Final report

From Pompeii to Fukushima: Time, intermediality and transregional imaginaries in disaster discourse (P12-1108)

PI: Professor Anders Ekström

The overall purpose of this project was to develop a long historical perspective on the cultural processes by which representations of extreme nature events travel across media, geographical borders and different times. A particular focus was on the notions of time and temporality involved in the remediation of disasters and geological extremes. Three case studies were conducted. The first was on the remediation of the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and the fall of Pompeii. This started as an empirical study of how the ancient disaster emerged as the most well known natural disaster to Western audiences through its frequent remediation in nineteenth-century panoramas, paintings, novels, stage melodramas and moving images. In the end, however, the study took a much broader long-term view on two thousand years of reconstructions of the event, from the two letters on the eruption that Pliny the Younger wrote to the historian Cornelius Tacitus to contemporary digital recreations of the final hours preceding the cataclysm.

The second case study was on the genre of disaster shows that developed in nineteenth-century exhibitions and fairgrounds. The study traced how this genre developed in intermedial exchange with various forms of theatrical attractions, panoramas and large scale reenactments of scenes of war and historical disasters, from the late eighteenth century and onward. Among its analytical themes were how historical disasters and more recent floods, eruptions and earthquakes were connected to each other by being framed and narrated in similar contexts. Working from the concept of media culture, this case study also provided insights into the relation between an emergent news culture and a long tradition of engaging with extreme nature events in broader visual and popular culture. Empirically, the study especially focused on the Johnstown flood in 1889 and its reenactment in turn-of-the-century disaster shows.

The third case study attempted to historicise contemporary templates for reports of extreme nature events and geological extremes in online news sites and small screen media. Empirically, it consisted of a close study of one news site between 2011-2015 with particular focus on the emergent aesthetics of clickable images in a real time frame as a culturally dominant template for reporting disasters of a different type, scale and location. The overall focus of this study was on the times and temporalities that emerged in this context. More specifically, the study engaged with two recurring themes in media history and theory. The first was the relationship between new media technologies and the modern notion of an increasingly pervasive culture of the now. The second was the long-standing role of natural disasters in the history of media innovation.

Taken together, the case studies provided material for working on the synthesizing themes of the project and, most importantly, the conceptions of time and temporality in the history of disaster discourse. Throughout the case studies, the project documented a recurring tension between repetition and disruption (process and event) in the long-term history of mediating nature dramas and geological extremes. It also conveyed insights into the cultural techniques by which extreme events of a very different type become associated to each other across different media and times. Most importantly, the project contributed to the analysis of how an increasing focus on nature emergencies related to anthropogenic climate change feeds into a more general sense of crisis and acceleration in nature and society. Another related contribution of the project lies in its way of historicizing the distinction between times of history and times of nature as well as the sense of multiple and extending times that emerge from contemporary disaster imagery.

These results from the project have formed the basis for new collaborations and cross-disciplinary research initiatives. For example, a new initiative to discuss the relation between historical and geological times in relation to anthropocene debates was developed together with geologist Henrik H. Svensen at Oslo University. Another collaborative effort was the Scandinavian network project "Cultures of Disasters", which involved a series of workshops and international conferences co-organized between universities in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and with contributions from scholars around the world. Another workshop in the project was organized in November 2016. For two days, a group of about fifteen scholars from different disciplines presented papers on the topic "Times of history, times of nature: Braudel and after". This meeting was also part of an effort to discuss new research ideas that emerged from the project.

Work from this project was presented in more than 20 invited talks, keynotes, seminars and conference papers at universities in five different countries (a list is attached).  Part of the project was conducted during a stay as Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall College and Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), both at Cambridge University. Some of the results and ideas from the project were also presented in lectures open to the public as well as in essays published in leading dailies in Sweden and Norway and interviews in Swedish radio. As part of the project, I have also conducted consultancies for arts and museum projects on related themes.

In all, the project has resulted in 13 publications in three languages: six articles in peer-review journals, two chapters in anthologies, one special journal issue, three essays in newspapers, and a monograph (to be published in 2018; full references are given in a separate list). Two important sample publications are the journal articles "Remediation, Time and Disaster", Theory, Culture & Society 33:5 (2016), and "When is the Now? Monitoring Disaster in the Expansion of Time", International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), respectively. Together, these articles provide insights into two of the case studies as well as some of the theoretical and synthesizing themes that were developed in the project. They are also examples of articles from the project that were published open access.


Publications

Anders Ekström, "Förödelsens utopi", Upsala Nya Tidning, April 14, 2012.

Anders Ekström, "Exhibiting Disasters: Mediation, Historicity and Spectatorship", Media, Culture & Society, 34:4 (2012), pp. 472-487.

Anders Ekström, "Katastrofens tid: Pompeji, Johnstown, Fukushima", Kungl. Vetenskapssamhällets i Uppsala årsbok, 39:2011-2012 (Kungl. Vetenskapssamhället i Uppsala: Uppsala, 2013), pp. 9-23.

Anders Ekström, "Katastrofer och kulturell improvisation", Omsorg: Nordisk tidsskrift for palliativ medisin, nr 1, 2014, pp. 11-14.

Anders Ekström & Henrik H. Svensen, "Så skapar vi kunskap om framtidens katastrofer", Dagens Nyheter, April 2, 2014.

Anders Ekström & Henrik H. Svensen, "Katastrofen, vitenskapen og oss", Morgenbladet, March 28, 2014.

Anders Ekström & Kyrre Kverndokk, eds., Cultures of Disasters, special issue of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 7:3 (2015), 202 pp.

Anders Ekström & Kyrre Kverndokk, "Introduction: Cultures of Disasters" (med Kyrre Kverndokk), Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 7:3 (2015), pp. 356-362.

Anders Ekström & Henrik H. Svensen, "Naturkatastrofer i menneskets tidsalder: Mot en tverrfaglig forståelse av antropocen-begrepet", Tidsskrift for kulturforskning 3 (2014), pp. 6-21.

Anders Ekström, "Remediation, Time and Disaster", Theory, Culture & Society 33:5 (2016), pp. 117-138.

Anders Ekström, "When is the Now? Monitoring Disaster in the Expansion of Time", International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), pp. 5342-5361.

Anders Ekström & Henrik H. Svensen, "Antropocena tider", Tidens paradoxer, red. Kim Salomon (Göteborg: Makadam förlag, 2017), pp. 15-32.

Anders Ekström, Tidens återkomst: Pompeji, Johnstown, Fukushima (forthcoming, 2018), c. 250 pp.


Invited talks, keynotes, workshops, etcetera.

"Exhibiting disasters: Transnational imaginaries in early twentieth-century popular visual culture", keynote at the conference Exhibitions as Sites of Cultural Diversity - Foreigness, Turku, November 18, 2010.

"Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship", paper presentation at the workshop Media Across Borders: Catastrophes in Turn-of-the-Century Popular Visual Culture, Stockholm, June 3, 2011.

Organiser of the workshop Media Across Borders: Catastrophes in Turn-of-the-Century Popular Visual Culture, Stockholm, June 3, 2011.

"Mediehistoriskt ABC: Fukushima, Johnstown, Pompeji", open lecture, Uppsala University, May 26, 2011.

"Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship", paper presentation at the conference Katastrofedramaturgier: Medieringar av naturkatastrofer, Oslo, May 31-June 1, 2011.

"Katastrofens tid: Från Fukushima till Pompeji", prize lecture, Uppsala University, October 8, 2011.

"A heritage of risk", paper presentation at the conference Museums in the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Social History, Stockholm, May 2-4, 2012.

"From Pompeii to Fukushima: Deep time, real time, repeat time", paper presentation at the workshop Katastrofkulturer, Stockholm, December 7, 2012.

Organiser of the workshop Katastrofkulturer, Stockholm, December 7, 2012.

"The fall of Johnstown: Exhibiting disasters at the turn of the 20th century", invited talk at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, February 7, 2013.

"From Pompeii to Fukushima: Time, intermediality and transregional imaginaries in disaster discourse", seminar presentation at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, March 11, 2013.

"Times of disaster imagery", keynote lecture at the conference Regimes of Temporality, Oslo, June 5-7, 2013.

"Time and the rediscovery of disaster", paper presentation at the conference Cultures of Disaster, Oslo, November 6-8, 2013.

Co-organiser of the conference Cultures of Disaster, Oslo, November 6-8, 2013.

"Tidens återkomst", public lecture, Uppsala University, November 12, 2013.

"Archiving the now", paper presentation at the workshop Medialiseringstider, Stockholm, May 5-6, 2014.

Project presentation at Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, October 2, 2014.

"Time and the rediscovery of disaster", open lecture at the University of Turku, December 4, 2014.

"Time and the rediscovery of disaster", paper presentation at the conference Mediatisation of Culture and Everyday Life: Comparisons, Histories and Critiques, Stockholm, April 23-24, 2015.

"Time and the rediscovery of disaster", invited talk at the seminar of aesthetics, Uppsala University, May 12, 2015.

"Tidsbegrepp i antropocen" (with Henrik H. Svensen), paper presentation at the conference Krapperups symposium om Tiden, June 4-6, 2015.

"When is the now? Monitoring disaster in the expansion of time", paper presentation at the workshop Medialiseringstider, August 24-25, 2015.

"Remediation, time and disaster", invited talk at the Department of Culturew and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, October 1, 2015.

"Hoten från kommande katastrofer", radio interview, Vetenskapsradion Forum, February 23, 2016.

"When is the now?", keynote lecture at the conference Key Concepts in Times of Crisis, Aarhus University, September 14-16, 2016.

"Aftertimes – a synthesis report", paper presentation at the workshop Times of History, Times of Nature: Braudel and After, Uppsala, 24-25 november.

Organiser of the workshop Times of History, Times of Nature: Braudel and After, Uppsala, 24-25, November 2016.