Who knows who we are? Questioning DNA analysis in disaster victim identification

The use of DNA analysis as a mode of identification of disaster victims has become increasingly predominant to other, traditional, methods of identification in recent years. Scientific advances of the technological processes, high-profile use in identification efforts across the globe (such as after 9/11 or in the Asian Tsunami of 2004), and its inclusion in popular media, have led to its popular adoption as one of the primary modes of identification in disaster scenarios, and to the expectation of its use in all cases by the lay public and media. It is increasingly argued to be integral to post-disaster management. However, depending on the circumstances, location, and type of disaster, this technology may not be appropriate, and its use may instead conflict with socio-political and cultural norms and structures of power. Using examples primarily from Cambodia and Iraq this article will explore what these conflicts may be, and in doing so, question the expanding assumption that DNA analysis is a universally appropriate intervention in disaster victim identification. It will argue instead that its use may be a result of a desire for the political and social capital that this highly prestigious technological intervention offers rather than a solely humanitarian intervention on behalf of survivors and the dead

Trauma as counter-revolutionary colonisation: narratives from (post)revolutionary Egypt

We argue that multiple levels of trauma were present in Egypt before, during and after the 2011 revolution. Individual, social and political trauma constitute a triangle of traumatisation which was strategically employed by the Egyptian counter-revolutionary forces – primarily the army and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood – to maintain their political and economic power over and above the social, economic and political interests of others. Through the destruction of physical bodies, the fragmentation and polarisation of social relations and the violent closure of the newly emerged political public sphere, these actors actively repressed the potential for creative and revolutionary transformation. To better understand this multi-layered notion of trauma, we turn to Habermas’ ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ thesis which offers a critical lens through which to examine the wider political and economic structures and context in which trauma occurred as well as its effects on the personal, social and political realms. In doing so, we develop a novel conception of trauma that acknowledges individual, social and political dimensions. We apply this conceptual framing to empirical narratives of trauma in Egypt’s pre- and post-revolutionary phases, thus both developing a non-Western application of Habermas’ framework and revealing ethnographic accounts of the revolution by activists in Cairo

What Does a Modern Anatomist Look like? Current Trends in the Training of Anatomy Educators

Anatomical sciences are foundational to the health professions, yet little is known about the qualifications of anatomy educators at the graduate and professional level in the United States. Moreover, there is concern that the number of qualified anatomy educators being trained may be insufficient to meet the growing demand posed by new and expanded programs in medicine and allied health specialties. The authors surveyed anatomists from across the country to (i) characterize the educational credentials of current anatomy educators and (ii) assess the perceived need for education‐focused postdoctoral positions or formal mentorships to prepare anatomists for teaching‐intensive faculty positions. To probe the survey responses more deeply, one‐on‐one interviews were conducted with eight individuals selected to represent a diverse sample of respondents in terms of institution, gender, and academic rank. Results indicate that 30–40% of educators at the graduate level and approximately 60% of those at the undergraduate level lack graduate coursework in histology, embryology, and neuroanatomy. Forty‐five percent of respondents had completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Eighty‐six percent replied “yes/maybe” to the question of whether an anatomy education postdoctoral fellowship would benefit doctoral graduates. The top 3 reasons for this recommendation were to (i) establish independent educational research, (ii) improve a publication record, and (iii) gain additional teaching experience. Notable weaknesses of education‐focused postdoctoral training were related to finances, fear of exploitation, and undervaluing of teaching. Moving forward, postdoctoral fellowships and other forms of postgraduate training may represent a key strategy for training anatomists in the current educational climate

From Surveillance to Witnessing: Revanche, Red Road, and the Anti-Revenge Film

This essay examines recent European art films that reinterpret the revenge plot and radically challenge the possibility of legitimized violence. I argue that what I term “anti-revenge” films, in particular Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006), and Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (2008), frustrate the desire for vengeance (both the protagonist’s and the spectator’s), replacing violent spectacle with uneasy engagement that inhibits revenge, gesturing instead toward the possibility, however remote, of forgiveness. In both films prolonged surveillance, surveillance ostensibly in the service of retribution, inadvertently becomes a means for ethical engagement that actually prohibits violence. In their failure to conform to generic conventions and their depiction of the collapse of the retributive drive, these films challenge the moral legitimacy of revenge, substituting uneasy, often inconclusive moments of potential forgiveness for violent spectacle

Apostrophe, witnessing and its essentially theatrical modes of address: Maria Dermôut on Pattimura and Kara Walker on the New Orleans flooding

Apostrophe is best known as a punctuation mark (') or as a key poetic figure (with a speaker addressing an imaginary or absent person or entity). In origin, however, it is a pivotal rhetorical figure that indicates a 'breaking away' or turning away of the speaker from one addressee to another, in a different mode. In this respect, apostrophe is essentially theatrical. To be sure, the turn away implies two different modes of address that may follow upon one another, as is hinted at by the two meanings of the verb 'to witness': being a witness and bearing witness. One cannot do both at the same time. My argument will be, however, that in order to make witnessing work ethically and responsibly, the two modes of address must take place simultaneously, in the coincidence of two modalities of presence: one actual and one virtual. Accordingly, I will distinguish between an address of attention and an address of expression. Whereas the witness is actually paying attention to that which she witnesses, she is virtually (and in the sense Deleuze intended, no less really) turning away in terms of expression. The two come together in what Kelly Oliver called the 'inner witness'. The simultaneous operation of two modes of address suggests that Caroline Nevejan's so-called YUTPA model would have to include two modalities of 'you'. Such a dual modality has become all the more important, in the context of the society of the spectacle. One text will help me first to explore two modes of address through apostrophe. I will focus on a story by Dutch author Maria Dermôut, written in the fifties of the twentieth century, reflecting on an uprising and the subsequent execution of its leader in the Dutch Indies in 1817. Secondly, I will move to American artist Kara Walker's response, in the shape of an installation and a visual essay, to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005. The latter will serve to illustrate a historic shift in the theatrical nature and status of 'presence' in the two modes of address. Instead of thinking of the convergence of media, of which Jenkins speaks, we might think of media swallowing up one another. For instance, the theatrical structure of apostrophe is swallowed up, and in a sense perverted, by the model of the spectacle in modern media. This endangers the very possibility of witnessing in any ethical sense of the word

Lament as Transitional Justice

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power

Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75748/1/j.1467-9558.2006.00295.x.pd

Hierarchies of Pain

Trauma has become a pervasive cultural model for representing individual and collective injuries and suffering. This process has produced what may be called a trauma aesthetic, a set of recognizable tropes in widespread use in trauma narratives. This chapter examines the adoption of this aesthetic in graphic narratives, focusing on the special capacities of the form. Familiar tropes, such as dissociation and the somatic trace, are presented in complex combinations of visual and textual components, often exploiting the differential appearance of text and image to introduce a dynamic of belatedness or disarticulation. This chapter analyses five works ordered according to their diminishing reliance on ‘trauma’. The trauma aesthetic is used, though not explicitly, in Catherine Meurisse’s La Légèreté (2016) about the Charlie Hebdo attack, Jean-Philip Stassen’s Déogratias (2000/2006) about the genocide in Rwanda, and Emmanuel Lepage’s Un printemps à Tchernobyl (2012) about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By contrast, it is absent from Mazen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry (2007/2017) about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Josh Neufeld’s A.D. about Hurricane Katrina (2009). These works’ reliance on formalized and sanctioned trauma tropes not only is influenced by narrative characteristics, such as temporal distance from the event or the presence of a single narrator-protagonist but may also be motivated by the prestige conferred by trauma as recognized suffering, affecting the canonization and translatability of the graphic narratives in question

Political apologies and the question of a ‘shared time’ in the Australian context

Although conceptually distinct, ‘ time ’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd

Landscape, Memory, and the Shifting Regional Geographies of Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

Writing and arguing with older discourses that have informed the subdiscipline of regional geography and setting them against new ways of conceiving of the region, this article considers the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a site that calls for a newly animated form of regional study. Of particular concern here is the role that memory and commemorative practices play in such a spatial schema. The monumental landscapes of the Tito regime and its collective commemoration of World War II sit alongside and are troubled by the more recent traumas and spaces of unmarked death associated with the ethnic war in Bosnia during the early 1990s. Read together, northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina functions as a vivid exemplar for understanding traumatic historical mourning as a phenomenological process that is inseparable from the wider geopolitical landscape