The Edge of Modernism

In The Edge of Modernism, Walter Kalaidjian explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian creates an original historical account of how American poets became witnesses, often unconsciously, to modern extremity. Combining psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this intense, sweeping account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history. Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets—among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht—Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics. In this way, The Edge of Modernism advances an innovative and dynamic model of modern periodization

Automated Landscape Painting in the Style of Bob Ross

This thesis presents a way of automatically generating a landscape painting in the artistic style of Bob Ross. First, a relatively simple, yet effective and versatile, painting model is presented. The brushes of the painting model can be used on their own for creative applications or as a lower layer to the software components responsible for automation. Next, the brush strokes and parameters used to automatically paint eight different landscape features, each with its own adjustable attributes and randomized forms, are described. Finally, the placement of all of the automated landscape features required to achieve the layout of one of Bob Ross's landscape paintings is shown

Operationalizing resilience planning, theory, and practice: Insights from U.S. seaports

Academics and practitioners advocate climate change resilience planning to guide seaport management, business continuity planning, capital improvements, and so forth. Yet, questions of whether resilience planning interventions influence seaports\u27 planning cultures and result in better prepared organizations remain underexplored. Through 10 cases of U.S. seaport resilience planning, this research explored the benefits and challenges of resilience planning and whether such efforts can enhance the adaptive capacity of a complex, multi-layered system such as a seaport. Results suggested that resilience planning interventions enhanced, inter alia, seaports\u27 social capital with their internal and external stakeholders, and that seaports frequently identified and pursued infrastructure-related resilience enhancement strategies after completing resilience planning. Even when the sponsors of such studies intended an operational and business resilience purpose, they stated benefits consistent with adaptive management and resilience planning theories. Further, while key informants emphasized the strengthened relationships with stakeholders as benefits, they also frequently cited them as key challenges that require deliberative guidance and resources to help stakeholders effectively use products from resilience planning. Additional takeaways captured in this research provide valuable insights that can inform guidance materials designed to help seaports undertake their climate resilience-building endeavors

An exploratory study of drama and video-based activities in late childhood

Healthy socioemotional development in childhood is key to successful societal functioning adulthood (Kim, 2016). Prosocial behaviours such as showing empathy, navigating friendships, and resolving conflict can be challenging if proper socioemotional development is interrupted or delayed in childhood (Spivey & Mechling, 2016). This can be especially challenging for some populations where nuance is difficult, as many of our societal rules are communicated indirectly. Various developmental and environmental factors may interfere with healthy socioemotional development (Alzyoudi, Sartaw, & Almuhiti, 2014). While these factors sometimes lead to disorders, they also translate to low level of social competence in children (Landy & Bradley, 2014). This low social competence may lead to victimization and rejection in childhood and may even follow an individual into adulthood (Bellini & Akullian, 2007). Most school-based social skills programs are based on direct instruction and focus on special needs populations (Wilson, 2013). However, Positive Youth Development (PYD) takes a holistic view and assumes that every child has potential that can be nurtured (Damon, 2004). Furthermore, current studies neglect to fully investigate how more highly socially competent peers can benefit from interacting with those with less social competence. There is also evidence that empathy and friendships can act as protective factors against victimization and bullying (Masten, 2014). Empathy can also be fostered in those with higher social competency by integrating with those with lower social competence (Corbett et al., 2011). Drama and video-based activities have been used in after-school and extra-curricular programs for some time. There is evidence that these fields have components that can help with indirect socioemotional learning (Emunah, 1994). This phenomenological project takes an exploratory approach to drama and video-based activities in an after-school context. Through this project, we observed children with different levels of social competence interact in a collectively creative way. Overall, findings suggest that creating a process-oriented after-school program, with the child at the center, and strong consistent adult relationships affects levels of trust, agency, and negotiation

Reading Abu Ghraib

Cet article défend la thèse selon laquelle ce qui rend les archives photographiques d’Abu Ghraib si particulières ce n’est pas seulement l’impact que peuvent avoir les images littérales de mort et de violences corporelles qu’elles présentent, mais aussi le retour d’un certain spectre du modernisme qui hante les archives photographiques de la politique étrangère américaine. Les clichés numériques d’Abu Ghraib ne mettent pas seulement en évidence des mises en scène de sadomasochisme, d’asservissement et de domination militaires, mais pointent du doigt un spectre de violence plus difficile à cerner, spectre dont la troublante répétition vient entacher l’illusion de bellum justum entretenue par l’Amérique, qui maintient la zone d’exclusion constituée par le camp moderne. En tant que documents du Réel, les archives numériques d’Abu Ghraib témoignent de l’horreur de l’exceptionnalisme américain, avec ses pouvoirs souverains et les conséquences traumatiques qu’ils entraînent.This essay argues that what makes the photographic archive of Abu Ghraib so unique is not just the impact of its literal images of death and bodily violation, but also the return of a certain specter of modernism haunting the photographic archive of American foreign policy. The digital snapshots of Abu Ghraib not only stage scripted scenes of military sadomasochism, bondage, and domination, but gesture toward a more elusive revenant of violence: one whose uncanny repetition stains the fiction of America’s bellum justum with the persistence of the modern camp’s zone of exclusion. As documents of the Real, Abu Ghraib’s digital archive witnesses to the horror of American exceptionalism: its sovereign powers and traumatic side effects

Human well-being and natural infrastructure: assessing opportunities for equitable project planning and implementation

There is consensus within psychological, physiological, medical, and social science disciplines that active and passive exposure to nature enhances human well-being. Natural infrastructure (NI) includes elements of nature that can deliver these ancillary well-being benefits while serving their infrastructure-related purposes and, as such, offer great promise for agencies including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a means of enhancing economic, environmental, and societal benefits in civil works projects. Yet, to date, NI are typically framed as alternatives to conventional infrastructure but are rarely competitive for project selection because there is no standardized approach to demonstrate their value or justify their cost. The infrastructure projects subsequently selected may not maximize societal well-being or distribute benefits equitably. A framework is needed to capture diverse and holistic benefits of NI. As part of ongoing research, this paper describes the components necessary to construct a framework for well-being benefits accounting and equitable distribution of NI projects and explores how they might be applied within a framework. We conclude with methodological examples of well-being accounting tools for NI that are based on ongoing research and development associated with this project. The findings provide insights and support for both the Engineering with Nature community and the community of NI practitioners at large

Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery

Places of Rest outlines a modernist aesthetic of slowness, immediacy and introspection in relation to a cultural history of nature protection in the United Kingdom. It draws on the archives of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, founded in 1912, which invoked a threatening rhetoric of Nature’s total exhaustion under the march of modern development. Literary modernism’s presentation of human fragility amidst exhausted environments challenged problematic industrial and imperial narratives of unlimited progress and generated new modes of ecological awareness in the 20th century. Faced with the restless and inescapable forces of modernization, modernist writers shifted away from the withdrawn, “restful contemplation” of the Romantics and moved towards an increasingly materialist attention to the world as an immersive stream of human and nonhuman connections that are interdependent and hierarchical in problematic ways. The Anglophone novel, as it develops through D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys and Chinua Achebe, becomes increasingly attuned to constructions of personal, social and planetary identity in relation to environmental exploitation. Highlighting the physical limitations that deny autonomy to human life, these writers communicate the unsustainability of relentless modernization and foreground the importance of recovery for communal wellbeing