Pine-ing for a Voice: Vegetal agencies, New Materialism and State Control through the Wollemi Pine

Attending to Wollemia nobilis (Wollemi Pine), we read this plant as ensconced and mobilised by political and politicised forces, towards distinct colonial and imperial ends. Seeking to work beyond a language of flowers, we attune to the appropriation and weaponisation of plants; a language beyond the merely decorative or affective, towards understandings of plants performing agency and political power.  Our reading of the Wollemi pine emerges from the scorched summer of 2019/2020, in which much of Australia caught alight, and during which the Wollemi was placed in danger of disappearing for a second, and perhaps final, time. A prehistoric tree, long thought extinct, before its rediscovery in 1994, the Wollemi holds special significance, but further, value within an Australian cultural context. In light of this significance, the Wollemi is apprehended and manipulated towards political ends. Within the frame of this text, we consider not only the contemporary diplomacy and governance within which the Wollemi is ensnared, but too, the legacies of Invasion and colonisation which support the mobilisation of the Wollemi in this manner.  Framing our approach within the broader context of contemporary ecological theory and in a manner attentive to frames of New Materialism, we engage with the entanglements of plant language, agency and being — as a means through which we can attune to our shared mattering and ongoing struggles for sovereignty amidst a rapidly changing natural world. 

Strange Letters Editorial

This special issue arises from a virtual symposium held on 5 February 2021 which sought to challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human. This seemed strangely fitting, occurring as it did in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the nonhuman was asking us to listen; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. As the symposium website describes, we were ‘dislocated from one another by lockdowns, border closures, and the unsustainability, cost, and even danger of travel’.  The marked rise in letter writing throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns emerged as a means of countering this dislocation, taking advantage of the epistolary form’s unique qualities as a way of being together-apart (Jenkins). Perhaps this trend was a reflection upon shifting temporalities (compared to other ways of communicating, the slowness of the postal service became less crucial amidst shifts in day-to-day realities), but also perhaps out of a desire to connect. But as we turned our attention to the Earth, the environment, to the more-than-human, we were called to rethink such correspondence. The symposium asked us to imagine how our letters might help us to connect with others through ‘arboreal love letters and existential ruminations’ as were written to the trees of Naarm (Melbourne) (City of Melbourne; Hesterman) or by ‘making-strange … ideas of ancestry, earth, law, weather and writing itself’ as Alexis Wright implored us to do in her letter ‘Hey, Ancestor!’ in The Guardian in 2018, or by paying attention to the way that nonhumans communicate with each other, as Vicki Kirby suggests when describing lightning as ‘a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky’ (10).

Business Interruption, Income Loss & Value-At-Risk To Catastrophes

Not all risks are insurable. In accordance with the natural and fundamental operation of the practice of insurance, insurers envision certain characteristics that they attribute to “ideally insurable” risks. One of these key elements of an insurable risk is the degree of loss caused by the risk, if loss were to occur. For an insurer, an insurable risk would ideally not result in devastatingly destructive loss; in other words, the risk must not be catastrophic. However, the difficulty of insuring against catastrophes does not lessen the importance for companies to be able to estimate how their own performance will be impacted by the occurrence of a catastrophic loss. This paper aims to estimate the extent of a firm’s business interruption, income loss, and value-at-risk to a catastrophic loss event. The study involves a Poisson-Pareto calamity simulation to estimate business interruption and income loss, and a modified VaR simulation that offers a customized estimation of value-at-risk to catastrophe. The data utilized to run these simulations is gathered from the financial statements of a thoroughly and realistically imagined hand-tool manufacturing company—Kingston Tools, Inc.—in order to provide an estimation of the firm’s risk in a catastrophic event

The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

This material has been published in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Stephen E. Tabachnick. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University PressProviding a range of cogent examples, this chapter describes the influences of the Manga genre of comics strip on the Graphic Novel genre, over the last 35 years, considering the functions of domestication, foreignisation and transmedia on readers, markets and forms

Shapes on the Horizon

In 2019, reports of a raft of pumice adrift in the Pacific Ocean circulated. We track its movement through surveillance technologies — tools of control that buttress turbulent and shifting contemporary borders. Our consideration of the movement of people across porous borders apprehends migratory discourse and critiques framings of abjectness, fear, and colonial reperformance in an Australian context. Security and surveillance, and the littoral composition of Australian borders figure as means of maintaining and reinforcing fixed, terrestrial constructions of sovereignty. Recent border polices involving stratified spaces of offshore detention become bureaucratic and inhumane extensions of the littoral sphere — convergences of the smooth and stratified, that invert, yet reinforce colonial control and persecution. Framed by Deleuzoguattarian notions and our ongoing research project, Ecological Gyre Theory, we see overlaps, collisions, and parallels between the pumice raft as agentic, ecological force, and legacies of invasion and colonisation, reperformed onto people and landscapes. Considering the agentic power of bodies, we read the traversal of the sea by both raft and asylum seekers towards a critique of Australian history and cultural identity. Our critique endorses both a decolonial and New Materialist approach, exploring ecology and being amidst climate collapse and a rapidly changing world

Shapes on the Horizon: Reading the Pumice Raft and Migration through Agentic Ecologies and Australian Border Control

In 2019, reports of a raft of pumice adrift in the Pacific Ocean circulated. Expelled from the Earth by an underwater volcanic eruption, the raft is wonderous and abject, severed from its geologic origins. A threatening Anthropocene omen, it troubles the smooth space of the ocean through its intrusion. We track its movement through sur-veillance technologies tools of control that buttress turbulent and shifting con-temporary borders.Our consideration of the movement of people across porous borders apprehends migratory discourse and critiques framings of abjectness, fear, and colonial reper-formance in an Australian context. Security and surveillance, and the littoral compo-sition of Australian borders figure as means of maintaining and reinforcing fixed, terrestrial constructions of sovereignty. Recent border polices involving stratified spaces of offshore detention become bureaucratic and inhumane extensions of the littoral sphere convergences of the smooth and stratified, that invert, yet reinforce colonial control and persecution.Framed by Deleuzoguattarian notions of smooth, stratified, and holey space, and our ongoing research project, Ecological Gyre Theory, we see overlaps, collisions, and parallels between the pumice raft as agentic, ecological force, and legacies of invasion and colonisation, reperformed onto people and landscapes. Considering the agentic power of bodies, we read the traversal of the sea by both raft and asylum seekers towards a critique of Australian history and cultural identity. Our critique endorses both a decolonial and New Materialist approach, exploring ecology and be-ing amidst climate collapse and a rapidly changing world

Estimated Effectiveness of JYNNEOS Vaccine in Preventing Mpox: A Multijurisdictional Case-Control Study — United States, August 19, 2022–March 31, 2023

As of March 31, 2023, more than 30,000 monkeypox (mpox) cases had been reported in the United States in an outbreak that has disproportionately affected gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons (1). JYNNEOS vaccine (Modified Vaccinia Ankara vaccine, Bavarian Nordic) was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2019 for the prevention of smallpox and mpox via subcutaneous injection as a 2-dose series (0.5 mL per dose, administered 4 weeks apart) (2). To expand vaccine access, an Emergency Use Authorization was issued by FDA on August 9, 2022, for dose-sparing intradermal injection of JYNNEOS as a 2-dose series (0.1 mL per dose, administered 4 weeks apart) (3). Vaccination was available to persons with known or presumed exposure to a person with mpox (postexposure prophylaxis [PEP]), as well as persons at increased risk for mpox or who might benefit from vaccination (preexposure mpox prophylaxis [PrEP]) (4). Because information on JYNNEOS vaccine effectiveness (VE) is limited, a matched case-control study was conducted in 12 U.S. jurisdictions,† including nine Emerging Infections Program sites and three Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity sites,§ to evaluate VE against mpox among MSM and transgender adults aged 18-49 years. During August 19, 2022-March 31, 2023, a total of 309 case-patients were matched to 608 control patients. Adjusted VE was 75.2% (95% CI = 61.2% to 84.2%) for partial vaccination (1 dose) and 85.9% (95% CI = 73.8% to 92.4%) for full vaccination (2 doses). Adjusted VE for full vaccination by subcutaneous, intradermal, and heterologous routes of administration was 88.9% (95% CI = 56.0% to 97.2%), 80.3% (95% CI = 22.9% to 95.0%), and 86.9% (95% CI = 69.1% to 94.5%), respectively. Adjusted VE for full vaccination among immunocompromised participants was 70.2% (95% CI = -37.9% to 93.6%) and among immunocompetent participants was 87.8% (95% CI = 57.5% to 96.5%). JYNNEOS is effective at reducing the risk for mpox. Because duration of protection of 1 versus 2 doses remains unknown, persons at increased risk for mpox exposure should receive the 2-dose series as recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP),¶ regardless of administration route or immunocompromise status

"Underground Comix and the invention of autobiography, history and reportage"

International audienceno abstrac

E-Graphic Novels

peer reviewedThis chapter presents an overview of how the contemporary graphic novel intersects with digital culture, focusing on three dimensions: the resistance to the digital and the complex relationship to print culture, practices of digitization and their impact on the reading process, and finally born digital e-graphic novels experimenting with digital technologies