Hot wheels, cool cars, and an aesthetics of simulation

This article considers Mattel’s miniature cars, Hot Wheels, and the aesthetic meanings of the word “cool”. It addresses the material object (the toy cars), the graphic art, and film representations in order to trace four specific aesthetic relationships: first, the relationship between shine, reflection, and transparency as necessary components for the assessment of “cool”; second, the ways in which these attributes also function as visual coding for Baudrillard's “hyperreal”; third, the ways in which this coding forges associative links between fantasy and simulation; and, lastly, the coincidence of this coding with evolutionary instincts. Following the development of the toy cars in the 1960s through to the 2000s, a development which has culminated in a media network that includes graphic art and animated feature films, as well as the toys and accessories, this article argues that the car, the act of driving, and the aestheticisation of reflective surfaces not only help to define the word “cool” but have also become defining symbols of technological postmodernity.peer-reviewe

Brain Imaging Correlates of Developmental Coordination Disorder and Associated Impairments

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a common developmental disorder characterised by an inability to learn age appropriate complex motor skills. The first aim of this thesis was to characterise additional cognitive impairments and their relationship with motor difficulties in school aged children with DCD. The second aim was to investigate grey and white matter neuroimaging correlates of motor and cognitive deficits identified. Thirty six children aged 8-10 years who met DSM-5 criteria for DCD and an age-matched typically developing group (N=17) underwent standardised assessments of motor, intellectual, attention, speech and language skills as well as structural and diffusion-weighted MRI scans. Grey matter correlates of impairments were identified using subcortical volumetrics and surface-based analyses of cortical morphology. White matter correlates were examined using tractography and fixel-based fibre morphology of the pyramidal tracts, corpus callosum and cerebellar peduncles. Alongside impaired motor skills, children with DCD performed poorer than controls on several domains of executive function (attention and processing speed) and speech motor control. Motor skills did not correlate with impairments in other domains. Cortical thickness was significantly reduced in the left central sulcus in children with DCD compared to controls. Poor motor skills correlated with measures in left sensorimotor circuitry, posterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula. Poor speech motor control was associated with measures in the thalamus and corticobulbar tract. Poor sustained attention was linked to measures in the right superior cerebellar peduncle. Lower processing speed was associated with reduced mean cortical surface area. Children with DCD show co-occurring impairments in attention and speech motor control. DCD is associated with sensorimotor circuits as well as regions that form part of the default mode and salience networks. Disruption of subcortical circuits may underlie additional impairments. This study provides novel evidence of the neural correlates of DCD

(Un)making the (post)human : biopolitics and the corporatization of the body in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and crake

Oryx and Crake (2003) de Margaret Atwood, o primeiro romance na trilogia Maddaddam, retrata um mundo pós-apocalíptico em que a espécie humana está praticamente extinta devido à disseminação de um vírus sintético, evento referido no texto como “o dilúvio.” Seguindo Snowman, o último homem à face da Terra, nos seus esforços para sobreviver num ambiente biológico e ecológico hostil, o romance produz uma narrativa fracturada que permite a Atwood comentar acerca de práticas sociopolíticas e económicas contemporâneas, bem como concepções tradicionais do sujeito presentes na cultural ocidental, ao mesmo tempo imaginando um futuro sem o ser humano. Esta dissertação desenvolve o argumento de que a narrativa de Atwood reproduz uma rede de estruturas de vigilância, disciplina e controlo biopolítico dominadas por autoridades corporativas, que integram o indivíduo, simultaneamente, num contexto de apropriação científica e capitalista que resulta na comercialização e reificação do corpo do indivíduo. O biopoder capitalista exercido pelas corporações perpetua uma tradição patriarcal e antropocêntrica que coloca o indivíduo humano, branco, do sexo masculino, no seu centro, desta forma retirando ao corpo não humano, não branco e não masculino o direito à subjectividade, à agência política e, como consequência, o direito à vida, e assim o reduzindo ao estatuto de “disposable other” (Braidotti 2013:28). Nesta dissertação, defende-se ainda que, através de Oryx e do mundo pós-apocalíptico dominado pelos Crakers, Atwood fornece-nos formas alternativas do sujeito, formas estas liminares que, encontrando-se na fronteira do poder corporativo mas nunca a este pertencendo, têm a capacidade de se mover através destes espaços vigilados pelas tecnologias biopolíticas. Deste modo, estas personagens desestabilizam dicotomias discursivas e políticas aparentemente estáticas. Finalmente, proponho que estes sujeitos alternativos abrem um espaço na narrativa para questionar outras formas de “ser” que não serão talvez puramente humanas, mas poderão constituir um indivíduo pós-humano ou pós-antropocêntrico. Começo esta dissertação com uma análise de género da obra de Atwood, com particular atenção à história genológica de Oryx and Crake, numa tentativa de situar o romance dentro um conjunto (mais ou menos flexível) de géneros literários. Tal análise é especialmente relevante para esta obra, visto que a bifurcação da narrativa, por um lado, numa distopia biocorporativa, e, por outro, num futuro pós-apocalíptico, colocam o texto na fronteira entre géneros, apropriando várias tradições e temáticas literárias, mas nunca se comprometendo apenas com um. Este capítulo propõe que o hibridismo genológico do romance reproduz uma crítica presente em Atwood ao modelo binário, muitas vezes selado, que, durante muito tempo, tem dominado as tradições literárias e sociopolíticas das culturas ocidentais. Desta forma, as escolhas de género de Atwood permitem examinar e questionar estruturas socioculturais, económicas e políticas que dominam o discurso ocidental, e que se reflectem nas relações binárias entre humano/não humano, masculino/feminino, sujeito/objecto. O Capítulo II examina a relação entre o laboratório biotecnológico e o mercado capitalista, com o intuito de iniciar a minha teorização da reificação e comodificação do corpo humano. Aqui, propõe-se que a representação de uma sociedade neoliberal e híper-científica dominada pelo interesse capitalista serve para Atwood criticar a realidade contemporânea marcada pela globalização de práticas político-económicas que concentram todo o poder político, jurídico, legal e económico nas mãos de corporações transnacionais, desta forma criando um fosso cada vez maior entre uma minoria privilegiada e as massas de cidadãos marginalizados. Este argumento é suportado por uma leitura do binário “compounds/pleeblands.” Este capítulo também teoriza o conceito de biopoder no contexto corporativo capitalista da obra de Atwood. Tomando como base de análise os conceitos originais de “biopoder” e “sociedades disciplinares” de Michel Foucault, identifico um conjunto de instrumentos de vigilância e controlo utilizados pelas corporações para conter e regular (e regularizar) os corpos dos “compounders” e dos “pleeblanders” dentro de uma rede de fronteiras e espaços rigidamente definidos. Concentro-me, principalmente, no uso dos corpos dos “pleeblanders” como cobaias insuspeitas no contexto de progresso e lucro biotecnológicos, analisando o modo como a utilização do corpo do “pleeblander” como espaço de experimentação o/a transforma, por um lado, em propriedade da corporação, e, por outro, num instrumento biopolítico utilizado contra si mesmo, desta forma impedindo o indivíduo de reclamar qualquer direito sobre si ou o seu corpo. Neste contexto, e adoptando alguns conceitos de Jacques Derrida, começo a avançar uma análise de Oryx enquanto presença intersticial que interrompe e subverte o discurso patriarcal e binário desta sociedade. Finalmente, o Capítulo III produz uma leitura do corpo da mulher e do corpo do animal dentro deste contexto de biopoder corporativo. Este capítulo afasta-se um pouco do conceito de Foucault, de modo a dar mais atenção a outros discursos teóricos pertinentes ao estudo do binário humano/não humano. Concentro-me na relação estabelecida entre o humano e o animal dentro do laboratório, onde se identifica a predominância de uma hierarquia antropocêntrica que centra o poder sobre o corpo e sobre a vida nas mãos do cientista humano, desta forma retirando qualquer subjectividade ou agência ao animal. Esta relação dentro do laboratório está intimamente ligada a um medo de contaminação e desejo de contenção que vê todos os corpos não tradicionais, como o animal, como ameaças ao espaço puro e limpo do laboratório, e que precisam, portanto, de ser eliminados. O capítulo vira-se, depois, para uma discussão mais detalhada da reificação e capitalização do corpo do animal, através da análise da presença dos pigoons e dos ChickieNobs no texto. Associado a estes animais está o acto de comer a carne animal, que denota a presença de uma tradição “carnofalogocêntrica,” termo concebido por Jacques Derrida (1991), que subjuga o corpo do animal e da mulher ao poder do “Homem.” Começo, então, aqui a analisar o corpo da mulher, que, como o do animal, é entendido como volátil, perigoso e que precisa de ser contido. Examino a reprodução de uma estrutura sociocultural patriarcal no espaço doméstico, que identifica a mulher com questões de maternidade, assim eliminando-a enquanto indivíduo e reduzindo-a à sua biologia. A relação entre o acto de comer e o corpo feminino também é aqui analisada, em particular com Ramona, notando-se assim uma identificação da mulher com o animal. Finalmente, o capítulo retorna a Oryx, cuja posição privilegiada coloca em questão a aparente estabilidade das hierarquias estabelecidas no laboratório e no âmbito doméstico. Proponho aqui que a objectificação do corpo de Oryx confere à personagem um maior controlo sobre o seu corpo, permitindo-lhe fugir ao discurso patriarcal e, consequentemente, abrindo-o ao escrutínio do “outro.”Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), the first novel in the Maddaddam trilogy, depicts a post-apocalyptic landscape where humanity has gone all but extinct by the dissemination of a man-made virus, referred to in the narrative as the “flood.” Following Snowman, the last human on Earth, as he attempts to survive in a biologically and ecologically hostile environment, the novel produces a fractured narrative that allows Atwood to critique current sociopolitical and economic structures, and traditional Western conceptions of subjectivity, while imagining a future without the human individual. This dissertation argues that Atwood’s narrative reproduces a network of corporately-mandated structures of biopolitical surveillance, discipline and control that integrate the subject within a combined setting of scientific and marketplace capitalism, which results in the commodification of the subject’s body. Corporate capitalist biopower perpetuates an anthropocentric, patriarchal tradition that positions the human, white, male subject at its center, in this way closing off subjectivity, political agency and, ultimately, the right to life, to nonhuman, non-white, non-male bodies, which are, as a result, reduced to the status of “disposable others” (Braidotti 2013:28). This project further argues that Atwood provides us with alternative or liminal forms of subjectivity with the character of Oryx and the Craker-ruled post-apocalyptic imagining. These liminal subjects stand at the borders of corporate power, and can move between and across surveilled biopolitical boundaries, in this way disrupting seemingly well-defined, static binary formations. Finally, these alternative subjects open up a space for thinking about subjectivity as perhaps not entirely human, but instead authorizing the emergence of a posthuman or post-anthropocentric self

The Ghoul Box: An Affective Ecopoetics of The Anthropocene

The Ghoul Box is a collection of poetry which explores the complex entanglements and affects of the Anthropocene – a proposed geological age defined by the impact of human activity on the global climate and the biosphere. The collection strives to convey a sense of anxiety related to our increasingly fraught relationship with the environment and a pervasive sense of crisis, while exploring the sources of this anxiety. My reflective essay discusses the development of my collection from my initial interest in shifting concepts of nature and ecology towards a more experimental exploration of energy, complexity, chaos, assemblage, and self-organization. I interrogate ideas of environmental melancholia, negative capability, and affective ecopoetic techniques. My research of nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecopoetry informed the development of my collection, and I examine this impact at length. The Anthropocene is a relatively recent concept but one with increasing influence. My poetry collection addresses the notion of complex interconnections across time and space, between the local and the universal, the personal and the social, through the frame of the Anthropocene. It offers a new perspective on our modern age – one which mingles memory and myth with technological mediation and immediate experience to form a novel image of our contemporary environmental and existential crisis

I have things to tell

This memoir describs Edgefield in the early 20th century

Casting calls on the hillbilly highway : a content analysis of Appalachian-based reality television programming.

This analysis examines two contemporary reality television shows set in the Appalachian region of the United States - Appalachian Outlaws and Moonshiners. I contextualized the portrayals by tracing the intertwined social, political and economic factors that influenced the evolution of mediated Appalachian stereotypes since the mid-1800s. Beginning with Cultivation Theory, which holds television to be most powerful and persuasive medium available for most people, I expanded the theoretical base to consider the programs to be part of a complex intertextual phenomenon involving various media. I found stereotypes of the Appalachian region and people to be readily present in both programs, although there were some notable differences in kind and degree. Alongside a rather pronounced hegemonic masculinity, the recurring themes of homogeneity, isolation, an aversion to outsiders, feuding, the inability to join modernity, taking the law into your own hands and, most notably, violence corresponded to well-established Appalachian stereotypes

Traditional Ecological Philosophy

A collection of creative essays that span a range of topics centered on Indigenous environmental wisdom

The commuter rail circulator network design problem: formulation, solution methods, and applications

Commuter rail is increasingly popular as a means to introduce rail transportation to metropolitan transportation systems. The long-term benefits of commuter rail include the addition of capacity to the transportation system, providing a quality commute alternative, and shifting land use toward transit-oriented development patterns. The success of a commuter rail system depends upon cultivating a ridership base upon which to expand and improve the system. Cultivating this ridership is dependent upon offering a quality transportation option to commuters. Characteristics of commuter rail systems in the United States present challenges to offering quality service that must be overcome. Commuter rail has been implemented only on existing rail right-of-way (ROW) and infrastructure (depending upon condition) in the United States. Existing rail ROW does not often coincide with current commercial and residential demand centers and necessitates the use of a circulator system to expand the service boundary of commuter rail to reach these demand centers. The commuter rail circulator network design problem (CRCNDP) addresses a particular aspect of the commuter rail trip, seeking to improve the performance of the entire system through accurately modeling the portion of the trip from rail station to the final destination. This final leg includes both the trip on the circulator vehicle and the walking trip from the circulator stop to the final destination. This dissertation seeks to provide an innovative mathematical programming formulation and solution methodology for the CRCNDP and apply this method to a case study.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus

This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited