Ghosts, Imagination and Theatre: re-enacting the futural past through documentary film

This practice-led research looks at creative strategies to address the under-represented and marginalised history of Roma persecution in WWII The research has resulted in a film, The Deathless Woman (89’ 2019), a hybrid documentary film that has been created in response to European sites of atrocity against the Roma. This practice employs a number of experimental strategies that seek to supplement the limited historiography of the genocide of the Roma during WWII and formulate an innovative approach to documentary production that questions notions of authenticity and indexicality in Western knowledge formation. Starting in 1942 with the murder of a Roma family in a small village in Poland, the film aims to bring these events into the present by employing strategies such as the use of ghosts, fantasy and theatre within a documentary framework. Through this, the film aims to visualise and connect the traumatic past of the Roma to other traumatic pasts and to the traumatic present. This research project interrogates two central research questions. Firstly, how might a phenomenological approach to the invisible be employed in knowledge production to reframe our relationship to traumatic or marginalised histories and make their legacy relevant? Within this, I employ an experimental approach to empiricism that foregrounds the sensory as a device to investigate sites of atrocity. That these events were traumatic and centred on specific geographic sites is critical in my choice of sensory methods. I have paid particular attention to atmospheres, ghosts and affects in constructing both a film and an academic argument that foregrounds sensory experience as a method for knowledge production. Critical to my methodology is my decision not to make binary distinctions between imagination and reality (or truth and fiction), but rather to see the two as interrelated and intertwined. More specifically, this extends to declining to rationalise such things as ghosts, but rather to treat the ghost as an object of experience and this has led to the employment of a ghost as a legitimatised narrator within a documentary film. This fantastic notion has been extended into the film’s production through the application of theatrical methods as strategies to further critically challenge and redress the failures of both the archive and of history and has led to my second research question – how might creative strategies in hybrid documentary film practice be effective in reframing marginalised histories in an affectively-impactful way? I demonstrate the potential for non-realist modes such as the literary fantastic, the methods of documentary theatre and the tableau vivant to offer audiences a route to thinking about complicated and traumatic subject matter while simultaneously revealing the virtues and flaws of its sources. The seemingly paradoxical nature of combining documentary and the fantastic comes out of a consideration of what role ghosts might have in the way traumatic histories are communicated and represented, and most importantly, how the ghost has the capacity to bring the past forwards to us in the present. This inter-relationship between imagination or artifice and moral or political thought is at the heart of my work

Why don't zombies like hibiscus tea? A multi-subject approach to photosynthesis through the use of Grätzel cells

Traditionally, photosynthesis has been seen as the domain of biology, with some input from chemistry when dealing with chromatography, while, apart from a passing reference to the colour of leaves, physics has tended to steer clear of the process that provides the lifeblood of human existence. This article outlines how a recent technological advance can be used as a teaching resource in all three branches of science

A unified approach to one-dimensional elastic waves by the method of characteristics

Unified approach to one-dimensional elastic waves by method of characteristic

MCDIT 21 - A computer code for one-dimensional elastic wave problems

Computer program for one dimensional elastic wave problems connected with structural member

Geochemistry of reduced inorganic sulfur, reactive iron, and organic carbon in fluvial and marine surface sediment in the Laizhou Bay region, China

Understanding the geochemical cycling of sulfur in sediments is important because it can have implications for both modern environments (e.g., deterioration of water quality) and interpretation of the ancient past (e.g., sediment C/S ratios can be used as indicators of palaeodepositional environment). This study investigates the geochemical characteristics of sulfur, iron, and organic carbon in fluvial and coastal surface sediments of the Laizhou Bay region, China. A total of 63 sediment samples were taken across the whole Laizhou Bay marine region and the 14 major tidal rivers draining into it. Acid volatile sulfur, chromium (II)-reducible sulfur and elemental sulfur, total organic carbon, and total nitrogen were present in higher concentrations in the fluvial sediment than in the marine sediment of Laizhou Bay. The composition of reduced inorganic sulfur in surface sediments was dominated by acid volatile sulfur and chromium (II)-reducible sulfur. In fluvial sediments, sulfate reduction and formation of reduced inorganic sulfur were controlled by TOC and reactive iron synchronously. High C/S ratios in the marine sediments indicate that the diagenetic processes in Laizhou Bay have been affected by rapid deposition of sediment from the Yellow River in recent decades

Wave propagation in stepped and joined shells Annual report, 1 Sep. 1968 - 1 Sep. 1969

Shell impact response and wave propagation in cylindrical and conical shells by experimental and analytical method

An assessment of transient hydraulics phenomena and its characterization

A systematic search of the open literature was performed with the purpose of identifying the causes, effects, and characterization (modelling and solution techniques) of transient hydraulics phenomena. The governing partial differential equations are presented which were found to be used most often in the literature. Detail survey sheets are shown which contain the type of hydraulics problem, the cause, the modelling, the solution technique utilized, and experimental verification used for each paper. References and source documents are listed and a discussion of the purpose and accomplishments of the study is presented

Basin Compartmentalization in the Foreland: El Cajon Basin, Southwestern Argentina

Shell Oil Corp