexuality, race, and STEM fields.

A Laboratory of Her Own studies representations of a diverse range of Spanish women and scientific cultural products from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. STEM topics include the environment, biodiversity, temporal and spatial theories, medicine and reproductive rights, neuroscience, robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. These scientific themes and other issues are analyzed in narratives, paintings, poetry, photographs, science fiction, medical literature, translation, newswriting, film, and other forms.

A first attempt to present an approach to Ukrainian history which goes beyond the standard 'national narrative' schemes, predominant in the majority of post-Soviet countries after 1991, in the years of implementing 'nation-building projects'.An unrivalled collection of essays by the finest scholars in the field from Ukraine, Russia, USA, Germany, Austria and Canada, superbly written to a high academic standard. The various chapters are methodologically innovative and thought-provoking. The biggest Eastern European country has ancient roots but also the birth pangs of a new autonomous state. Its historiography is characterized by animated debates, in which this book takes a definite stance. The history of Ukraine is not written here as a linear, teleological narrative of ethnic Ukrainians but as a multicultural, multidimensional history of a diversity of cultures, religious denominations, languages, ethical norms, and historical experience. It is not presented as causal explanation of 'what has to have happened' but rather as conjunctures and contingencies, disruptions, and episodes of 'lack of history.'