Book 2.0 - Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2021

After the explosion of the AIDS epidemic in the United States was virtually ignored because it was mostly hitting the gay community, gay authors started to employ their work for two main purposes: to protest the situation and, particularly in the beginning, to spread information about the virus. The portrayal of physical details is one of the most interesting devices employed in AIDS texts. In the early AIDS years, when the cause of the epidemic was unknown, literary tools such as the list of symptoms were widely used: authors were addressing their own community, and gave people a way to recognize the early signs of illness, such as the night sweats and the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Even after the discovery of HIV, when there was not a cure yet, AIDS texts represented a crucial source of information: the first official leaflet was provided by Surgeon General Koop in 1986. The act of incorporating medical information in literary texts was considered an act of service within the community: authors such as Paul Monette and Larry Kramer regarded the gay underground as a more credible source of information, since in the beginning people who had gotten through it often knew more than the doctors. Later on, as information became more available, the display of those same physical manifestations of the disease and of AIDS-ridden bodies became an effective way to denounce the persisting silence from the government, with works such as Kushner’s Angels in America and Wojnarowicz’s portraits of Peter Hujar’s body. This article focuses on how the display of symptoms and other physical manifestations of the epidemic turned the cultural production into a key element in shaping the discourse around AIDS, highlighting the evolution in the use of physical medical evidence – from information to outcry.

George Mackay Brown’s poetry and prose in relation to Orcadian history and landscape.

The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a number of texts, which are aimed at helping children to cope with situations alien to them. For example, the picture book Staying Home by Sally Nichols and Vivienne Schwarz (2020) deals with the conditions of lockdown and family isolation, whilst Piperpotamus by Annis Watts endeavours to explain COVID-19. This pandemic is not the only such event in history. The Black Death swept across Europe (1347–51) followed by the Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20). Both of these have stimulated historical fiction for older children and Young Adults and have done so by employing differing literary approaches. For instance, Cat Winters’ In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2013) incorporates a ghost story set against the contexts of séances and spirit photographers as the bereaved hope to gain comfort, whilst Charles Todd’s An Unmarked Grave (2012) is a murder mystery. Dystopian science fiction has also been employed to examine the equivalent circumstances of such pandemics. The plague in Gone (2008–14) by Michael Grant follows a nuclear disaster, which has produced a world where only those under fifteen have survived beneath a dome created by a young autistic child at the point of the explosion. Unforeseen forces have erupted resulting in mutation where individuals have supernatural powers taking them into a posthuman state. Their world is later blighted by plague and the children have to deal with remaking their lives and their society without the help of adults. This article will consider the various ways that such texts have approached these world-changing disasters and the common themes, which emerge to give our current generation of children ways of thinking about their present and their future.

This essay arose as a response to teaching the final post-graduate course in the taught master's programme of the Faculty of Education at Brock University (St. Catharine’s Ontario Canada) in the spring and autumn of 2020, just after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the complete closures of schools and universities. Three students wrote about their relationships with teaching in the time of COVID. An experienced middle-school teacher discusses how the transition to suddenly homeschooling her five-year-old focused her attention on distinctions between curriculum-driven education and maternal teaching. A newly graduated teacher, concerned about the complete cancellation of extra-curricular sport programmes researches their histories. She discovers the ways in which intercollegiate sport, especially in the United States, transformed what had been healthy competition between undergraduate teams of students into multi-million-dollar businesses driving university revenue streams, eclipsing academic life and exploiting student athletes. In the United States, with academic institutions limiting or prohibiting in-person instruction in 2020-201, basketball and football teams competed. COVID spiked and people died. A nurse-educator, faced with the sudden requirement to remove of all nursing students from their required clinical placements at the onset of the pandemic writes about recalibrating the relationships between virtual experience (including simulations) and practical experience in nursing instruction. Given the vulnerability of clinical placements to sudden closures (SARS in 2003 had been a warning), the nurse-educator explains why it is time to determine which programme components could best be moved online. The contributions by the three students are framed by the professor's own adaptation to an online environment, including her development of asynchronous iMovie instruction combined with short synchronous seminars (with no more than five students at a time) and one-on-one tutorials.

This hybrid creative-critical article explores how new ways of living beyond the current environmental crisis are forged on two sandscaping schemes that have been constructed as new experimental measures against coastal erosion. The Zandmotor, created in 2011, is an artificial peninsula built out of sand on the coast of South Holland. The success of this project inspired a similar sandscaping scheme at Bacton on the coast of Norfolk, constructed in 2019. The strange liminal landscapes that are the result of these projects are not just symbols of adaptive, nature-based water management in times of rising sea levels, they also become time machines, making fossils of different times emerge out of the sand taken from the seabed of the North Sea. In addition, the sandscapes are symbols of the artificialization of the coastal landscape, given the fact that sand suppletions disrupt not only life on the beach, but also destroy much bottom-dwelling life on the seabed from which the sand is harvested. However, these unique liminal landscapes between land and sea also create new ecological opportunities. At the Zandmotor, for example, rare bristle worms and Baltic clams have made their unexpected appearance. Moreover, the sandscape invites people not just to look for fossilized mammoth teeth, but also inspires them to create sense-altering art projects specifically adapted to the unique conditions in the area. In this article, I trace these various significances of both sandscaping schemes and argue that they cannot be reduced to any of these different meanings. Instead, I describe the Zandmotor as an example of Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016: 4) and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of ‘contaminated diversity’ (2015: 30). For although enormous amounts of animal and plant life have been destroyed for the creation of the Zandmotor, this does not discredit the fact that this new liminal environment has opened up new ecological opportunities for multispecies flourishing, creating unexpected combinations of landscapes and creatures. These new combinations inspire a shift in thinking about coastal environments and present new ways of living that may emerge beyond the current environmental crisis.

Since the early 2000s social media has transformed the internet into a site for the exchange of stories through the mass democratization of publishing. And yet, new forms of digital and online storytelling have at the same time compromised one of the core functions of storytelling, namely its social aspect, the ability to build community when two or more people share stories in the same space, at the same time, breathing the same air. Somewhat ironically the advent of social media may have broadened the audience for any one person’s storytelling, whilst diminishing the social intimacy of the storytelling experience. As part of its research work into storytelling as a means of engaging people in the public debate around environment, the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University has been developing new forms and processes of digital storytelling to promote wider engagement and dissemination of environmentally driven personal stories. ‘The Reasons’, first staged in Cambridgeshire in 2016, was an attempt to create a live, community social event that provided a public forum for storytelling as a way of debating issues around drought and water governance in the Fens. Inspired by a re-staging of La Rasgioni in Sardinia in 2015, a traditional form of conflict resolution, whereby a ‘mock’ court provides the means for the community to publicly tell its stories to each other, ‘The Reasons’ was co-designed for the Fenland context and was performed twice in 2016. It was then further adapted for use in the Korogocho slum in Nairobi for an event to discuss the issue of waste management with members of the local community, as part of an initiative with UN Live. ‘The Reasons’ is an attempt to bring together the advantages of digital storytelling as a reflective process with the social intimacy of the live storytelling event. The result is a new form of hybrid storytelling that seeks to build community and establish co-thinking processes to build resilience to environmental change. This article reflects critically upon the development and evolution of this work over the past five years.

Climate change and migration occupy our daily diet of news today. It does and must fuel our contemporary consciousness. The following is an attempt to share the story of an epiphany about a rooted and constant connection that expands across plant life and human existence. This story’s sap is derived from oral traditions, ancestors and our collective modern botanical knowledge. It takes the form of a walk in live time across the geography of a microclimate where the epiphany occurred. The walk endeavours to awaken a conscious kinship between human and plant cells, through a story’s language, towards a daily worldwide response to consciousness about climate change.

Review of: Children’s Literature, Carrie Hintz (2019)

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