Back in Formation: Presenting the 2018-2019 CWI Fellows

With the new academic year off to a racing start, the Civil War Institute Fellows are back and ready to muster in. Veterans, Ryan Bilger ’19, Savannah Labbe ’19, Jonathan Tracey ’19, and Zachary Wesley ’20 will be joined by new recruits, James Goodman ’20, Elizabeth Hobbs ’21, Benjamin Hutchison ’21, Benjamin Roy ’21, Cameron Sauers ’21, and Isaac Shoop ’21. Everyone is eager to begin working on their new projects and sharing history with all of you. [excerpt

Plane curves with prescribed triple points: a toric approach

We will use toric degenerations of the projective plane ${{\mathbb{P}}^ 2}$ to give a new proof of the triple points interpolation problems in the projective plane. We also give a complete list of toric surfaces that are useful as components in this degeneration

The Things We Remember: Interpreting the Virginia Memorial

When I was in high school, I read The Things They Carried for my English class. It is a fiction book about the Vietnam War written by a Vietnam veteran. The author, Tim O’Brien, had the life experiences to write an autobiography based on true events, but he chose fiction as his vehicle. He explains this choice in one of the chapters in his book. O’Brien stated that, in an ironic way, fiction allowed him to share more truth than reality. His made-up stories allowed him to create the feelings and meanings of the war that his real experiences couldn’t get across for people who had not lived them. This is an idea that has stuck with me ever since, and it has been on my mind a lot lately. [excerpt

The effect of eye movements on traumatic memories and the susceptibility to misinformation : a partial replication : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

The issue of whether certain techniques used in psychotherapy might increase false memories is a major source of contention between cognitive and practising psychologists. Recently, a study by Houben, Otgaar, Merckelbach, and Roelofs (2018) found that bilateral eye movements used in Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy increase susceptibility to misleading information. EMDR is a popular treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder and is primarily thought to reduce the vividness and emotional intensity of traumatic memories. Individuals who undergo EMDR therapy may be more susceptible to misinformation that is inadvertently introduced by the therapist due to reductions in memory vividness. Despite strong theoretical links between eye movements and false memories, few studies have investigated this effect. The current study addressed this issue by attempting to replicate the study by Houben et al. (2018). This study also investigated the working memory account underlying EMDR by comparing eye movements to an alternative dual-task. An initial pilot study comprising a reaction time task established that attentional breathing taxed working memory most comparably to bilateral eye movements. The main study predicted that eye movements would increase susceptibility to misinformation and that eye movements and attentional breathing would lead to comparable reductions in memory vividness and emotionality. 94 students (Mage= 25.74, SDage= 9.68) were recruited to participate in the study at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand. Participants viewed a five-minute video depicting a serious car accident. Afterwards, they were randomly assigned to perform either eye movements, attentional breathing, or a control task while simultaneously recalling the car accident. Participants rated the vividness and emotionality of their memory before and after performing the tasks. All participants then received misinformation about the video before completing a recognition test. Results indicated that the misinformation effect was not replicated, with no effect of eye movements on susceptibility to false memories. Findings also suggested that eye movements and attentional breathing were ineffective in reducing the vividness and emotional intensity of the trauma memory. The present study raises questions about the validity of materials and procedures used to instil the misinformation effect. Limitations of the study and key areas for improvement are considered for further investigation

Suicidal journeys: attempted suicide as geographies of intended death

In geography, a conversation around suicide survivors and their suicidal journeys has yet to happen. The current prioritisation of suicide as end points marked on maps and patterns of death in space and regions has obscured the lived experience of adults who attempt suicide and do not die. In an effort to reduce this invisibility, evidence derived from in-depth interviews with adults (18 years and over reported as missing) who freely delivered narratives of their attempts is employed to understand the complex spatiality of suicide in retrospect. Situating suicide survivors as knowledgeable about their feelings, beliefs and experiences, the paper encounters testimonies of intended death via a focus on spatialised journeys: physical routes, pathways and places of attempted suicide. Discussing these particular journeys as socio-spatial process represents the potential for geographical scholars to rework geographies of dying and (attempted) death as an active practice

Topologies for intermediate logics

We investigate the problem of characterizing the classes of Grothendieck toposes whose internal logic satisfies a given assertion in the theory of Heyting algebras, and introduce natural analogues of the double negation and De Morgan topologies on an elementary topos for a wide class of intermediate logics.Comment: 21 page

Finding Meaning in the Flag: Rebel Flag

I’m sure that as fans of history, at some point in your pursuit of knowledge, you have either read or heard the phrase “language is key”. This is something my professors have harped on, class after class, explaining that the way we talk about things shapes the way they are viewed. This lesson holds true for the Union perspective of the Confederate flag during the war. In all the documents written by Northerners that I looked over for this post, I did not come across a single mention of the “Confederate flag.” This was because the flag was pretty consistently, and intentionally, known as the “rebel flag.” This term was used for each subsequent version of the flag, showing that each of the flags had the same meaning for Northerners, regardless of the changing design