March 20, 2023

Elder Orphans: A Hard Knock Life?

March 20, 2023/ Kelly Marnfeldt

We can learn from Jay-Z's point of view about the resilience and strength of the underdog when it comes to growing old on one’s own and on what it means to be an “elder orphan” in America. Being a solo ager is not rare and is even becoming the norm, especially for women. It’s not a stretch to think that older adults are more freaked out than usual about the possibility of being placed in a nursing home, given what we’ve lived through over the last three years - over 200,000 staff and residents in nursing facilities in the U.S. died, more than 23 times the death rate for people over 65 not in a nursing home. What's an elder orphan to make of that?

March 15, 2023

The Fight Between Liberal Arts and STEM Majors

March 15, 2023/ Botao Xu

The conflict between liberal arts and STEM majors has been debated in China for the past few decades. The debate reflects a STEM-first education culture in China, which developed because the contemporary education system was modeled after the Soviet Union and focused on the development of industrialization. This situation is quite different from the central role that liberal arts studies played in China’s historical development. The argument that this article is trying to state is not that the STEM major is not worthy of being valued but that both majors should be given similar weight.

March 14, 2023

Extending the Body: Exploring Protest Posters as Feminist Media in South Africa’s Am I Next? Movement

March 14, 2023/ Jacqueline Nkhonjera

When thinking about South Africa’s Am I Next? movement, I realized that the protest poster is a tool that feminists use to turn their own bodies into feminist media. Initially a hashtag, the Am I Next? movement began as a digital tool to raise awareness and an online space for feminist expression. With this in mind, I wonder: How do viral hashtags transform when attached to the human body? Does attaching text to the Black female body in protest make Black female pain easier to read? And if so, how does this complicate our understanding of what it means to write and read with the body?

(Content Warning: This article contains references to gender violence)

March 13, 2023

Self-Dissection Through My Obsession with LEGO

March 13, 2023/ Jun Wang

At first, my love for LEGO was an intuition. Later I started to think about it with rationality. I suspect one of the basic logics behind my love for LEGO is my obsession with miniature versions of common items. Lately, I’ve found that Johan Huizinga’s concept of “free play” could partially explain my obsession with LEGO and miniatures.

March 08, 2023

Towards More Just Game Worlds: Conversations with Creative Game Designers

March 08, 2023/ Areej Mawasi

This project is a part of the NSF-funded National AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming (DRL-2019805) housed at University of Colorado Boulder. Indeed, people with the backgrounds of the six game designers we interviewed are underrepresented and systematically marginalized in the commercial game industry. The goal for interviewing the six game designers during our co-design process of curriculum was to introduce young learners to transformative ways for game design and develop their understanding of game ecology.

March 02, 2023

Chernobyl Roundtable

March 02, 2023/ Nicola Dusi and Charo Lacalle

To conclude this special Pop Junctions series, this roundtable gives a range of scholars an opportunity to discuss the many complexities of the miniseries, Chernobyl.

March 01, 2023

What Makes Chernobyl Beautiful from a Screenwriting Perspective?

March 01, 2023/ Paolo Braga

Chernobyl achieved considerable critical and public acclaim. A result that couldn’t be taken for granted when the project started. The not so fashionable subject matter, its tragic nuances, the risk of addressing historical figures, events, and a society – the Soviet Union of the Eighties – that could appear unappealing, if not even too far from western contemporary culture and tastes. Greenlighting the production meant going against all odds. It ended up being a very good bet, though. What are the reasons for this surprising success?

February 27, 2023

Chernobyl and the Anthropology of Sacrifice

February 27, 2023/ Alberto N. García

From the very beginning, Chernobyl is packed with scenes of sacrifice. It is no coincidence that the narrative opens with Legasov’s immolation, underlining the centrality of sacrifice in the series. In this sense, the various sacrificial events presented in the story may be broadly grouped into three types: the one voluntarily assumed by multiple characters throughout the series (heroic); the animal sacrifice perpetrated by the authorities or forced by the toxic radioactive situation, where immolation adopts a literal as well as figurative value (symbolic); and finally, the offering of another innocent human being, releasing others from their hardships and adversities (redemptive).

February 26, 2023

Chernobyl a Miniseries Between “Reality” and “Television”

February 26, 2023/ Giorgio Grignaffini

Chernobyl (HBO – SKY, 2019) is a miniseries inspired by the real fact (or, rather to say, by the huge amount of historical, journalistic, administrative and scientific documents available on the subject) and also, in part, by the book Prayer for Chernoby by Svetlana Aleksievic. Miniseries are one of the most popular formats in current television production. They are characterised by a closure at the end of the planned episodes and are therefore also called limited series.

February 23, 2023

Lessons from Chernobyl... the HBO Series...

February 23, 2023/ Ioanna Vovou

The above quotes of Greek audiences of the series Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) raise a crucial question regarding the cognitive effects of the interplay between audiovisual genres. One could ask: What if history was teached through watching movies inside classrooms? The question is partially rhetoric since - to various extents - this educational and pedagogical practice, e.g. the use of fiction and movies to support teaching history or other subjects is implemented in all educational levels. Thus, fiction is de facto crafting historical memories and knowledge…

February 20, 2023

History, Power, and Narrative: Chernobyl is Still There

February 20, 2023/ Federico Montanari

The title of this contribution is alluding to the relationship between history and fiction, in Chernobyl tv series. On the one hand, the Chernobyl series challenges the so-called connection between fiction and nonfiction. It takes up the narration of the events in a rather precise way; but, at the same time, it works on memory and narrative, on the construction of personal experience and testimony, as well as on perception – and therefore on the plastic (that is, aesthetic-perceptual) and visual/figurative dimension. On the other hand, the question is: how the process of contextualization is staged?

February 18, 2023

Chernobyl: From Nuclear Disaster to the TV Series, and Beyond – The Importance of Archives in Narrative Construction

February 18, 2023/ Antonella Mascio

February 15, 2023

Chernobyl Miniseries Polarizations: Good/Bad, Rational/Emotional

February 15, 2023/ Andrea Bernardelli

Plots in Television series are often based on polarizations, in other words, on binary oppositions, which are extremely simple to follow. The miniseries Chernobyl brings into play a distinct clash between good and evil. The main opposition spectators are faced with is an ethical one, between the good guys, the scientists Valery Legasov and Ulana Khomyuk, who heroically try to limit the damage of the disaster, and the bad guys, the technicians of the nuclear plant Anatoly Dyatlov, Viktor Bryukhanov and Nicolai Fomian, who due to their incompetence and arrogance are the cause of the accident. Amongst the bad guys, various institutions can be placed like the government and the KGB, which have hidden and are still continuing to hide the deplorable mistakes made in the plant construction.

February 13, 2023

Intermedial Realism in Chernobyl

February 13, 2023/ Nicola Dusi

The persuasive effectiveness of the miniseries Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) comes from its documentary approach (Odin 2013). It is not just about historical accuracy in representing places and people, furnishings, clothing and technology in the fictional reconstruction of a narrative possible world (Eco 1979; Ryan 2014). The "figures" of death from invisible radiation are achieved through a sound design that remixes Geiger counters; the scenes of contaminated urban spaces and forests are based on iconographic sources from photo reports at the disaster site; characters and narrative situations (e.g., the death of the young firefighter) are created using investigative literature of interviews with survivors and their families as source texts. And after the fictional finale, Chernobyl goes on to feature a long documentary sequence, with photos and archive footage, that becomes an ethical and political commentary on the nuclear disaster and its management.

February 10, 2023

Chernobyl Reloaded: Renewing Traditional Male Heroism Through Female Characters

February 10, 2023/ Charo Lacalle

As highlighted in various studies on the miniseries, the protagonism and tragic fate of Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) in Chernobyl grants them an absolute pre-eminence. This work, however, vindicates the narrative prominence of the two female characters, who rework the male Homeric models of heroism: Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), the wife of one of the first victims of the nuclear accident, and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), the scientist who travels to Chernobyl to determine the causes of the explosion at the nuclear power plant. Both women, who initially complement the firefighter Vasily Ignatenko (Adam Nagaitis) and the scientist Legasov plots respectively, subvert the men's protagonism by forging their own narrative trajectories: Lyudmilla's desperate struggle to find her husband and support him in his agony, and Ulana's collaboration with Legasov to halt the spread of the radiation.

February 09, 2023

Remembering (and Refiguring) Chernobyl: What Can be Learned from the HBO (2019) Series?

February 09, 2023/ Nicola Dusi and Charo Lacalle

The premiere of Chernobyl (HBO-SKY, 2019) recalled the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history and the enormous damage on both living beings and the environment. This "historical drama" —as the critics labelled the miniseries— made nuclear disasters the focus of public attention once again, after being overshadowed in the last two decades by the increasing dramatization of other risks such as climate change. This article launches a Pop Junctions series that unpacks a range of dimensions related to the series Chernobyl.