New insight into BRST anomalies in superstring theory

Based on the extended BRST formalism of Batalin, Fradkin and Vilkovisky, we perform a general algebraic analysis of the BRST anomalies in superstring theory of Neveu-Schwarz-Ramond. Consistency conditions on the BRST anomalies are completely solved. The genuine super-Virasoro anomaly is identified with the essentially unique solution to the consistency condition without any reference to a particular gauge for the 2D supergravity fields. In a configuration space where metric and gravitino fields are properly constructed, general form of the super-Weyl anomaly is obtained from the super-Virasoro anomaly as its descendant. We give a novel local action of super-Liouville type, which plays a role of Wess-Zumino-Witten term shifting the super-Virasoro anomaly into the super-Weyl anomaly. These results reveal a hierarchial relationship in the BRST anoamlies.Comment: 29 pages, PHYZZ

Engaging Hashima: Memory Work, Site-Based Affects, and the Possibilities of Interruption

How is memory embodied, narrated, interrupted, and reworked? Here, we take a postphenomenological approach to memory work that is attentive to how site-based affects prompt and ossify, but also transmogrify, memory of place. With reference to an intensely traumatized, but also domesticated and entropied, environment—the island of Hashima, off the coast from Nagasaki City in Japan—we demonstrate the relevance and explanatory reach of culturally specific accounts of memory, time, and place; how an attentiveness to cultural context in the making of meaning helps mark out the epistemological violences that accrue around sites such as Hashima as objects of analysis in and of themselves; and the affective capacities of the materialities and forces that compose such sites, which can present a welter of surfaces and interiorities that are sensuously “felt” as memory

Reconfiguring ruins: Beyond Ruinenlust

What explains the global proliferation of interest in ruins? Can ruins be understood beyond their common framing as products of European Romanticism? Might a transdisciplinary approach allow us to see ruins differently? These questions underpinned the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project Reconfiguring Ruins, which deployed approaches from history, literature, East Asian studies, and geography to reflect on how ruins from different historical contexts are understood by reference to different theoretical frameworks. In recognition of the value of learning from other models of knowledge production, the project also involved a successful collaboration with the Museum of London Archaeology and the artist-led community The NewBridge Project in Newcastle. By bringing these varied sets of knowledges to bear on the project’s excavations of specific sites in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan, the article argues for an understanding of ruins as thresholds, with ruin sites providing unique insights into the relationship between lived pasts, presents, and futures. It does so by developing three key themes that reflect on the process of working collaboratively across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, including professional archaeology: inter- and transdisciplinarity, the limits of cocreation, and traveling meanings and praxis. Meanings of specific ruins are constructed out of specific languages and cultural resonances and read though different disciplines, but can also be reconfigured through concepts and practices that travel beyond disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic borders. As we show here, the ruin is, and should be, a relational concept that moves beyond the romantic notion of Ruinenlust