The Times of Caring in a Nuclear World: Sculpture, Contamination and Stillness

Care takes time. Caring, whether with, for, or about a living being or entity that is more-than-human, disrupts expectations of how a linear, human time should progress. To practice care for the contaminated, the lands, waters, and animate life altered by human industry, is to extend that indeterminacy into distant, deeper time. Aesthetic representation of the affective and ethical dimensions of care, in this extreme, offers an experience that can transfer the arguments about nuclear contamination into more nuanced and sensed responses and contributes to current thinking about care in the arts worlds. I was commissioned to make a sculpture exhibition in 2020 as part of an anthropological study into the future of the Sellafield nuclear site in West Cumbria, UK. The exhibition, ‘x = 2140. In the coming 120 years, how can humans decide to dismantle, remember and repair the lands called Sellafield?’, consisted of three sculptural ‘fonts’ which engaged with ideas of knowledge production, nuclear technologies, and the affective dimensions of care about/for/with the contaminated lands and waters. This article presents my intentions for the sculptures in their context of a nuclear-dependent locale: to engage with the experience of nuclear futures without adversarial positioning; to explore the agential qualities of the more-than-human; and to create a stillness expressive of the relationality of the human and the contaminated through which one could fathom what care might feel like. These intentions are alongside theories of time, aesthetics, and care across disciplines: care and relational ethics, science and technology studies, and nuclear culture.

Rhetoric and Critical Affect Theory

Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This article revisits the so-called affective turn in rhetoric and addresses subsequent critiques of the idea of a turn. Accounting for scholarship published since 2010, this article then groups critical affect work into six subareas of research in rhetorical studies: feminist, queer, trans, and crip affects; race and affect; Black women’s affective labor; affective publics and counterpublics; new materialism, materiality, and affect; and affective economics. This article outlines affective methodologies in rhetorical studies and highlights the affective dimensions of “theories of the flesh” in rhetorical inquiry. It ends by considering what is critical about affect theory in rhetoric.

Prevalence and severity of differing dimensions of breathlessness among elderly males in the population

Breathlessness is common in the general population. Existing data were obtained primarily with the uni-dimensional modified Medical Research Council (mMRC) breathlessness scale that does not assess intensities of unpleasantness nor physical, emotional, and affective dimensions. The aim of this research was to determine the prevalence and intensity of these dimensions of breathlessness in elderly males and any associations with their duration, change over time, and mMRC grade. We conducted a population-based, cross-sectional study of 73-year-old males in a county in southern Sweden. Breathlessness was self-reported at one time-point using a postal survey including the Dyspnoea-12 (D-12), the Multidimensional Dyspnoea profile (MDP), and the mMRC. Presence of an increased dimension score was defined as a score≥minimal clinically important difference for each dimension scale. Association with mMRC, recalled change since age 65, and duration of breathlessness were analysed with linear regression. Among 907 men, an increased dimension score was present in 17% (D-12 total score), 33% (MDP A1 unpleasantness), 19% (D-12 physical), 17% (MDP immediate perception), 10% (D-12 affective), and 17% (MDP emotional response). The unpleasantness and affective dimensions were strongly associated with mMRC ≥3. Higher MDP and D-12 scores were associated with worsening of breathlessness since age 65, and higher MDP A1 unpleasantness was associated with breathlessness of less than one year duration. Increased scores of several dimensions of breathlessness are prevalent in 73-year-old males and are positively correlated with mMRC scores, worsening of breathlessness after age 65, and duration of less than one year.

Affect Theory and Breast Cancer Memoirs: Rescripting Fears of Death and Dying in the Anthropocene

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities.

The Impact of Risk Perception on the Destination Image and Visit Intention: COVID-19 Pandemic and Wuhan Tourism

This study aims to explore the relationship between risk perceptions and destination image and visit intentions with Chinese domestic tourists. This article divides the destination image into cognitive and affective dimensions. The current study also examines how three risk perceptions, including physical, financial and performance risks, influence the intention to visit a destination. Evidence from 336 Chinese domestic tourists who visited Wuhan after COVID-19 pandemic suggest that perceived risk negatively and significantly influences cognitive and affective images. At the same time, cognitive and affective images positively influence the intention to visit.