Images of nuclear war in US government films from the early Cold War

Nowak, L.

doi:10.7765/9781526101327.00017

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Images of nuclear war were just as central to civil defence activists as they were for the mass of 'ordinary' people who confronted the Cold War. Lars Nowak has written about the centrality of training films for civil defence in the United States (Nowak 2016), and in the UK, representations of nuclear war were central in ways that illustrate the interrelationship between the imaginary and the material (see Chapter 5 by Bennesved and Sylvest in this volume). Civil defence exercises remind us that civil defence was performative, and that this performative element was intrinsically material.…”

Section: Mediationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

Cronqvist

Grant

2021

Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe

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This chapter explores how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can be used to examine civil defence as remembered. In focus stand oral histories testifying to the entanglement of civil defence in everyday life. The chapter employs a historical ethnography approach, using interviews and questionnaires collected between 2006 and 2012 in Sweden and the UK. The analysis, which departs from the three themes of localities, temporalities and mediations, illustrates the value of a more ‘bottom-up’ approach and discusses how we may refine the sociotechnical imaginaries framework to incorporate at least some elements of the ‘fuzziness’ of everyday life. It shows how elements of everyday culture relate to processes of embedding, resistance and extension of civil defence in Sweden, the UK and beyond.

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Section: Mediationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

Cronqvist

Grant

2021

Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe

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“…Their differences notwithstanding, American films rehearsed a familiar theme: something could be done, and preparation was of the essence (e.g. Masco 2008;Jacobs 2010;Matthews 2012;Nowak 2016). Historians have initiated studies of civil defence films in other parts of the Cold War West (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

Embedding Preparedness, Assigning Responsibility: The Role of Film in Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Civil Defence

Bennesved

Sylvest

2021

Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe

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This chapter examines the role of film and television in embedding sociotechnical imaginaries of civil defence during the early nuclear age (c. 1949–1965) by zooming in on Sweden and Denmark, two neighbouring countries that differed both in terms of their political position in the Cold War and in the scale of their civil defence efforts. Following a theoretical discussion of the psychosocial effects of films and their manner of circulation, we analyse Swedish and Danish films in two periods demarcated by the thermonuclear disruption of civil defence during the mid-1950s. The analysis highlights how films were used to frame technologies and script and perform social norms. We argue that films constitute an important source for understanding the difficulties of embedding sociotechnical imaginaries of civil defence.

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Images of nuclear war in US government films from the early Cold War

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

Embedding Preparedness, Assigning Responsibility: The Role of Film in Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Civil Defence

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