‘The family that feared tomorrow’: British nuclear culture and individual experience in the late 1950s

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN HOGG

AbstractJournalistic representations of a suicide pact in 1957 encapsulated wider popular assumptions on, and anxieties over, nuclear technology. Through an exploration of British nuclear culture in the late 1950s, this article suggests that knowledge of nuclear danger disrupted broader conceptions of self, nationhood and existence in British life. Building on Hecht's use of the term ‘nuclearity’, the article offers an alternative definition of the term whereby nuclearity is understood to mean the collection of assumptions held by individual citizens on the dangers of nuclear technology: assumptions that were rooted firmly in context and which circulated in, and were shaped by, national discourse. The article will argue that nuclearity was an active component in the formation of British identity by the late 1950s. The article is intended as a starting point for extended reflections on the ways in which nuclearity can add to our understanding of individual experience, nuclear anxiety and Cold War culture in post-war Britain.

Author(s):  
Beryl Pong

The coda briefly recapitulates the central concerns of this book by discussing Second World Wartime in relation to the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Ernst Bloch’s conception of time as a river, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of historical materialism, it discusses why post-war literature and culture looked back to the wartime period through the trope of unexploded bombs, which functioned as mnemonic time capsules. It ends by considering Second World Wartime’s broader relationship to the later chronophobia of the Cold War, when advancements in nuclear technology created a newly fraught relationship between anticipation and retrospection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-171
Author(s):  
Mojca Kovač Šebart ◽  
Roman Kuhar

The article takes as its starting point the public debate about the newly proposed Family Code in Slovenia in 2009. Inter alia, the Code introduced a new, inclusive definition of the family in accordance with the contemporary pluralisation of family life. This raised a number of questions about how – if at all – various families are addressed in the process of preschooleducation in public preschools in Slovenia. We maintain that the family is the child’s most important frame of reference. It is therefore necessary for the preschool community to respect family plurality and treat it as such in everyday life and work. In addition, preschool teachers and preschool teacher assistants are bound by the formal framework and the current curriculum, which specifies that children in preschools must be acquainted with various forms of families and family communities. This also implies that parents – despite their right to educate their children in accordance with their religious and philosophical convictions – have no right to interfere in the educational process and insist on their particular values, such as the demand that some family forms remain unmentioned.


2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

ABSTRACTAngola's oil-fuelled reconstruction since the end of the civil war in 2002 is a world away from the mainstream liberal peacebuilding approach that Western donors have promoted and run since the end of cold war. The Angolan case is a pivotal example of what can be termed ‘illiberal peacebuilding’, a process of post-war reconstruction managed by local elites in defiance of liberal peace precepts on civil liberties, the rule of law, the expansion of economic freedoms and poverty alleviation, with a view to constructing a hegemonic order and an elite stranglehold over the political economy. Making sense of the Angolan case is a starting point for a broader comparative look at other cases of illiberal peacebuilding such as Rwanda, Lebanon and Sri Lanka.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512097734
Author(s):  
Laura Tisdall

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links these depictions to adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’.


1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 281-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Timmermans

This article presents an empirical analysis of how nurses deal with terminal and dying patients in two inpatient wards in a Belgian general hospital. The starting point for the analysis is the observation that nurses often feel dissatisfied with their terminal caregiving. These feelings are traced back to KUbler-Ross' psychodynamic conception of terminal care. Based on the everyday practice of nurses interacting with terminal patients, a broader definition of terminal care is suggested: Terminal care or care of dying patients includes specific physical, social, religious and psychological services, given to a terminal patient and the family or significant others, to obtain as high a level of comfort as possible. The implications of this definition are further examined for the problem of burnout and stress.


2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH LAUCHT

AbstractThis article concerns the Atom Train travelling exhibition that the chief body of the British nuclear scientists' movement, the Atomic Scientists' Association (ASA), organized in collaboration with government offices and private industry in 1947–1948. It argues that the exhibition marked an important moment within post-war British nuclear culture where nuclear scientists shared aspects of their nuclear knowledge with the British public, while simultaneously clashing with the interests of the emerging British national security state in the early Cold War.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (16) ◽  
pp. 414-423
Author(s):  
Marlena Stradomska

The article is an analysis of the deliberations on legal and psychological issues. The thesis will include the most important theses on factors protecting against the act of suicide in relation to social life. In the 21st century, the problem of self-destruction is extremely significant, because every year many citizens in each country take their lives. An important aspect is that an individual feeling safe in the family, the local environment, society and the state has a better chance of maintaining mental well-being. The issue of citizenship lies on the border between administrative law and international law. Each state imposes many duties on its citizens, grants them rights as well as takes responsibility for them and protects them against foreign states. The starting point for existing legal regulations concerning the institution of Polish and international citizenship should be the definition of the concept and its practical consequences. This knowledge will determine further considerations regarding the treatment of a citizen as responsible for his fate of an individual who has certain characteristics, obligations, as well as rights and opportunities. In the present sense, citizenship is considered a legal state of submission on the legal status of a natural person. About civic education in the broader aspect should take care of the smallest social group which is the family. The task of this social unit is first and foremost a civic education of the individual, it also depends on implanting the citizen with respect and love for the homeland and shaping the national idea. In this case, the work will refer to suicide policy issues and protective factors that may weigh and determine the aspect related to the citizen's mental life.


Author(s):  
Mª Eva Fernández Baquero

A diferencia de las declaraciones genéricas de la actual legislación internacional que evita definir a la familia, en las fuentes jurídicas romanas contamos con definiciones de familia en los textos jurídicos. Ello otorgó a la sociedad romana dar la suficiente seguridad para consolidar los pilares fundamentales del Derecho de Familia en el Derecho Romano. Y es que, en Roma como en la actualidad, la familia –como institución jurídica– no fue inmutable, sufrió cambios importantes a lo largo de los siglos en función de las transformaciones políticas, sociales y culturales. Sin embargo, y a diferencia del Derecho actual, dichos cambios tuvieron siempre presente el contenido sustancial y jurídico de lo que implica la idea primordial de la familia pues, dichas definiciones jurídicas, sirvieron como punto de partida para encontrar nuevas soluciones.Unlike generic statements of current international legislation that avoid defining family, in Roman legal sources there are definitions of family in legal texts. This granted Roman society sufficient certainty to consolidate the fundamental pillars of family law in Roman law. And in Rome, as at the present, the family – as a legal institution – was not immutable, it suffered major changes over the centuries on the basis of the political, social and cultural transformations. However, and contrary to current law, changes always had present substantial and legal content of what the primary idea of family was because such legal definitions served as a starting point to finding new solutions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-278
Author(s):  
Moisés Prieto

Abstract In the summer of 1964, Miguel Soto, a Spanish immigrant to Switzerland, was arrested and imprisoned during his summer vacation in Spain, due to his participation in an anti-Francoist demonstration in Switzerland. This incident is the starting point for an inquiry into the problems – denunciation, political surveillance, xenophobia and anti-communism – that politically committed foreigners were confronted with in their home country and in Switzerland, and into the strategies they used to overcome them. Soto’s experience, including an oral history interview with him and archival material, reveals the regime of fear under which such immigrants lived, and questions the quality of democracy in post-war Switzerland.


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