The Reflective Age: Nostalgia at the End of History

This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in nostalgic media, I contend, is a symptom of this condition, so affected by the cultural forces that produced it that the nostalgia we see today is unlike what has come before. Nostalgia in this period is often premised on a process of hyperaestheticization, which substitutes mediated visions of the past for history, subsequently encouraging a breakdown between text and referent––the ‘80s, in this formulation, was defined more by John Hughes, neon, and synthesizers than Reagan and austerity. These texts, in other words, often rely on an elevation of mediated reference as a means of reconstructing the past, wherein understanding of the past is merely a matter of recognizing its mediated artifacts. This nostalgic paradigm also reflects the conditions of the end of history in its cruelly optimistic compulsion to repeat, particularly in the form of reboots and revivals, in a world where everything always already repeats. Nostalgia in this period promotes the idea of reflecting on and reconnecting with the past, often as a means of recovering what has been lost, but does so in superficial ways that ultimately result in misrecognition and further alienation from history. Nostalgic media, in this way, exacerbates the fraught, confounding conditions of the end of history. Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One and its 2020 sequel Ready Player Two, for instance, reveal the ways in which the end of history’s abandonment of a progressive teleology has encouraged the notion that the past is the only viable refuge from the horrors of the present, while, at the same time, the period’s emphasis on mediated pasts leads nostalgic subjects to not only misrecognize the past into which they wish to flee, but also the circumstances that led to this point. The hyper-referentiality of the Netflix series Stranger Things is a perfect example of the aesthetic logic of this paradigm, with its hollowed allusions to media replacing a deeper engagement with the contours of the historical period it purports to capture. Twin Peaks: The Return, the 2017 revival of the celebrated series, provides a profound critique of the ways in which televisual reboots and revivals seek (and inevitably fail) to symbolically repair the problems of the present by returning to, and revising, the crises of the past

A study in merger induced galaxy evolution through post-starburst systems

We discuss an optical study of a triple galaxy system at a redshift of 0.06. In optical images from Data Release 7 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the system consists of a close pair plus another galaxy at a projected distance of 35 kpc. Tidal features extending at least 30 kpc are visible to the southeast of both the galaxy pair and the third member of the system, suggesting significant interaction. One of the the pair and the more isolated galaxy are low-luminosity radio sources. The lone galaxy appears extended in a radio map from the FIRST survey. If the radio emission arises from ongoing star formation, the implied star formation rates are 1 to 2 solar masses per year in each source. We have acquired deep spatially resolved optical (3500-8500 ˚A) spectroscopy with the Sparsepak integral field unit and the Bench Spectrograph on the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope. Both the pair and the more isolated galaxy show post-starburst (K+A) spectral signatures, and stellar population synthesis using Bruzual and Charlot (2003) models indicate that all components of the triple system had episodes of significant star formation at comparable times in the past. This system is part of a larger study of post-starburst galaxies which host radio sources that potentially indicate the presence of an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The goals of this study include a better understanding of the connection between, and relative timing of, galaxy interactions and the triggering of star formation and an active galactic nucleus

Salvation: Into the Cosmos: Board Game Project Blending 4X and Eurogame Styles

This project is an attempt at creating a shorter and simpler 4X strategy game. To do this, the author takes elements of the Eurogame genre and combines aspects of The Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber and Shattered Plans by Jagex while following the requirements of the German board game award, the Spiel de Jahres. After following the traditional game design process of conceptualization, prototyping, and repeated testing, analysis, and revision, the author succeeded in creating a core foundation for such a game that also had marketing potential on its own

Images, Silences, and the Archival Record: An Interview with Michelle Caswell

Dr. Michelle Caswell is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Asian American Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Her book, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (2014), which explores the role of archives and records in the construction of memory about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia through a collection of mug shots taken at Tuol Sleng prison, won the 2015 Waldo Grifford Leland award for Best Publication from the Society of American Archivists. Caswell is also the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository which documents and provides access to the diverse stories of South Asian Americans

Volume 27: Archives

The 2017-2018 Editorial Collective is pleased to present the 27th volume of disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. Over the past year, we have compiled an exciting collection of interviews, scholarly articles, poetry, and fiction that explore the volume’s central theme: “Archives.” Archives are dynamic constellations of absence and presence, ghosts and ghouls, dust and the digital. As such, discussions of archives stretch into multiple schools of thought and practice, raising questions about power, knowledge, memory, community, and social justice. The works collected here, each one employing its own theoretical and methodological approach to archives, contribute to these important and timely conversations. The volume features interviews from the four scholars invited to the University of Kentucky for the Committee on Social Theory’s 2017 Spring Lecture Series: Karen Till, Kimberly Christen, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and Michelle Caswell. They were generous with their time and energy, sharing insights gathered from years of engagement with archival issues in their research. In their interviews, they tackle archives from the perspectives of indigenous knowledges, privacy, knowledge production, memory, legacies of colonization, violence, community control, art, embodiment, identity, and difference. Ultimately, their words remind us what is at stake in discussions of archives: the past, present, and future of the people who archives do–or do not–represent. The poetry and artwork in this collection reflect the fragmentary and distant yet paradoxically immediate nature of the archive, tracing the ways in which the stories that we tell, the stories that we remember, and the stories that become official shape our existence. These works also productively probe the role that geography and power play in archives and memory-work, while asking provocative questions about the presence of the past. Together, they comprise a multifaceted study of the archive and its significance in our lives

Surveying the Safety Culture of Academic Laboratories

The university traditionally has been the foundation for young adults’ professional development, yet the proclivity toward safety culture has garnered less focus in higher education than in the workforce. A survey of faculty at a medium-sized, research-active, private institution revealed specific areas of policy noncompliance as well as specific safety attitudes that can be targeted for interventions. Albeit a snapshot view, the survey implies that safety needs better representation in the classroom, teaching laboratories, and research facilities at universities. Safety is not abandoned by any means, and there is a strong presence of safety-oriented individuals, but the data show barriers to safety do exist that need to be addressed. The implications of this small-scale study serve as a foundation for a more comprehensive multi-institutional study in the future