The open secret: Hiding and revealing sexuality in the roman de moeurs (1880-1905)

Beginning with the sole literary text that does figure at any length in the first volume of Foucault's history--Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets, which dates from 1748--Cryle examines some semiotic routines involved in that telling of secrets, and to understand more about scientia sexualis through its literary development. He tries to show that narratives of the time tended to gather the mysterious, the unknown, and the generally inscrutable in the same functional place, holding them close to a thematics of the sexual. And returns to eighteenth-century texts from time to time in order to mark this as a fundamental shift in the literary constitution of sexual knowledge.

The interaction between technologies and society: Lessons learnt from 160 evolutionary years of online news services

In mapping the evolutionary process of online news and the socio-cultural factors determining this development, this paper has a dual purpose. First, in reworking the definition of “online communication”, it argues that despite its seemingly sudden emergence in the 1990s, the history of online news started right in the early days of the telegraphs and spread throughout the development of the telephone and the fax machine before becoming computer-based in the 1980s and Web-based in the 1990s. Second, merging macro-perspectives on the dynamic of media evolution by DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach (1989) and Winston (1998), the paper consolidates a critical point for thinking about new media development: that something technically feasible does not always mean that it will be socially accepted and/or demanded. From a producer-centric perspective, the birth and development of pre-Web online news forms have been more or less generated by the traditional media’s sometimes excessive hype about the power of new technologies. However, placing such an emphasis on technological potentials at the expense of their social conditions not only can be misleading but also can be detrimental to the development of new media, including the potential of today’s online news.

Kosovo and international society

This book explains the international engagement with the Kosovo conflict from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to Operation Allied Force. It shows how Kosovo was deliberately excluded from the search for peace in Yugoslavia before going on to demonstrate how a shaky international consensus was forged to support air strikes in 1999. In doing so, it exposes many of the myths and conspiracy theories that have developed about the war and explains the dilemmas facing actors in this unfolding drama.