Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking

Contemporary theatricalized refugee narratives are often understood to communicate the profound trauma associated with forced displacement, even as this trauma is made ‘meaningful’ or ‘recognizable’ to audiences by the identification, however nebulous, of hope. This article examines some of the ways in which an affective dialectic of victimhood and hope functions inEvery Year, Every Day, I Am Walking(2006–), a small-scale international touring work directed by Mark Fleishman and produced by Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre. Paying attention to questions of narrative and performative form, I investigate how, and for whom, victimhood and hope function in and through the work, constructing its emotional and political tensions. I trace some of the conditions of its circulation, with particular emphasis on its transnational work with respect to a metropolitan audience at London's Oval House Theatre in 2010. In this, my purpose is to probe the question of who is served (as well as who is implicated and mobilized) by refugee narratives that may occupy all too easily a generalized geopolitical imaginary: ‘far from here’.</jats:p

Processional Aesthetics and Irregular Transit:Envisioning Refugees in Europe

Examines the definition, history, and media coverage of procession aesthetics and their significance regarding refugee movements and issues in Europe. Briefly compares Hemingway’s descriptions of refugee processions in dispatches from the Greco-Turkish conflict to present day media portrayals

Statistical models for over-dispersion in the frequency of peaks over threshold data for a flow series.

In a peaks over threshold analysis of a series of river flows, a sufficiently high threshold is used to extract the peaks of independent flood events. This paper reviews existing, and proposes new, statistical models for both the annual counts of such events and the process of event peak times. The most common existing model for the process of event times is a homogeneous Poisson process. This model is motivated by asymptotic theory. However, empirical evidence suggests that it is not the most appropriate model, since it implies that the mean and variance of the annual counts are the same, whereas the counts appear to be overdispersed, i.e., have a larger variance than mean. This paper describes how the homogeneous Poisson process can be extended to incorporate time variation in the rate at which events occur and so help to account for overdispersion in annual counts through the use of regression and mixed models. The implications of these new models on the implied probability distribution of the annual maxima are also discussed. The models are illustrated using a historical flow series from the River Thames at Kingston

Maiden, Martyr, Sinner, and Saint: Performing the Narratives of Joan of Arc

This Capstone Experience/Thesis Project, made possible through the WKU Mahurin Honors College, is a study of historiography, or the way history is written. Joan of Arc is used to explore historiography because she is a figure that is written in many ways, each version giving us a snippet of the whole picture. The show written based on my research is titled Jehanne. I wanted to tell Joan’s story, but not just one version of it; I wanted to tell the whole story of who she is, not just what she did or what she believed. Not only does Jehanne tell the story of Joan of Arc, but it also illustrates historiography’s effect on her story; we see two playwrights’ versions of her, where they differ and where they merge; The audience is confronted with the differences and discrepancies between the versions, leading them to ask, “What is the truth?” Further, Jehanne allowed me to be a historian myself in the writing of my show by changing the plays and trial record to meet my needs as a playwright. The root of historiography shaped my show and trickled into every choice I made along the way. Perhaps it is impossible to capture the essence of a person in words, but I wanted to put my voice in the mix of Joan’s story which has been told and retold so often; the voice of a twenty-two-year-old Catholic woman from Nashville, TN in 21st Century America