How war is depicted matters vitally to all of us. In the vast literature on war representation, little attention is paid to the fact that where the war recorder1stands crucially affects the portrayal. Should the writer be present on the battle-field, and, if so, where exactly? Should the recording figure be present in the text, and, if so, in what guise? 'Standing' differs from person to person, conflict to conflict, and between genders. Therefore, this thesis focuses on one particular war recorder in one particular war: the American journalist and fiction-writer, Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), in the European Theatre of Operations during World War Two. The fact that Gellhorn was a woman affected how she could and did place herself in relation to battle - but gender, though important, was not the only factor. Her course in and around war was dazzling: hitching rides, stowing away, travelling on dynamite-laden ships through mined waters, flying in ancient planes and deadly fighter jets, driving from battle-field to battle-field, mucking in, standing out. Her trajectory within her prose is equally versatile: she zooms in and out like a camera lens from impassiveness to intense involvement to withdrawal. The thesis is organised along the same spectrum. The first two chapters plot the co- ordinates forming the zero point on the graph of Gellhorn's Second World War writings (earlier American war correspondence, the 1930s' New Reportage, Gellhorn's upbringing and journalistic apprenticeship). Chapter Three then shows her in the guise of self-effacing, emotionally absent recorder. Moving from absence to presence, Chapter Four considers Martha Gellhorn in the field and Chapter Five 'Martha Gellhorn' in the text. Chapter Six describes the shift from presence to participation, before reaching the end of the parabola in Gellhorn's disillusionment in the power of writing to reform and her concerns about women's presence in the war zone. Given that positioning is the central concern, it is important to note the placement of Martha Gellhorn within the thesis itself. She stands as the central, pivotal example of the war recorder, illuminated by various contexts and comparisons with other writers (notably Ernest Hemingway, to whom she was married from 1940 to 1945). As a result of this approach, there are necessarily stretches of the text from which she is absent, as the survey turns to theoretical and comparative discussion. The hope is that this methodology reveals why Gellhorn, in the field and in the text, went where she did.

Thesis (MFA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2008. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gesine Janzen.

Human risk perceptions and responses to risks are driven in part by personal experiences with relevant threats. In the case of climate change, humans have been slow to take sufficient action to mitigate climate risks, but personal experiences with extreme or abnormal weather events may shape attitudes and behaviors regarding climate risk. This dissertation presents a series of five papers that examine the effects of experiences with weather events on people’s attitudes and behaviors related to climate change. Paper 1 presents a detailed review of existing recent theoretical and empirical papers on the topic. Paper 2 presents evidence that a variety of extreme weather events can increase attention to climate change. This paper quantifies attention to climate change as frequencies of social media messages about climate change paired with records of extreme weather events in the United States. Next, Paper 3 reports evidence that experiences with abnormal weather events can impact climate policy support, an essential climate mitigation behavior. Across five studies in Paper 3 including survey data, online search data, and real election outcomes paired with objective weather observations, findings indicate that experiences with abnormal temperatures can increase climate policy support. Papers 2 and 3 together provide evidence that experiences with extreme or abnormal weather can affect attention to climate change and can affect substantial real-world climate mitigation behaviors. Paper 4 sheds light on the psychological mechanisms underlying the effects of experiences with extreme weather on climate change attitudes and behaviors. We examine experienced affect about climate change as a candidate mechanism which is investigated over three studies including survey data, experimental data, and social media data. We find support for the hypothesis that weather experiences influence climate attitudes and behaviors in part through experienced affect. Papers 1-4 together provide evidence that experiences with abnormal weather events can influence climate attitudes and behaviors. It remains an important question how these effects compare to effects of other drivers of climate attitudes such as climate activist events. Paper 5 analyzes the effects of climate activist events in direct comparison with effects of abnormal weather experiences. We find that the aggregate effects of weather experiences over the course of an average year are comparable to the individual effects of the world’s largest recent climate activist events and also to the effects of intergovernmental climate summit events. In sum, this dissertation reviews and synthesizes past literature, reports new evidence that abnormal weather experiences can affect citizens’ climate attitudes and mitigation behaviors, sheds light on an underlying mechanism of this phenomenon, and demonstrates that the magnitude of the effects of personal experiences is comparable to other known drivers of climate risk perceptions and mitigation behaviors.

Life Holders is a collection of personal essays reflecting on my interactions with others concerning my military service.

Scholars have recognized the importance of illness narratives, and some of this work hastargeted terminal-illness stories, but little has directly addressed what distinguishes them from other illness narratives. In most illness narratives, recovery and life beyond the acute incident are a critical part of the overall experience of a disease. But terminal illness always ends with death. It has no “after.” This difference fundamentally changes how the illness is experienced – and how we should analyze a story told about it. Recognizing this distinction is important not only from a narratological perspective, but also for the study of the ways people live while dying and the models of behavior these stories reveal. I offer four ways to consider the specific genre of terminal-illness stories: the desire to tell, a turn to living dyingly, the alternative triumph, and endings-beyond-endings. These four elements recognize that terminal-illness stories are a distinct subset of illness narratives, and thus they can yield important insights unavailable through existing methods of looking at illness narratives more generally. Beyond the expanded narratological knowledge, this understanding is crucial because close listening is an ethical responsibility both to the individual and to those who come after her. Thinking about how and why people tell these stories and what we can get from them helps us see how they function in the world. That, in turn, gives us more concrete ways to think about the abstract ideas around terminal illness, dying, and death. This awareness will let us think more carefully about our master narratives of death and dying and what models of behavior are available to those who are terminally ill and those who care for them, and it can also offer insight into societal structures of health care. Such insights can further the cultural movement toward supporting a so-called good death, part of a larger shift from a biomedical model to a biocultural one that incorporates a patient’s subjective experience. Recognizing these signals can help a dying person and her caregivers think through treatment options, social support, and other aspects of care. Truly hearing the stories told by people with terminal illness helps us create a better ethic of caregiving and a better dying for all of us.

This dissertation journeys into the heart of narrative writing, exploring how personal stories shape the practices and identities of both students and instructors within academic writing instruction. At its core, it is an autoethnographic study that employs my own writing life as primary data to investigate the impact of narrative writing on teaching pedagogy. The research interrogates the traditional academic prioritization of objective, linear essay structures, questioning how such practices may obscure other legitimate forms of knowledge representation and identity construction within educational settings. Drawing from personal experiences of struggle within the constrictions of academic writing expectations, this work advocates for a narrative pedagogy. It recognizes storytelling as a rich, inclusive medium through which students can engage with texts and express complex understandings. By weaving in elements of motherhood, ancestry, and lived experience, the study underscores the need for a pedagogical shift towards recognizing the multiplicity of writer identities and the value of diverse narrative expressions.

Literature review -- Methodology -- Body of project : Fire in the belly. / Dept. of Journalism