Dounreay: Creating the Nuclear North

2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-108
Author(s):  
Linda M. Ross

This article combines the traditionally rural focus of Highland history with the growing field of nuclear culture to examine the impact which Dounreay Experimental Research Establishment had on Caithness between 1953 and 1966. From the outset of the project the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority knew that it would have to import specialist technical staff into an area economically driven by agriculture and fishing. This resulted in a distinct form of employment-based migration to the Highlands, reversing population decline in Caithness during the period of study. This article identifies the reasons for, and local reaction to, the UKAEA's choice of Caithness as the location for its fast breeder reactor establishment. It assesses the significant in-migration to the area during the initial phase of the Dounreay plant's development, before exploring how perceptions of distance and Caithnessian ‘difference’ affected the recruitment of staff in what the UKAEA considered an ‘unconventional’ location. It puts people and place at the centre of the nuclear project, revealing Dounreay's role in creating a mid-twentieth century Highland counter-narrative of in-migration and modernity far removed from traditional discourses of depopulation.

The familiar narrative in this field has focused on playwrights: from the foundational work of W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge of the early twentieth-century national theatre movement to contemporary figures such as Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, and Enda Walsh, sometimes including Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett. These playwrights are all given detailed analysis in this volume, while extending the conspectus to the full phenomenon of modern Irish theatre. Two sections of the book are devoted to performance, examining the neglected work of directors and designers, as well as exploring acting styles and playing spaces. While the Abbey, as Ireland’s national theatre, has been of central importance, individual chapters bring out the contesting voices of women in a male-dominated arena, the position of Irish-language theatre, and ‘little theatres’ that challenged the hegemony of the Abbey. The middle of the twentieth century saw what amounted to a new revival of Irish drama with the emergence of a generation of playwrights responding in innovative ways to a modernizing Ireland, again diversified by the establishment of regional companies and alternative dramaturgical directions from the 1970s. The contemporary period in Irish theatre has featured a movement beyond scripted plays to more experimental work. The impact and interactions of Irish theatre are finally placed within the wider world of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. The forty-one chapters of the volume offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of modern Irish theatre.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Ildikó Szántó

Falling birth rates had already been recorded as early as the late-eighteenth century in south-western Hungary in the Ormánság. Population loss from low birth rate remained one of the main topics writers and sociologists focused on in the twentieth century. The issue of Hungarian population decline was highlighted among the social ills in the interwar period, which was one of several subjects that divided intellectuals into ‘populists’ and ‘urbanites’. Following the impact of the low birth rate figures in the 1960s, the populists’ views of the 1930s resurfaced in public discourse in the 1960s and 1970s and up to the present day. The concern about the increasing trend of single-child families in rural settlements as well as in urban areas appeared in the various works of Hungarian writers and journalists throughout the previous century. The present paper intends to focus on the intellectual background to the public debates on the population issue, outlining the accounts of the interwar ‘village explorers’ briefly, and the way they are related to the pre-Second World War populist movement. Finally the reappearance of the debates between populists and non-populists of the 1970s is discussed, a debate that is still continuing.


2020 ◽  
pp. 643-659
Author(s):  
Rachel Matthews

This chapter explores the impact of the dominance of the corporate-owned local newspaper in the United Kingdom during the ‘long’ twentieth century (around 1880 to 2008). It draws on newspaper business records relating to the Western Mail and Echo and the Norfolk News Company to demonstrate the process by which profitability displaced notions of public service in conglomerate newspaper enterprises and the consequences of this for editorial structures and output.   In doing so, it argues that it is this structure which presaged the financial predicament experienced by the post-digital, post-banking crisis, and now post-Covid, local newspaper business, and suggests that hope for the future of this media form can be found outside of this dominant pattern of ownership


2021 ◽  
pp. 647-664
Author(s):  
Gladys Ganiel ◽  
Martin Steven

This chapter examines the role of religion in Ireland and the United Kingdom in four stages, focusing on how divisions between Protestantism and Catholicism have contributed to political tensions and, at times, violence: (a) from the colonization of Ireland by Britain until the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, when religion was used both to justify colonialism and to oppose it; (b) state-building in the early twentieth century, when religion impacted politics and society in ways that diverged from the wider European Christian democratic movement; (c) a period of secularization in the late twentieth century; and (d) a period of religious change, but at the same time persistence, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It concludes by examining the impact of religion on the 2016 Brexit referendum vote, arguing that Brexit has destabilized political and religious relationships between the islands, with particular reference to Northern Ireland and Scotland.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


Author(s):  
Adrian Daub

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-17
Author(s):  
Mahsa Assadi

This study reports a pre-experimental research on the impact of metacognitive instruction on EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness and their listening performance. To obtain the goal of the study, a group of 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners, including 14 males and 16 females, were selected randomly. Their ages range from 20 to 24. The participants took part in 16 weeks’ intervention program based on metacognitive pedagogical sequence consisted of five stages. The metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (MALQ), and a listening test were also used to find changes in metacognitive awareness and listening performance before and after the treatment. The results of comparing pre and posttests scores revealed that metacognitive instruction raised the learners’ metacognitive awareness and helped them improve their listening comprehension ability.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Andrea Circolo ◽  
Ondrej Hamuľák

Abstract The paper focuses on the very topical issue of conclusion of the membership of the State, namely the United Kingdom, in European integration structures. The ques­tion of termination of membership in European Communities and European Union has not been tackled for a long time in the sources of European law. With the adop­tion of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), the institute of 'unilateral' withdrawal was intro­duced. It´s worth to say that exit clause was intended as symbolic in its nature, in fact underlining the status of Member States as sovereign entities. That is why this institute is very general and the legal regulation of the exercise of withdrawal contains many gaps. One of them is a question of absolute or relative nature of exiting from integration structures. Today’s “exit clause” (Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union) regulates only the termination of membership in the European Union and is silent on the impact of such a step on membership in the European Atomic Energy Community. The presented paper offers an analysis of different variations of the interpretation and solution of the problem. It´s based on the independent solution thesis and therefore rejects an automa­tism approach. The paper and topic is important and original especially because in the multitude of scholarly writings devoted to Brexit questions, vast majority of them deals with institutional questions, the interpretation of Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union; the constitutional matters at national UK level; future relation between EU and UK and political bargaining behind such as all that. The question of impact on withdrawal on Euratom membership is somehow underrepresented. Present paper attempts to fill this gap and accelerate the scholarly debate on this matter globally, because all consequences of Brexit already have and will definitely give rise to more world-wide effects.


2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-179
Author(s):  
Oana Roxana Chivu ◽  
Augustin Semenescu ◽  
Claudiu Babis ◽  
Catalin Amza ◽  
Gabriel Iacobescu ◽  
...  

Rainfall is a major component of the environment and the main source of the air purification becouse of many pollutants increases who have the most varied sources: various human activities including industry and agriculture, and some household duties. Air purification by means of precipitation is achieved by numerous highly complex mechanisms. The final products of degradation of the pollutant in the air, which are generally harmless, can be reacted with each other in the presence of water, giving rise to the final compounds with a high toxicity. Thus, exhaust, mobile sources of noxious almost identical to those specific activities in the industrial processing of oil, contain lead which is the ideal catalyst for converting SO2 to sulfuric acid in the presence of rainwater, with all the disadvantages that they create. This paper will present an experimental research oabout how rainfall water quality is influenced by the activity of the industrial processing of oil, in a chemical plant in Constanta County.


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