Poetics of Authenticity

Based on tape-recorded interviews with a multitude of historical eyewitnesses, Svetlana Aleksievich’s five-volume literary project Golosa utopii depicts some of the most calamitous events of Soviet history – the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This thesis seeks to provide the first systematic study of the different social, historical and cultural factors which have shaped Aleksievich’s genre-transgressive writing, which is marked by both historiographical and literary aspirations. This thesis examines the development of Aleksievich’s complex aesthetics in the context of the documentary tradition in Russian and Soviet culture, including her engagement with such prominent predecessors in the literary canon as Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Ales’ Adamovich. I argue that Aleksievich’s continuous insistence on the ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ of her work is central to her thinking and writing. This thesis demonstrates that these key concepts emerge during her work as a journalist for the Soviet press – an apprenticeship which would also leave clear traces in her practice as a writer. This historical, cultural and social context is crucial to understanding Aleksievich’s construction of a particular public persona in the later stages of her career. I therefore examine Aleksievich’s strategies of positioning herself as a non-conformist writer exposing the untruths of the official Soviet discourse, including Soviet newspapers, which are foregrounded as the negative other of her own discourse. Analysing her employment of counter-narratives using a Bordieuan framework, I examine the truth-claims underpinning her public persona as a dissident writer ‘giving a voice’ to the repressed. The interplay between authorial voice and the many witnesses in her books underpins both this self-portrayal and the claim to the authenticity and truth of her work. This thesis examines the multi-voiced structure of Aleksievich’s works against the backdrop of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of literary polyphony and analyses the authorial interventions in her texts. Focusing on the historical, cultural and literary context of the production and reception of Aleksievich’s work, this thesis presents the first systemic study of the complex strategies by which Aleksievich authenticates and legitimizes her claims to present a higher form of truth in her literary-historiographical project Golosa utopii

Poetics of Authenticity

Based on tape-recorded interviews with a multitude of historical eyewitnesses, Svetlana Aleksievich’s five-volume literary project Golosa utopii depicts some of the most calamitous events of Soviet history – the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This thesis seeks to provide the first systematic study of the different social, historical and cultural factors which have shaped Aleksievich’s genre-transgressive writing, which is marked by both historiographical and literary aspirations. This thesis examines the development of Aleksievich’s complex aesthetics in the context of the documentary tradition in Russian and Soviet culture, including her engagement with such prominent predecessors in the literary canon as Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Ales’ Adamovich. I argue that Aleksievich’s continuous insistence on the ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ of her work is central to her thinking and writing. This thesis demonstrates that these key concepts emerge during her work as a journalist for the Soviet press – an apprenticeship which would also leave clear traces in her practice as a writer. This historical, cultural and social context is crucial to understanding Aleksievich’s construction of a particular public persona in the later stages of her career. I therefore examine Aleksievich’s strategies of positioning herself as a non-conformist writer exposing the untruths of the official Soviet discourse, including Soviet newspapers, which are foregrounded as the negative other of her own discourse. Analysing her employment of counter-narratives using a Bordieuan framework, I examine the truth-claims underpinning her public persona as a dissident writer ‘giving a voice’ to the repressed. The interplay between authorial voice and the many witnesses in her books underpins both this self-portrayal and the claim to the authenticity and truth of her work. This thesis examines the multi-voiced structure of Aleksievich’s works against the backdrop of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of literary polyphony and analyses the authorial interventions in her texts. Focusing on the historical, cultural and literary context of the production and reception of Aleksievich’s work, this thesis presents the first systemic study of the complex strategies by which Aleksievich authenticates and legitimizes her claims to present a higher form of truth in her literary-historiographical project Golosa utopii

In search of the author: narrative voice in Svetlana Aleksievich's Chrnobyl'skaia molitva

Svetlana Aleksievich is a contemporary Belarusian author whose works straddle the divide between Soviet and post-Soviet time. Based on tape-recorded interviews with eyewitnesses to events of historical and political significance, such as the Chornobyl’ nuclear disaster and the Soviet-Afghan war, her works can be considered a hybrid form of journalism and fiction. This form of writing, where the statements of a multitude of individuals are selected, processed and arranged by a single author, raises important questions about representation and authorial agency. Focusing on Aleksievich’s fifth book, Chernobyl’skaia molitva: khronika budushchego (Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future) [1985], this MA thesis examines the unresolved tension between the voices of the eyewitnesses and that of Aleksievich. Its aim is firstly to contextualise and conceptualise the question of authorial agency in Aleksievich’s writing in general, and secondly to examine the concrete textual manifestations of authorial agency in Chernobyl’skaia molitva. The thesis will explore the extent to which Chernobyl’skaia molitva displays a clear political bias through the ideological position that its implied author occupies in relation to the narrators. Moreover, it will show that in its thematic insistence, Chernobyl’skaia molitva presents a specific eco-critical perspective on the nuclear accident, a particular interpretation of the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens, and a specific view on issues related to the possibilities of language to adequately communicate an experience – points which, contrary to the implicit assertion of the text of being the product of a multitude of authors, can only be attributed to a single consciousness. Thus, this thesis argues that Chernobyl’skaia molitva performs two separate functions: “giving a voice” to the witnesses of the event and, through these voices, presenting a particular “message” or “worldview”

Articulated Clinician Detection Using 3D Pictorial Structures on RGB-D Data

Reliable human pose estimation (HPE) is essential to many clinical applications, such as surgical workflow analysis, radiation safety monitoring and human-robot cooperation. Proposed methods for the operating room (OR) rely either on foreground estimation using a multi-camera system, which is a challenge in real ORs due to color similarities and frequent illumination changes, or on wearable sensors or markers, which are invasive and therefore difficult to introduce in the room. Instead, we propose a novel approach based on Pictorial Structures (PS) and on RGB-D data, which can be easily deployed in real ORs. We extend the PS framework in two ways. First, we build robust and discriminative part detectors using both color and depth images. We also present a novel descriptor for depth images, called histogram of depth differences (HDD). Second, we extend PS to 3D by proposing 3D pairwise constraints and a new method that makes exact inference tractable. Our approach is evaluated for pose estimation and clinician detection on a challenging RGB-D dataset recorded in a busy operating room during live surgeries. We conduct series of experiments to study the different part detectors in conjunction with the various 2D or 3D pairwise constraints. Our comparisons demonstrate that 3D PS with RGB-D part detectors significantly improves the results in a visually challenging operating environment.Comment: The supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/iabbGSqRSg

Human 3D Pose Estimation in the Wild : using Geometrical Models and Pictorial Structures

QC 20131218</p

Real-Time Radiosity : Real-time global illumination of a static scene with dynamic lights using hierarchical radiosity

This thesis investigates how to compute the physical correct illumination of a virtual 3d-scene. Global Illumination is simulated, i.e. the light gets reflected multiple times, possible infinite. The goal is to achieve real-time Global Illumination of a static scene with dynamic light sources. The Radiosity algorithm is investigated and adjusted for real-time. The algorithm is derived in detail to stress its physical correctness. Methods to numerically solve the resulting equation systems are discussed like: gathering, Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel Relaxation. The ability to use information from the previous frame when computing the following is emphasized in the discussion of Gauss-Seidel Relaxation. Methods of accelerating the algorithm using hierarchies and clusters are explored and Hierarchical Radiosity is implemented for a real-time application. See section 11 for the main results. Face Cluster Radiosity and Vector Irradiance are also discussed. We end by discussing the benefits of using a precalculated inverse solution and various ways of improving the performance

Women in international peacekeeping operations

Kvinnor har sedan 1980 fått tjänstgöra som officer i Sveriges försvarsmakt. Trots detta är fortfarande de kvinnliga officerarna och soldaterna i klar minoritet i organisationen. FN:s säkerhetsråd har arbetat fram två resolutioner som båda strävar efter att involvera kvinnor i större omfattning när det gäller arbeten vid kris, krig och konflikter. Inte enbart att öka andelen kvinnor i hjälpande trupper, utan även involvera lokalbefolkningen. Hur ser då verkligheten ut vid de internationella insatserna? I detta arbete presenteras en fallstudie om MOT Juliette, ett kvinnligt observationsteam som under sju månader tjänstgjorde i Afghanistan. Målet med detta team var att effektivisera underrättelseinhämtningen i insatsområdet. Arbetet syftar till att undersöka vilka för- respektive nackdelar kvinnor kan föra med sig vid internationella insatser. Resultatet visar att kvinnor har flera möjliga fördelar att tillföra till insatserna, bland annat att underlätta underrättelsearbetet samt att verka som förebilder för de lokala kvinnorna. Även att förbandet uppnår jämställdhet kan vara en fördel.The purpose of this study is to find out if deployment of women improves an operation’s chances of success. Since 1980 traditionally male roles within the Swedish Armed Forces have been avalible for women. In spite of this fact, deployment of women in international military operations are not very common. The method used in this essay is a case study. The author has studied a Swedish operation in Afghanistan in 2006, where the commander decided to form a MOT (military observation team) only with women. The main purpose with this team was to gather intelligence from the local population. Earlier operations in the country clearly showed that male soldiers were experiencing difficulties in interacting with local women. During seven months the team, MOT Juliette, worked in the area and found out that the presence of women considerably contributed to the success of the operation. To acknowledge the need to increase the proportion of women in the work of war and conflict, the UN Security Council has adopted a number of resolutions where the two most important are 1325 and 1820. The results of the study show that women have an important role in international operations. Not just to gather intelligence, but also to act as role models for the women in the country.Avdelning: ALB – Slutet Mag. 3 Hylla: Upps. YOP 06-09 // Avdelning:  Karlberg-filial - Karlberg Öppen hylla Hylla: K Upps. YOP REF</p

Women in international peacekeeping operations

Kvinnor har sedan 1980 fått tjänstgöra som officer i Sveriges försvarsmakt. Trots detta är fortfarande de kvinnliga officerarna och soldaterna i klar minoritet i organisationen. FN:s säkerhetsråd har arbetat fram två resolutioner som båda strävar efter att involvera kvinnor i större omfattning när det gäller arbeten vid kris, krig och konflikter. Inte enbart att öka andelen kvinnor i hjälpande trupper, utan även involvera lokalbefolkningen. Hur ser då verkligheten ut vid de internationella insatserna? I detta arbete presenteras en fallstudie om MOT Juliette, ett kvinnligt observationsteam som under sju månader tjänstgjorde i Afghanistan. Målet med detta team var att effektivisera underrättelseinhämtningen i insatsområdet. Arbetet syftar till att undersöka vilka för- respektive nackdelar kvinnor kan föra med sig vid internationella insatser. Resultatet visar att kvinnor har flera möjliga fördelar att tillföra till insatserna, bland annat att underlätta underrättelsearbetet samt att verka som förebilder för de lokala kvinnorna. Även att förbandet uppnår jämställdhet kan vara en fördel.The purpose of this study is to find out if deployment of women improves an operation’s chances of success. Since 1980 traditionally male roles within the Swedish Armed Forces have been avalible for women. In spite of this fact, deployment of women in international military operations are not very common. The method used in this essay is a case study. The author has studied a Swedish operation in Afghanistan in 2006, where the commander decided to form a MOT (military observation team) only with women. The main purpose with this team was to gather intelligence from the local population. Earlier operations in the country clearly showed that male soldiers were experiencing difficulties in interacting with local women. During seven months the team, MOT Juliette, worked in the area and found out that the presence of women considerably contributed to the success of the operation. To acknowledge the need to increase the proportion of women in the work of war and conflict, the UN Security Council has adopted a number of resolutions where the two most important are 1325 and 1820. The results of the study show that women have an important role in international operations. Not just to gather intelligence, but also to act as role models for the women in the country.Avdelning: ALB – Slutet Mag. 3 Hylla: Upps. YOP 06-09 // Avdelning:  Karlberg-filial - Karlberg Öppen hylla Hylla: K Upps. YOP REF</p

In search of the author: narrative voice in Svetlana Aleksievich's Chrnobyl'skaia molitva

Svetlana Aleksievich is a contemporary Belarusian author whose works straddle the divide between Soviet and post-Soviet time. Based on tape-recorded interviews with eyewitnesses to events of historical and political significance, such as the Chornobyl’ nuclear disaster and the Soviet-Afghan war, her works can be considered a hybrid form of journalism and fiction. This form of writing, where the statements of a multitude of individuals are selected, processed and arranged by a single author, raises important questions about representation and authorial agency. Focusing on Aleksievich’s fifth book, Chernobyl’skaia molitva: khronika budushchego (Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future) [1985], this MA thesis examines the unresolved tension between the voices of the eyewitnesses and that of Aleksievich. Its aim is firstly to contextualise and conceptualise the question of authorial agency in Aleksievich’s writing in general, and secondly to examine the concrete textual manifestations of authorial agency in Chernobyl’skaia molitva. The thesis will explore the extent to which Chernobyl’skaia molitva displays a clear political bias through the ideological position that its implied author occupies in relation to the narrators. Moreover, it will show that in its thematic insistence, Chernobyl’skaia molitva presents a specific eco-critical perspective on the nuclear accident, a particular interpretation of the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens, and a specific view on issues related to the possibilities of language to adequately communicate an experience – points which, contrary to the implicit assertion of the text of being the product of a multitude of authors, can only be attributed to a single consciousness. Thus, this thesis argues that Chernobyl’skaia molitva performs two separate functions: “giving a voice” to the witnesses of the event and, through these voices, presenting a particular “message” or “worldview”