E-Thesis 106 views
One hundred and ten years of tears: examining the human experience of tear gas use and its memories, memorials, and meanings / HELEN TURNER
Swansea University Author: HELEN TURNER
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DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUThesis.68053
Abstract
This thesis explores the everyday experience of being exposed to tear gas and how it is remembered, represented, and retold. The research into the human experience of tear gas use, its implications and legacy, interrogates how tear gas is explicated in a broad spectrum of material and media sources...
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Swansea University, Wales, UK
2024
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Doel, M. A., and Closs Stephens, A. |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa68053 |
| Abstract: |
This thesis explores the everyday experience of being exposed to tear gas and how it is remembered, represented, and retold. The research into the human experience of tear gas use, its implications and legacy, interrogates how tear gas is explicated in a broad spectrum of material and media sources as well as through commemorative practices at sites of memory. Utilising primarily secondary sources, this thesis offers an interpretation of how these representations convey and shape an understanding about what tear gas use means to the people it is used upon. Whilst tear gas does not chemically persist in the air, the sources and spaces of tear gas use show that it indelibly endures in memory. This thesis acknowledges both the context and the significance of existing, predominantly scientific, literature on tear gas whilst moving to set itself apart and engages valuable perspectives from feminist and emotional geographies in conjunction with creative methodologies. From murals on the walls of Free Derry, proclaiming that while tear gas encapsulated them, it did not obscure or conceal their struggle, to poems that place tear gas firmly as part of the lived experience of being Black in America, looking at the multitude of ways tear gas use is remembered helps us to vicariously experience that exposure for ourselves. This thesis finds the disastrous and detrimental experience of tear gas use can be affirmed through the construction of physical memorials and monuments, as well as in the active and passive voices of dissent which are teased out from a critical analysis of narrative or visual sources. Narratives of power, vulnerability and resilience are brought forth from the theoretical foundation of this thesis – geographies of memory, embodiment and grief – into a new way to conceptualise the actors, objects and experiences of tear gas use. |
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| Item Description: |
A selection of content is redacted or is partially redacted from this thesis to protect sensitive and personal information. |
| Keywords: |
tear gas, memory, vicarious experience, protest, less-lethal |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |