Chernobyl Gothic: From Horror to Terror and Disaster to Aftermath

An article applying the movements of horror and terror in Gothic fiction to the shift from trauma (horror) to its abreaction, reflection, and imagination in light of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986

Society Must Be Defended: Online Quality of Life, a Foucauldian Case Study of Gamergate

The activity of real-life trolls and the psychological impact on their victims has been the subject matter of recent television drama, such as Channel 4’s Cyberbully (2015), and horror films with a supernatural twist, such as Unfriended (2015). However, this article explores a key transition in the construction of online social power, from its direct, brutal enforcement by the figure of the troll, to a particular example of the online, biopolitical regulation of quality of life using the device of Vivian James: the fictional character, mascot, and figurehead of the Gamergate protest movement

From Fiction to Gallows Humour: How Chernobyl Survivors are still Coping with Trauma

A brief study of Chernobyl survivors' unique methods of coping with psychological trauma thirty years after the disaster, and an overview of the adaptation of these struggles in Chernobyl-set fiction.  Article is available from The Conversation website: http://theconversation.com/from-fiction-to-gallows-humour-how-chernobyl-survivors-are-still-coping-with-trauma-57923

The Winter Ecology of the Gadwall in Louisiana

Data on the disabled in textbooks revealed that more disabled males than disabled females were visible. More adults including senior citizens were depicted as disabled characters. Sixty-seven percent of the disabilities were physical in origin. Nearly 70 percent of the disabled characters were Caucasian. Characterization and language were generally positive. Analysis of flock characteristics indicated paired and unpaired gadwall remained partially segregated and that pairs were dominant over unpaired gadwall. Pairs were involved in less agonistic activity and remained at greater distances from other birds than unpaired gadwall. Pairing cnronology and behavior suggested that although pairs arose from temporary associations, pair formation occurred rapidly and by late November 80% of the females were paired. Results suggested that advantages in resource exploitation and energy acquisition were enjoyed by pairs. Analysis of esophageal and gizzard contents indicated that vegetation comprised 95.3, animal matter 4.2, and seeds 0.5% of the diet. Algae, Eleocharis parvula, Ruppia maritime, and Myriophyllum spicatum were primary foods consumed and utilization varied seasonally. Food habits did not differ by sex but did by habitat. Diets were selected based upon quality, quantity and preference of available vegetation. Except for changes in body weight, lipid level, gut morphology, and plumage, little morphological variation occurred in wintering gad- wall. Adults completed alternate molt prior to immatures, correlating with their earlier initiation of courtship activities. Weights and lipid levels increased rapidly in fall, declined in midwinter, and increased slightly in spring in adults. Data on fall weights of immatures indicated no change or a decline with time. Gut morphology varied in response to diet quality and most measurements increased significantly during the study. These data reflect the importance of energy acquisition to gad- wall, reliance upon vegetation, and adaptib\u27lity to various habitats and diets. Management must insure that habitat providing abundant, preferred vegetation is available to wintering gadwall

Reading Chernobyl: Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Literature

This thesis explores the psychological trauma of the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986. I argue for the emergence from the disaster of three Chernobyl traumas, each of which will be analysed individually – one per chapter. In reading these three traumas of Chernobyl, the thesis draws upon and situates itself at the interface between two primary theoretical perspectives: Freudian psychoanalysis and the deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida. The first Chernobyl trauma is engendered by the panicked local response to the consequences of the explosion at Chernobyl Reactor Four by the power plant’s staff, the fire fighters whose job it was to extinguish the initial blaze caused by the blast, the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, and the soldiers involved in the region’s evacuation and radiation decontamination. Most of these people died from radiation poisoning in the days, weeks, months or years after the disaster’s occurrence. The first chapter explores the usefulness and limits of Freudian psychoanalytic readings of local survivors’ testimonies of the disaster, examining in relation to the Chernobyl event Freud’s practice of locating the authentic primal scene or originary traumatic witnessing experience in his subjects’ pasts, as exemplified by his Wolf Man analysis, detailed in his psychoanalytic study ‘On the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918). The testimonies read through this Freudian psychoanalytic lens are constituted by Igor Kostin’s personal account of the disaster’s aftermath, detailed in his book Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter (2006), and by Svetlana Alexievich’s interviews with Chernobyl disaster survivors in her book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2006). The second chapter argues that Freudian psychoanalysis only provides a provisional, ultimately fictional origin of Chernobyl trauma. Situating itself in relation to trauma studies, this thesis, progressing from its first to its second chapter, charts the geographical and temporal shift between these first and second traumas, from trauma-as-sudden-event to trauma-as-gradual-process. In the weeks following the initial Chernobyl explosion, which released into the atmosphere a radioactive cloud that blew in a north-westerly direction across Northern Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, symptoms of radiation poisoning slowly emerged in the populations of the abovementioned countries. To analyse the psychological impact of confronting this gradual, international unfolding of trauma – the second trauma of Chernobyl – the second chapter of this thesis explores the critique of the global attempt to archivise, elegise and ultimately understand the Chernobyl disaster in Mario Petrucci’s elegies, compiled in his poetry collection Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl (2006), the horror film Chernobyl Diaries (2012, dir. Bradley Parker), and Adam Roberts’ Science Fiction novel, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009). Analysing the deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida in these texts – his notions of archive fever, impossible mourning and ethical mourning – this chapter argues that the attempt to interiorise, memorialise and mourn the survivors of the Chernobyl disaster is narcissistic, hubristic and violent in the extreme. It then proposes that Derrida’s notion of ethical mourning, outlined most clearly in his lecture ‘Mnemosyne’ (1984), enables us to situate our emotional sympathy for survivors – who, following Derrida’s lecture, are maintained as permanently exterior and inaccessible to us – in our very inability or failure to comprehend or locate the origin of their Chernobyl traumas. The third and final chapter analyses the third trauma of Chernobyl: the psychological and physiological effects of the disaster on second-generation inhabitants living near the Exclusion Zone erected around the evacuated, cordoned-off and still-radioactive Chernobyl region. These second-generation experiences of living near a sealed-away source of intense radiation are reconstructed in literature and videogaming: in Darragh McKeon’s novel All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2014), Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Dead Lake (2014) and the videogame S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), developed by the company GSC Game World. The analysis of these texts is informed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic theory of the intergenerational phantom: the muteness of a generation’s history which returns to haunt the succeeding generations. This chapter will explore the psychological effects upon second-generation Chernobyl survivors, which result from these survivors’ incorporation or unconscious interiorisation of their parents’ psychologically repressed traumatic Chernobyl experiences, by analysing reconstructions of this process in the abovementioned texts. These parental experiences, echoing the Exclusion Zone as a denied physical space, have been interred in inaccessible psychic crypts. By way of conclusion, the thesis then offers an alternative theory of reading survivors’ Chernobyl trauma. Survivors’ restaging of their Chernobyl witnessing experiences as jokes enables them to cathartically, temporarily abreact their trauma through the laughter that these jokes engender

Six of the scariest horror comics

First paragraph: Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s made a point of their potential to terrify, with anthologies from Entertaining Comics, such as Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, and Tales of the Crypt, boasting covers with straplines such as “Within these pages dwell creatures from the terrifying beyond!” The House of Mystery series from rival DC Comics asks: “Dare you enter the house of mystery?” – and cover art often depicts children or young adults on the cusp of discovering what lies within. This teasing investigation and revelation of horror has always been a key trope in horror comics – from their earliest days to the resurgence of interest in the format in recent decades. As darkness descends around Halloween, here are some of the most chilling reads the graphic novel medium has to offer.https://theconversation.com/six-of-the-scariest-horror-comics-10562

The Gardens of Singapore

Singapore has several public gardens of which two, Singapore Botanic Gardens and Gardens by the Bay, are of particular national and international renown. These two gardens have contrasting but complementary ways of enthusing and educating the public about plants and of gaining their support for horticultural excellence, botanical research and conservation. Founded in 1859, Singapore Botanic Gardens is an old and established garden with a long history of horticultural and botanical research, plant exploration and conservation. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, the world’s first tropical botanic garden to receive this accolade. Gardens by the Bay opened in 2012 and its focus is on large-scale displays in spectacular settings, thereby attracting huge numbers of visitors since its opening. In their contrasting ways, both gardens enthuse and educate the public about plants and the natural world. This work lays the foundations for public advocacy of conservation efforts in Singapore, resulting in a very high level of public support for greening efforts and the protection of natural areas in land-scarce Singapore

The Role of Botanic Gardens in Species Recovery :

A translocation experiment to reintroduce the rare fern Woodsia ilvensis (L.) R.Br. to former sites in England and Scotland is described. The demands of this kind of conservation work brings the work of scientists and horticulturists together. High losses of transplants are to be expected and in order to gradually build up populations in the wild, translocation programmes may have to adopt a multi-phased approach. The facilities at botanic gardens are well suited to this type of conservation work

New digital interactions with John Cage\u27s Variations IV, V and VI

To celebrate the centenary of John Cage’s birth in 1912, Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel undertook the realization of the American composer John Cage’s (1912 – 1992) complete Variations I – VIII. The works offer a unique insight into the development of Cage’s approach to composition practice, aleatoric approaches, spatial arrangements and the use of electronics. Entitled the “John Cage Complete Variations Project”, Decibel created a performance of the eight pieces in around an hour. The preparation and reading of the scores that make use of transparent sheets (Variations I, II, III, IV and VI) has been adapted using digital score creators and readers. This permits real time generation of measurements and graphics, as well as the assemblage of performance symbols, that can occur during the actual performance of the works. This paper examines the approach to the Variations whose instructions result in the employment or creation of maps: Variations IV (1963), V (1965) and VI (1966)