Singing exile: Music in Irish emigration literature

Ireland possesses a cultural heritage that is particularly literary and musical. The island is also renowned for its extensive and ongoing history of emigration, and imagery of exile and return is as intrinsic to conceptions of Irishness as the island’s artistic lineage. The impact on the creation of a modern Irish identity by exilic Irish writers and musicians is testament to this relationship. The act of emigration can be conceived as a narrative of individual identity framed by a wider cultural discourse. It is therefore natural that the themes of exile and departure are a frequent presence in Irish art, especially literature and music. Literary expressions of the complex negotiation of self within culture that exile entails are enhanced by the connotative power of music. This thesis assesses the vital role music plays in framing shifts of identity within Irish emigration literature. Individual migration events occur alongside developing biographies of the self and the nation, and music provides crucial insight into the mechanisms of identity formation within social constructions of exile. This research analyses musical devices in the prose works of a series of Irish authors, focusing on the period between the commencement of the Gaelic Revival, circa 1880, and the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on a variety of theoretical bases, including literature, geography, musicology, and history, it examines how musico-literary portrayals of emigration reflect and mediate the multiplicities inherent in narratives of exilic Irish identity

Elemental trauma: A case study of living with contaminated water near sites of Marcellus Shale gas extraction

This qualitative research study examines the experiences of individuals living with contaminated water near sites of unconventional Marcellus Shale extraction (commonly called “fracking”) in western Pennsylvania. Five individuals across three households were recruited following IRB approval. Fieldwork was completed in a small town in western Pennsylvania from July of 2013 to April of 2014. This project examines how participant’s relationship to the materiality of water undergoes a drastic transformation. Water is explored as a dynamic, elemental substance that creates the conditions for both life and disease and death for participant-households. Water becomes a re-animated character in participant lives that restructures their attention towards valuing and conserving water as it becomes finite and irreversibly contaminated. Forms of embodiment are then explored, as they are forced into highly precarious and hazardous conditions. Participant-households describe ways that boundaries between their own bodies and their eco-contexts dissolve. The location of water contamination becomes the body and the blood. The emotional impact of water contamination on the participants and their social network are described as they relate to the social and ecological violence of the fracking process, such as community conflict, social strife, and personal and collective grief. Finally, the role of technology as it mediates survivability of the participants is examined. Industrial technology, in relation to the expansion of fracking in participant-household lives, can neither be characterized as good or bad, but must be instrumentally deployed in order to attempt to reduce the ecologically catastrophic aspects of energy production. Additionally, technology will be explored in relation to the human body as it clashes with obstacles to transparent medical care due to legislation. Demand for energy to power the planet and support immense population growth is in overdrive. Energy production and consumption is the central pursuit of the current epoch. This has come with immense cost. Energy production has created the worst environmental disasters currently known on the planet. Of the various causalities of these events, elemental substances are continually damaged. The concept of elemental trauma is defined as a way of thinking catastrophic change due to large-scale industrial processes of energy production

Laying a Foundation for Nevada's Electricity Future: Generation Facility Uncertainties and the Need for a Flexible Infrastructure

Outlines the need to build an infrastructure that can support distributed and centralized resources, and describes the elements required: interconnection of power companies, efficiency programs, renewable energy projects, and complementary gas generation