Securitization is the process by which subjects move from the mundane to “worth securing”. What a group of people consider to be “worth securing” reflects how they understand that subject’s value in relation to their lives. A dominant trend in securitization studies has been the use of speech-act theory to allocate the “source” of security to some specific dominant influence; speech-act securitization is not necessarily coercive, but it privileges the act of declaring security, and only offers that privilege to a handful of actors. This paper instead proposes that declaration is not the dominant aspect of securitization. Rather than stemming from communication, security is a feature of a social system that exists within communication. Securitization is an autopoeitic (in the language of social theorist Niklas Luhmann, whose work this paper draws upon heavily) process that allows society to adapt and respond to threats and change in specific ways.

This dissertation explores a body of films produced after the events of 9/11, and while examining this specific point of departure, the author presents the argument on the vast cultural relevancy of the omnipresent zombie. These films are interrogative and complex, offering the viewing audience a rich tapestry of interwoven meanings. Furthermore, the author suggests that the zombie trope has, in fact, left the genre altogether, reinserted into a style of films he labels as "non-zombie appropriation." Chapter 1 introduces the zombie genre as both part of the larger horror genre aesthetic and as its' own legitimate subgenre. The zombie has a rich cinematic history, going back more than seven decades; heretofore, the last decade continues to see an unabated release of the viewing world's favorite creature. Chapter 2 examines 28 Days Later and the sequel 28 Weeks Later as critical films functioning as works that refocus the zombie for the twenty-first century. As no serious discussion of filmic zombies can occur without the immeasurable significance of George A. Romero, chapter 3 concentrates on the auteur reclaiming a genre he helped to invent with his films Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. These two works show a director that refuses to rest on his laurels by encoding these films with rich post-9/11 concerns. In chapter 4, the examination of the disparate films Equilbruim and The Happening discuss the utilization of non-zombie appropriations, films with no discernible zombies, but for all intents and purpose, imitate that specific narrative. By way of conclusion, chapter 5 continues the non-zombie trope with the abstract (and indeed postmodern) They Came Back. The chapter ends with an augmentation of the framework and with other concerns for the argument. This dissertation should be of interest to both horror scholarship overall and zombie films in particular. It aims to provide a refined reading of a significant body of works and add to the current and critical legitimization to this important style of cinematic artistry.

This dissertation examines how commercially successful military-themed video games produced after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are crafted, marketed, and played with the goal of understanding the interlocking technological, cultural, and social practices that contribute to their interactive pleasures. The systematic inquiry into the production and experience of media pleasure carries with it vexing questions about how such affect is created and how it is situated within broader cultural fields. This interdisciplinary project accordingly utilizes multiple methods including close textual readings of seminal games, a critical discourse analysis of marketing materials, and an ethnography and focus group of a war gaming fan community to track how these sites of practice give post-9/11 military-themed gameplay its distinctive experiential character and cultural import. The case studies examined herein reveal that the affective dimensions of militarized gameplay are intimately linked to the political and cultural forces undergirding their production, marketing, and reception, and that the games industry mobilizes anxieties about terrorism to entice gamers into virtually striking back against foreign aggressors. / text

It is very important to study the mental health impact of disasters to provide adequate mental health services when there is an increased demand of mental health services and a concurrent deterioration of mental healthcare capacity after disasters. This study examined the mental health impact of 9/11 attacks among the individuals living close to the disaster area and compared them to the individuals living farther from the disaster area. New York (NY) state and Washington DC were selected as the disaster areas and Illinois (IL) was selected to study individuals living farther from the disaster area. The study also assessed the effects of mental health on risky behaviors such as cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption and how they vary based on age, gender and proximity to the disaster. Ten year Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data from 1996-2005 was obtained for NY, DC and IL. Significant increase in mental distress was observed in NY and DC but not in IL. Increased use of alcohol was found among DC and NY residents but the increase in IL was not significant. Logistic regression showed that increase in alcohol consumption was not associated with mental health. An overall decrease in cigarette smoking was observed and there was no impact of disaster on smoking rates. Mental distress was much higher among the female respondents as compared to the male respondents. Mental distress was highest among 35- 49 year old respondents as compared to other age groups. In future longitudinal studies should be conducted in order to establish the causal relationship of mental health and risk behaviors such as smoking and alcohol consumption after disasters. Most of the interventions regarding post-disaster mental health focus on PTSD but other mental disorders should also be addressed.

In this study, I use visual and material culture that addresses the contemporary war in Afghanistan to critically assess the ways in which national conflict history is envisioned. I focus in particular on cultural production related to the involvement of Australia and Canada in the conflict. I do so to question the ways in which Australia’s and Canada’s engagements with this particular conflict are visualized in relation to their official narratives, which posit their military activities in Afghanistan as undertaken in the name of security, peacekeeping, and rebuilding. Such a query is important, because it allows me to investigate which visualizations contribute to the history and narrative of national engagements with conflict, and which are ignored. Moreover, it allows me to ask how visual and material culture not only constitutes, but also legitimates national conflict narratives. And finally, it allows me to locate examples within this field of cultural production that renegotiate, contest, subvert, and resist state representations. These lines of inquiry help to situate my study of visual and material culture by suggesting that such objects can act as lenses through which to address what Jon Stratton and Ien Ang describe as the “unstable, provisional and often jeopardous status of the national” (1996, 381). Following Stratton and Ang, I approach the concept of the “nation” as “a contested terrain between historically specific ‘cultures’ structured in relations of dominance and subordination to each other” (367). Using exhibitions and cultural objects produced post-9/11 in Australia and Canada (that is, after 11 September 2001), I analyze the visual and material culture of conflict within the “contested terrain” of national/ist narratives. The particular process of culture-making exemplified in exhibitions and cultural objects is crucial when it comes to advancing national/ist narratives, since as I argue throughout this study, it represents part of the larger historical transition from the state enlistment of cultural production in support of nation-building to the neoliberal mobilization of visual culture for the global marketplace. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-22 00:54:55.819

Jonathan Lethem’s 2009 novel Chronic City and Colum McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin can each be read as unique forms of the post-9/11 novel. In this study, I take up the argument that much of the established scholarship analyzing post-9/11 fiction often examines the same set of texts and frequently employs similar theoretical lenses, more often than not a specific form of trauma analysis. I argue that McCann and Lethem’s novels can each be read as unique forms of the post-9/11 novel for the way each work incorporates the Freudian processes of fetishism and disavowal into their respective narratives. In two close readings, I analyze each text to demonstrate how these processes function and what they offer both the authors and readers of the novels.

In 1997 the Labour Party introduced the White Paper Rights Brought Home: The Human Rights Bill. Bringing rights home was considered necessary to significantly influence rights conception in the UK and internationally. Rights Brought Home argued that incorporation would allow human rights to become a more prominent feature of society. The Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was brought into force with optimism and expectations. However, the war of terror has significantly impacted the way in which rights have been understood and appreciated. National security issues have clashed with Convention rights. There is mounting concern that British judges must blindly follow the rulings established by the European Court of Human Rights. There have been problems of public disengagement and hostility. The HRA is characterized by a story of failure. Understanding the relationship between the war on terror and the HRA is central to human rights development.

In 1997 the Labour Party introduced the White Paper Rights Brought Home: The Human Rights Bill. Bringing rights home was considered necessary to significantly influence rights conception in the UK and internationally. Rights Brought Home argued that incorporation would allow human rights to become a more prominent feature of society. The Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was brought into force with optimism and expectations. However, the war of terror has significantly impacted the way in which rights have been understood and appreciated. National security issues have clashed with Convention rights. There is mounting concern that British judges must blindly follow the rulings established by the European Court of Human Rights. There have been problems of public disengagement and hostility. The HRA is characterized by a story of failure. Understanding the relationship between the war on terror and the HRA is central to human rights development.

Securitization is the process by which subjects move from the mundane to “worth securing”. What a group of people consider to be “worth securing” reflects how they understand that subject’s value in relation to their lives. A dominant trend in securitization studies has been the use of speech-act theory to allocate the “source” of security to some specific dominant influence; speech-act securitization is not necessarily coercive, but it privileges the act of declaring security, and only offers that privilege to a handful of actors. This paper instead proposes that declaration is not the dominant aspect of securitization. Rather than stemming from communication, security is a feature of a social system that exists within communication. Securitization is an autopoeitic (in the language of social theorist Niklas Luhmann, whose work this paper draws upon heavily) process that allows society to adapt and respond to threats and change in specific ways.

Like many other cataclysmic events September 11, a day now popularly believed to have 'changed the world', has become a topic taken up by children's writers. This thesis, titled The Whole World Shook: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities in Children's Fiction About 9/11, examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifies three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children: ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities. The thesis argues that the identities formed within the selected children's texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. This study is located within the field of children's literature criticism, which supports the understanding that children's books, like all texts, play a role in the production of identities. Children's literature is highly significant both in its pedagogical intent (to instruct and induct children into cultural practices and beliefs) and in its obscurity (in making the complex simple enough for children, and from sometimes intentionally shying away from difficult things). This literary criticism informed the study that the texts, if they were to be written at all, would be complex, varied and most likely as ambiguous and contradictory as the responses to the attacks on New York themselves. The theoretical framework for this thesis draws on a range of critical theories including literary theory, cultural studies, studies of performativity and postmodernism. This critical framework informs the approach by providing ways for: (i) understanding how political and ideological work is performed in children's literature; (ii) interrogating the constructed nature of cultural identities; (iii) developing a nuanced methodology for carrying out a close textual analysis. The textual analysis examines a representative sample of children's texts about 9/11, including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics. Each chapter focuses on a different though related identity category. Chapter Four examines the performance of ethnic identities and race politics within a sample of picture books and young adult fiction; Chapter Five analyses the construction of collective, national identities in another set of texts; and Chapter Six does analytic work on a third set of texts, demonstrating the strategic performance of particular kinds of heroic identities. I argue that performances of cultural identities constructed in these texts draw on familiar versions of identities as well as contribute to new ones. These textual constructions can be seen as offering some certainties in increasingly uncertain times. The study finds, in its sample of books a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. Being a recent corpus of texts about 9/11, these texts provide information on the kinds of 'selves' that appear to be privileged in the West since 2001. The thesis concludes that the shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitute good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of children's literature by providing a focussed and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.