Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'War landscape'

This dissertation explores the ways in which media, visuality, and politics intersect through an analysis of contemporary war photography. In so doing, it seeks to uncover how war photography as a social practice works to produce, perform and construct the State. Furthermore, it argues that this productive and performative power works to constrain the conditions of possibility for geopolitics. The central argument of this project is that contemporary war photography reifies a view of the international in which the liberal, democratic West is pitted against the barbaric Islamic world in a ‘civilizational’ struggle. This project’s key contribution to knowledge rests in its unique and rigorous research methodology (Visual Discourse Analysis) – mixing as it does inspiration from both quantitative and qualitative approaches to scholarship. Empirically, the dissertation rests on the detailed analysis of over 1900 war images collected from 30 different media sources published between the years 2000-2013.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between tourism and remembrance in a landscape of war, specifically the Normandy beaches of World War II where the D-Day Landings of June 6, 1944 took place. The anthropological investigation employs a theoretical framework that incorporates tourist performance, tourism worldmaking, landscape, cultural memories of war and remembrance. The thesis also examines the tourism-remembrance relationship by way of the various vectors that inform cultural memory, such as the legend of D-Day, national war mythologies and war films, and how these are interpreted and refashioned through tourism.

This thesis investigates the entanglement of David Jones’ portrayal of the sacrifice of Christ with his experience of the First World War, particularly through his depiction of landscape. In the face of the jingoistic, sentimental and ironic uses of the image of Christ’s sacrifice in relation to the war amongst his contemporaries, the Roman Catholic convert David Jones was interested in the sacrifice of Christ understood sincerely as a theological mystery in relation to the war, and he reflected on his experience for nearly 20 years ‘in tranquility’ before seeking to express it in art. In the interim (c. 1919-1935), his experience both of Roman Catholic liturgy and his extensive reading and conversation in the heated early 20th-century theological and anthropological debates about the sacrifice of Christ in relation to pre-Christian sacrificial figures provided him with a radically different model for thinking about the relationship between the sacrifice of Christ and the suffering of soldiers in the landscape than the politicised rhetoric of the war. Jones’ unusual and strongly modernist sense of visual and verbal artistic ‘shape’ enabled him to portray the sacrifice of Christ as related to the war by means of immanent presence instead of according to typological ‘comparison’. He therefore relinquishes neither the horror of the war’s violence nor the hope that it can be ‘redeemed’ by the dynamic action of Christ at the source of creation permeating history. Jones presents the ravaged landscape of the war, therefore, as radiating a glimmer of Christ’s sacrifice from the hidden dimension of eternity; he presents the crucifixion of Christ, conversely, as a flourishing landscape that shows the scars of the WWI battlefield transformed by incorporation into it. His strongly sacramental sense of the function of artwork therefore seeks a real participation in the work of ‘redemption’ seen in the understanding of Christ’s sacrifice as a theological mystery.

This thesis argues that avenues of honour were the first choice of memorial to the Great War created by Australians. Despite not being the first such avenue, the thesis argues that, by virtue of the massive amount of publicity it brought to focus on this form of memorial, the Ballarat Avenue of Honour was a significant cultural statement by Australians during the Great War. The Ballarat Avenue of Honour was inspirational and pivotal to the establishment of a movement that saw similar memorial avenues planted throughout Australia and also in the U.S.A., U.K., Canada and New Zealand. Using examples from municipal council minutes, correspondence and newspaper reports the spread of this form of memorial is followed from its infancy in South Australia through the Ballarat experience to Britain, North America and New Zealand. Following Australia‘s first plantings in 1915, there was a groundswell from many communities throughout Australia who adopted this form of memorialisation. Australian communities took control of their own need to honour their heroes, their local volunteers, in avenue of honour plantings. Following the example of Ballarat after 1917, this desire to plant memorial avenues became a movement. Examples of the growth of this memorial movement, while government aimed to control spending by curtailing ‗waste‘ on memorials, are outlined and analysed. The thesis also examines the symbolism of avenues against the perceived superior ‗worthiness‘ of later built memorials. By the time the movement declined in Australia, other countries were continued to plant avenues. The diminution, and eventual fall, from memory of many of these heritage landscapes is explored as a part of the politics of identity. In examining the arguments, the links between Ballarat‘s avenue and others throughout Australia, the respective Commonwealth countries as well as the U.S.A. are developed.
Doctor of Philosophy

The outmanoeuvring of Allied forces in May 1940 led to the eventual evacuation of the BEF from the continent in June 1940. Fearing an invasion, GHQ Home Forces set about the rapid re-militarisation of the UK to oppose, arguably, the first very real threat to this country’s sovereignty since the Norman conquest of 1066 AD. Constructing a series of anti-invasion defences throughout the countryside, a network of defensive fieldworks and concrete gun emplacements were erected, with linear stop lines forming part of the overall stratagem for a countrywide defence in depth. Examining one particular linear stop line, GHQ Line Green, despite previous research into its archaeological route through the landscape several questions still remain unanswered - Did the proposed wartime route for the stop line match the documented archaeology? Did the defensive fieldworks conform to 1940 WO specifications, or were they similar in design to the linear fieldworks of the First World War? Did GHQ Line Green dismiss the defensive ‘folly’ notion of the Maginot Line by being strategically sited in the Bristol hinterland? A prepared battlefield that never faced the unpredictable test of conflict, evidence offered by original cartographic, archaeological and GIS ‘Fields-of- Fire’ analysis concluded that the GHQ Line Green was strategically placed in the landscape. In ideal conditions GHQ Line Green could have had limited success in slowing down an invasion force. This dismisses the notion that the stop line was a defensive ‘folly’. With its origins found to lay in First World War fortifications, the research undertaken for this thesis will further our understanding of an often forgotten Second World War landscape.

This project covers the development of a model framework intended to allow researchers of the archaeology of the Cold War to recognise a range of behaviours played out on military sites. The order and chaos model developed and utilised in this thesis introduces a heterotopian landscape populated by the Royal Observer Corps. Through a process of archaeological fieldwork a number of behavioural traits are recognised and discussed here for the first time. The group in question is fully researched, providing a historiography of the practice played out during the groups life-cycle. The landscape archaeology is discussed and contextualised by narration from the volunteers who once operated the posts. A range of case studies are introduced confirming the validity of the order and chaos model and potential for application elsewhere. Finally, the findings are discussed in detail and a proposal for the next step in the research are revealed.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired.

The Battle of New Hope Church was fought on May 25-26, 1864 as part of the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War. This research utilizes historical records along with archaeological fieldwork in order to better understand the battlefield landscape. In particular, I seek to answer whether soldiers behaved in, perceived of, and constructed the battlefield landscape based on a set of cultural norms imposed on them by the strict structure of the military. This research offers insight into the construction of the battlefield landscape at New Hope Church, how it is connected to related battlefield landscapes, and how it has been memorialized as a landscape of conflict.

This thesis explores a history of fashion and art in post-war Britain. The historical analysis of this study focuses on how institutions and spaces of public culture – such as museums, galleries, exhibitions and art schools – were used as locations for editorial photo-spreads published in the British editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar between 1945 and 1962. Fashion magazines participate in the cultural production of art by depicting its institutions, its products and producers as fashionable. This thesis interrogates the ways in which the field of fashion, and fashion media in particular, thereby gives symbolic value to the field of art through its mediation. In its examination of the ways in which representations of art and fashion have been meaningfully constructed for a high fashion magazine readership, the thesis contributes to a further understanding of the relationship between fashion and art, and affords new insights into the cultural history of post-war Britain. The theoretical framework of this study engages with Agnès Rocamora’s model of ‘fashion media discourse’, which brings together the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This thesis draws upon Foucault’s work on ‘discourse’ and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural production’ in order to conduct an ‘archaeology’ of post-war British fashion media and its participation in the cultural production of art. This thesis has developed Rocamora’s concept in its application to a specific historical study of fashion media. In doing so, this thesis contributes to a wider understanding of how the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu can be applied in the scholarly research of fashion media and histories of fashion. This thesis contributes to the further knowledge of practices in history concerning methodologies of archival research and textual analysis.

Many war memorials today face loss of relevant meaning to the members of their community over time, an inability to adapt to evolving historical perspectives, and a lack of ability to engage visitors in a deep and authentic way of creating meaning and understanding. New war memorials should provide opportunities for visitors to engage with them in an active, conscious, and dynamic relationship with the built site. Encouraging such a connection facilitates deep and authentic meaning making that continues beyond the site visit, and that allows the memorialâ s form to evolve over time in response to visitor interaction. The constructivist model for war memorial design incorporates ten strategies, and the Active Physical Interaction strategy in particular, that allow designers to create places that encourage visitors to have personalized interaction. These strategies are built on the constructivist philosophy that explains how individuals and groups of people understand the non-objective world through experience. This position was tested through the design of a Dutch World War Two memorial at Warm Hearth Village in Blacksburg, Virginia. This memorialâ s main features include community garden beds for cultivation by the Villageâ s elderly residents. The concept of sharp contrast reflected in three distinct areas of the memorial recall the oppression under five-years of Nazi occupation, the celebration of liberation in 1945, and the efforts of Allied and Resistance fighters in making this liberation possible.
Master of Landscape Architecture

Just over a hundred years ago, the First World War profoundly disrupted the landscape of Europe: from the fields of Galicia to the French plains, from the Alpine arc to the coasts of the Baltic Sea, position and trench warfare brought about transformations by etching the ground, carving out mountains, reorganizing territorial arrangements and original environmental ecosystems, leaving room for the stratification of new traces and meanings that, over time, have contributed to the construction of what is now universally recognized as a fragile cultural heritage of high complexity. If Law n.78 of 2001, as a synthesis of a very intense and fruitful debate, protects the remains of the First World War mainly intending to protect this particular historical heritage without altering “the material and historical characteristics” (in the Italian context), in the aftermath of the celebrations for the Centenary, and in light of numerous projects that have been applied to the restoration/recovery/evaluation of these assets, to return to investigate the “landscapes of war” means to set up a new research to understand how these remains can continue to narrate their “being in time” to future generations, stimulating “possibilities of memory” and representing at the same time substantial resources, cultural but also economic, for the future. A problem of scale clearly emerged following the analysis of the status quo of a representative sample of places and artifacts and concluded/ongoing projects at the international level. The pregnant force of the remains as a “system” deeply connected not only by a physical infrastructure of field fortifications, entrenchments, barracks, and obstacle courses but also by a dense network of intangible and visual relationships that substantiated their functioning, today is increasingly weakening. As a confirmation of this, it is evident, for example, how the fragmentation of the interventions and their management policies is also reflected in the greater attention paid by the majority of the carried out projects to the permanent fortifications compared to the entrenched articulated systems that surrounded them and were an integral part of them. To solve this interpretative-operative gap, the need to recover a systemic vision capable of moving at different scales and grasping the intangible wholeness of the system-vestiges, today apparently shattered, has emerged. This vision should focus attention not on the fragments as “remains of a whole that no longer exists”, but on the potential that they can still generate if put in tension with each other: a magnetic field capable of binding the different parts and recomposing their meanings. This has led to moving away from the specificity of individual disciplinary knowledge to embrace a transversal approach able to place the warscape at the core and analyze it in its entire nature and biography of landscape-palimpsest multi-layered in different times. In this perspective, the indissoluble symbiosis between physical “signs” and immaterial values (deposited over time) has turned out to be the specific peculiarity of the “character” of these “war landscapes”, thus recognizing the condition of fragility not as a point of weakness, but rather as their most “authentic” peculiarity. It was possible to identify different “ways of seeing” these warscapes through this simultaneously inductive and deductive knowledge-based process, studying not only the theoretical and methodological aspects of spatial analysis but also the relationships between the socio-cultural, historical, and anthropological factors that have defined its development and transformation. This approach focuses increasingly on the need to adopt a holistic vision to overcome the current fragmentation of this heritage and think about its future without betraying its authenticity. Operationally, this approach has been declined through two current levels of research. As an essential moment to consciously set up the future operative proposals, an order matrix was defined to reread the complexity recovering a systemic vision also in the analytical phase. By arranging the building typologies with the different morphologies of the territories, it was possible to identify some “war-scape classes”, useful to interpret the fragmentary nature of the different “war landscapes” through the identification both of the driving forces that had determined their construction, in different times, and of the same ones that can determine the trajectories of future change. By identifying the different “war-scape classes”, it was possible to critically reinterpret the status quo of places and artifacts through a “systemic look”. Based on what emerged, an articulate SWOT analysis was devolped to highlight the main potential and criticality of the remains at the system level. The second declination of this holistic approach focused on the meaning of the recognition of “war landscapes” as “places of memory”. Through the evolutionary study of the different phases of the “construction of the Great War memory”, which throughout a century have alternated multiple and polysense “practices of narration”, it was possible to better understand the processes that led to the recognition of the testimonial value of the remains. In this way, it was also possible to understand that specific “sense of place” that, metaphorically, identifies the different warscapes as “high capacity condensers of values”, in which the intensity of the potential (the meaningfulness of meanings/new re-significations) is directly proportional to the charge that is generated at the moment in which the relationships between the different poles (archipelago of vestiges as fragments) are strengthened. In this specific regard, it was possible to identify the physical space of the threshold between “the visible and the submerged” as a particularly dense and pregnant accumulation basin to be “poetically investigated” to unveil the permanence of the imprint of the war (manifested there as much on a physical level in the “matter marked” by the conflict as in the meanings assumed by such “signs”), still present today but “hidden” under the multiple layers of deposition that have stratified over time. The considerations obtained through the two levels of research have been combined with a theoretical reflection on the recognition of the “landscapes of war” as “heritage” understood in its various etymological meanings (legacy, inheritance, and patrimony). In this way, it was possible to better understand the meaning of the concept of enhancement applied to this heritage, bringing to the surface some semantic nuclei that are currently critical concerning the strengthening and/or enhancement of which to consciously direct future orientations of priorities. The priority issue, which strongly emerged, was the pressing need to develop new operational strategies to facilitate the recognition, within the contemporary multi-layered landscape, of the different levels of permanence of the remains, including in particular the most fragile “signs” in terms of permanence, currently at greater “risk of loss”. In addition to this, the need to propose new strategies regarding the policies of coordination and management of processes with particular attention to the importance of participatory aspects (issues identified but not explored in detail in this research), and the need to better understand some aspects of construction technology (related to technological experiments of reinforced concrete of whose structural behavior little is known), also emerged. In an inter-scalar vision, these aspects have assumed even greater importance in the awareness that the ability to recognize different areas concerning which the vestiges remain in the contemporary world at different levels of semantic significance is a necessary prerequisite for future projects to operate recovering that systemic vision lost today, ensuring the system-vestiges, as such, different margins of design, preserving our “possibility of memory” through its evocative potential. In this perspective, the research has therefore elaborated and proposed a “method in complexity” proper to facilitate the recognition of what can have testimonial value at the landscape scale by identifying areas in which the vestiges of war persist at different temperatures. This is a new paradigm that, moving from the need to recover a systemic view capable of recognizing the permanence of even the most fragile remains, expands the meaning of “testimonial value” at the scale of the “warscape” by introducing the concept of “testimonial gradient”. This is a useful parameter to identify the different areas in which the degree of semantic significance of the vestiges and the related “possibilities of memory” are graduated according to the level of knowledge of specific indicators, such as the historical-identity aspects, the typological-constructive knowledge of the artifacts, the degree of community involvement and, above all, the legibility of the vestige-system. In addition to having defined at a conceptual level the meaning of these indicators, the research has also developed an analytical method based on a multi-criteria analysis to make operational the qualitative considerations expressed by the knowledge-based parameters previously identified and to obtain accurate fragility maps of the different warscapes. These documents are fascinating not only because they give an overall view of the semantic density of a given context, but because they are a fundamental proactive tool for future practices of “care”: the essential knowledge base on which to base future choices in terms of conservation, protection, and enhancement. In the light of the previous considerations, it has emerged the awareness of how necessary is the interdisciplinary collaboration for the definition of the indicators constituting the “testimonial gradient”: the last part of the present research has therefore been mainly focused on the elaboration of an operative method to facilitate the deepening of two of these indicators, in relation also to the criticalities previously emerged, linked to the issues of recognizability of the most fragile permanences, both from an overall point of view and of construction technology. Therefore, intending to contribute to the unveiling of the broad and deep information basin in which the complex system of visible but also “submerged” vestiges has been recognized, the research proposed the elaboration of a knowledge-based method called “stratigraphic telescope”, a methodological tool able to explore the processes of construction/transformation of war landscapes at different scales. This method proved to be a fertile contribution to place, side by side with the study of archival documents and manuals of fortifications, an indispensable store of knowledge to better understand the construction techniques, the technical and technological details, the materials used, and the tactical or planting solutions proposed. This method is clearly based on applying the interpretive code of architectural stratigraphy to the scale of the landscape, thus interpreting the history of artifacts as the result of processes of addition, subtraction, and transformation that have left physical traces linked together in a stratigraphic sequence. Operationally, this has been interpreted in understanding the archaeological transformation’s dynamics of the landscapes over time, comparing the impact of the war event with the current recognition of land uses and the permanence of the remains. This method founds itself mainly on analyzing, comparing, and interpreting historical documentation, period aerial photographs, current orthophotos, and data processing obtained by techniques of high-resolution (remote sensing). In this perspective, the use of software for the creation of Geographic Information Systems such as ArcGis and QuantumGis has been fundamental, as these work environments have allowed overall coordination of the entire cognitive process: from the integrated management of the different input datasets (georeferencing of historical maps of militarization and military aerial photographs) to the processing of the expected outputs. In this regard, the most innovative result of the research has been the important contribution that some specific visualization modalities of LIDAR data obtained through specific tools such as the Relief Tool Visualization (e.g., Hillshading from multiple directions and Sky-View-Factor visualization) have provided in the identification of different degrees of legibility of the footprint of the Great War within the topography of today’s landscape. The validation phase on specific case studies, for example, on the system of Austro-Hungarian forts in Trentino (Italy) and on the entrenched system around Fort Busa Verle (Altopiano di Vezzena, TN, Italy), has allowed us to verify the effectiveness of this method not only on a qualitative but also on a quantitative level. In conclusion, therefore, the elaboration of the tool “stratigraphic telescope”, in addition to the new possibilities of narration introduced by it, is a significant methodological contribution to the definition of the “testimonial gradient” previously described as a crucial moment to consciously set up future projects. The implementation of the proposed method on other case histories and the theoretical-operational deepening of the other identified indicators are the main directions towards which future research perspectives can be developed.
Poco più di cent’anni fa, il Primo Conflitto Mondiale ha profondamente sconvolto il paesaggio dell’intera Europa: dai campi di Galizia alle pianure francesi, dall’arco alpino sino alle coste del Mar Baltico, la guerra di posizione e di trincea ha determinato trasformazioni incidendo il terreno, scavando le montagne, riorganizzando gli assetti territoriali e gli ecosistemi ambientali originali, lasciando spazio alla stratificazione di nuove tracce e significati che, nel corso del tempo, hanno contribuito alla costruzione di quello che oggi è universalmente riconosciuto come un patrimonio culturale fragile ad alta complessità. Se la Legge n.78 del 2001, come sintesi di un dibattito molto intenso e fecondo, protegge le vestigia della Prima guerra mondiale principalmente con l’obiettivo di tutelare questo particolare patrimonio storico senza alterarne «le caratteristiche materiali e storiche» (in ambito italiano), all’indomani delle celebrazioni per il Centenario ed alla luce di numerosi progetti che, sino ad oggi, si sono applicati al restauro/recupero/valorizzazione di questi beni, tornare ad indagare i “paesaggi di guerra” significa impostare una nuova ricerca per comprendere in che modo tali vestigia possano continuare a narrare il loro “essere nel tempo” anche alle prossime generazioni, stimolando “possibilità di memoria” e rappresentando al tempo stesso concrete risorse, culturali ma anche economiche, per il futuro. A seguito dell’analisi dello status quo di un campione rappresentativo di luoghi e manufatti e di progettualità concluse e in atto, a livello internazionale, è chiaramente sorto un problema di scala: la forza pregnante delle vestigia in quanto “sistema” profondamente connesso non solo da un’infrastrutturazione fisica di fortificazioni campali, trinceramenti, baraccamenti e campi ad ostacoli, ma anche da una fitta rete di relazioni intangibili e visuali che ne sostanziavano il funzionamento, oggi si sta sempre più indebolendo. A conferma di ciò si evidenzia, ad esempio, come la frammentazione degli interventi e delle politiche di gestione degli stessi si riverberi anche nella maggior attenzione dedicata dalla maggioranza dei progetti realizzati alle fortificazioni permanenti rispetto agli articolati sistemi trincerati che le circondavano e ne costituivano parte integrante. Per risolvere tale gap interpretativo-operativo, è emersa la necessità di recuperare una visione sistemica in grado di muoversi alle diverse scale e cogliere l’intangibile interezza del sistema-vestigia, oggi apparentemente infranta, focalizzando l’attenzione non ai frammenti in quanto “resti di un intero che ora non esiste più”, ma al potenziale che essi possono ancora generare se messi in tensione uno con l’altro: un campo magnetico in grado di legare le diverse parti e ricomporne i significati. Ciò ha portato ad allontanarsi dalla specificità dei singoli saperi disciplinari per abbracciare invece un approccio trasversale in grado di porre al centro il warscape ed analizzarlo nella sua intera natura e biografia di paesaggio-palinsesto pluristratifcato in tempi diversi. In questa prospettiva, l’indissolubile simbiosi tra “segni” fisici e valori immateriali depositatisi nel corso del tempo è risultata essere la peculiarità specifica del “carattere” di tali “paesaggi di guerra”, riconoscendo quindi la condizione di fragilità non quale punto di debolezza, quanto piuttosto come la loro peculiarità più “autentica”. Attraverso tale processo conoscitivo contemporaneamente induttivo e deduttivo, studiando non solo gli aspetti teorici e metodologici dell’analisi spaziale, ma anche le relazioni tra i fattori socio-culturali, storici ed antropologici che ne hanno definito sviluppo e trasformazioni, è stato quindi possibile individuare differenti “way of seeing” di questi warscapes, mettendo sempre più a fuoco la necessità di adottare una visione olistica per superare l’attuale frammentarietà di questo patrimonio e pensare al suo futuro senza tradirne l’autenticità. Operativamente questo approccio si è declinato attraverso due contemporanei livelli di ricerca. Per recuperare una visione sistemica anche in fase analitica, quale momento essenziale per impostare consapevolmente le future proposte operative, è stata definita una matrice d’ordine per rileggere la complessità: mettendo a sistema le tipologie costruttive con le differenti morfologie dei territori, è stato possibile identificare alcune “war-scape classes”, utili per interpretare la frammentarietà dei differenti “paesaggi di guerra” attraverso l’individuazione sia delle driving forces che ne avevano determinato la costruzione, in tempi diversi, sia delle stesse che ne possono determinare le traiettorie di cambiamento future. Attraverso l’individuazione delle differenti “war-scape classes” è stato possibile reinterpretare criticamente lo status quo di luoghi e manufatti attraverso uno “sguardo sistemico”. Sulla scorta di quanto emerso è stata quindi elaborata un’articolata analisi SWOT per mettere in luce le principali potenzialità e criticità delle vestigia a livello di sistema. La seconda declinazione dell’innovativo approccio olistico precedentemente proposto si è concentrata sul significato del riconoscimento dei “paesaggi di guerra” quali “luoghi della memoria”. Attraverso lo studio evolutivo delle diverse fasi di “costruzione della memoria della Grande Guerra”, che nel corso di tutto un secolo hanno alternato molteplici e polisense “pratiche di narrazione”, è stato possibile meglio comprendere i processi che hanno portato al riconoscimento del valore testimoniale delle vestigia, e quindi di quel “sense of place” specifico che, metaforicamente, identifica i differenti warscapes quali “condensatori di valori ad alta capacità”, in cui l’intensità del potenziale (la pregnanza di significati/nuove ri-significazioni) è direttamente proporzionale alla carica che si genera nel momento in cui vengono rafforzate le relazioni tra i diversi poli (arcipelago di vestigia in quanto frammenti). A questo specifico riguardo, è stato possibile individuare lo spazio fisico della soglia tra “il visibile e il sommerso” quale bacino di accumulo particolarmente denso e pregnante da “indagare poeticamente” per disvelare le permanenze dell’impronta della guerra (ivi manifestatasi tanto a livello fisico nella “materia signata” dal conflitto quanto nei significati assunti da tali “segni”), oggi ancora presente ma “nascosta” al di sotto dei molteplici layer deposizionali che si sono stratificati nel corso del tempo. Le considerazioni ottenute attraverso i due livelli di ricerca sopra descritti sono state messe a sistema con una riflessione a livello teorico rispetto al riconoscimento dei “paesaggi di guerra” in quanto “patrimonio” inteso nelle sue diverse accezioni etimologiche (legacy, inheritance e patrimony). In questo modo è stato possibile meglio constualizzare il significato del concetto di enhancement applicato a questo patrimonio, facendo affiorare alcuni nuclei semantici attualmente critici, rispetto al rafforzamento e/o valorizzazione dei quali indirizzare consapevolmente i futuri orientamenti di priorità. Oltre alla necessità di proporre nuove strategie riguardanti le policies di coordinamento e gestione dei processi con particolare attenzione all’importanza degli aspetti partecipativi (questioni individuate ma non approfondite in dettaglio nella presente ricerca), e all’esigenza di meglio comprendere alcuni aspetti di tecnologia costruttiva (legati alle sperimentazioni tecnologiche del cemento rinforzato del cui comportamento strutturale poco si conosce), la questione prioritaria, emersa con forza, è stata la stringente necessità di elaborare nuove strategie operative per facilitare il riconoscimento, all’interno del paesaggio contemporaneo pluri-stratificato, dei diversi livelli di permanenza delle vestigia, tra cui in particolare dei “segni” più fragili in quanto a permanenza, attualmente a maggior “rischio di perdita”. In una visione inter-scalare, questo aspetto ha assunto ancor maggior importanza nella consapevolezza che la capacità di riconoscere diverse aree rispetto cui le vestigia permangono nella contemporaneità a differenti livelli di pregnanza semantica, costituisce un presupposto necessario alle future progettualità per operare recuperando quella visione sistemica oggi perduta, garantendo al sistema-vestigia, proprio in quanto tale, diversi margini di progettabilità, conservando la nostra “possibilità di memoria” attraverso la sua potenzialità evocativa. In questa prospettiva, la ricerca ha quindi elaborato e proposto un “metodo nella complessità” utile per facilitare il riconoscimento di ciò che può avere valore testimoniale alla scala del paesaggio attraverso l’individuazione di aree in cui le vestigia della guerra permangono a differenti temperature. Si tratta a tutti gli effetti di un nuovo paradigma che, muovendo dalla necessità di recuperare uno sguardo sistemico in grado di riconoscere le permanenze anche delle vestigia più fragili, dilata il significato di “valore di testimonianza” alla scala del “warscape” introducendo il concetto di “gradiente testimoniale”. Si tratta di un parametro utile ad identificare i diversi ambiti nei quali il grado di pregnanza semantica delle vestigia e le relative “possibilità di memoria” risultano graduati in base al livello di conoscenza di specifici indicatori, quali gli aspetti storico-identitari, le conoscenze tipologico-costruttive dei manufatti, il grado di coinvolgimento delle comunità e, soprattutto, la leggibilità del sistema-vestigia. Oltre ad aver definito a livello concettuale il significato di tali indicatori, la ricerca ha sviluppato anche un metodo analitico basato su di un’analisi multicriteriale per rendere operative le considerazioni qualitative espresse dai parametri conoscitivi precedentemente individuati ed ottenere delle vere e proprie mappe della fragilità dei diversi warscapes. Tali elaborati sono particolarmente interessanti non solo perché restituiscono una visione complessiva della densità semantica di un dato contesto, ma in quanto costituiscono un vero e proprio strumento proattivo verso le future pratiche di “cura”, la base conoscitiva indispensabile su cui fondare le future scelte in termini di conservazione, protezione ed enhancement. Alla luce delle precedenti considerazioni è emersa la consapevolezza di quanto necessaria sia la collaborazione interdisciplinare per la definizione degli indicatori costituivi il “gradiente testimoniale”: l’ultima parte della presente ricerca si è quindi concentrata principalmente sull’elaborazione di un metodo operativo per facilitare l’approfondimento di due di questi indicatori, in relazioni anche alle criticità precedentemente emerse, legate alle questioni di riconoscibilità delle permanenze più fragili, sia da un punto di vista d’insieme che di tecnologia costruttiva. Con l’obiettivo quindi di contribuire al disvelamento del bacino informativo ampio e profondo quale è stato riconosciuto il complesso sistema di vestigia visibili ma anche “sommerse”, la ricerca ha proposto l’elaborazione di un metodo conoscitivo denominato “cannocchiale stratigrafico”, uno strumento metodologico in grado di esplorare i processi di costruzione/trasformazione dei paesaggi di guerra alle diverse scale. Tale metodo si è dimostrato essere un contributo conoscitivo molto fertile per affiancare allo studio dei documenti d’archivio e dei Manuali di fortificazioni, bagaglio conoscitivo irrinunciabile per meglio comprendere le tecniche costruttive, i dettagli tecnici e tecnologici, i materiali utilizzati e le soluzioni tattiche o d’impianto proposte, l’applicazione alla scala del paesaggio del codice interpretativo proprio della stratigrafia dell’architettura, che interpreta la storia dei manufatti come esito di processi di apporto, sottrazione e trasformazione che hanno lasciato tracce fisiche collegate tra loro in una sequenza stratigrafica. Operativamente ciò si è declinato nell’interpretazione delle dinamiche di trasformazione archeologica dei paesaggi nel corso del tempo, mettendo a confronto l’impatto dell’evento bellico di cent’anni fa con la ricognizione attuale degli usi del suolo e delle permanenze delle vestigia, principalmente attraverso l’analisi, comparazione e relative interpretazioni tra documentazione storica, fotografie aree d’epoca, ortofoto attuali ed elaborazioni dei dati ottenuti da tecniche di telerilevamento ad alta risoluzione (remote sensing). In questa prospettiva, fondamentale è stato l’utilizzo di software per la creazione di Sistemi Geografici Informativi come ArcGis e QuantumGis in quanto tali ambienti di lavoro hanno permesso una coordinazione complessiva dell’intero processo conoscitivo: dalla gestione integrata dei diversi dataset di input (georeferenziazione di mappe storiche di militarizzazione e fotografie aeree militari) all’elaborazione degli outputs attesi. A questo riguardo, il risultato più innovativo ottenuto della ricerca è stato l’importante contributo che alcune specifiche modalità di visualizzazione dei dati LIDAR ottenute attraverso specifici tools quali il Relief Tool Visualization (ad esempio Hillshading from multiple directions e Sky-View-Factor visualization) hanno fornito nell’identificazione dei diversi gradi di leggibilità dell’impronta della Grande Guerra all’interno della topografia del paesaggio d’oggi. La fase di validazione su specifici casi-studio, ad esempio sul sistema dei forti austro-ungarici del Trentino (Italia) e sul sistema trincerato insistente nell’intorno di Forte Busa Verle (Altopiano di Vezzena, TN, Italy), ha permesso di verificare l’effettiva efficacia di tale metodo a livello non solo qualitativo ma anche quantitativo. In conclusione, quindi, l’elaborazione dello strumento “cannocchiale stratigrafico”, oltre alle nuove possibilità di narrazione da esso introdotte, costituisce un importante contributo metodologico per la definizione del “gradiente testimoniale” precedentemente descritto, quale momento necessario per impostare consapevolmente le future progettualità. L’implementazione del metodo proposto su altre casistiche e l’approfondimento teorico-operativo rispetto agli altri indicatori individuati costituiscono le principali direzioni verso cui possono essere sviluppate future prospettive di ricerca.

My aim for That Dark Remembered Day was to create a work of fiction with a strong sense of the literary, one whose themes of violence, landscape and survivor guilt shone a light on the human condition, specifically the effects of post-war trauma on one family. The novel’s structure would be crucial in achieving its emotional heft, as each of the central characters is allocated at least one section, the reader experiencing events from disparate and increasingly illuminating perspectives. Fragmenting the book’s chronology (both throughout, but particularly in Part 3) by employing a technique of temporal blurring, helped to recreate a sense of disorientation in the reader, a key symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. And despite an at times lyrical style, readability was important to me, in that I wanted the novel to retain its pace as a psychological thriller, albeit one where the reader is told what happens at the outset, the remainder of the book tasked with explaining how and why. Crucial to this thesis is the relationship I developed with my appointed editor, specifically how conflict emerged and was for the most part resolved during revision of the work. Significantly, I argue that these negotiations, together with my exploration of the author/editor relationship, contributed to my development as an author, and to the realisation of the novel. Research was conducted into the Falklands conflict by studying first-hand accounts of those who served, allowing me to blur fact with fiction, a process that delivered its own ethical challenges.

The missile's significance has been central to national security since the Soviet launching of Sputnik, and became increasingly important throughout the years of the Cold War. Much has been written about missile technology, but little has been written about how the development and deployment of this weapon affected Americans. The missile was developed to both deter war but also to win war. Its presence, however, was not always reassuring. Three areas of the United States are studied to evaluate the social implications of the missile during these pivotal years: San Francisco, home of multiple Nike installations; of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the nation's primary missile test center; the Great Plains, the location of the largest ICBM concentration in the country. Interviews were conducted, tours of facilities were taken, and local newspapers were reviewed. In conjunction with national newspapers and magazines and public opinion polls, this information provided a local social context for missile history. Nationally and locally, Americans both feared and praised the new technology. They were anxious for government funding in their cities and often felt that the danger the missile brought to their communities by making it as a Soviet target was justified in the larger cause for national security.

Though the American Revolutionary Army is often portrayed as a crucible of national feeling, this study of 169 diaries reveals that Revolutionary soldiers barely understood, or accepted as part of their community, large parts of the country for which they fought. The diaries include journals of ordinary soldiers, officers, and camp followers, and demonstrate the largely overlooked significance of soldiers’ physical environment in shaping their world-view. Typically episodic, often filled with random and apparently mundane detail, and occasionally dark with deep sadness and melancholy, diary writings reveal soldiers’ definitions of who belonged to the national community. Military historians of the Revolutionary War have long culled important details from various diaries, with the goal of constructing a synthesis of relevant narratives into a single history. In many ways, this project does the opposite. Instead of fitting soldier diarists into a single linear narrative of the war, it looks at how soldiers fought their war and understood its landscapes by creating a variety of sometimes complimentary, sometimes conflicting, personal and group narratives. The purposes and conventions that defined soldiers’ descriptions of land, architecture and people they encountered reveal their motivations for fighting, definitions of just violence, and hopes for victory. In turn each of these factors shaped their understanding of their war and the community for which they fought. This thesis follows American soldiers’ problem of understanding their new country through three chronological phases of the war. In the early years of the war, as American strategy focused on cities, soldiers struggled to protect themselves against the perceived immorality of city life. By blaming cities for their losses, soldiers developed a dark set of justifications for destroying civilian landscapes. In the mid war, the use of landscape description as a weapon intensified as both armies increasingly turned to scorched earth policies. As the campaigning turned south late in the war, northern soldiers guarded themselves against a landscape they perceived as inherently unhealthy. In their depiction of these places, soldiers used their diaries as tools to protect their bodies and souls, and contemplate American landscapes they often found foreign.
History

This thesis is about the use of trees for commemoration and the memory that they have anchored in the landscape. There has been little written on the use of trees for commemorative purposes despite its symbolic resonance over the last 150 years. To determine the extent to which commemorative trees have been employed, the social practice and context in which the trees were planted, field and archival work was undertaken in New Zealand and Australia. This has been supported with some comparative work using examples from Britain and the United States of America. The research also utilizes the new availabilities of records on-line and the community interests that placed historical and contemporary material on-line. The commemorative tree has been a popular commemorative marker for royal events, the marking of place and as memorial for war dead. It has been as effective an anchor of memory in the landscape as any other form. The memory ascribed to these trees must be understood in terms of the era in which the tree was planted and not just from a distance. Over time the memory represented by the trees and its prescribed meanings, has changed. For all its power and fragility, memory is not permanent but nor is it so ephemeral as to exhibit no robustness at all. Instead memory exists in a state of instability that leaves it open to challenge and to constant reassessment based on the needs of the viewing generation. This instability also allows the memory, and thus the tree, to fade and become part of the domestic landscape of treescape memories (Cloke and Pawson, 2008). However, in some circumstances trees are retrieved and reinscribed with specific memory and made relevant for a new generation. The landscape created by commemorative trees is, therefore, multifunctional, in which social relations support memory, remembrance, forgetting, silences, erasures, and memory slippage.

On 6 May 1966 the ‘Trial of the Century’ came to an end. Chester Assizes court convicted Ian Brady and Myra Hindley for the murders of 12-year-old John Kilbride, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, and 17-year-old Edward Evans. The court found Brady guilty on all three murder charges and sentenced him to three concurrent life sentences. Hindley received two life sentences for the murders of Downey and Evans, and a further seven years for being an after-the-fact accomplice in Brady’s murder of Kilbride. Following the description already given to the police investigation and trial, the newspapers gave Brady and Hindley the infamous label of the ‘Moors Murderers’ straight after the trial. The Moors murders have become a part of British folklore since the 1960s, but the case itself has hitherto received surprisingly little attention from academic historians. Following Martin Wiener’s injunction for historians to pay closer attention to murder stories, this doctoral thesis presents a cultural history of the Moors murders case. My study analyses the courtroom arguments, media coverage and post-trial books about the case, to interrogate broader themes of moral and cultural change in 1960s Britain. My thesis emphasises the multi-vocal nature of representations of both the case and the murderers in order to challenge the linear and progressive historiographies of the 1960s, associated in particular with Arthur Marwick. The thesis examines four major facets of the Moors murders story, dedicating a chapter to each. The first chapter explores how the news media (primarily the press, but also broadcast media) negotiated the story. The first detailed empirical analysis of newspaper coverage of the case reveals the limitations of studies structured primarily around social class. The thesis follows Stuart Hall and A.C.H. Smith in arguing that analyses of the press should not be reduced to a simple differentiation between popular, middle-brow and high-brow but should instead consider the ‘personalities’ of each publication and the moral relationships constructed with readers. Furthermore, the chapter engages with Adrian Bingham’s recent argument about the moral politics of the press, exploring his assertion that the popular press balanced commercial profits alongside a commitment to maintain their reputation as ‘family newspapers’. The chapter argues that content of the press coverage of the Moors murders case generated far greater concerns than the suspect practices of journalists. Chapters two and three focus in turn on the diverse representations of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Commentators debated the origins of the evil behind the murders, with some highlighting his illegitimacy, others his reading of ‘dangerous’ books, the writings of the Marquis de Sade especially. Hindley’s role was hotly contested: most commentators emphasised how she had changed under Brady’s influence, but disagreed over the extent of her own involvement in the murders. The thesis reveals for the first time how images of Nazi Germany shadowed the case. The thesis thus contributes to historical investigations of permissiveness in post-war England, engaging with debates about censorship, child-rearing, the changing role of women, and the popular memory of the holocaust. The fourth and final chapter analyses the tensions generated around a murder story which took place in urban settings, but which became indelibly associated with the rural locations of the moors. The story mobilised a distinctive combination of gothic imagery with a long literary heritage, and the more recent language of social realism.

Conflict archaeology is a fairly new discipline and is in the process of defining its methods and theories. Recently, the American Battlefield Protection Program has started requiring that grant applicants perform a KOCOA analysis. KOCOA is a modern military technique and stands for Key terrain, Obstacle, Cover and Concealment, Observation, and Avenues of Approach. However, this method was developed for modern warfare, and its adoption by the archaeological community has not yet been analyzed. I argue that this method needs a few modifications to make it more applicable to historical research and that it can be broadened to investigate more complex questions regarding decision-making processes. In its current form, KOCOA only looks at how a landscape was used during conflict based on the results of what happened. I contend we can use this method to analyze the landscape and look at the decisions that went into selecting it. Employing KOCOA in this manner will allow us to understand how militaries adapted, or failed to adapt, to a given landscape. The Second Seminole War in Florida (1835-1842) can serve as an ideal case study. For one thing, the military had never experienced the Florida environment, and therefore adaptations to landscape utilization will be readily apparent. Also, in the early 19th-century, the military as a cultural institution indoctrinated its members through extensive training at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY, and I propose this standardized education had a significant negative effect on the shape, direction, and outcome of the Second Seminole War due to the gap between the knowledge gained through training and the knowledge needed in the field when fighting a war with Indians in the swamps and hammocks of Florida. Using modern military theory, the purpose of this research is to develop tools to measure how traditional European educational methods, which officers received while at the Military Academy, hindered their ability to adapt to the unique and challenging environment they encountered while trying to remove the Seminole Indians from the Florida territory. Conflict archaeology is also well suited to investigate the more human side, such as the decision-making processes and adaptations required, moving beyond the "what" and "how" aspects of conflict to the "why." One traditional approach to conflict archaeology is KOCOA. As used archaeologically, KOCOA employs modern cartographic information. Those participating in the conflict, however, would not have had access to this level of detail. Therefore, I propose that KOCOA be revised to incorporate the knowledge that would have been available to the decision makers at the time of the conflict. The aim of this research is to expand the methodologies of conflict archaeology to include indirect expressions of warfare and to incorporate them into a meaningful discussion of their role in the outcome of conflict. To accomplish this, I have developed a model against which hypotheses about the decision-making processes and their effectiveness can be compared.

This thesis is the first study using contemporary spatial theory, including cultural geography and its precursors, to examine and compare representations of space in the poetry of three mid-twentieth century American poets: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Because of the autobiographical content often foregrounded in their work, these poets have been labelled Confessional. Previous criticism has focused primarily on the ways in which they narrate (or draw on) their personal lives, treating accompanying descriptions of their surroundings primarily as backdrops. However, these poets frequently manifest their affective states by using the pathetic fallacy within structures of metaphor that form a textual mapping of the physical space they describe. This mapping can be temporal as well as spatial; the specific spaces mapped in the poem s present are often linked to memories of earlier life or family. These spaces include psychiatric, general, and penal institutions, parks and gardens, nature (especially coastal settings), and the home (almost always a place of tension or conflict). Each poet addresses these broad types of space differently according to their evolving subjective relationship to them. These relationships are in turn strongly influenced by their social class and gender: for the two women, their experience of their own bodies as prescribed space, in relation to the restrictive and objectifying female role that was imposed on them, is critical. Also, critical in shaping the poets experience of space are post-World-War II socio-cultural and demographic changes in the United States, notably suburbanisation, consumerisation and the consolidation of a therapeutic culture . Interwoven with these influences are major political concerns of the period such as the Cold War with its accompanying surveillance and conformism and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the work of all three poets, awareness of these modern fears fused with traditional Gothic motifs to permeate their descriptions of spaces with anxiety, bitterness, and even dread in a rejection of the synthetic optimism of the American Century and commercial culture. Other criticism has touched on many of these themes in relation to one or another of the poets, but this study, by way of the theme of space, offers comparison and synthesis that aims to shed new light on their work and its relation to the period during which they wrote.

The Arab spring has been called a social media revolution and social media have been given large importance and significant space in both academic discussions and analysis in the media. The main focus of this study was to examine whether social media have impacted the news reporting of the conflicts. A sample of articles from four different newspapers was examined, taken randomly from all relevant articles published on the newspapers websites between December 2010 and December 2013. A part of that sample was checked for news agency cable reliance and the entire sample were checked for material from social media. Three newspapers were found to rely heavily on news agency material. The New York Times was the exception, having only 4 percent of articles being based on news agency material. Social media material and quotes were found and were used in the report-ing in different ways, but only in 4 percent of articles. It was mainly used as a way to get protester commentary. Two of the included newspapers were China Daily and the New York Times. The differences between the respective reporting in these newspapers were also examined in yet an-other subsample consisting of 100 articles from each newspaper. Several differences be-tween the reporting were found, with China Daily for example presenting a framing more in favour of the government of Syria than the New York Times.

This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space.

This project explores two main lines of inquiry concerning representations of ruins in Paris. I first identify a turning point in the evolution of the ruin leitmotif beyond Romanticism in its transfer into a new context: modern Paris. The analysis demonstrates the correlation between this leitmotif and urban environment in transformation, and their influence on aesthetics, leading to the renewal of modes of representation in literary and visual discourse. Unconventional ruins, recently created by demolition during Haussmannisation (1853-70) or war (1870-71) challenge conceptions about space (inside/outside, up/down, visible/invisible), time, and the individual in relation to the city. In view of tracing the transformation of the ruin ethos in relation to modern sensibilities towards the city and its modes of representation, a chronological approach concentrates on two main periods divided into four chapters. The first interval extends from 1848 throughout the Second Empire and the second spans the 1870-1871 conflagration and the Third Republic. An interdisciplinary and dialogic approach reveals the exchanges between different media (literature, journalism, painting, photography) aiming to convey the paradoxes of Paris's modern ruins. Moreover, close reading and comparisons of authors' and artists' depictions across media and genres nuance, correct or disprove critical appraisals, re-establishing artistic authority (e.g. photographers Charles Marville and Bruno Braquehais). The second line of inquiry posits that representations of ruins reflect on the relationship of Parisians with their city during systematisation and wartime destruction. Research reveals that individual initiatives of representing urban ruins attest to a new sensibility towards the city, preceding the Second Empire's (1853-1870) apparatus of historical and topographic documentation to preserve the appearance of spaces before intervention. Thus, during Paris's systematisation, private and artistically-minded projects become the tools of patrimonial preservation. By comparison, aesthetic approaches to ruins in 1871 mark a new appreciation of modern architecture, while engaging with war trauma.

Bunker Kunst Bunker Kunst is an experimental and community platform, aiming at potential and contemporary role of post-war fortress. The point of interest is reinterpretation of bunker architectural phenomenon and its relationship with landscape. Bunker Pneumaticon Bunker Pneumaticon is co-working project, aiming on resuscitation of bunkers and post-war landscape. The point is community realisation of pneumatic architectures connected to the bunkers. The border is becoming a route.

This research sets itself within the field of modern conflict archaeology and adopts a material approach towards the study of the landscapes and material culture of the Chaco War, fought between Paraguay and Bolivia from 1932-1935. This study represents the first ever attempt at examining the conflict using an archaeological ontological framework. It is the aim of this research to present and discuss the complex entangled relationships between humans and things during the conflict and its aftermath. By employing a symmetrical approach to the study of material culture, it breaks down the modern object/subject divide and treats things as equally contributing factors in the shaping of collectives of human and non- human entities that make up the world we live in. In this vein, the thesis discusses the relationships between indigenous people, Mennonites and soldiers, and argues how opening up to different ontologies and understandings of the Chaco bush can be a life-saver in situations of conflict. The study furthermore examines the material culture of the war in relation to concepts of recycling, trench art and non-modern traditional worldviews. Finally, it assesses the war's physical remains in the landscape as material mementoes of a past that are firmly embedded within the present.

Abstract Lamu Island on the Kenyan coast is the home of a society with a thousand year history of contacts with other cultures through trade and shipping.  The loss of its traditional socio-economic base has led to the entry of tourism as the main income generating activity and the major contact with distant peoples. Tourism in Lamu is based on the old heritage in combination with a rich but sensitive tropical landscape.  One concern is how to develop tourism and at the same time preserve a certain set of landscape values. The thesis is based on observations and interviews with the host community in Lamu, focusing on how the local community conceptualize and adjust to the transformations in their envisaged and experienced landscape as a result of their involvement in tourism. Modern tourism ought to be closely linked to development in all respects and could be regarded as an important part of an open society which gives possibilities for interaction between people from different backgrounds. This investigation focus on the socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability and deals with the residents’ adaption to the new opportunities. The analysis show that the meeting with tourism gives certain effects in the social land-scape such as the accentuation of differences already existing in the society, the evolvement of a new moral landscape and the highlighting of the need of strategies to achieve sustainable development.

Thesis (M.L.A.)--Ohio State University, 2005.
Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 60 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-56). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Cette étude s'attache au statut des ruines dans la photographie de guerre et en dresse l'inventaire de leurs aspects esthétiques. Le cas de la ville de Beyrouth, défigurée par les bombardements pendant la guerre civile (1975-1990), est à bien des égards exemplaire puisqu'elle a fait l'objet d'une commande photographique confiée à des photographes prestigieux, en 1991, qui avaient pour mission de conserver la mémoire d'un immense champ de ruines. Cette commande photographique est donc, pour cette raison, au centre de notre recherche. Pour saisir pleinement les enjeux des choix effectués par les photographes au cours de cette commande, il était nécessaire dans un premier temps, d'analyser la mise en place de la constitution d'une esthétique des ruines dans l'histoire de la photographie de guerre de 1853 à 1945, à travers des exemples célèbres sur les champs de bataille. Dans un deuxième temps, il était important de considérer les motivations et les objectifs de chacun des photographes dans le contexte de la commande, en les mettant en résonance avec d'autres expériences photographiques menées à Beyrouth pendant et après le conflit, mais aussi en filiation avec les cas étudiés dans la première partie. La troisième partie de cette thèse constitue un compendium des aspects esthétiques dans le traitement photographique des ruines de guerre à Beyrouth qui permet d'affirmer aujourd'hui que, la ruine de guerre est un genre à part entière en photographie
The present study explores the status of ruins in war photography and draws up the inventory of their aesthetic features. Disfigured by bombing and shelling during the civil war (1975-1990), the city of Beirut is in many respects an examplary case since it was the subject of a photographic commission entrusted to prestigious photographers in 1991, the mission of which was to preserve the memory of an immense field of ruins. For this very reason, this photographic commission is at the core of our research project. Firstly, in order to understand fully what was at stake in the choices made by the photographers within the framework of this commission, we had to analyze how the aesthetics of ruins has been elaborated in the history of war photography from 1853 to 1945, using famous examples from battlefields. Secondly, it was important to consider the motivations and objectives of each of the photographers within the context of the commission. For this purpose we made these elements echo other photographic experiences conducted in Beirut during and after the conflict, then we related them to the cases studied in the first part. The third part of the present thesis forms a compendium of aesthetic aspects in the photographic vision of war ruins in Beirut that makes it possible to assert that war ruins form a fully fledged genre in photography

My thesis is one artist's response to the question of the relevance of landscape painting today, focusing on the communication of the idea of environmental stewardship. The process of studying nature and transferring that vision to canvas promotes greater understanding of the beauty and complexity of elements that comprise ecosystems. The artist possesses a creative impulse finding satisfaction in making artwork that expresses a love of nature as part of a larger worldview. If done well, the persuasive power of such art may be enormous. Comprised of oil paintings and written work, this thesis establishes a way of approaching both landscape painting and the natural environment. Literature pertaining to the contributions of landscape artist Frederic Church, varying aesthetic theories, nature writings, and selected contemporary artists are discussed. The focus then turns to particular landscape elements, introducing the artwork created for the thesis. The thesis concludes with the artist's purpose statement.
M.A.
Department of Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies MA

Après une analyse théorique et historique de la notion de paysage et à partir de l'étude diachronique et thématique de l'œuvre rigonienne, il apparaît que le paysage y occupe une place prépondérante tout en revêtant plusieurs dimensions. Tour à tour élément constitutif de l'être, écoumène, personnage à part entière ou simplement miroir de l'âme, il sous-tend et anime la narration en même temps qu'il accompagne l'homme tout au long de son existence. L'écriture de Mario Rigoni Stern nous fait ainsi prendre conscience du rôle central des paysages pour notre compréhension du monde. Au-delà du simple concept de nature, les paysages deviennent alors révélateurs d'une organisation sociétale et culturelle et constituent un véritable axis mundi autour duquel s'organisent Histoire de l'Humanité et histoire(s) des hommes ; un livre dont les pages se tournent au fil des saisons, qui contient les signes de nos civilisations et nous permet de découvrir la mémoire de nos ancêtres. Ainsi les paysages qui jalonnent la vie de l'auteur ne sont plus de simples cadres où l'homme évolue mais se retrouvent intrinsèquement liés à son expérience sensible et existentielle. Entre altérité et identité, la perception de l'espace environnant devient dès lors une fenêtre ouverte sur le monde, une clé de lecture essentielle de notre paysage intime et du cosmos
After a theoretical and historical analysis of the notion of landscape, and from the study of both diachrony and themes in Rigoni Stern's works as well, it seems that the landscape achieves pre-eminence there, while taking on several dimensions. By turns a constituent element of the being, the place where man has left his mark, an authentic character or simply a mirror of the soul, it underlines and livens up the narrative while accompanying man all along his life. Mario Rigoni Stern's writing makes us become aware of the central part played by the landscapes in our apprehension of the world. Beyond the mere concept of nature, the landscapes then point to a social and cultural organization and constitute both a true axis mundi on which hinge both the History of Mankind and the history or histories of men, and a book the pages of which are turned over as the seasons go by, containing the signs of our civilizations and allowing us to discover our ancestors' memory. So the series of landscapes which mark the author's life do not prove any longer to be mere surroundings where man evolves, but appear to be intrinsically linked to his sensitive and existential experience. Between otherness and identity, the perception of the surrounding space from then on becomes a window open on the world, an essential key to understand both our inner landscape and the cosmos

The landscapes and material remains of the Holocaust survive in various forms as physical reminders of the suffering and persecution of this period in European history. However, whilst clearly defined historical narratives exist, many of the archaeological remnants of these sites remain ill-defined, unrecorded and even, in some cases, unlocated. Such a situation has arisen as a result of a number of political, social, ethical and religious factors which, coupled with the scale of the crimes, has often inhibited systematic search. This thesis will outline how a non-invasive archaeological methodology has been implemented at two case study sites, with such issues at its core, thus allowing them to be addressed in terms of their scientific and historical value, whilst acknowledging their commemorative and religious significance. In doing so, this thesis also demonstrates how a study of the physical remains of the Holocaust can reveal as much about the ever-changing cultural memory of these events as it can the surviving remnants of camps, execution sites and other features associated with this period. By demonstrating the diversity and complexity of Holocaust landscapes, a case is presented for a sub-discipline of Holocaust Archaeology.

The focus of this study is a trend in British children’s literature concerning the ancientness of British landscape, with what I argue is a Neo-Romantic sensibility. Neo-Romanticism is marked by highly subjective viewpoints on the countryside, and I argue that it illuminates our understanding of post-war children’s literature, particularly in what is often called its Second Golden Age. Through discussion of four generally overlooked authors, each of importance to this formative publishing era, I aim to explore certain aspects of the Second Golden Age children’s literature establishment. I argue that the trend I critique is characterised by ambiguity, defined by the imaginative practice entailed in the archaeological view.

Thesis (M. L. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009.
Includes special report study entitled: Treatments of the tidal edge for appreciation. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 resulted in the deaths of more than 500 Minnesota settlers, the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homeland, and the largest mass execution in U.S. history. For more than a century, white Minnesotans declared themselves innocent victims of Indian brutality and actively remembered this war by erecting monuments, preserving historic landscapes, publishing first-person narratives, and hosting anniversary celebrations. However, as the centennial anniversary approached, new awareness for the sufferings of the Dakota both before and after the war prompted retellings of the traditional story that gave the status of victimhood to the Dakota as well as the white settlers. Despite these changes, the descendents of white settlers persisted in their version of events and resented the implication that the Dakota were justified in starting the war. In 1987, the governor of Minnesota declared “A Year of Reconciliation” to bring cultural awareness of the Dakota, acknowledge their sufferings, and reconcile the continued tense relationship between the state and the Dakota people. These efforts, while successful in now telling the Dakota side of the war at official historic institutions, did not achieve a reconciliation between native and non-native residents of the state. This study of the commemorative history of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 illustrates the impact this single event exhibited for the state of Minnesota and examines the continued tense relations between its native and non-native inhabitants.