Sociology Prof. Ben Weiss’s new article, “Carceral lock-in: How organizational conditions stymie the development of justice alternatives in a rape crisis center,” identifies barriers to the treatment of “complex victims” — people who have both experienced and perpetrated violence — in a rape crisis center (RCC). Although staff and volunteers acknowledge the existence of complex victims and believe they deserve access to care, the RCC rarely serves them. Weiss shows how organizational features — namely physical infrastructure and departmental silos — prevent organization members from transforming their ideological support for complex victims into actual service provision. This article helps explain complex victims’ limited access to care and illustrates how RCCs reproduce carceral constructions of “victim” and “perpetrator” as discrete categories.
In her article “Imagined Selves: Mediating Desires and Subject Positions in the Japanese Literati Art of Okuhara Seiko (1837-1913),” Art & Art History Prof. Yurika Wakamatsu presents a new understanding of the role of subjectivity in East Asian literati art—a mode of art-making often seen as a means of self-representation. Through close analysis of an artwork produced by the Japanese woman artist Okuhara Seiko in 1907, she shows how the work effects the viewer’s movement from one subject position to another, undermining the binaries of spectator and spectacle, heterosexual relationship and homosocial bond, and subject and object. Engaging with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, she argues that if we do not assume a direct alignment between the subject of representation and the represented subject, a literati artwork can become a mediator of multiple shifting “selves” rather than an extension of a singular, unified “I.” Ultimately, this article demonstrates that literati art functions not merely as a repository of self-expression but also as a mediator of identities and social relations.
In a new study, "The social perception of intervocalic /k/ voicing in Chilean Spanish" by Spanish and Linguistics Prof. Mariška Bolyanatz Brown and her co-author investigate what social meaning is attributed to a nascent change in progress in Chilean Spanish, examining whether intervocalic voicing of the phonologically voiceless stop /k/ affects listener judgments along several perceptual scales. Eight brief excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in voicing in tokens of /k/, and thirty listeners responded via an online experiment. They find that listeners are not sensitive to voicing along three of the measured scales and are not sensitive to voicing at all in female speech. They also determined that listeners are only sensitive to intervocalic voicing when assigning values of Chilean identity to male speakers, and that this effect is mitigated by headphone use. Some of listeners’ insensitivity matches previous production data in this dialect, while we expected some sensitivity along other measures but found none. We posit that this mismatch is due to the salience of the variable: because listeners may be unfamiliar with intervocalic voicing of /k/, they have not yet indexed voicing of intervocalic /k/ with particular speaker features, aligning with Campbell-Kibler (2009).
Black activists in the nineteenth century frequently documented the suffering and pain experienced by Black people as a way to challenge white supremacist social and rhetorical depictions of racial violence. Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) were two such activists who shifted the discourse and representation of the violence and trauma enacted upon the bodies of African Americans from a spectacle for white consumption to a critique of white supremacy. American Studies Prof. Julie Prebel's new essay, "“Wake Work”: Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Embodied Black Feminist Rhetoric in Slavery and Its Aftermaths," examines how Harper and Wells use strategies and features of embodied rhetoric in their work through images of the body and narratives of bodily experiences. Joined in their work to validate black experience and humanity, Harper and Wells use embodied rhetoric to articulate Black body knowledge, reinscribe Black agency, and give meaning to Black experience as they facilitate social change.
Young children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” often become scientifically illiterate adults? In a new article, Psychology and Cognitive Science Prof. Andrew Shtulman addresses this question by examining the role of intuition in learning science, both as a body of knowledge and as a method of inquiry. Intuition supports children's understanding of everyday phenomena but conflicts with their ability to learn physical and biological concepts that defy firsthand observation, such as molecules, forces, genes, and germs. Likewise, intuition supports children's causal learning but provides little guidance on how to navigate higher-order constraints on scientific induction, such as the control of variables or the coordination of theory and data. We characterize the foundations of children's intuitive understanding of the natural world, as well as the conceptual scaffolds needed to bridge these intuitions with formal science.
In a newly published paper, "Hilbert modular forms and codes over Fp2," Mathematics Prof. Jim Brown and his co-authors use number theory, in particular, algebraic number theory and modular forms, to study coding theory. Coding theory is the field that uses advanced mathematics to make sure information is transmitted accurately. For instance, your netflix movie downloading accurately or your file being stored correctly on the cloud relies on coding theory.
Just transition policies aim to mitigate economic losses and provide an equitable transition away from fossil fuel extraction and use. Yet, just transition is often contested in the regions the policies are meant to aid. In a newly published paper, "A just transition for whom? Politics, contestation, and social identity in the disruption of coal in the Powder River Basin," Urban & Environmental Policy Prof. J. Mijin Cha presents a case study of thePowder River Basin, Wyoming, the largest coal mining region in the U.S where the energy transition is deeply contested. The research conducted explored whether sudden mine closures changed perceptions toward the energy transition or just transition polices based on interviews with decision makers, environmental advocates, coal industry officials, and union officials. Cha finds that the energy transition and just transition remains deeply contested and opposed, even after the sudden closure of the mines, indicating that transition may always be contested due to the long-standing role coal has played in the region. Despite opposition and efforts to prolong the life of the coal industry, an energy transition is occurring and a government-led managed decline with just transition policies is the best way to prevent severe economic distress in the region.
English Prof. Ross Lerner's new essay, "'Doubly Resounded': Narcissus and Echo in Petrarch, Donne, and Wroth," offers a new perspective on the influence of Francesco Petrarch’s Augustinian meditations on verse's capacity to scatter or collect a poet on two Renaissance English poems: John Donne’s “Valediction: Of My Name in the Window” and the first sonnet that appears in Mary Wroth’s "The Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania." It does so by tracing the curious reworkings of Ovid's Narcissus and Echo myth in all three poets, ultimately outlining the vision of anti-Petrarchan, queer, feminist mutuality that emerges in Wroth's thinking about Echo and echo. Prof. Lerner wrote this essay in response to some Oxy students' questions about how women began to claim space for their poetic voices within an early modern European poetic tradition that sought to deny their capacities for expression.
In this study, "'Us vs. them' pair housing: Effects on body weight, open field behavior, and gut microbiota in rats selectively bred on a taste phenotype," Psychology Professors Nancy K. Dess and Dale Chapman show for the first time that the lines express different behavioral strategies in a novel open field. In addition, weight gain and open field measures indicate that other-line housing was stressful. A previous finding that the lines possess different gut microbiota was replicated. These findings add to the characterization of non-gustatory correlates of a taste phenotype and suggest that rats differing strikingly on the taste phenotype and/or its correlates may be socially incompatible.
In a newly published article, "Bridging Biology and Ethnohistory: A Case for Collaboration," Biology Prof. John McCormack and co-authors outline a collaborative future between ethnohistory and biology, especially one incorporating specimens housed in biological collections like the Moore Laboratory of Zoology. They focus on uses of feathers in the Nahua culture of ancient Mexico--a subject that can be illuminated by reference to the Moore Lab's extensive Mexican bird collection. Comparison to biological specimens helps identify species from feathers in existing museum artifacts. They also provide a critical assessment of prior species identification in pre-Columbian texts like the Florentine Codex.
French Prof. Arthur Saint-Aubin's new essay, "Chuck Berry's Autobiography: Rock Music, Racial Practice, and One Black Man's Problematic Relationship with White Women," examines the autobiography of Chuck Berry--the "Father of Rock & Roll"-- as a narrative that functions, inadvertently, to expose how racial practice determines how rock music is made and listened to in the US. Saint-Aubin demonstrates how Berry’s account of his life story, though not necessarily accurate in every detail, helps readers to understand how rock music, a genre initiated by and whose first stars were black performers, has evolved into a genre dominated by white men. Berry’s account of his life as a songwriter and performer exposes, in addition, the racial and gender ideologies that underpin the historically fraught relationship between black men and white women.
Learning science requires contending with intuitions that are incompatible with scientific principles, such as the intuition that animals are alive but plants are not or the intuition that solids are composed of matter but gases are not. In a new paper, "How children's cognitive reflection shapes their science understanding," Prof. Andrew Shtulman (Psychology and Cognitive Science) and his co-author Dr. Andrew Young explore the tension between science and intuition in elementary school-aged children and whether that tension is moderated by children’s tendency to reflect on their intuitions. Their participants--children between the ages of 5 and 12 years (n = 142)--were administered a statement-verification task, in which they judged statements about life and matter as true or false, as well as a children’s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D), in which they answered "brain teasers" designed to elicit an intuitive, yet inaccurate, response that could be corrected upon further reflection. Participants also received a tutorial on the scientific properties of life or matter, sandwiched between two blocks of the statement-verification task. Shtulman and Young found that performance on the statement-verification task, which pitted scientific conceptions against intuitive conceptions (e.g., "cactuses are alive"), was predicted by performance on the CRT-D, independent of age. Children with higher levels of cognitive reflection verified scientific statements more accurately before the tutorial, and they made greater gains in accuracy following the tutorial. These results indicate that children experience conflict between scientific and intuitive conceptions of a domain in the earliest stages of acquiring scientific knowledge but can learn to resolve that conflict in favor of scientific conceptions, particularly if they are predisposed toward cognitive reflection.
A new article by Economics Emeritus Professors Jim Whitney and Robby Moore and former Oxy administrator and UEP Prof. Hanna Song, "Do Students Discriminate? Exploring Differentials by Race and Sex in Class Enrollments and Student Ratings of Instructors," has been published in the Eastern Economic Journal. The paper explores differentials in student ratings of instructors by both race (white and nonwhite) and sex (male and female), taking into account not only the race and sex of class instructors but also the race-sex percentage composition of their enrolled students. The data set is by far the largest in the literature to date and includes all Oxy course evaluations over Academic Years 2006-2012. Their findings include evidence that is consistent with existence of bias on the part of white students.
In "Responsibility for climate justice: Political not moral," (in European Journal of Political Theory), Politics Prof. Michael Christopher Sardo takes up the question of who should bear responsibility for responding to climate change. Arguing against traditional framings of this question in terms of distributive justice and moral responsibility, this article argues that the climate crisis requires revising our theories of justice and responsibility. The injustice of the climate crisis is structural in nature: the structure of the global political economic order simultaneously fuels the climate crisis and creates relationships of domination and exploitation. Responding to such an injustice requires a theory of political responsibility - in which individuals and communities bear responsibility for climate justice by their participation in and benefit from these global structures rather than their personal carbon footprint. The article turns to Fossil Fuel Divestment activism and the idea of a "just transition" of energy systems to illustrate the advantages of this theoretical approach.
Despite the notable successes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activism in the region, individual European countries have varied considerably in the extent and speed with which they have adopted legislation to recognise the rights of their LGBTI citizens. Scholars have often turned to modernisation theory to explain these variable outcomes and argue that high levels of national wealth are an important factor in the success of LGBTI movements. Although the correlation between modernity, economic development and tolerance of LGBTI lifestyles is often treated as a truism in the literature, scholars have paid less attention to the precise mechanisms by which the complex processes associated with modernisation facilitate policy change. Drawing on the classic works of both modernisation theory and gay and lesbian history, DWA Prof. Phillip Ayoub and his co-author examine a less explored route by which modernisation leads to the expansion of LGBTI rights. In their new article, "(Same)‐sex in the city: Urbanisation and LGBTI rights expansion," they posit that urbanisation facilitates the adoption of rights policies by strengthening LGBTI movements and enhancing their political effectiveness. To test this proposition, they use event history analysis and an original dataset that contains measures for institutional, cultural, economic and movement variables, as well as measures of urbanisation in 44 European countries between 1980 and 2015. Their findings support the contention that urbanisation has a strong effect on the formation of LGBTI movement organisations as well as the speed with which European states adopt both same‐sex union and anti‐discrimination legislation.
Prof. Kristi Upson-Saia (Religious Studies) and her co-author contributed the opening essay, “Politics and the Pedagogue of Late Antiquity,” to a newly published special issue that queries how instructors—especially instructors of classes that focus on late antiquity—ought to engage with the “political” in the classroom. The essay frames the question in terms of our current historical moment: a moment when instructors find themselves pulled between students’ desire for an education that is “relevant” and that enable them to meaningful engage the world on the one hand, and the increasing politicization of both the topics we teach and the way we teach them on the other. Instructors of late antiquity, in particular, confront the increasing deployment of pre-modern sources for the construction of political ideologies, deployments that are regularly ahistorical and inaccurate, introducing additional challenges of “being political” in the classroom. This essay provides readers with background on the motivations for teaching politically-relevant (and sometimes politically-charged) courses; the relationship between such courses and the mandates of higher education; and the relevance of both religious studies and late antiquity to political discourse. The essay then provides definitional clarification of politics and the political, and offers a more focused theorization of the value added by our position as scholars of religion in late antiquity. (The special issue is an outgrowth of a 2017 workshop on politics and pedagogy, a workshop funded by grants Prof. Upson-Saia procured from the Wabash Center and the North American Patristic Society.)
Economics Prof. Andrew Jalil’s study, "Eating to Save the Planet: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Using Individual-Level Food Purchase Data," was published in the journal Food Policy. Using a dataset of 50,000 meal purchases over eight months, the study examines the effectiveness of an educational intervention to shift consumers towards more sustainable food purchases. For months following a 50-minute lecture, participants in the treatment group reduced their purchases of meat (high greenhouse gas emissions) and increased their purchases of plant-based meals (low greenhouse gas emissions). Merging food purchase data with surveys indicates that the lecture largely worked by persuading and motivating people who already cared about global warming to change their behavior. The findings help to inform the international food policy debate on how to counter rising global levels of meat consumption to achieve climate change goals.
In a new article, "Women Leaders and Pandemic Performance: A Spurious Correlation"—published in the peer reviewed journal Politics & Gender as part of University of Cambridge's Coronavirus Collection—Politics Prof. Jennifer Piscopo tackles the popular media narrative that women presidents and prime ministers were better at containing the coronavirus. Instead, she argues that countries with high capacity -- meaning countries that are wealthy, democratic, with strong bureaucracies and citizens that trust the government -- are more likely to be better at containing the pandemic *and* more likely to elect women. In other words, pandemic performance is not about women leaders, but about the kinds of countries that elect women leaders.
The bacterial membrane has been suggested as a good target for future antibiotics, so it is important to understand how naturally occurring antibiotics like antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) disrupt those membranes. The interaction of the AMP magainin 2 (MAG2) with the bacterial cell membrane has been well characterized using supported lipid substrates, unilamellar vesicles, and spheroplasts created from bacterial cells. However, to fully understand how MAG2 kills bacteria, we must consider its effect on the outer membrane found in Gram-negative bacteria. In a newly published article, Chemistry Prof. Eileen Spain and co-authors use atomic force microscopy (AFM) to directly investigate MAG2 interaction with the outer membrane of Escherichia coli and characterize the biophysical consequences of MAG2 treatment under native conditions. While propidium iodide penetration indicates that MAG2 permeabilizes cells within seconds, a corresponding decrease in cellular turgor pressure is not observed until minutes after MAG2 application, suggesting that cellular homeostasis machinery may be responsible for helping the cell maintain turgor pressure despite a loss of membrane integrity. AFM imaging and force measurement modes applied in tandem reveal that the outer membrane becomes pitted, more flexible, and more adhesive after MAG2 treatment. MAG2 appears to have a highly disruptive effect on the outer membrane, extending the known mechanism of MAG2 to the Gram-negative outer membrane.
In a new article, "'Improbable Spectacles': White Supremacy, Christian Hegemony, and the Dark Side of the Judenfrage," Religious Studies Prof. Ben Ratskoff argues that the twin premises of American liberal democracy—racial whiteness and political forms that 'materialize' Christianity—explain how Jews can be both the targets of white supremacists and among the members and ideologues of Trump’s xenophobic, racist administration. Supplementing Karl Marx’s observation in On the Jewish Question that the United States was a nation state without a Jewish question with a reading of debates around the 1790 Naturalization Act, Ratskoff observes that from the perspective of U.S. law, Jews have always been classified as white, and thus 'implicated in racial whiteness.' Yet while racial whiteness historically 'neutralized religious differences between Europeans,' establishing an abstract individual equivalence within a civil society that rested on the subordination and exploitation of non-whites, that whiteness, Ratskoff insists, has never been monolithic: it neutralizes but does not dissolve religious difference, leaving Jews subordinate within a genealogically when not overtly—Christian (and particularly Protestant) political formation. The ambiguities of American Jews’ racial and political status today can be traced back to this foundational tension.
During the worldwide shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many reports emerged of urban wildlife sightings. While these images garnered public interest and declarations of wildlife reclaiming cities, it is unclear whether wildlife truly re-occupied urban areas or if there were simply increased detections of urban wildlife during this time. In a new article, "What can we learn from wildlife sightings during the COVID‐19 global shutdown?" Biology Prof. Amanda Zellmer and co-authors detail key questions and needs for monitoring wildlife during the COVID-19 shutdown and then link these with future needs and actions with the intent of improving conservation within urban ecosystems. They discuss the tools ecologists and conservation scientists can use to safely and effectively study urban wildlife during the shutdown. With a coordinated, multi-city effort, researchers and community scientists can rigorously investigate the responses of wildlife to changes in human activities, which can help us address long standing questions in urban ecology, inspire conservation of wildlife, and inform the design of sustainable cities.
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a widely used measure of adults’ propensity to engage in reflective analytic thought. The CRT is strongly predictive of many diverse psychological factors but unsuitable for use with developmental samples. In a new paper, "Children's cognitive reflection predicts conceptual understanding in science and mathematics," Prof. Andrew Shtulman (Psychology and Cognitive Science) and his co-author Dr. Andrew Young examined a children’s CRT, the CRT–Developmental (CRT–D), and investigated its predictive utility in the domains of science and mathematics. School-age children (N = 152) completed the CRT–D, measures of executive functioning, measures of rational thinking, and measures of vitalist-biology and mathematical-equivalence concepts. CRT–D performance predicted conceptual understanding in both domains after the researchers adjusted for children’s age, executive functioning, and rational thinking. These findings suggest that cognitive reflection supports conceptual knowledge in early science and mathematics and, moreover, demonstrate the theoretical and practical importance of children’s cognitive reflection. The CRT–D will allow researchers to investigate the development, malleability, and consequences of children’s cognitive reflection.
The heat transport law in turbulent convection remains central to current research in the field. Our present knowledge of the heat transport law for Ra > 10^{12} is inconclusive, where the Rayleigh number Ra is a measure of the strength of convection. Massively parallel simulations of the three-dimensional convection have progressed to Ra = 10^{15} in slender cells. In a newly published paper, "Classical 1/3 scaling of convection holds up to Ra = 1015," Physics Prof. Janet Scheel and co-authors resolve velocity gradients inside thin boundary layers and show that the turbulent heat transport continues to follow the classical 1/3 scaling law with no transition to the so-called “ultimate” state that is variously argued to have 1/2 scaling. Their work suggests that the boundary layers remain marginally stable and continue to act as the bottleneck for global heat transport.
Citizens of liberal democracies today increasingly exhibit a distrust of perceived elites, especially experts and those of advanced educational attainment more generally--a trend which can be seen in a variety of policy areas, from vaccines and climate change to Covid-19 safety measures. In a new article, "Mill on Deference and Democratic Character,” Politics Prof. Alec Arellano shows how John Stuart Mill’s work offers potential responses this phenomenon. Mill regards deference to superior wisdom as an essential part of a well-developed character while at the same time esteeming independent thought. Though his emphasis on the importance of character formation is well known, his concern for inculcating a salutary form of deference has been underexplored. The article shows how Mill’s approaches to this task include redesigning the political process in order to amplify the voice of the highly educated, promoting more widespread opportunities for learning, and consistently emphasizing the partiality of human understanding. The article also compare Mill’s treatment of the place of deference in democratic politics to that of Alexis de Tocqueville’s, and consider how Tocqueville might critique Mill’s strategies for cultivating deference. In so doing, Arellano demonstrate how these authors provide us with resources for navigating the tensions between popular sovereignty and expertise, and between independent thought and intellectual authority.
In a new paper, "Congruence primes for automorphic forms on unitary groups and applications to the arithmetic of Ikeda lifts," Mathematics Prof. Jim Brown and his co-author provide sufficient conditions for two automorphic forms defined over the unitary group U(n,n) to be congruent modulo a prime p. The study of congruence primes has a long history and is important in many major problems, including the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (one of the Clay Math Institute's Millennium problems, worth $1 million if you solve one.)
Since its publication in the seventeenth century, John Milton's Paradise Lost has caused readers to feel overwhelmed by its difficulty and discouraged by the specific challenges presented by its last two books, which depict the consequences of Adam and Eve's fall on human and cosmological history. When English Prof. Ross Lerner teaches the poem, my students often echo these concerns in compelling, self-reflective ways. Their comments prompted his latest essay, “The Astonied Body in Paradise Lost,” which tries to explain the significance of such readerly responses through an analysis of"astoniment" (or “astonishment”) in Paradise Lost, the experience of being overwhelmed by an experience you cannot cognitively or emotionally process. It demonstrates how the experience of astonishment in the poem relates to the prosodic, rhythmic, narrative, and ideological changes in the poem's final two books, offering a new interpretation of the poem's fascination with the petrification of bodies and landscapes, and with its own rhythmic "astoniment" that follows its depiction of the fall of humankind.
Learning science requires contending with intuitions that are incompatible with scientific principles, such as the intuition that animals are alive but plants are not or the intuition that solids are composed of matter but gases are not. In a new paper, "How children's cognitive reflection shapes their science understanding," Prof. Andrew Shtulman (Psychology and Cognitive Science) and his co-author Dr. Andrew Young explore the tension between science and intuition in elementary school-aged children and whether that tension is moderated by children’s tendency to reflect on their intuitions. Their participants--children between the ages of 5 and 12 years (n = 142)--were administered a statement-verification task, in which they judged statements about life and matter as true or false, as well as a children’s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D), in which they answered "brain teasers" designed to elicit an intuitive, yet inaccurate, response that could be corrected upon further reflection. Participants also received a tutorial on the scientific properties of life or matter, sandwiched between two blocks of the statement-verification task. Shtulman and Young found that performance on the statement-verification task, which pitted scientific conceptions against intuitive conceptions (e.g., "cactuses are alive"), was predicted by performance on the CRT-D, independent of age. Children with higher levels of cognitive reflection verified scientific statements more accurately before the tutorial, and they made greater gains in accuracy following the tutorial. These results indicate that children experience conflict between scientific and intuitive conceptions of a domain in the earliest stages of acquiring scientific knowledge but can learn to resolve that conflict in favor of scientific conceptions, particularly if they are predisposed toward cognitive reflection.
Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has upended our modern lives in unimaginable ways, questioning the very basis of our political economy. In a special virtual issueof Politics and the Life Sciences (PLS) on Coronavirus: Politics, Economics, and Pandemics, co-edited by DWA Prof. Sophal Ear, the articles provide insight on what we might learn going forward by looking at past research appearing in the pages of PLS.
Studies indicate that Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs, are safe to consume, but many adults remain skeptical. What kind of input are children receiving about GMOs? And how does that input shape their understanding of what GMOs are? In a new article, "OMG GMO! Parent-child conversations about genetically modified foods," Psychology Prof. Andrew Shtulman and co-authors--including Oxy alum Ilana Share '17 and Rosie Silber-Marker '17--investigated this question in the context of parent-child conversations about food product decisions. Seventy parent-child dyads were shown a series of food product pairings and asked to discuss their preferences. The products differed by whether they were made from GMOs, as well as whether they contained gluten and whether they were grown organically. Non-GM foods were preferred over gluten-free foods, and conversations about GM foods contained more moral language than conversations about gluten. Preferences for organic foods equaled preferences for non-GM foods, and conversations about organic foods were as morally charged, but parents were less knowledgeable about the meaning of GMO than they were about the meaning of organic. Children’s knowledge of these terms varied with their parents’ knowledge, and their participation in the food-product conversations varied with their parents’ use of moral language. Taken together, these findings suggest that children’s conceptions of GMOs are shaped by their parents’ conceptions, despite the fact that parents’ preferences and attitudes toward GMOs outstrip their knowledge of what GMOs actually are.
Urban & Environmental Policy Prof. Mijin Cha and co-authors published a new paper, "Environmental Justice, Just Transition, and a Low-Carbon Future for California" that presents the results of a community-informed research project analyzing the challenges and opportunities of a just transition for environmental justice communities in California. Through interviews, case studies, and original data analysis, a framework for just transition policy development is presented built on four pillars: strong governmental support, dedicated funding streams, diverse and strong coalitions, and economic diversification.
Citizen scientists can help professional scientists amass much larger datasets than would be possible without their input, but the quality of these data may impact their utility. Therefore, it is imperative to develop standard practices that maximize the accuracy of data produced by citizen scientists. One method increasingly used to improve data accuracy in citizen science-based projects is just-in-time training (JITT), in which volunteers are given on-demand resources to train them on the spot or in conjunction with the research they are performing. In a new article by Biology Prof. Amanda Zellmer and co-authors, "Just-in-Time Training Improves Accuracy of Citizen Scientist Wildlife Identifications from Camera Trap Photos," they examine whether JITT improves citizen scientist accuracy of subject identification, specifically wildlife identification from camera trap photos. Ninety-four participants with varying degrees of experience in biology were asked to identify photos from camera traps in Los Angeles, California set to capture photos of wildlife in an urban habitat. Without access to JITT, citizen scientists with no background in biology had lower accuracy than professional biologists. However, when participants with no background in biology received JITT, they were able to identify wildlife with a similar level of accuracy as professional biologists. There was a significant interaction between biology background and training treatment. The increase in accuracy of novice citizen scientists who received JITT was due primarily to fewer misidentifications of species overall but also to increased confidence in classification of species. From these results, the authors conclude that the use of JITT can significantly improve subject identification accuracy for citizen scientists with no background in biology.
Studies indicate that Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs, are safe to consume, but many adults remain skeptical. What kind of input are children receiving about GMOs? And how does that input shape their understanding of what GMOs are? In a new article, "OMG GMO! Parent-child conversations about genetically modified foods," Psychology Prof. Andrew Shtulman and co-authors--including Oxy alum Ilana Share '17 and Rosie Silber-Marker '17--investigated this question in the context of parent-child conversations about food product decisions. Seventy parent-child dyads were shown a series of food product pairings and asked to discuss their preferences. The products differed by whether they were made from GMOs, as well as whether they contained gluten and whether they were grown organically. Non-GM foods were preferred over gluten-free foods, and conversations about GM foods contained more moral language than conversations about gluten. Preferences for organic foods equaled preferences for non-GM foods, and conversations about organic foods were as morally charged, but parents were less knowledgeable about the meaning of GMO than they were about the meaning of organic. Children’s knowledge of these terms varied with their parents’ knowledge, and their participation in the food-product conversations varied with their parents’ use of moral language. Taken together, these findings suggest that children’s conceptions of GMOs are shaped by their parents’ conceptions, despite the fact that parents’ preferences and attitudes toward GMOs outstrip their knowledge of what GMOs actually are.
History Prof. Sharla Fett's new chapter, "'Fugitive Liberated Congoes': Recaptive Youth and the Rejection of Liberian Apprenticeships, 1858-1861" examines the experiences of recaptive African youth, removed from illegal slave ships by the U.S. Navy and then transported to Liberia during the peak era of American slave trade suppression. Under the Liberian apprenticeship system thousands of young people were contracted out to six hundred Americo-Liberian households and missionary stations. Yet, recaptive shipmates of illegal slaving vessels often viewed Liberia as one more stop in a long series of forced migrations. In the initial period of resettlement, many responded to detention and apprenticeship with protest and collective attempts at escape. A close analysis of the records of U.S. Agent for Recaptured Africans John Seys, together with missionary accounts, indicates that a sizeable group of recaptives rejected their apprenticeship under the colonial hierarchies of Liberian society as an arrangement akin to the slavery from which they had purportedly been rescued. By examining recaptured Africans’ resistance to the terms of Liberian apprenticeship soon after their arrival, we catch a glimpse of both their initial hopes and the true cost of surviving enslavement and becoming Liberian “Congoes.”
Chemistry Prof. Jeff Cannon, Emeritus Prof. Don Deardorff, and Oxy undergraduate co-authors, Scott Niman, Mark Paulsen, Anasheh Sookezian, Meghan Whalen, Christopher Finlayson, Collrane Frivold, and Hilary Brown published a new article: "Development of a Combined Enzyme- and Transition Metal-Catalyzed Strategy for the Synthesis of Heterocycles: Enantioselective Syntheses of (–)-Coniine, DAB-1, and Nectrisine." The enantioselective syntheses of (−)-coniine, DAB-1, and nectrisine have been developed, utilizing a complementary strategy of enzyme- and transition metal-catalyzed reactions. The initial stereocenter was set with >99% enantioselectivity via an enzyme-catalyzed hydrocyanation reaction. Substrate incompatibilities with the natural enzyme were overcome by tactical utilization of ruthenium-catalyzed olefin metathesis to functionalize an enzyme-derived (R)-allylic fragment. The piperidine and pyrrolidine alkaloid natural products were obtained by a route that leveraged regio- and stereoselective palladium-catalyzed 1,3-substitutive reactions.
DWA Prof. Anthony Tirado Chase's new chapter, "Broadening Human Rights: The Case for a Pluralistic Approach" (co-written with Indiana University professor Hussein Banai, a former Oxy colleague) asks if and how human rights could help constitute an alternative to rising populist xenophobia. Chase and Banai argue that this question implies a challenge rather than a definitive answer. The challenge is if human rights are discursively and conceptually capacious enough to be (re)conceptualized in two essential ways. The first of these is to foreground how it is that human rights might specifically address embedded structural inequalities in local and global political economies. A second challenge is if human rights can be re-conceptualized to move beyond modest reformism toward informing ambitiously pluralistic foundations of political community.
Small and medium multifamily properties—defined as buildings having between 2 and 49 units—house over 20% of the U.S. population, yet they remain an understudied segment of the housing market. Using a rich, transaction-level dataset in eleven major urban counties, UEP Prof. Seva Rodnyansky and co-authors' new paper ("Why Are Small and Medium Multifamily Properties So Inexpensive?") finds that they transact at a significant price discount relative to both single-family and large multifamily properties on a per square foot basis. Controlling for both unit- and building-level structural characteristics, small multifamily structures (with 2 to 4 units) transact at a 13.2% discount relative to single-family houses. Further analysis shows that neighborhood characteristics can explain 48.5% of this difference, leaving a sizable residual unexplained. They also find that medium-sized multifamily structures (5 to 49 units) are similarly discounted relative to larger multifamily buildings. This persistently remaining discount may result from asset-specific characteristics. On balance, the analysis reveals a U-shaped price gradient, with the greatest discount for the smallest multifamily properties (2 to 9 units) and a diminishing discount for greater building size.
History and East Asian Studies Prof. Sasha Day edited a roundtable review issue for the PRC History Review on Joel Andreas' important new book Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford University Press, 2019)
In a new paper, "Congruence primes for automorphic forms on unitary groups and applications to the arithmetic of Ikeda lifts," Mathematics Prof. Jim Brown and co-author provide a sufficient condition for a prime to be a congruence prime for an automorphic form f on the unitary group U(n,n)(A_F) for a large class of totally real fields F via a divisibility of a special value of the standard L-function associated to f. We also study p-adic properties of the Fourier coefficients of an Ikeda lift I(ϕ) (of an elliptic modular form ϕ) on U(n,n)(A_Q) proving that they are p-adic integers which do not all vanish modulo p. Finally we combine these results to show that the condition of p being a congruence prime for I(ϕ) is controlled by the p-divisibility of a product of special values of the symmetric square L-function of ϕ.
UEP Prof. Mijin Cha contributed a chapter to We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style, a new volume edited by UEP Prof. Peter Dreier, Michael Kazin, and Kate Aronoff. Prof. Cha's chapter, "We the People: Voting Rights, Campaign Finance, and Election Reform," argues that democratic reforms are needed in order to adopt policy measures advocated by democratic socialists. She discusses the distorting influence money has in our political system and details the wide-scale voter suppression efforts under way, specifically targeted towards voters of color and low-income voters. Prof. Cha concludes by offering a policy agenda that ensures every vote is counted and our electoral system is no longer dominated by monied interests.
Prof. Ben Ratskoff (Religious Studies) published a chapter in the first essay collection to consider the Caribbean’s relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Caribbean Jewish Crossings takes a pan-Caribbean approach, with chapters addressing the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. Prof. Ratskoff's chapter, "Splattering the Object: Césaire, Nazi Racism, and the Colonial," argues that Aimé Césaire's particular surrealist style and unique rhetorical figures of the choc-en-retour and the horticultural graft align Nazi racism within the scope of European colonialism and, in contrast to the conventional discourse on racism, as continuous (rather than deviant from) Western humanism. In turn, Césaire de-exceptionalizes the Jewish experience of Nazism as racism’s urtext while suggesting the incorporation of European Jewish history into anti-colonial critique.
People who hold scientific explanations for natural phenomena also hold folk explanations, and the two types of explanations compete under some circumstances. In a new paper, "Competing Explanations of Competing Explanations: Accounting for Conflict Between Scientific and Folk Explanations," Psychology and Cognitive Science Prof. Andrew Shtulman and co-author explore the question of why folk explanations persist in the face of a well‐understood scientific alternative, a phenomenon known as explanatory coexistence. They consider two accounts: an associative account, where coexistence is driven by low‐level associations between co‐occurring ideas in experience or discourse, and a theory‐based account, where coexistence reflects high‐level competition between distinct sets of causal expectations. We present data that assess the relative contributions of these two accounts to the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas. Participants (134 college undergraduates) verified scientific statements like “air has weight” and “bacteria have DNA” as quickly as possible, and we examined the speed and accuracy of their verifications in relation to measures of associative information (lexical co‐occurrence of the statements' subjects and predicates) and theory‐based expectations (ratings of whether the statements' subjects possess theory‐relevant attributes). Both measures explained a significant amount of variance in participants' responses, but the theory‐based measures explained three to five times more. These data suggest that the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas typically arises from competing theories and that such ideas might be made more intuitive by strengthening scientific theories or weakening folk theories.
