Listen Up! Temple University Press Podcast, Episode 6: Billy Brown on Exploring Philly Nature

This week in North Philly Notes, we debut the latest episode of the Temple University Press Podcast. Host Sam Cohn interviews author Bernard “Billy” Brown about his book, Exploring Philly Nature: A Guide for All Four Seasons, which provides a handy guide for all ages to Philly’s urban plants, animals, fungi, and—yes—even slime molds.

The Temple University Press Podcast is where you can hear about all the books you’ll want to read next.

Click here to listen

The Temple University Press Podcast is available wherever you find your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Overcast, among other outlets.

About this episode

Bernard “Billy” Brown is a nature writer and urban herper—that’s someone who recreationally seeks out reptiles and amphibians. In this episode, he talks with podcaster Sam Cohn about his new book, Exploring Philly Nature, a guide to experiencing the flora and fauna in Philly.

This compact illustrated volume contains 52 activities from birding, (squirrel) fishing, and basement bug-hunting to joining a frog call survey and visiting a mussel hatchery. Brown encourages kids (as well as their parents) to connect with the natural world close to home. Each entry contains information on where and when to participate, what you will need (even if it is only patience), and tips on clubs and organizations to contact for access.

The city and its environs contain a multitude of species from the lichen that grows on gravestones or trees to nocturnal animals like opossums, bats, and raccoons. Exploring Philly Nature is designed to get readers eager to discover, observe, and learn more about the concrete jungle that is Philadelphia.

Going snake hunting in Philly—and finding snails

This week in North Philly Notes, urban herper Billy Brown, author of Exploring Philadelphia Nature, recounts his adventures in the concrete jungle and how enjoying the beauty of the natural world can be full of delights and surprises.

I couldn’t find a brown snake (Storeria dekayi) right away, and it was starting to stress me out. The railroad embankment by the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant looked perfect: waist-high mugwort and other weeds with the usual assortment of trash that gets dumped in out-of-mind corners of the city. I was planning to return later in the day with a group that had signed up for a nature-themed bike ride. My M.O. for guiding nature excursions is to capture common critters like brown snakes (small, tan, harmless snakes that eat worms and slugs) along the route ahead of time. If the participants don’t manage to find anything themselves, at least I can show them the one I found and then release it. Brown snakes are the most widespread and abundant snake in urban Philadelphia, easily found in gardens, vacant lots, cemeteries—basically anywhere you’ve got more than a couple square yards of vegetation. Everywhere, that was, except where I needed to find them that morning.

I waded through the weeds and lifted everything I could find—old boards, chunks of concrete, parts of furniture. What I was finding, instead of brown snakes, were beautiful yellow and brown snails.

I didn’t recognize them. As far as their shape, there were as basic a snail as you could imagine: a round spiral shell about as wide as a quarter, but what dazzled me was their patterns. No one was like another. Some were plain brown. Others were yellow with one or more dark stripes following the spiral of the shell all the way in.

Eventually, I did find a brown snake under part of a discarded file cabinet and tucked it into a jar for later, but I made a mental note to look up the snails.

It turns out they were grove snails (a.k.a. brown lipped snails or Cepaea nemoralis), a European species that humans have spread to North America. iNaturalist records show they are not uncommon in Philadelphia, yet, somehow I had missed them. Had I just simply not crossed paths with them before? Or, had I ignored them when they weren’t what I was looking for?

The grove snails were a hit for the cyclists and a great launching point for discussing the nature of waste spaces. Too often we ignore weedy railroad embankments as sites to connect with nature the way we might in proper parks. With a little attention, though, they can become outdoor classrooms as well as places to enjoy the beauty of the natural world.

Learning about the natural world can be stimulating in a purely intellectual or academic sense, but it can also open doors to visceral experience. You learn about a new creature, like the grove snail, and you feel something special when you find it. The world isn’t just a background to the routines of your life. It becomes a little more joyful, a little more wonderful, little by little, snail by snail.

A couple years later, I dragged my daughter along on a trip to check out some five-lined skinks that had been reported on an old stone wall in a park in Northeast Philadelphia. Although five-lined skinks are native to the area, these days they seem to only live in old, overgrown industrial sites along the Delaware River. My daughter was not thrilled to be there as her dad did something boring. I told her it would just take a minute to look for the lizards.

We didn’t find any skinks, but grove snails were everywhere. We found them in damp crevices between the stones or under rocks at the base of the wall, and each one was new and beautiful in its own way. We spent much longer than the promised minute, but I wasn’t complaining.

Announcing Temple University Press’ Spring 2022 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we are pleased to present our forthcoming Spring 2022 titles (in alphabetical order).

Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Grant Farred
A provocative collection committed to keeping the dynamism of the Africana Studies discipline alive

Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China, by Jennifer Lin, with a foreword by Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin

An eye-opening account of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unprecedented 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China

Before Crips: Fussin’, Cussin’, and Discussin’ among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs, by John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani

A historical analysis of South Los Angeles juvenile gang life as revealed by those who were there

Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, by Christopher Krentz

Why disabled characters are integral to novels of the global South

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury

Illuminates how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can generate possibilities for gender justice

Exploring Philly Nature: A Guide for All Four Seasons, by Bernard S. Brown, Illustrations by Samantha Wittchen

A handy guide for all ages to Philly’s urban plants, animals, fungi, and—yes—even slime molds

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger, with a Foreword by Heather Ann Thompson

Highlighting the creativity, tenacity, and discipline displayed by Black activists in Philadelphia

It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, by David Steele

Examining American athletes’ activism for racial and social justice, on and off the field

Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, by Akemi Nishida

How care is both socially oppressive and a way that marginalized communities can fight for social justice

Letting Play Bloom: Designing Nature-Based Risky Play for Children, by Lolly Tai, with a foreword by Teri Hendy

Exploring innovative, inspiring, and creative ideas for designing children’s play spaces

Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth, by Mrill Ingram

Providing a new vision for the ignored and abused spaces around us

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, by Long T. Bui

A study of the stereotype and representation of Asians as robotic machines through history

Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, by J. Celeste Lay

A comprehensive examination of education reforms and their political effects on Black and poor public-school parents in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina

Regarding Animals, Second Edition, by Arnold Arluke, Clinton R. Sanders, and Leslie Irvine

A new edition of an award-winning book that examines how people live with contradictory attitudes toward animals

School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization, by Pamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer

Why some school environments are more conducive to crime than safety

Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, by Joo Ok Kim

Examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano/a cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood, by George Uba

An evocative yet unsparing examination of the damaging effects of post-internment ideologies of acceptance and belonging experienced by a Japanese American family

What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now, by Roberta Rehner Iversen

Voices from the labor market on the chronic lack of advancement

On the Future of Animals

This week in North Philly Notes, Wayne Gabardi, author of The Next Social Contract, argues that we need to adopt a more post-humanist and co-evolutionary outlook and relate to animals on more equal terms.

Like many people, I’ve been an animal lover my entire life. Yet it’s one thing to be involved with animals in a conventional sense and another to systematically research and reflect on how we understand other species of life, relate to them, and treat them. The academic field of animal studies and the animal advocacy movement have grown dramatically in the past few decades. This is due to the tragic plight of so many animals around the world today as well as to major advances in animal research and our knowledge of animals.

When I set out to write The Next Social Contract my goals were ambitious:

• To develop a big picture approach to understanding animals;
• To expand the scope of animal studies and focus on a broader range of human-animal relationships;
• To devel
  op an ethical framework and political theory of how we should relate to and treat animals that goes beyond the animal welfare-animal rights debate; and
• To explore some practical, community-level applications of what I refer to as a posthumanist and coevolutionary ethical-political philosophy.

I believe we have entered a new era in the history of planet Earth and humanity – the Anthropocene, or new human age – where modern civilization is radically altering the biosphere to such an extent that many animals are in big trouble. I identify four major battlegrounds that I believe are defining and will continue to define animal ethics and politics in this century and beyond:

• Wild animals on the fast track to extinction;
• Industrialized farm animals and the future of animal agriculture;
• The crisis of our oceans and ocean life; and
• The status of contact zone animals increasingly moving into human-occupied habitats.

One trend I discovered in my research is that most people relate to and evaluate animals through an anthropocentric mindset, even strong animal welfare and animal rights advocates. The worthiness of animals are measured in human terms in relation to our attributes and capacities. The more human-like animals behave the more we value them. This is a major flaw in my view. We need to adopt a more posthumanist and coevolutionary outlook and relate to animals on more equal terms. Although they are different from us in many ways, they are also the same as us in many ways, and deserving of equal consideration as integral members of our community. We therefore need to negotiate a new social contract in human-animal relations. At the heart of this new compact is a rejection of the outdated belief that humans are categorically different from and superior to all other species of life and that this entitles us to use animals as instrumental means for our ends. We need to think of animals as members of our communities who we need to coexist with, not as fashionable accessories, alien invaders, objects of consumption, or less-than-human impediments to our unending colonial expansion.

As for the future of animals, I unfortunately am as pessimistic as I am hopeful. The modernization and human colonization of the planet will only intensify in the twenty-first century. As I conclude in the book, “the task before us is nothing less than a labor of Sisyphus.”

Temple University Press titles now available through Knowledge Unlatched

We’re pleased to announce the release of our latest round of titles available through Knowledge Unlatched.  The following books are now freely available on OAPEN and HathiTrust.

Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, by Marwan Kraidy

The intermingling of people and media from different cultures is a communication-based phenomenon known as hybridity. Drawing on original research from Lebanon to Mexico and analyzing the use of the term in cultural and postcolonial studies (as well as the popular and business media), Marwan Kraidy offers readers a history of the idea and a set of prescriptions for its future use.  Kraidy analyzes the use of the concept of cultural mixture from the first century A.D. to its present application in the academy and the commercial press. The book’s case studies build an argument for understanding the importance of the dynamics of communication, uneven power relationships, and political economy as well as culture, in situations of hybridity. Kraidy suggests a new framework he developed to study cultural mixture—called critical transculturalism—which uses hybridity as its core concept, but in addition, provides a practical method for examining how media and communication work in international contexts.

Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves, by Arnold Arluke

Psychiatrists define cruelty to animals as a psychological problem or personality disorder. Legally, animal cruelty is described by a list of behaviors. In Just a Dog, Arnold Arluke argues that our current constructs of animal cruelty are decontextualized—imposed without regard to the experience of the groups committing the act. Yet those who engage in animal cruelty have their own understandings of their actions and of themselves as actors. In this fascinating book, Arluke probes those understandings and reveals the surprising complexities of our relationships with animals. Just a Dog draws from interviews with more than 250 people, including humane agents who enforce cruelty laws, college students who tell stories of childhood abuse of animals, hoarders who chronically neglect the welfare of many animals, shelter workers who cope with the ethics of euthanizing animals, and public relations experts who use incidents of animal cruelty for fundraising purposes. Through these case studies, Arluke shows how the meaning of “cruelty” reflects and helps to create identities and ideologies.

Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus: Immigrant Incorporation in New Destinations, by Stefanie Chambers

In the early 1990s, Somali refugees arrived in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Later in the decade, an additional influx of immigrants arrived in a second destination of Columbus, Ohio. These refugees found low-skill jobs in

warehouses and food processing plants and struggled as social “outsiders,” often facing discrimination based on their religious traditions, dress, and misconceptions that they are terrorists. The immigrant youth also lacked access to quality educational opportunities.In Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus, Stefanie Chambers provides a cogent analysis of refugees in Midwestern cities where new immigrant communities are growing. Her comparative study uses qualitative and quantitative data to assess the political, economic, and social variations between these urban areas. Chambers examines how culture and history influenced the incorporation of Somali immigrants in the U.S., and recommends policy changes that can advance rather than impede incorporation. Her robust investigation provides a better understanding of the reasons these refugees establish roots in these areas, as well as how these resettled immigrants struggle to thrive.

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture, by Heike Bauer

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century.  Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence—including persecution, death and suicide—shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Comprehending Columbine, by Ralph W. Larkin

On April 20, 1999, two Colorado teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School. That day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding twenty-four other people, before they killed themselves. Although there have been other books written about the tragedy, this is the first serious, impartial investigation into the cultural, environmental, and psychological causes of the Columbine massacre. Based on first-hand interviews and a thorough reading of the relevant literature, Ralph Larkin examines the numerous factors that led the two young men to plan and carry out their deed. For Harris and Klebold, Larkin concludes, the carnage was an act of revenge against the “jocks” who had harassed and humiliated them, retribution against evangelical students who acted as if they were morally superior, an acting out of the mythology of right-wing paramilitary organization members to “die in a blaze of glory,” and a deep desire for notoriety. Rather than simply looking at Columbine as a crucible for all school violence, Larkin places the tragedy in its proper context, and in doing so, examines its causes and meaning.

Remembering the late TUP author Tom Regan

This week in North Philly Notes, we honor the late Tom Regan, who was the author or editor of several Temple University Press titles, including: Animal Sacrifices, Health Care Ethics, The Early Essays, The Thee Generation, and Elements of Ethics, among other titles.  

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Regan’s obituary (below) appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on February 17.

Tom Regan, the author of a noted book on animal rights and a professor emeritus of philosophy at NC State University, has died. Marion Cox Bolz, a spokesperson for the family, said Regan died Friday after a bout of pneumonia at his North Carolina home. Regan was 78.

Regan is known for “The Case for Animal Rights,” which is described on the web page http://www.tomregan.info as stating non-human animals bear moral rights. He wrote that a crucial attribute that all humans have in common, he argues, is not rationality, but the fact that each of us has a life that matters to us.

Regan is survived by his wife Nancy, son Bryan and daughter Karen and four grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.

 

What Temple University Press staff wants to give and read this holiday season

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press suggest the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to read this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: As a recent Press tweet suggested, I’d give Alexander Wolff’s The Audacity of Hoop to those on my list who’ve been in a funk since November 8.

Read:  A review of Maria Semple’s new book, Today Will Be Different, pointed me to an earlier book, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and I’ve had it on my list ever since. I love smart, witty, satirical contemporary novels and this looks to be just that.

Karen Baker, Financial Manager
Give: Boathouse Row  by Dotty Brown and Building Drexel, edited by Richardson Dilworth and Scott Gabriel Knowles, as both of these books are beautiful. Since all of my family are born and raised in Philadelphia, they will make great gifts for them.

Read: A Dog’s Purpose: A Novel for Humans. This book was just brought to my attention because it is about to be made into a movie, and it looks like a fun read.

 

 

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief

Give: Boathouse Row, by Dottie Brown. We at Temple University Press have done our part to make holiday gift giving a little easier on Philadelphians this year. Dottie is a terrific writer who is passionate about rowing, the book is gorgeous, and it’s the first full exploration of this fascinating and unique Philadelphia institution. Giving Boathouse Row is practically a required act of Philadelphia civic pride.

Read: American Amnesia, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. These authors argue we have apparently forgotten how a “mixed economy” — with a substantial role for public intervention as well as for free markets — was crucial to achieving American prosperity in the twentieth century. It’s hard to know where we’re headed these days, but with seemingly everything up for grabs this looks like the sort of fundamental civics lesson we could all use.

Sara Cohen, Editor

Give: I’ll be giving folks copies of Dennis and Michele Waskul’s Ghostly Encounters.  It’s fascinating, readable, and (at least as far as I’m concerned) nothing says “holiday season” like ghosts.

Read:  I’ll be reading Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, the latter of which I received as an early holiday gift from a good friend.

 

 

 

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Will Big League Baseball Survive? The World Series this year brought in so many viewers and gave them such a sublime show at just the moment that football looks like it might be losing a shade of its luster. Will baseball fandom remain arcane to casual audiences? Is a breakthrough imminent, possible, or even necessary? Lincoln Mitchell sees the path forward. His book is perfect for the baseball evangelists I know.

Read: Colson Whitehead’s NBA-winning (no – we’re not talking about sports anymore) Underground Railroad and Zadie Smith’s new Swing Time (read her speech on hope and history ) in fiction and I’m curious about Michael Lewis’s take on Kahneman and Tversky in The Undoing Project.

Nikki Miller, Rights and Contracts Manager

Give: Dotty Brown’s Boathouse Row, which takes you through the history of rowing with beautiful pictures along the Schuylkill.  It offers a relaxing balance of history and storytelling which makes it a perfect read for the holiday season.

Read: The holidays give me an excuse to lay by the fire and reread my favorite book: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Editor

Give: Suicide Squeeze: Taylor Hooton, Rob Garibaldi, and the Fight against Teenage Steroid Abuse, by William C. Kashatus. This important story of the tragic steroids-related suicides of two up-and-coming student-athletes is an essential addition to the continuing education on the widespread problem of steroid abuse among young people.

Read: I hope to receive The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter, by Tom Mendicino, a novel about two brothers who grow up in 1960s South Philadelphia and then go their separate ways: one staying and taking over their father’s barbershop and the other moving away and becoming a high-society lawyer. When life goes awry, they reveal the strength of the bond between them.

Kate Nichols,  Art Manager

Give: I would give George Lipstiz’s How Racism Takes Place.

 

Read: I have already given myself Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (through a donation to WXPN).

Dave Wilson, Senior Production Editor

Give: I thoroughly enjoyed working on and reading City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System by Lynn Miller and Jim McClelland. The authors recount a fascinating story of the birth of the park system, and I found myself wanting to visit the many places and houses so vividly depicted by the authors. The accompanying talks the authors gave made me more aware of one of the world’s greatest park systems, one that I didn’t fully appreciate until I had read this book.

 

 

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

Give: I’d like to give a few of my friends copies of The Possessive Investment of Whiteness, by George Lipsitz, a book that illustrates the injustices suffered by and the advantages of white supremacy.

Read: I’m trying to catch up on my reading, so from the 2015 New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books list, I just bought Loving Day by Mat Johnson to read over the holiday break.  Peace and love to all this holiday season!

 

 

 

Emma Pilker, Editorial Assistant

Give: Framing the Audience by Isadora Anderson Helfgott, to my art history colleagues. Anyone interested in the social history of art will appreciate Helfgott’s analysis of pivotal 20th century movements that shaped today’s art world.

Read: I have been putting off reading Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller because of the heavy themes, but the end of the year is the perfect time to commit to some historical reflection and cultural

 

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give: Considering how 2016 was, Timothy Recuber’s Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster,  an appropriate gift. Recuber looks at how the media covered four crises–the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings and the 2008 financial crisis–and how our concern for the suffering of others help soothe our own emotional turmoil.

Read: I just started read Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, which actually acknowledges a Temple University Press book–Murray Dubin’s South Philadelphia—as source material for the depiction of South Philadelphia in the book. This video of Chabon, made during his Free Library of Philadelphia appearance on December 8 opens with him talking about how Dubin’s South Philadelphia influenced his “autobiographical novel.”

Temple University Press is having a Back-to-School SALE!

Commemorating Katrina Ten Years Later

This week in North Philly Notes, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the natural disaster, we feature various Temple University Press titles on and authors whose work relates to Hurricane Katrina.

Behind the Backlash author Lori Peek, was interviewed on the CBS Evening News on August 24 about the Children of Katrina.

Peek is the author of two books on Katrina,  Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora (with Lynn Weber) and Children of Katrina  (with Alice Fothergill).

Filling the Ark by Leslie Irvine

When disasters strike, people are not the only victims. Hurricane Katrina raised public attention about how disasters affect dogs, cats, and other animals considered members of the human family. In this short but powerful book, noted sociologist Leslie Irvine goes beyond Katrina to examine how disasters like oil spills, fires, and other calamities affect various animal populations—on factory farms, in research facilities, and in the wild.

Filling the Ark argues that humans cause most of the risks faced by animals and urges for better decisions about the treatment of animals in disasters. Furthermore, it makes a broad appeal for the ethical necessity of better planning to keep animals out of jeopardy. Irvine not only offers policy recommendations and practical advice for evacuating animals, she also makes a strong case for rethinking our use of animals, suggesting ways to create more secure conditions.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lipsitz

In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities.

Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, This revised and expanded edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city’s image as a tourist party town.

Rebuilding Community after Katrina, edited by Ken Reardon and John Forester (forthcoming in November)

Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation’s largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants’ voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.

What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

TUP Authors on the outcry over Cecil the Lion

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost portions of a recent article by Alison Nastasi from HopesandFears.com about the outcry over Cecil the Lion, including quotes from Temple University Press authors Leslie Irvine, author of If You Tame Me, and Clint Sanders, author of Understanding Dogs.

Cecil—the 13-year-old male Southwest African lion named after Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia (known as Zimbabwe since 1980)—was a fixture at Hwange National Park, the country’s largest game reserve and the park’s biggest tourist attraction. He was accustomed to having his picture taken and reportedly trusting of humans. Scientists at Oxford University studied Cecil for an ongoing project about conservation. Last month, Cecil was shot with an arrow and, it is believed, lured out of the protected zone of the sanctuary.

Forty hours later, he was killed with a rifle, skinned, and decapitated. His headless body was missing the GPS tracking collar that he had been fitted with by Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). Walter Palmer, an American dentist and big-game hunter, paid over $50,000 to stalk and kill Cecil. The despised Minnesotan has since closed down his practice after becoming the target of widespread backlash from celebrities, activists and the public (trending on Twitter under #CecilTheLion).

But there’s another kind of backlash taking place over the killing, namely, expressing the troubling nature of such outspoken support over the death of a single animal, when mounting incidents of unarmed black men and women being brutalized and killed by police in the US, largely, with little to no recourse, don’t seem to inspire the same outpouring of mainstream attention and anger.

Hoping to gain some insights from sociological, behavioral, and ethical perspectives, we reached out to several experts whose professional focus included issues of human-animal relations, race, politics, and gender. We wanted to find out if people respond differently to images of animal versus human suffering—and, given the aforementioned cases and claims, why some people seem more moved by accounts of animal abuse and murder than those endured by fellow human beings.

Leslie Irvine, PhD

Professor, Gender, Qualitative and Interpretive Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder

The short answer is that it depends on which animals and which people. The sympathy people feel depends on their perceived innocence of the victim. In a paper forthcoming in the journal Society & Animals, Arnold Arluke, Jack Levin, and I examine the assumption that people are more concerned about the suffering of animals than of people. Arnie and Jack conducted research on this at Northeastern University. They had 240 students read one of four hypothetical stories, allegedly from the Boston Globe. The accounts were the same, but the victims were either a puppy, an adult dog, a human infant, or a human adult. After reading the fictitious article, students rated the degree of sympathy they felt on a 15-point scale. They were most upset by the stories about the infant, followed by the puppy, then the adult dog, and, finally, the adult human.

Clinton R. Sanders, PhD

Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut

It’s likely that dependence is the predominant issue surrounding the difference in people’s emotional response to animal pain and death as opposed to that of humans. Nonhuman animals typically are defined in western culture as far less “able” than humans. Of course, there’s a considerable continuum here since we routinely kill animals for food, sport, or convenience (overpopulations, danger, etc.). To the extent we see animals as “minded” or as viable social partners (i.e., “pets”), they are seen as worthy of intense emotional connection (Cecil was, in many ways, afforded this designation).

The difference between the typical emotional response to news of a child’s abuse or murder as opposed to violence committed against an adult is another example of the importance of dependence to people’s socially generated feelings of relative distress. When doing the interviews with “everyday” dog caretakers that formed part of the basis for Understanding Dogs, a number of those I talked to spoke of feeling more acute sorrow when their canine companions died than when close family members passed on.