From Imperial Port City to Logistics Hub: The Production of Strategic Space in Djibouti (1859–2020)

This article examines what I call the production of strategic space, or the process whereby a particular place, the Republic of Djibouti, and its capital, the port city of Djibouti, became strategically valuable to different states over time, including the French Empire, the United States, and China. Throughout the period from 1859 to the present day, Djibouti’s strategic value has fluctuated as states reacted to different political and economic contexts. These events constantly shifted state interests, re-configuring their conceptions of the importance of Djibouti’s territory. As a result of this process, spaces within Djibouti became strategic relative to other spaces. In particular, the port has been more important to the French authorities and other outsiders than the desert hinterland, which was treated mainly as a useless wasteland. The various authorities organized space within Djibouti to reflect these government priorities, which had a profound impact on its inhabitants’ mobilities, economic opportunities, and political freedoms. The ordering of space within Djibouti reflected state interests, exposing the relationship between geography and power, strategy and spatial organization.

Evaluation of Ti–Mn Alloys for Additive Manufacturing Using High-Throughput Experimental Assays and Gaussian Process Regression

Compositionally graded cylinders of Ti–Mn alloys were produced using the Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS™) technique, with Mn content varying from 0 to 12 wt.% along the cylinder axis. The cylinders were subjected to different post-build heat treatments to produce a large sample library of α–β microstructures. The microstructures in the sample library were studied using back-scattered electron (BSE) imaging in a scanning electron microscope (SEM), and their mechanical properties were evaluated using spherical indentation stress–strain protocols. These protocols revealed that the microstructures exhibited features with averaged chord lengths in the range of 0.17–1.78 μm, and beta content in the range of 20–83 vol.%. The estimated values of the Young’s moduli and tensile yield strengths from spherical indentation were found to vary in the ranges of 97–130 GPa and 828–1864 MPa, respectively. The combined use of the LENS technique along with the spherical indentation protocols was found to facilitate the rapid exploration of material and process spaces. Analyses of the correlations between the process conditions, several key microstructural features, and the measured material properties were performed via Gaussian process regression (GPR). These data-driven statistical models provided valuable insights into the underlying correlations between these variables.

Building new narratives: academies, aspiration and the education market

This chapter introduces readers to Dreamfields Academy, a flagship secondary academy located in the English city of Goldport. It also introduces the academy program more generally and its roots within marketised education reforms of the 1980s. Academies presented an apolitical, technocratic means of overwriting narratives of educational failure in urban boroughs and securing investment. Yet through this process spaces of negotiation formerly provided by local authorities were forced out of existence as power is transferred to central government and its private sector partners. These reforms do not aim to provide practical equality, but focus on individualized aspiration while instating authoritarian methods as a means of disciplining racialised and classed populations.