Humanities
Thinking about your topic from a humanities perspective, you would think about how the topic relates to or has impacted human action or work. The video The Door This link opens in a new window below is a great example of a film that has been produced after the disaster. Using the Chernobyl disaster as an example again, consider the following questions that are reflective of humanities centric thought:
- Has the disaster influenced any artists? What themes are they trying to portray and discuss?
- How would photography or film of the aftermath of Chernobyl affect individuals? Looking into the hope of progress for more access to environmental friendly nuclear power and how the disaster back fired would be one way to take this analysis.
Suggested Databases
The list of databases below are some options that you can look through for topics related to Chernobyl and the humanities. Before searching, let's strategize on constructing a few example searches.
Keywords and search strings might include:
- Chernobyl AND literature
- Chernobyl AND (literature OR film OR art)
- Themes AND art AND environmental disasters
- Themes AND art AND nuclear power
- Arts & Humanities Database - ProQuest This link opens in a new windowThe definitive database of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from 1964 to present, this database is without question the most important bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history.
- ARTSTOR This link opens in a new windowDigital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Please note that ARTSTOR is not available on mobile browsers/phones.
- Humanities International Complete - EBSCO This link opens in a new windowComprehensive collection of journals in the humanities, with full-text for approximately 1,200.
- Photographs capture an abandoned world inside the Chernobyl Exclusion ZoneWhen photographer David McMillan first visited the city of Pripyat in 1994, he expected his movements to be restricted. Just eight years prior, a reactor at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had exploded, forcing a region-wide evacuation and sending radioactive fallout billowing across Europe.
- Aftermath: Three decades on, Russia's artists are still dealing with the fallout from ChernobylDuring the Cold War, awareness of the atomic threat was everywhere in Russia: in pop songs, poems and art. Nothing embodies technology’s threat and promise to mankind so well as atomic weapons (and atomic power stations like Chernobyl). For a generation of Russian artists, atomic apocalypse was a metaphor for the emptiness beneath the banality of everyday life. With a long history of millenarian doomsday predictions anchored in religiosity, the atomic threat and the artworks that it seemed to motivate allowed for a contemporary update of a very old and very Russian fatalism.