Following Artists into Orphaned Space

This week in North Philly Notes, Mrill Ingram, author of Loving Orphaned Space, writes about providing a new vision for the ignored and abused spaces around us.

Recently I had the opportunity to launch my new book, Loving Orphaned Space, the art and science of belonging to Earth, at a Madison, Wisconsin based community arts organization called Art + Literature Laboratory. I was really pleased to be able to celebrate the book at a center dedicated to expanding community participation and access to the arts. The book is rooted in research I pursued on art-science collaboration, which revealed to me a new perspective on how we sideline the arts as an optional, even leisure pursuit. I’ve learned how the arts can assist all of us in navigating the everyday and imagining and enacting a better future. It’s also provided a powerful new perspective for my writing on the environment. Because so many of us don’t experience the power art can play, we often don’t recognize what we are missing. Sharing that insight was one of the reasons I wrote my book.

Following artists around is likely to pull a person out of their comfort zone. It certainly has done so for me. For example, in my writing, I am compelled to center emotional impulses and images I might have previously sidelined. The roots of this book lie in what began as a very personal preoccupation with the scattered bits of open space so many of us are surrounded by, much of it dedicated to infrastructure and often abused. Why did I care about these spaces? Why did I want to know more about each one of them? By following artists (literally) as they venture into such spaces, occupying them in a variety of ways, my personal, individual feelings expanded into something more social, that involved feelings of belonging and connectedness, respect, and responsibility, as well as delight and surprise. Wow! All that in a street terrace!

In the book I describe the energy and the politics of keeping infrastructure spaces such as drainages, stormwater basins, abandoned gas stations, right of ways, so policed and “empty.” It is an active process, an “orphaning” that quite literally, disappears space by keeping ecological and social relationships simple. This takes physical effort – I’m talking about fencing, channelizing, lighting, herbiciding, and cementing. Brownfields are orphaned by the toxicity of pollutants they are storing. I want us to think about what this purposeful disciplining of space costs us. I’m also talking about a psychic erasure. We literally do not recognize this space as Earth. Our culture normalizes so much land as a commodity, something anonymous, bought and sold, and with infinite possible futures but no history.

Open space is an enormous amount of territory, representing some 25% to over 40% of land in many cities. This is true around the world, as cities expand, and shrink, at different rates than their populations shift. In the wake of the pandemic, this kind of territory is being increasingly seen as a “solution” to problems like polluted stormwater, flooding, urban heat islands, lack of green space in neighborhoods. But I think there’s more here. I see these as spaces of struggle. Their distribution is deeply influenced by histories of racism and discrimination. Through my work with artists, I came to understand such spaces as portals through which people like me, our privilege revealed by how easily we disappear all this space, can catch a glimpse of important history and relationships and recognize potential for action.

I share stories of artists who’ve helped me to see this disappeared space in new ways, but also present a general framework to help us appreciate the work of art in building new connections and producing new results. I argue that the arts, by engaging with science and technologies of infrastructure in new ways, can transform those processes, shifting the purpose and the outcomes of technical endeavors for new benefits and ends, including ways to address inequities. In the book, I describe discoveries in phytoremediation, a process by which plants help dismantle soil pollutants, produced by a Chicago based artist, and a new model for capturing dirty water running off roofs and parking lots. I also celebrate ways in which artists build unconventional relationships, including with nonhuman beings, that can free us up to realize new projects and to experience and feel in new ways. I write about this kind of expansive and emergent relationship building as artists’ “diplomacy,” a term inspired by Isabelle Stengers.

It took me a while to put many of these pieces together in a way that felt coherent enough to deserve a book. In some ways the process of “loving” orphaned space is just beginning for me. I see them anew every day. In preparing for the talk at the book launch, for example, I looked at an image of open space distribution in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the first time, I put together the lack of open space in what is a very open city, with the I-90 corridor, which, when built in the 1960s, obliterated parts of a thriving predominantly Black neighborhood. Many businesses were lost and 1 in every 8 Black households in Minneapolis lost a home. The neighborhood lives on, still rich, but adjacent to a thundering expressway with the health threats, disconnectedness, and loss of property values that freeways bring.

This kind of recognition is the opening of the orphaned space portal. To venture in, and to occupy, involves many skills I learned from artists. They are certainly not the only ones doing this work, nor should they be. But for me, they’ve enabled me to shift my perspective on the land around me. They’ve provided me with examples of how careful listening, telling stories, and building relationships inside and out, can connect humans to each other and to other beings in new ways that transcend notions of a functioning system and enter the realm of loving.

Examining our fraught relationship with food

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Haydu, author of Upsetting Food, writes about how food is ethically identified—and why that matters.

On May 28, 2021, the New York Times reported a lawsuit against Vital Farms. Plaintiffs charged that Vital Farms misled consumers by advertising its eggs as, “‘delicious, ethical food you don’t have to question.'” Three years earlier, a leading proponent of alternative agriculture, The Cornucopia Institute, rounded up different egg labels (ranging from “All Natural” to “Omega-3”). Of eleven examined, the Institute found five to be meaningless, misleading or “seriously flawed.”

These disputes testify to our fraught relationship with food. Concerns about the safety, nutritional value, and ethical virtues of what we eat are pervasive. Increasingly, consumers rely on third-party programs to certify a food as “good,” whether for body or soul, local community or planet. Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States, shows that such doubts about commercial food date back to the early 19th century. But the ways in which conscientious consumers sought to resolve those doubts have changed. Consumers have looked to quite different markers of trustworthy food from one era to another.

In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham warned his followers of the dangers of meat, commercial bread, and spices. What were the hallmarks of trustworthy foods? Those sanctified by the Bible, but also those prepared at home with the loving hands of wives and mothers. Such food, wrapped in piety, family, and tradition, was good for the body. It also met ethical goals by quieting men’s and women’s baser impulses.

Food reformers of the 1890s and 1900s voiced some similar concerns over suspect bread, contaminated meat, “unnatural” preservatives, and adulterated beverages. In this era, however, consumers were told to trust food that had been vetted by the federal government; that conformed to the new science of nutrition; and that had been prepared in modern, “hygienic” factories. Here too, more than health was at stake. The new regulatory and educational regime would restore honesty to markets and expertise to tradition-bound homemakers.

In the 1960s, some additional concerns emerged: “artificial” foods and pesticides joined fluffy white bread and preservatives on the list of anxieties. But now, food untainted by modern technology and nutritional science—”natural” food—represented the gold standard. And food acquired through alternative institutions like small farms, natural food stores, and neighborhood co-ops was deemed more reliable. By patronizing these alternatives, moreover, consumers were joining a virtuous conspiracy against Big Ag, corporate capital, and a servile state.

These differences among the three eras mostly reflect the larger movement cultures in which food reformers moved. Graham applied to diet a more general evangelical template for social uplift, one already in use to address the problems of slavery, intemperance, and “fallen women.” Proponents of pure food legislation and nutritional science applied to food the standard Progressive playbook: modern science can identify solutions for social ills, and government regulation can implement those solutions. Early organic advocates shared with a wider counterculture a deep suspicion of organized politics and modern technology. They shared, too, its belief that by living our lives differently we could bit by bit build a better society. Nowadays, many activists retain doubts about government as a lever for change. And partly for that reason, we have more faith in our ability to achieve social justice through concerted consumer choices. For a better food system, vote with your fork!

But there is more to the story than that. Upsetting Food also shows how reformers’ ideals of trustworthy food built on—or deliberately repudiated—the efforts of their predecessors. Progressive reformers were deeply skeptical of religion and tradition as guides to social practices, whether in managing factories or cooking food. Early organic advocates, in turn, explicitly rejected modern science and government—the Progressive stalwarts—for being little more than shills for big business. And contemporary food reformers are often guided by the perceived failures of the organic movement. Its eventual embrace of minimalist government standards and its cooptation by large food companies, we hear, doomed organic as a genuinely alternative food system. Hence the appeal both of labels less easily coopted by global corporations (“local”) and of third-party certifiers (Non-GMO Project, Certified C.L.E.A.N.) who, we hope, can themselves be trusted. And thus the outrage (channeled through legal action) when the virtues proclaimed by labels (“delicious, ethical food”) prove illusory.

Addressing marijuana legalization and policy reform

This week in North Philly Notes, Clayton Mosher and Scott Akins, provide talking points about the legalization of marijuana, the subject of their new book, In the Weeds. 

In the Weeds is a historically grounded examination of marijuana policy reform and ultimately the move toward legalization over a period extending back more than 100 years, that also deconstructs the arguments of marijuana prohibitionists/demonizers. Examined under a larger historical lens, and given use of the substance for both medicinal and recreational purposes for thousands of years, we emphasize that prohibition of marijuana constitutes a historical anomaly.  We review the findings of several government commissions on marijuana from a variety of countries from the 1890s to 1970s, almost all of which concluded that marijuana was not a dangerous drug, was not physiologically addicting, and was not a “gateway” to the use of harder drugs. Marijuana prohibitionists (conveniently or deliberately) ignore this history.

Beginning with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act  in 1937, the U.S. federal government has taken a negative, science-optional, and essentially evidence-free approach to marijuana, most notably reflected in its refusal to remove marijuana from Schedule I status (i.e., no medical applications and high addictive liability/potential for abuse) under the Controlled Substances Act.  This refusal has several negative implications, including depriving scientists from accessing quality marijuana for the research needed to demonstrate its medicinal applications, as well as its possible negative effects; it affects the ability of marijuana-related businesses to secure financial services from banks; prevents the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating pesticides and other chemicals used on cannabis crops, and, allows companies to fire, or refuse to hire, people who test positive for marijuana. The placement of marijuana in Schedule I also ultimately gives the federal government the ability to overturn both medical and recreational legalization of marijuana in states.

In the Weeds also assesses the outcomes of current marijuana legalization “experiments,” with a focus on Colorado and Washington State (the first states to legalize recreational marijuana, in 2012, with sales commencing in 2014). Marijuana prohibitionists predicted that legalization would lead to skyrocketing youth use of the substance, and that our highways would be full of carnage due to “stoned drivers.” Neither of these outcomes have manifested. Youth use of marijuana in both Colorado and Washington State has stabilized and even declined. And while there have been modest increases in drivers involved in collisions (fatal and otherwise) testing positive for marijuana, and somewhat greater increases in the prevalence of drivers testing positive for marijuana in combination with other psychoactive substances,  we do not have sufficient data to prove that marijuana “impairment” caused these collisions (i.e., finding mere traces of marijuana in one’s system does not prove that the person was impaired, nor that the alleged impairment caused the collision). We also do not have sufficient historical data (i.e., pre-legalization) to determine whether there has been an actual increase in such incidents. It is important to stress that people drove under the influence of marijuana well before its legalization. Legalization did not invent marijuana.

Marijuana prohibitionists emphasize that marijuana use among adults in the U.S. is increasing, as is heavy and frequent use among certain individuals. There are legitimate concerns regarding these increases in heavy and frequent use. However, marijuana prohibitionists have not acknowledged the emerging research indicating that cannabis may serve as a substitute for other drugs such as alcohol, opiates, and even stimulant drugs. And importantly, it is by no means clear that increases in heavy and frequent use of marijuana is attributable to the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana – that is, marijuana use, including heavy use, began increasing in the mid-2000s.

Marijuana prohibitionists (conveniently or deliberately) ignore that, although cannabis is now legal for recreational purposes in 10 U.S. states, pursuit of the substance by law enforcement continues to be a major component of the ongoing war on drugs. In fact, the most recent FBI data indicate that marijuana arrests nationally increased in both 2016 and 2017, reaching almost 600,000 arrests for possession alone in both of these years. Over the last two decades, police in the United States have made more than 11 million arrests for marijuana possession.

Marijuana prohibitionists also conveniently or deliberately ignore the fact that the defining characteristic of marijuana (and other drug law) enforcement in the United States is the gross racial/ethnic disparities in these arrests. Nationally, blacks, who consume marijuana in roughly similar proportions to whites, are about four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession – in some U.S. jurisdictions, the disparity ratio is as high as 30.

Even in the rare cases where they do acknowledge the number of arrests and disparities, prohibitionists will claim that none of this is a big deal, because “no one goes to jail for marijuana possession.” This is simply not true. A 2015 report by the Department of Justice found that 11,553 people in the United States were in prison on marijuana-related charges (compared to only 5,800 for heroin). In addition, each year, tens of thousands of people arrested for marijuana possession are held in jail for several days or months because they cannot post bail. There are also collateral costs associated with these arrests – they commonly result in criminal records that show up on background checks when individuals apply to rent apartments or obtain and keep their jobs.

Marijuana prohibitionists have emphasized the fact that the marijuana available today is “not your father’s marijuana” – in particular, that the THC levels in marijuana available in states where the substance is legal is much higher than in the past. This assertion is debatable to begin with – people in the United States and elsewhere who wanted high potency marijuana have always been able to obtain it (consider hashish, for example). While high potency marijuana (especially as contained in edibles and other such products) may be problematic for novice users, there is scientific evidence that more experienced users will respond to higher potency marijuana by titrating their doses to achieve their desired high.  And importantly, one of the advantages of legalization is that consumers are informed of the content of the product they are consuming.  This obviously does not occur when marijuana is only available through the black market.

Marijuana prohibitionists (especially, recently, Alex Berenson in his book Tell Your Children) have emphasized a connection between consumption of cannabis and psychosis/schizophrenia. As we document in In the Weeds, prohibitionists have overstated the results of the complex science on this issue, and confuse correlation and causation.

Among the most significant incentives for recreational marijuana legalization is that the substance can be regulated, controlled, and taxed by government entities rather than the regulation and profit remaining in the hands of criminal enterprises. For governments that have legalized recreational marijuana, the tax revenue has been substantial, far exceeding expectations, and these revenues have been used to fund a variety of societal needs, including drug prevention and treatment programs, general health services, and public education.

In the Weeds concludes that marijuana has been legalized, and the sky has not fallen.

University Press Week Blog Tour: Science

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #TurnItUP. Today’s theme is Science

Johns Hopkins University Press @JHUPress

To Be Determined

Princeton University Press @PrincetonUPress

Our director Christie Henry will be writing about the evolution of science publishing at university presses, with a focus on how the evolution and long-term sustainability of these programs depend on the ability to create equitable and inclusive populations of authors.

Rutgers University Press @rutgersupress

We’ll post about Finding Einstein’s Brain by Frederick Lepore, MD.

University Press of Colorado @UPColorado

Imagination requires hope: at once a mode of survival and a form of resistance. A post from UPC author Char Miller.

Columbia University Press @ColumbiaUP

Our new acquisitions editor in the sciences, Miranda Martin, will write a guest blog post about why it’s important for University Presses to publish in the sciences and what her vision is for a list moving forward.

University Press of Toronto @utpress

We reach back to the archives of The Heritage Project at UTP to highlight some key titles from our backlist on the history of science.

University of Georgia Press @ugapress

The post will be of the latest episode of our podcast and it will feature a talk William Bryan gave recently at the Decatur Book Festival for his book The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South. Bryan’s book is in our Environmental History and the American South series and is about the efforts business leaders in the post-civil war south took to promote environmental stewardship through something they called “permanence,” which is a sort of precursor to what we think of as sustainability.

A sneak peek at the new issue of KALFOU

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase the new issue of KALFOU, and the symposium on race and science, a highlight of Volume 5 issue 1.

Volume 5 Issue 1 of KALFOU features a symposium on race and science in which distinguished scholars from across the disciplines address the ways in which current developments in genomic research pose new challenges for analyses of the social construction of race. Advances in genetic research have provoked a revival of the claim that race has a genetic basis, a claim that has now been embraced by pharmaceutical companies seeking to make profits by marketing drugs that profess to address illnesses endemic to specific racial groups and by social scientists eager to explain racially skewed life outcomes as the product of the genetic defects of aggrieved groups rather than the result of racist practices, processes, and structures.  The symposium features astute and insightful articles by anthropologists Michael Montoya and John Hartigan, historians Terence Keel and Gabriela Laveaga-Soto, sociologists Ruha Benjamin and James Doucet Battle, and physician and public health scholar Claudia Chaufan.  Although these authors deploy a diverse range of scholarly methods and perspectives, their arguments cohere around an insistence that genetic research itself actually shows that race is a political rather than a biological category and that the “new” arguments about sciences and race are simply reiterations of very old forms of scientific racism.

George Lipsitz

Kalfou Vol. 5 Issue 1. Table of Contents:

SYMPOSIUM ON RACE AND SCIENCE • edited by Terence D. Keel and George Lipsitz

Race on Both Sides of the Razor • Terence D. Keel
Facing Up to Neanderthals • John Hartigan Jr.
What Can the Slim Initiative in Genomic Medicine for the Americas (SIGMA)
Contribute to Preventing, Treating, or Decreasing the Impact of Diabetes
among Mexicans and Latin Americans? • Claudia Chaufan
Race, Genetics, and Health: Transforming Inequities or Reproducing
a Fallacy? • Michael J. Montoya
Prophets and Profits of Racial Science • Ruha Benjamin
Race and the Epigenetics of Memory • Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Ennobling the Neanderthal: Racialized Texts and Genomic Admixture • James Doucet-Battle
Concluding Remarks: Social Justice Requires Biocritical Inquiry • Terence D. Keel

FEATURE ARTICLE
Feminist Mobilization in MEChA: A Southern California Case Study • Gustavo Licón

IDEAS, ART, AND ACTIVISM
TALKATIVE ANCESTORS
Cedric Robinson: “For a People to Survive in Struggle”

LA MESA POPULAR
The Septuagenarians’ Sankofa Dialogue • Kalamu ya Salaam and Jerry W. Ward Jr.

ART AND SOCIAL ACTION
The Play’s the Thing: An Interview with Rosten Woo • J.V. Decemvirale

MOBILIZED 4 MOVEMENT
“It Is Time for Artists to Be Heard”: Artists and Writers for Freedom, 1963–1964 • Judith E. Smith

TEACHING AND TRUTH
A UK–US “Black Lexicon of Liberation”: A Bibliography of African American
and Black British Artists, Artworks, and Art-Making Traditions • Celeste-Marie Bernier

IN MEMORIAM
James Oliver Horton, 1943–2017 • Melani McAlister

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

What we know about gender, race, and STEM – African American women

Sandra Hanson, author of Swimming Against the Tide explains that African American women are interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

A recent publication (in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology) by a group of psychologists found that race and gender intersect in understanding Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) attitudes and participation. The research team was headed by Laurie T. O’Brien and focused especially on African American women. The researchers and subsequent media reports on the findings (e.g. in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education) expressed surprise at the high interest and participation in STEM among African American women. Several decades ago I began doing research on African American women in STEM funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Although some researchers have not focused on the way that race/ethnicity and gender interact to affect STEM experiences we have known for some time that we can expect the unexpected when it comes to African American girls and women in STEM. Some have argued that because women do less well in STEM and minorities do less well in STEM, there will be a double disadvantage for African American women.

The argument of double jeopardy sees race and gender as additive. My findings from a representative sample of young African American women (published in a number of journal articles and in my book, Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education) suggested otherwise. Quantitative data from my sample and larger NSF surveys as well as open-ended questions and responses to vignettes were critical in measuring the young women’s experiences. They loved science. The young African American women signed up for science classes, loved doing experiments, went to science camp, and had posters of scientists on their walls. One young woman said that “science was like opening up a present from your favorite aunt.” My findings provided considerable evidence for the African American family and community as key in understanding this love of science. African American families have always made considerable investment in and had high educational and occupational expectations for their daughters.

African American women have historically combined work and family roles. The answer to young African American women’s high level of interest and participation in STEM does not come from schools and teachers. In fact, the young women in my sample experienced considerable difficulty in the STEM classroom. One young girl reflected the opinion of many when she described the attitude of science teachers –“They looked at us like we weren’t supposed to be scientists.” The young women reported not being called on in the classroom and not being chosen as lab partners. Somehow, in spite of the chilly classroom climate, a disproportionate number of African American women manage to “swim against the tide” and persevere in STEM education and occupations.

Data from NSF show that African American women persist in many areas of STEM at a higher rate than do white women. My recent research on the male dominated area of engineering shows that even here African American women earn the largest share of doctorates relative to men (when looking within race/ethnic groups). In my testimony to the U.S Congress (Subcommittee on Girls in Science) I suggested that we need better teachers, science classrooms, and science textbooks. When young African American women look around them and see white teachers and white scientists in the science textbooks, they do not feel welcome. The considerable agency that African American women show in the context of a white, male STEM culture is encouraging. One can only imagine the increased number of talented African American women who would participate in STEM education and occupations in a more welcoming climate. The major science organization in the U.S. – the National Science Foundation – has recognized the problem and is funding a good number of programs to encourage minorities and minority women in STEM. After all, diversity in science makes for better science.

Sandra Hanson provides testimony as an expert witness at a House Subcommittee

In this blog entry, Sandra Hanson, author of Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education, describes her research providing testimony at the House Subcommittee on “Encouraging the Participation of Females Students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Fields.”

Statistics on degrees and jobs in science published by the National Science Foundation show progress for women and minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However they also show that a gap remains, especially in science occupations. I am optimistic about the gains, but we must still work on making science more inclusive.

These young women love science. However, when they go into the science classroom, one girl suggests that teachers “look at us like we are not supposed to be scientists.” What do these young girls say about changing the science classroom? They want, for example: better preparation in STEM in the early years and access to advanced STEM tracks in the later years, changes that make science more accessible, better trained and motivated teachers, smaller classes, more work in groups (cooperative learning), more hands-on experiences (and an active laboratory component), more gender and race diversity in science teachers and curriculum (especially text books), high expectations for all students, special programs to encourage women and minorities in science, and more access to mentoring and networking. My research and other research supported by the National Science Foundation suggest that these changes in STEM education would benefit all youth. In the Q and A after the testimony Representative Fudge (D-OH) asked about access to science for girls (and boys) in inner-city schools. I noted in my response a need to equalize resources across school districts. Children unlucky enough to be born in a lower-income school district should not have to deal with science classrooms that lack good teachers, textbooks and equipment.

The committee inquired about other things that might be done to reduce the gender gap in science. I noted some of my research on girls and sport in my testimony. My research shows that sport provides an important resource in enhancing young women’s science access and achievement. It encourages independence, teamwork, and competition – the same traits that tend to be associated with women’s success in the male domain of science. Female athletes have an advantage in science over non-athletes. Young girls who are given an early opportunity to be involved in sport may well be less intimated and more prepared for the culture of science classrooms and work settings. It was encouraging to hear Representatives Ehlers (R-MI) and Fudge (D-OH) as well as Cheryl Thomas (one of the experts providing testimony at the hearing who is President and Founder of Ardmore Associates, LLC) express interest and support for this notion.

When second grade girls and boys are asked to draw a picture of a scientist they often draw a white male who is alone and ominous looking. This is not an attractive image for boys or girls. We need to change the image of science for all youth and importantly we need to make science available to all. If we are to be economically competitive in an age of global markets we need diverse strategies, skills, and competence in STEM. Students in the U.S. (male and female) score behind students from many other countries on math and science exams. We need to improve the quality of our science education system. We know what works. The new practice guide by the National Center for Education Research (“Encouraging Girls in Math and Science”) offers five recommendations for schools and teachers for increasing girls’ participation and interest in science. Guides such as this one need to be integrated in a routine way into U.S. STEM programs.

For more information on Sandra Hanson’s Swimming Against the Tide, visit: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1904_reg.html