The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern in the Works of Richard A.W. Hughes

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward identification with the Stranger. Hughes continues to probe the uncharted and taboo through his poems of death and putrefaction, often in the comic Gothic vein, by which humanity must confront its shared abjection. The confrontational nature of Hughes’s poems follows from his understanding, shaped by fellow poet Robert Graves, that humankind is a neurotic, communicative, and pattern-making “animal.” By means of memento mori, Hughes promotes a view of death that re-members a society torn apart by modernity’s multiple dismemberments. Finally, in Hughes’s novels and dramas, the author emphasizes the means for humanity to interface imaginatively with the Abject through a series of metempsychotic masks that bring gods and devils to life. First, Hughes’s two sea novels explore the postcolonial world, engaging the cultural Other through masks that highlight female abjection in the face of cataclysmic trauma. Furthermore, in Hughes’s two interbellum novels, the author brings six movie monsters to life as he explores human subjectivity scarred by personal, societal, and historical traumas. Across Hughes’s oeuvre, including in his stage dramas and screenplays, the author leverages Gothic tropes, themes, and diegetical patterns as a form of shock therapy that demonstrates shared human abjection across genders as male subjects learn to crawl into the Cave of Abjection with all whom the male gaze has traditionally cast down into that space. This dissertation asserts that it is Hughes’s instinctive use of the Gothic within modernist literature that forms the crux of his reparative vision of truth, change, and forgiveness

2009 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Primatologists

No abstract.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64333/1/20230_ftp.pd

Superfund, Hedonics, and the Scales of Environmental Justice

Environmental justice (EJ) is prominent in environmental policy, yet EJ research is plagued by debates over methodological procedures. A well-established economic approach, the hedonic price method, can offer guidance on one contentious aspect of EJ research: the choice of the spatial unit of analysis. Environmental managers charged with preventing or remedying inequities grapple with these framing problems. This article reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on unit choice in EJ, as well as research employing hedonic pricing to assess the spatial extent of hazardous waste site impacts. The insights from hedonics are demonstrated in a series of EJ analyses for a national inventory of Superfund sites. First, as evidence of injustice exhibits substantial sensitivity to the choice of spatial unit, hedonics suggests some units conform better to Superfund impacts than others. Second, hedonic estimates for a particular site can inform the design of appropriate tests of environmental inequity for that site. Implications for policymakers and practitioners of EJ analyses are discussed

Learning at the Interstices; Locating Practical Philosophies for Understanding Physical/virtual Inter-spaces

Virtual worlds are relatively recent developments, and so it is tempting to believe that they need to be understood through newly developed theories and philosophies. However, humans have long thought about the nature of reality and what it means to be “real.” This paper examines the three persistent philosophical concepts of Metaxis, Liminality and Space that have evolved across more than 2000 years of meditation, contemplation and reflection. Our particular focus here is on the nature of the interface between the virtual and the physical: at the interstices, and how the nature of transactions and transitions across those interfaces may impact upon learning. This may, at first, appear to be an esoteric pursuit, but we ground our arguments in primary and secondary data from research studies in higher education

Academic Games in Validation Events: A Study of Academic Roles and Practices

This paper presents the results of a three-year study that examined academics’ espoused and actual practices in validation or approval events of UK degree courses. The study used narrative inquiry to explore academics’ accounts. The paper provides a literature review and then presents the findings which indicate that often procedural processes interrupt the process of curriculum making. The paper uses scenarios to illustrate the ways in which procedural processes can result in subverting and subversive practices during the validation process. It is, therefore, argued that academics take up particular stances, defined here as positional identities, which may help or hinder the validation process. The paper argues that by ignoring staff experiences, the risk is that dominant discourses of regulation become accepted without question and the spaces available for dialogue about professional futures, alongside creation of flexible curricula to address these needs, are crowded out by the performative requirements of the process

The remembering–imagining system

Remembering and imagining are intricately related, particularly in imagining the future: episodic future thinking. It is proposed that remembering the recent past and imagining the near future take place in what we term the remembering–imagining system. The remembering–imagining system renders recently formed episodic memories and episodic imagined near-future events highly accessible. We suggest that this serves the purpose of integrating past, current, and future goal-related activities. When the remembering–imagining system is compromised, following brain damage and in psychological illnesses, the future cannot be effectively imagined and episodic future thinking may become dominated by dysfunctional images of the future

ÆGIS: Shielding Vulnerable Smart Contracts Against Attacks

In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, cost- ing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified once deployed. Though various tools have been proposed to detect vulnerable smart contracts, the majority fails to protect vulnera- ble contracts that have already been deployed on the blockchain. Only very few solutions have been proposed so far to tackle the issue of post-deployment. However, these solutions suffer from low precision and are not generic enough to prevent any type of attack. In this work, we introduce ÆGIS, a dynamic analysis tool that protects smart contracts from being exploited during runtime. Its capability of detecting new vulnerabilities can easily be extended through so-called attack patterns. These patterns are written in a domain-specific language that is tailored to the execution model of Ethereum smart contracts. The language enables the description of malicious control and data flows. In addition, we propose a novel mechanism to streamline and speed up the process of managing attack patterns. Patterns are voted upon and stored via a smart contract, thus leveraging the benefits of tamper-resistance and transparency provided by the blockchain. We compare ÆGIS to current state-of-the-art tools and demonstrate that our solution achieves higher precision in detecting attacks. Finally, we perform a large-scale analysis on the first 4.5 million blocks of the Ethereum blockchain, thereby confirming the occurrences of well reported and yet unreported attacks in the wild