This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.

At the 1988 IAU General Assembly in Baltimore, among many who offered reminiscences of earlier meetings was Charlotte Moore Sitterly. She first attended the 1932 GA meeting, in Cambridge, Mass., though she already “helped to assemble material for delegates” since the 1920s, for astronomers at Princeton, Mount Wilson and Lick Observatory. She was an ardent member of the new Commission 14 (then called “Fundamental Spectroscopic Data”), eventually becoming its president. In her 1988 reminiscence, she recalled that the Commission meeting was sparsely attended and very informal, but astronomers’ “never-ending demand for tables and data analysis” soon changed all that (Sitterly 1988). Here we provide a brief overview of how Charlotte Moore Sitterly came to be at the very center of that change, which Donald Menzel early on described as having “turned chaos into order” and just a “little short of miraculous” (Menzel 1928) We will recount highlights of her early life, aspirations, training, and contributions during her years at Princeton, Berkeley, Mount Wilson, and the National Bureau of Standards.

Publications of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), such as Proceedings of IAU Symposia and Colloquia, contain biographical notes and papers as well as obituaries. Of great value are also the death announcements in the IAU Information Bulletins that contain the only biographical data known for about 200 astronomers. The kind of data given in these announcements varied over time. References to these data can be found in the Biographical Index of Astronomy. Recently the printed announcements were replaced by entries in the on-line IAU membership database.

In this article, we use clothes as a tool for exploring the life stories and narratives of people with dementia, eliciting memories through the sensory and material dimensions of dress. The article draws on an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study, ‘Dementia and Dress’, which explored everyday experiences of clothing for carers, care workers and people with dementia, using qualitative and ethnographic methods including: ‘wardrobe interviews’, observations, and visual and sensory approaches. In our analysis, we use three dimensions of dress as a device for exploring the experiences of people with dementia: kept clothes, as a way of retaining connections to memories and identity; discarded clothes, and their implications for understanding change and loss in relation to the ‘dementia journey’; and absent clothes, invoked through the sensory imagination, recalling images of former selves, and carrying identity forward into the context of care. The article contributes to understandings of narrative, identity and dementia, drawing attention to the potential of material objects for evoking narratives, and maintaining biographical continuity for both men and women. The paper has larger implications for understandings of ageing and care practice; as well as contributing to the wider Material Turn in gerontology, showing how cultural analyses can be applied even to frail older groups who are often excluded from such approaches.

Selected events of the scientific biography of Wojtek Dziembowski are briefly described, and several related photos are presented. The full version of the presentation is available at the IAU Symposium 301 webpage.

Owen Bruce Slee is one of the pioneers of Australian radio astronomy. During World War II he independently discovered solar radio emission, and, after joining the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics, used a succession of increasingly more sophisticated radio telescopes to examine an amazing variety of celestial objects and phenomena. These ranged from the solar corona and other targets in our solar system, to different types of stars and the ISM in our Galaxy, and beyond to distant galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Although long retired, Slee continues to carry out research, with emphasis on active stars and clusters of galaxies. A quiet and unassuming man, Slee has spent more than half a century making an important, wide-ranging contribution to astronomy, and his work deserves to be more widely known.

This paper explores the embodied dimensions of computer and internet use in later life, and examines how technology use relates to constructions and experiences of the ageing body. It is argued that previous research on technology use and embodiment has neglected older bodies, in contrast to research on gender and disability. Furthermore, while earlier theorisations presented internet use as disembodied, it is argued that the experience of using such technologies is grounded in our embodiment. In the light of these limitations and arguments for more complete theories of the body, this paper explores how technology use relates to various aspects of embodiment. These issues are examined in the light of data from qualitative interviews and time-use diaries completed by retirees in 17 households in the United Kingdom. By examining the ‘technobiographies’ of these older computer users, it is shown that changes in body techniques are prompted and in some cases required by broader cultural and technological change. The findings evince the process of acquiring computing skills as an embodied competency, and as a form of ‘practical knowledge’ that can only be ‘learned by doing’. These experiences of technology use were embedded within constructions and experiences of ageing bodies. Although the participants drew on discourses of ageing in complex ways, their coding of computer technologies in terms of the competences of youth often reproduced hierarchies between young and old bodies.