Containment and nuclear memory in contemporary climate change fiction

Confronted with the global existential threat of climate change, human subjects in the Anthropocene must grapple with a parallel teleological crisis: how do we direct ourselves as individuals and collectives in the face of an ongoing global catastrophe? To answer this question, this thesis seeks to understand the material, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that authenticate meaningful action toward large-scale, systemic changes that might forestall the worst effects of climate change. This thesis names these mechanisms containment, exploring how contemporary climate change fiction, or “cli-fi,” uses the metaphorically flexible figure of the fallout shelter to help negotiate a relationship to the scale, complexity, and horror of climate change. The fallout shelter is inflected with the legacies of Cold-War containment culture, which developed in response to the similar existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Originally, containment culture was associated with resistance to the perceived threat of communism, but its ideological principle of defensive exclusion replicated throughout society, creating racially exclusive suburban localities that came to stand in for the space and place of the American nation. Contemporary cli-fi featuring the fallout shelter necessarily grapples with containment culture in its efforts to capture and manage global-scale problems, often in hyperlocal contexts. Such fictions position readers and spectators as "contained subjects," converting pleasurable literary and cinematic escapism into a psychological survival tactic against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. This thesis also aims to broaden ecocriticism’s understanding of what cli-fi can be, selecting texts from a variety of narrative media that center the fallout shelter space as their primary dramatic fulcrum. While many of the texts examined in this thesis appear to have little to do with climate change, understanding them through the lens of containment demonstrates how climate change can be rendered in modalities beyond the apocalyptic imaginary. This thesis concludes by examining recent real-world deployments and imaginings of the fallout shelter, suggesting that containment culture persists in a more globally-conscious (but potentially more dangerous) fashion

Investigating the possible futures of communities driven by emerging digital technology and affected by community-centred design

Emerging digital technology can positively impact humans, but its existence and rapid advancement also causes unintended consequences and externalities – the costs and benefits of the industry’s activity – in society. In particular, emerging digital technology is disrupting healthy communities. With healthy communities as the backbone of a democratic society, the risks of unintended impacts, such as social fragmentation and social polarization, are significant. Therefore, this research explores a definition of healthy community, the evolution of community in the context of technology, and how digital technology can be designed to preserve and build healthy communities now and across various possible futures. Leveraging systems thinking and foresight methodologies, multi-level system community-fortifying interventions are developed, propelling the paradigm shift from human-centred design to community-centred design

Seed Storytelling: Growing Food as Cultural and Ecological Resilience in Asian American Communities

For many communities in the Asian American diaspora impacted by colonial legacies of the U.S., there is an understanding that healing and wellness are practiced on the community level. Practices of collective care have been found through growing and sharing nourishing food and plants, which have the ability to ground communities in their sense of home and family. This project looks historically at Asian American relationships to settler colonialism and agricultural labor, and then turns to how small-scale Asian American farmers and Asian immigrant gardeners are practicing community-based care by saving and stewarding seed varieties that are meaningful in their own contexts. These seeds preserve and represent memory, identity, and livelihood that are important for biodiversity and community health. Ultimately, seeds are keepers of culture and family histories; they have the ability to hold sacred stories that can tell us about our lineages and who we are. Cultivating diasporic Asian seeds can root down a sense of place for Asian American communities and facilitate land-based healing, as well as embed people in intergenerational relationships of care. These implications are intrinsically linked to the health of Asian American communities, as growing familiar food can bring a better understanding of self, collective commitment to one another, and the places we inhabit

Unity in diversity? Identity, relationship and cultural context in the classic Mini and the BMW Mini communities

When brand objects attract a number of consumers who exhibit strong loyalty to that object, and who communicate such loyalties with each other, brand communities form. Studies of such communities have hitherto focused on the individual relationships between their members in order to explain the dynamics driving such groups. This study aims to explore the wider universe in which such groups operate, and to establish the interconnecting relationships between the various actors associated with the brand object, including marketer-consumer, consumer-society and community-subculture. Positivist research methods are inappropriate to such a study, because of their basic assumption that people can be studied in the same manner as the physical world. Instead, the interpretivist paradigm has been used for this research, because the researcher believes that the meaning of brands can only be fully understood when the subjective experiences of those who use them are taken into consideration. A case study of the Mini brand community has been chosen as a vehicle for this study. The results are inductive rather than deductive, allowing theories of social phenomena to emerge from the data, thus ensuring that they are grounded in observation and experience. The case study method has also enabled the researcher to become fully involved in the phenomenon under investigation. Analysis was conducted on data collected from a wide range of online and offline sources relating to this community. This data revealed that marketers abandoned the Mini when production of the car ceased, leaving the brand community to maintain the remaining vehicles and perpetuate the meanings that surround the brand. Community members became solely responsible for preserving the values of “small-is-beautiful”, “fun” and “Britishness” with which the Mini has come to be associated. They maintained the cultural meanings of the Mini so successfully that the Mini’s successor, the BMW MINI, was able to reclaim these meanings to maximize its launch and development. In this way, brand meaning can be shown to be the result of a complex process of interaction between all the actors concerned at every level, rather than being created and sustained only by marketers. This study proposes a conceptual framework by which consumer behavior within brand communities can be studied, and which takes account of all those actors and levels concerned with creating the cultural meaning(s) attached to a given brand object

Personality and personological predictors of psychological sense of community

Research has indicated the importance of individual differences to the development of psychological sense of community (PSOC). This research explores a number of key personality and personological factors in combination with each other. Data were collected through an online survey method. Using SEM the findings show that both personality and personological factors are significant predictors of PSOC and that, extroversion, optimism, openness and attachment style account for over a quarter of the variance in PSOC