Channels of Communication
Asynchronous Session
Translating Occupation Chronicles: Translator’s Agency as Anti-propagandistic Stance in Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Antonova
In the environment of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, translation of Ukrainian war-themed literature has become a critically relevant cultural practice meant to represent the nation’s identity, disseminate its narratives of resistance and resilience, and share its people’s lived experiences. This study engages with Lidia Wolanskyj’s translation of Stanislav Aseyev’s collection of documentary essays In Isolation: Dispatches from the Occupied Donbas (В ізоляції. Есеї про Донбас) to foreground how the translator’s visibility and textual interventions contextualize occupation narratives for Anglophone audiences and amplify the author’s pro-Ukrainian political perspective in opposition to Russia’s propagandistic ideology. Stanislav Aseyev, a Donetsk-born writer and journalist who personally witnessed Russia’s 2014 occupation of Donbas and experienced arrest, torture, and unlawful detention, in his essays documents the unravelling occupation and analyzes the shifts in local postcolonial mentality as an identity conflict between post-Soviet propaganda-instilled beliefs and the emerging Ukrainian national self-awareness. The English version’s translatorial interventions, including textual transformations (changed order of texts; added timelines) and paratextual elements (translator’s notes; captioned photos and maps) centre the translator’s/editors’ project on the goal of educating their target audiences and raising awareness of Russia’s military aggression and informational warfare. Undertaken in 2022 amid continuing full-scale invasion, this translating project acquires special significance as a way to broadcast Ukraine’s war narratives and dismantle harmful tropes of Russian propaganda. My analysis highlights how the translator’s self-positioning contributes to this objective, while raising important questions on the translating subject’s agency in giving voice to the silenced survivors.
Humanizing Childbirth: Transferring Concepts from Consciousness Studies to Promote Contemporary Birth Experience View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Orli Dahan
The subjective childbirth experience is crucial from a public health standpoint. There are correlations between a negative childbirth experience and a poor mental state after birth. I offer a new approach to how insights from consciousness research can promote the science of human birth. The theory of set and setting proves that peak experiences are shaped, first and foremost, by the mindset of an individual entering the experience (set) and the surroundings in which the experience happens (setting). The history of psychedelics’ extreme polar experiences directs us to give more attention to how non-physiological factors shape altered states of consciousness and their effects on the mind and body. Because recent studies suggest that birthing women enter an altered state of consciousness during physiological birth, I analyze the typical modern birthing experience in terms of set and setting theory. Transferring these ideas from consciousness studies to birth healthcare can help design, navigate, and explain many human birth process psycho-physiological elements. Moreover, because women also give birth with their minds, not just their bodies – these new ideas challenge one of the rooted premises of modern obstetrics: that birth progresses as it does purely from a physiological mechanism. Thus, framing and characterizing human childbirth in different terms, transferred from consciousness research, is a central tool to promote physiological births and subjective positive birthing experiences, which is currently a primary yet unreached goal in modern obstetrics and public health.
Power and Control within the Branching Narrative of Black Mirror's Bandersnatch: A Postmodern Analysis that Transcends Spatial, Contextual, and Gamified Structures View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Orchida Fayez Ismail
Bandersnatch, the first Black Mirror full-length movie aired by Netflix on 28 December 2018, allows viewers to choose how the actions unfold by picking one or more options at certain points using the remote control. This sets the foundation for exploring its branching narrative technique allowing the viewers to make choices that shape the story's outcomes, creating a unique interactive experience with multiple forces at play. Understanding the postmodernist philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault further enhances our analysis of Bandersnatch, as their concepts of deconstruction and power and control are evident throughout the episode. The non-linear narrative offers layers of meaning that derive from the allusion of the title to Lewis Carol's, Through the Looking Glass, while travelling through a future where the protagonist realizes his reality as part of a computer game. This paper argues that Bandersnatch goes beyond traditional literary analysis and transcends the gaming schema where audiences can choose different paths for winning into choosing different paths that achieve a moral responsibility.
From 'the Cradle of Civilization' to Ben Okri's Changing Destiny View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rosemary Alice Gray
The paper begins with a brief discussion of ’the cradle of civilization’, and an outline of the BA-RA relationship, a pivotal concept that underpins both the generative poem and its migration into a play, seen through the prism of a 4000-year-old Egyptian poem, Sinuhe. This is followed by a summary of the 1875 BCE funerary autobiography. A comparison of the framing poem with Ben Okri’s drama, Changing Destiny, serves to explore the transfer and transformation of key ideas of what it means to be human and the nature of exile and homecoming. The discussion is bolstered by theories of hospitality encapsulated in Merle Williams’s 2020 Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South. I conclude by arguing that despite the four-century gap and the dearth of literary criticism, the ideas in the poem, transferred and transformed by Okri in his drama, resonate powerfully with our times.
