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"Phobias Fiction."
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Separating Fact from Fiction in the Debate over Drone Proliferation
What are the consequences of drone proliferation for international security? Despite extensive discussions in the policy world concerning drone strikes for counterterrorism purposes, myths about the capabilities and implications of current-generation drones often outstrip reality. Understanding the impact of drones requires separating fact from fiction by examining their effects in six different contexts—counterterrorism, interstate conflict, crisis onset and deterrence, coercive diplomacy, domestic control and repression, and use by non-state actors for the purposes of terrorism. Although current-generation drones introduce some unique capabilities into conflicts, they are unlikely to produce the dire consequences that some analysts fear. In particular, drone proliferation carries potentially significant consequences for counterterrorism operations and domestic control in authoritarian regimes. Drones could also enhance monitoring in disputed territories, potentially leading to greater stability. Given their technical limitations, however, current-generation drones are unlikely to have a large impact on interstate warfare. Assessing the consequences of drone proliferation has important implications for a range of policy issues, including the management of regional disputes, the regulation of drone exports, and defense against potential terrorist attacks on the homeland.
Journal Article
The great cheese robbery
Patrick Elephant is scared of lots of things, like the dark and the fluff under the sofa. His daddy isn't scared of anything-- except mice! So when a mouse posing as a cheese inspector tries to steal the elephants' cheese, Daddy is too terrified to stop him! Can little Patrick Elephant save the cheese-- and his father? The Great Cheese Robbery is the perfect book for kids dealing with phobias.
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Demographic Fever Dreams
In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under attack by secular men (in Turkey), or of Muslim Romeos luring Hindu women to convert (in India). In each of these cases, the story lodges in the body and takes on a life of its own, inspiring fear and devotion, and centering the need for a heroic rescue. Here, we argue for the need for feminist engagement with political narratives about population change and point to the important work that fantastical stories focused on demographically based fears have done for the recent rise of right-wing politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. We refer to these stories as demographic fever dreams to emphasize their simultaneous obsession with demography and detachment from demographic data. Our analysis shows that demographic fever dreams deploy gendered tropes to create a narrative of vulnerability for dominant groups in relation to a takeover by religious, racial, and sexual others. Attending to the discursive constitution of demographic fever dreams in media and by political leaders in each context, we examine how they effectively invoke populist fears and identify which bodies become threatening and which ones need protection. We show that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Donald Trump in the United States, and Narendra Modi in India have all deployed an imaginary of an authentic nation under threat—whether that is racialized as the white working class in the United States or given religious inflection as authentically Sunni in Turkey and authentically Hindu in India. This imaginary becomes a fetishized group under threat from all manner of others threatening demographic destruction. In each of these instances, we argue that figures with political power use a vivid and fantastic fiction to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality so as to consolidate political power or to dismiss and undermine class tensions and create fictitious communities of homogeneity. Thus, demographic fever dreams effectively produce a rationale for strongman masculinity and contribute to the retrenchment of nationalist values.
Journal Article
Control freak
Steve is King of the Bench. No brag. That's just a fact. And this season, Steve and his friends are ready to sit on the sidelines of the Spiro T. Agnew Middle school football field. But then they stumble upon an old-school video game controller, and they become convinced it can control sports plays. With it, Steve might become King of Football too!
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The creeping clown : a tale of terror
Josh is terrified of clowns, and the news that someone dressed as a clown in a neighboring town has been kidnapping children does not help, especially after the kidnapper escapes custody; so when he encounters a threatening clown at the House of Horrors at the amusement park he panics--but will he be able to save himself, much less rescue a little girl who is lost in the hall of mirrors?
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Posthuman Gothic Tale
It is at the intersection of Posthuman thought, Gothic narratives, and the New Weird mode where “Two Houses” from Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble (2016) can be framed. In the story, six female astronauts alternate years of hibernation and moments of wakefulness in search of a habitable planet. The House of Secrets spaceship is controlled by the AI Maureen. Isolated in space, the astronauts amuse themselves by telling ghost stories. Through the stories, the reader is gradually dislocated from the recognizable landscape of a technologically plausible speculative fiction story to be plunged into a Gothic world of murder, haunted houses, and ghosts. The purpose of this paper is to trace the intersection of Posthuman thought and Gothic characteristics in the story to discuss the slippery relationship between what we believe we are and what we actually are.
Journal Article
Dust
\"Dust tells the story of a librarian terrified by the decay of the world around him. With the help of his wife, the librarian wages a futile war against the dust that coats his surroundings until one day Adrian Bravi, or a character very much like the author, arrives on the scene attesting to the very same fears of decay and decline. Drawing on the tradition of magical realism, this novel delves deeply into the nature and meaning of obsession\" -- Provided by publisher.
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Gothic Mycology and Posthuman Ethics in Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
In light of the recent popularity of fungi in ecohorror literature and film, this essay coins the term \"Gothic mycology\" to describe instances of human-fungal hybridity that suggest posthuman entanglement and symbiosis, using Edgar Allan Poe's \"The Fall of the House of Usher\" as an early and exemplary illustration. Gothic mycology is frightening due to the very nature of fungi themselves: they resist categories, being more closely related to animals than plant life; they proliferate at seemingly unnatural rates; they grow in darkness; they are agents of decomposition; they are mysterious, chthonic, and Other. However, Gothic mycology is also inherently hopeful, offering a glimpse of how we might reimagine our entanglement with the nonhuman that goes beyond mere posthuman hybridity and embraces instead a novel becoming. Poe's tale undermines anthropocentric individualism and prioritizes human entanglement through the fungal colonization of both house and human. In doing so, Poe's tale transgresses the boundary of what defines the human and suggests the necessity, or, perhaps more accurately, the current reality of our hybrid, dependent, and symbiotic relationship with the more-than-human.
Journal Article