Login
Pamela J. Haney is the president of Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. She took office on July 1.
Moraine Valley Community College enrolls more than 10,500 students, according to the most recent data reported by the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 10 percent of the student body.
“It is an honor and privilege to be named as Moraine Valley’s president,” Dr. Haney said. “I’m following in the footsteps of a highly respected and committed leader from whom I’ve learned so much. As I begin my presidency, I promise to build on the college’s excellent foundation while advancing student success, innovation, community engagement, and mission-driven priorities.”
Since 2012, Dr. Haney has been serving as vice president for academic affairs at the college. Prior to coming to Moraine Valley in 2009, Dr. Haney served as program administrator and assistant professor of communication arts at Defiance College in Ohio. She also taught as an assistant professor of speech communication at Norfolk State University in Virginia.
Dr. Haney holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s degree in speech communication, both from Norfolk State University. She earned a doctorate in interpersonal communication from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
I feel a bit behind the curve in writing about Reclaim Open, but I suppose it’s better late than never. We’re still technically in June, meaning the in-person event was just earlier this month, and we still have the online recap coming throughout the month of July, so perhaps my tardiness may be forgiven!
Reclaim Open is Reclaim Hosting’s 4th biennial conference following Domains17, Domains19, and OERxDomains21. It can be easy to compare each conference to those preceding it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned while hosting these through the years, it’s that each event captures a moment in time and creates a space for connection– however it may be needed or defined in that moment by each participant– and they’re all uniquely special. In some ways these conferences snowball and build over time; we take the lessons that we learn from one and embed them into the next one. In other ways, each conference is its own entity where a distinctive group of folks will converge, share ideas and inspire, and then part ways again. The conversations are always different, but the goal (at least for me when planning) is always the same: to create a space where folks feel comfortable to share, challenge, and build alongside each other.
OERxDomains21 came at a time during covid where connection and professional support felt more difficult to come by. That event was collaborative, powerful, and pushed boundaries – all while being completely online. Domains 17 & 19 were equally powerful, and reinforced art & creativity by taking place in various museum hotels (penguins & tv stack installations included).
While there were no penguins this go around, Reclaim Open was no different in how it carved out space for a community to join forces. In many ways, this conference felt like a reunion, celebration, and call to action all in one. The conference themes were perfect for this:
In April 1993, Tim Berners Lee open sourced the World Wide Web, and the ensuing decades of internet technologies bears the mark of that historic moment. Thirty years later, open source still remains central to building and providing an open web. For our 4th biennial conference, Reclaim Hosting plans to not only celebrate the history of the open web, but take stock of the present moment while exploring the future of Open. To this end we established 3 distinct, though always related, tracks wherein we asked folks to share their work around the past, present, and future of the open web. It was so fun to head back where it all began, and we had a blast welcoming web historians, creative tinkerers, digital humanists, instructional technologists, project admins, and open source advocates to Fredericksburg, Virginia on June 5-7, 2023.
Excerpt on reclaimopen.com
The past, the present, the future: going back to where it all began in Fredericksburg, VA and sharing stories with old and new friends; a celebration of how far we’ve come, marking Reclaim’s 10th year in business and the anniversary of the open web; dreaming up where we want to be and how the future of the web will shape that path.
Each time we dream up, plan for, and host an event like this, I always re-learn just how much work goes into hosting a conference and I have so much respect and admiration for folks that do this more regularly. Coordination for the logistics alone are no joke, and we added a bit of complexity this year by recording sessions, live-streaming and experimenting with Hybrid, and producing an on-the-fly documentary. These extra elements would not have been possible without the amazing Dream Team, and it was such an honor to work alongside them these past few weeks/months (years!) to make it happen.
In no particular order, here’s a list of some of my Reclaim Open highlights:
The Reclaim team dinner after the event where we talked about the future of green web hosting, inspired by Bryan Alexander‘s keynote, What might the web become in its next generation?
Unveiling the documentary, and hearing the impromptu, round-robin experiences from conference goers at the end of day 3.
Checking out Reclaim Arcade. Still so in awe with how that space has transformed, and that evening was a blast!
The way that Rajiv Jhangiani used storytelling and visual/audio aids in his keynote, Accept all cookies and continue: The many presents of the web.
I was really interested in juxtaposing elements of “old” with our techy, future-driven web conference as a way of thinking about how the past and future can intersect. It was fun to loosely play with this using color on the website, which was black & white until the week of the conference.
I also really enjoyed creating the conference programs, which ended up sitting somewhere between a newspaper and a zine.
The programs were created using Newspaper Club and their provided Canva template for the Digital Mini Magazine. I really love how these came together in the end, along with the other stickers and t-shirts we had on hand to showcase Bryan Mathers‘ fantastic artwork:
And because I’m always curious what folks use for other conferences… the name tags were created and printed using Conference Badge and the lanyards were purchased in bulk on Amazon. Stickers were printed through Sticker Mule, which we’ve used for years, and our collection of Reclaim Open t-shirts were designed and printed through Spreadshop on shop.reclaimhosting.com.
Back to the list of highlights– I loved the casual nature of the Unconference. The slower pace on day 1 felt like a great way to kick off the event.
Hanging in downtown Fredericksburg again and eating all the Benny’s pizza I could manage.
The power of A.I. Levine
And last, but certainly not least, I really loved witnessing other Reclaimers run the show. This was a true team effort and I’m so glad to have been a part of it.
Is it ever possible to reconcile clashing visions of national memory?
The post Socialist Nostalgia, Cuban State Power appeared first on Public Books.
In the last of this series of posts about this year's Annual Meeting, SSP's Marketing and Communications Committee asked members of our community what the conference meant to them.
The post Ask the Community: What Did SSP 2023 Mean to You? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The ORCID US consortium, managed by Lyrasis, is five years old in 2023 - hear about their progress so far and plans for the future in Alice Meadows' interview with their PID Program Leader, Sheila Raybun
The post The ORCID US Consortium at Five: What’s Worked, What Hasn’t, and Why? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The biology, as astonishing as it is, does not tell us what it will mean. -Stephan Helmreich, “Homo Microbis” (2014, 4)
Within microbiome research, the human body can be recast as a host of microbial ecologies, a “supraorganism” or “holobiont.” From this comes new ways of understanding and treating digestive diseases as well as illnesses associated with brain functioning, like depression and Alzheimer’s. This research reflects the increasing emphasis in the life sciences on “life as process” (Dupre and O’Malley 2007, Dupre 2020), and in the social sciences on the body as “biosocial” (Niehwöhner and Lock 2018). We take up these insights and examine one way that these ontologies of body and environment circulate in public ways by analyzing how the human body is depicted in relation to microbes and environments through public visualizations of the human microbiome.
Despite the fact that the human microbiome is made of up non-humans and should raise questions about human exceptionality, the human microbiome circulates in the media primarily in relation to human health. How to care for health through attending to the human microbiome has become a wellness topic circulating in popular news media, from science journalism to lifestyle and wellness magazines and websites. There are soaps, foods, and food preparation methods that are microbiome-friendly. There are direct-to-consumer tests that will offer personalized, if not precise, nutrition recommendations. There are magazine articles advising readers on how to care and optimize their various microbiomes, from stomach to skin to vagina. How are bodies, microbes, and environments portrayed as the relational entities that they are for public audiences?
We explore two prominent visual themes in the public visualizations of the microbiome. First, the representations of boundaries of the human body in relation to microbial bodies. This means paying attention to how the microbial worlds within, and the environment outside, the body are visually constituted. This is to visually contextualize the ubiquitous headline or textual hook about the human microbiome: that within the human body, microbial cells outnumber human cells. The scale of difference has oscillated as research accumulates and has ranged from estimates of a ratio of 100 microbial cells to 1 human cell, to 10:1 to 3:1, and most recently resting closer to a ratio of 1.3:1 (Saey 2016). Second, we consider how differences (racial, gendered, in physical ability/fitness) were represented. Our focus on public media follows Adele Clarke’s analysis of the role of the media in the assemblages of “healthscapes” (2010, 105-06) and shows how the microbiome becomes part of expansive processes of biomedicalization (Clarke et al 2010) that normalize directions of health care and individual responsibility. The media is not only central to the proliferation of concepts of health, but also generates and reproduces expectations of how the world should work in regard to health (Briggs and Hallin 2016).
We argue that the visualizations of the microbiome in the popular media depict it as a friendly frontier within the bounded human body. Through pictures and the news article headlines that accompany them, the human microbiome is presented as having silently cared for the body until its potential was recently discovered by scientists. This depiction suggests that the human body’s health is the purpose of the microbiome itself and of scientific research into its mechanisms. The human body, with the guidance of experts, becomes a site in which one can attune themselves to their microbiome’s unique composition through experiments in diet, skin care, nutritional supplements, and nutraceuticals. Ultimately, the microbiome becomes another part of the human body that can be known through biomedicine with the ends of optimizing human health. As such, we are critical of the science communication but also see it as embedded in social and political processes that exceed it, meaning that the future for more-than-human flourishing that some narratives of microbiome science hope for will take a great deal of work to realize in a world of the financialization of microbial life.
Our visual discourse analysis is based on publicly circulating images we compiled from online news articles about the human microbiome. In so doing, we aimed to capture a part of the microbiome’s place in the contemporary healthscape. Our database spans across all forms of online news, from traditional to specialist, reflecting the accessibility of media in the current age. We collected these articles by following Google Alerts set up to catch the keywords “microbiome” and “direct-to-consumer microbiome test.” We have focused our visual analysis on images featured in articles for a generalized audience—like a health news site detailing steps readers can take in their daily lives to improve their health—rather than those speaking to experts—like a health news site informing practitioners about new treatments and developments in the field. We compiled this data in the fall of 2019, from September 7th, 2019 to January 20th, 2020, unknowingly doing so just before the COVID-19 pandemic began and people the world over were compelled to be aware of a new microbe harmful to human health. Throughout this article, we focus in-depth on several images which reflect or contest the makeup of our larger collection of 152 images.
With few exceptions, the human bodies portrayed in these articles are all white, able-bodied, and fit (Figure 1). The link between fitness and the human microbiome is strongly emphasized in the media, visually and textually, echoing the portrayal of able-bodiedness and weight loss as ideals by direct-to-consumer microbiome tests, as Dryden has also found in gut microbiome therapies (2023). The majority of the photos featuring people show them alone. If not alone, then the images depict humans in a clinical setting of medical professionals or scientists alongside a patient. Very few images feature people together in non-medical settings.
Figure 1: A close up on a white person’s bare torso with hands cradling a slim stomach (Image taken from iStock, Peopleimages)
Figure 2: Illustration of microbes in the shape of two human bodies coded as female and male (Shuttershock, lanatoma)
There are important translations occurring in these images, notably that of scale, a particular challenge for visualizing the connection between humans and their microbiomes as the average human is well over a million times greater in size than a single microbe. Even the width of a single human hair is seventy-five times greater than an average microbe. The relationship between the two across this vast space is visually affirmed by truncating the human body and enlarging the microbes, portraying them as closer in scale. Related images show enlarged microbes that render the silhouette of a human body (Figure 2). Notably, even in this abstracted state, the microbes privilege sexual dimorphism and gender stereotypes: the microbes representing a woman are identifiable as such because they are positioned to imply the wearing of a skirt, much like the dualistic symbols used to denote gender on public washrooms stalls. In contrast to the solitude of the human body among microbes, microbes are always represented in plenty; there is no solitary microbe, only solitary humans.
Of all the images we analyzed, only two showed microbes engaged in activity, and they offer a striking contradiction. One image features two microbes fighting each other, equipped with anachronistic armour and weapons[1]; the other image features three microbes with stick arms and legs meditating harmoniously in a stomach.[2] These images represent differing public metaphors for understanding the microbiome. One is antagonistic, portraying the supposed need to attack and destroy to survive, while the other shows harmony as the desired state and solution. The microbiome is a potential site for human intervention and control in service to one’s health, but it is also a slippery research subject that requires large data sets and whose implications are emergent and nascent, despite what the landscape of wellness products would have consumers believe. The microbiome challenges contemporary health management practices but is still trying to be understood through these practices (Wolf-Meyer 2017).
The microbes in our database images are made friendly by their bright colouring. This makes them approachable, perhaps to counteract their daunting plenitude, association with germs that impede health, and integrality to scatological functions. Only one image of a microbe from our data set was not digitally rendered and colourized; all the others were turned into bright colours. Images of diverse microbiomes used an array of aesthetically pleasing colours to differentiate between the different microbes. This colourizing continues outside of our dataset. For instance, on the front page of APC Microbiome Ireland’s (a research centre at University College Cork) website for World Microbiome Day, microbes are caricatured into bright, grotesquely smiling little monsters reminiscent of the characters from Monsters Inc. or the pill-shaped yellow Minions (similar to Figure 3). This representation maintains the otherness of the microbe to the human—some have only one eye, others have horns, all are oddly shaped—while also bringing the microbe closer to the human—the mere fact that they have eyes, smiling mouths, waving arms, and bipedal legs. The translation between human and microbe is emphasizing commonality and aestheticizing difference in a familiar and palatable way. The microbes are not quite anthropomorphized, but recognized as distinct yet potentially friendly. Microbes—these infinitesimal organisms that have only the most basic similarities to humans—are being translated into human conceptions of what life looks like and how the human can optimize it through proper management and care regimes.
Figure 5: Banner from APC Irelands’ World Microbiome Day (Image taken from Shuttershock, curiosity)
These visual representations of microbes contribute to narratives that strongly associate the microbiome with actively managing human health. Microbiome science also challenges narratives of dangerous microbes as disease causing pathogens to be systematically eradicated. Because the microbe of the microbiome’s ecology challenges such narratives, it is rendered visually relatable and appealing through the methods of representation detailed above. While people are mostly pictured alone in these representations, they are also frequently pictured in clinical settings. The individualism of healthy practices is thus bridged through the figure of the expert, the scientist or doctor.
Penny Ironstone (2019) writes that the human microbiome is associated with a liberatory micropolitics because it potentially challenges biomedical models of health, providing “post-Pasteurian models” (Paxson 2008) or “post-antibiotic futures” (Sariola 2021). But while certain people, such as fermentation specialists (e.g. Hey in press; Widmer 2021), draw on human-microbial relations to critique biomedicine, even capitalism, in favor of new futures, the optimism of new relations between humans and microbes is conveyed slightly differently in biomedical and wellness narratives.
There is an almost unimaginably large amount of microbial life that humans move through in their daily lives, and that moves through humans. Although the microbiome’s promise in the health sciences, and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, circulates with much hope for new experiences of the body and new kinds of politics, the visual depictions to date rather replicate other aspects of biomedicalization: the microbiome is visualized as a scientized entity to be harnessed by the human host to optimize wellness. This is in the scaling translations of microbes to seem closer to human, as well as in the way that microbes are depicted in relation to the boundaries of the human body and not to microbes in surrounding environments, such as soils. This is also in the depiction of friendly microbes that resemble children’s cartoons. The visualizations of the microbes in the service of the human host render the “human microbiome” as something that can become “my microbiome.” This rendering lends itself well to precision wellness possibilities. The visualizations do not disrupt other common naturalizing categories associated with the body: the bodies in the healthscape of the microbiome centre whiteness, able bodies, and heteronormative gender binaries.
The microbiome sciences and the social scientists who engage with them (e.g. Benezra 2020, 2023) hold promise for reimagining the body and illness in ways that might decentre the human. While this work is crucially necessary for grappling with health and social issues of the broader late or post-industrial context, the images of the microbiome in the current biomedicalized healthscape only take us a short way there.
[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/569226
[2] https://thevarsity.ca/2019/09/30/the-promise-of-the-human-microbiome-in-cancer-research/
Benezra, Amber. 2020. “Race in the Microbiome.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 45(5): 877–902. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920911998.
Benezra, Amber, 2023. Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Briggs, Charles L., and Daniel C. Hallin. 2016. Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London: Routledge.
Clarke, Adele. E. 2010. “From the Rise of Medicine to Biomedicalization: U.S. Healthscapes and Iconography, circa 1890–Present.” In Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., edited by Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, 104–146. Durham: Duke University Press.
Clarke, Adele E., Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, eds. 2010. Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dryden, Jane. 2023. “The Gut Microbiome and the Imperative of Normalcy.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16:1, 131-162
Dupré, John, and Maureen A. O’Malley. 2007. “Metagenomics and biological ontology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 38 (4):834–846.
Dupré, John. 2020. “Life as Process.” Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 57 (2):96–113. https://doi.org/10.5840/eps202057224.
Hey, Maya. (in press). “Communicating with the Microbial Other: How the Material Practices of Fermentation Connect Humans and Microbes in Polylogue.” Global Media Journal: Canada Edition.
Ironstone, Penny. 2019. “Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome.” European Journal of Social Theory 22 (3):325–341.
Niehwöhner, Jörg, and Margaret Lock. 2018. “Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on environment/human entanglements.” BioSocieties 13:681–697. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-017-0089-5.
Paxson, Heather. 2008. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (1):15–47.
Saey, Tina. 2016. “Body’s bacteria don’t outnumber human cells so much after all.” Science News. January 8, 2016. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bodys-bacteria-dont-outnumber-human-cells-so-much-after-all.
Sariola, Salla. 2021. “Fermentation in Post-antibiotic Words: Tuning in to Sourdough Workshops in Finland.” Current Anthropology 62 (S24):S388–398.
Widmer, Alexandra. 2021. “Positioning Human Microbiome DTC Tests: On the Search for Health, Data and Alternatives Amid the Financialisation of Life.” Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 8(2): online. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.2.5127.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J. 2017. “Normal, Regular, and Standard: Scaling the Body through Fecal Microbial Transplants: Normal, Regular, and Standard.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31 (3): 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328.
Written by Rebecca Brown
Breed Specific Legislation
The UK currently imposes what’s called ‘Breed Specific Legislation’ in an effort to limit serious injuries due to dog attacks. The legislation was introduced in 1991 and made it illegal to own, sell, abandon, give away or breed dogs deemed to belong to one of four banned breeds. These are the Pit Bull Terrier, Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino and Fila Brasileiro. These breeds, having been selectively bred for purposes such as fighting, hunting and guarding, and are considered to have physical and behavioural attributes that mean they pose an unacceptable risk to the public. Dogs that meet the criteria for being a banned breed can be seized and either destroyed or permitted to remain with their owner under restrictive conditions. Breed specific legislation has been recently criticised in a number of organisations.
I do not intend to defend Breed Specific Legislation. It’s plausible that there are alternative, more effective and less damaging ways of reducing harm from dog attacks. However, many of the critiques of Breed Specific Legislation made by prominent animal charities and veterinary bodies are flawed. In pursuing what they no doubt see as a worthwhile end (the scrapping of Breed Specific Legislation), those publicly lobbying for change have made numerous confused and misleading arguments. Below, I outline why these arguments are misleading, implausible or weak, and how they fail to show that Breed Specific Legislation should be revoked.
Any dog can bite
One common claim is that “All dogs, whatever their breed type or size, are capable of showing aggression” and that “All dogs have the potential to be dangerous”. I don’t want to quibble about whether or not a Chihuahua is technically capable of inflicting a serious injury, but the relevant question is surely a) how likely a given dog is to bite a person, coupled with b) how damaging that bite is likely to be.
The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) point to the more relevant claim that “recent studies found no difference observed between legislated and non-legislated breeds in the medical treatment required following a bite, or in the severity of bite and the type of dog that bit.” Unfortunately they don’t provide any citation or link to this evidence so it’s impossible to evaluate it. So we are left with the frankly implausible claim that if you get bitten by a toy poodle puppy you’re as likely to be harmed as if you are bitten by a breed of dog that was selectively bred to be able to fight a bull to the death.
Elsewhere on the RSPCA website is a document about dog aggression. Here they seem to acknowledge – albeit carefully – the fairly obvious point that some dog breeds are more likely to show aggression, and are more dangerous when aggressive, than others:
Although it might seem that some dogs are born to be aggressive, it is more accurate to say that they are born with inherited tendencies that might, if not controlled, make aggressive behaviour more likely… There are inherited ways of behaving that are particular to some breeds or types of dogs that make it more likely for individuals to grow up to use aggression where others would not… Aggression is not a single characteristic, however there are breeds of dogs that have historically been used for specific purposes, such as for fighting dogs or other animals, or for guarding. Whilst these breeds may not be any more likely to show aggression, because of their physical and temperamental attributes if they do show aggression it is likely to have more serious consequences. Persistence in attack coupled with strong jaws can cause serious injuries.
Lack of evidence
Notwithstanding the above quote from the RSPCA, another common claim is that there’s no ‘robust scientific evidence’ that some dogs (and types of dog) are able to inflict more damaging injuries than others. Again, this seems to be a case of absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. It may be worth recalling Yeh et al’s (2018) article ‘Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial’ which usefully highlights how direct RCT evidence might not be necessary in order to conclude that interventions such as parachutes are probably a good idea when jumping out of aeroplanes. Thinking again of the toy poodle versus pit bull example, we can probably draw some fairly reliable conclusions based upon ‘mechanistic reasoning’, without a need to inflict different kinds of dogs bites upon participants as part of a randomised trial.
Disconfirmatory evidence
It is also claimed that there is direct evidence that banned breeds are no more dangerous than other breeds, and that Breed Specific Legislation is completely ineffective at reducing (serious) injuries from dogs.
The RSPCA tells us that “Between 1989 and 2017, 48 people died in dog-related incidents. Of the 62 dogs involved, 53 were dog breeds not on the prohibited list.” And that “Only 8% of dangerously out of control dog cases involved banned breeds”. They also reference evidence that “in the past 20 years (1999-2019), the number of hospital admissions for the treatment of dog bites has increased by 154%, despite the prohibition of certain types of dogs”.
What can we make of this? First of all, the population data: dog bites requiring hospital treatment do not appear to have dropped as a result of the introduction of Breed Specific Legislation. This may well be the case, but it’s not possible to tell based on the information provided. We don’t know how dog ownership has changed over the time period studied – perhaps there were lots more dogs, and this resulted in more bites. It has certainly been speculated that the enthusiasm for pets during the covid lockdown (the number of dogs registered with the UK Kennel Club increased by nearly 40% between 2020 and 2021) might have contributed to more dog bite injuries in recent years. The population data might be suggestive, but it is far from conclusive evidence that Breed Specific Legislation doesn’t or hasn’t prevented any serious injuries from dogs since it was introduced.
Second, the breed-linked data, supposedly showing that banned breeds are responsible for only a small minority of serious injuries, including deaths. But wait: banned breeds, of which there are only four (amongst hundreds of other dog breeds) were involved in 1/7 (14%) of the fatal attacks on people during the period mentioned; they were implicated in 8% of cases of ‘dangerously out of control’ dogs. We don’t know how many dogs belonging to banned breeds exist in the UK, but surely it’s less than 14%, meaning they’re at least overrepresented in these samples.
And surely we can go further than that. I’m pretty keen on dogs and had a childhood of obsessively recording and watching all the annual coverage of Crufts repeatedly. I can reliably tell the difference between an Italian Greyhound, a Whippet and a Greyhound, or describe to you what a Wirehaired Vizsla looks like. But I have never heard of three of the breeds on the banned list and possibly never seen them.
This Wikipedia article lists fatal dog attacks in the UK, including breed information where known. The breeds responsible for fatal attacks on humans since 1980 are largely unsurprising. In the below table I’ve summarised the data from the Wikipedia article. (Note that I’ve grouped some breeds / breed types together [Mastiffs; Bulldogs other than American Bulldogs]).
| Breed | Number of fatalities involved in since 1980 (including as part of cross-breed) |
| Staffordshire Bull Terrier | 12 |
| American Bulldog | 9 |
| American Bully XL | 7 |
| Mastiff / Bull Mastiff / Neapolitan Mastiff / Italian Mastiff | 7 |
| Alsatian / German Shepherd | 6 |
| American Pit Bull Terrier / Pit Bull type | 6 |
| Rottweiler | 6 |
| Bordeaux Bulldog / Bulldog type / Aylestone Bulldog / British Bulldog | 4 |
| Jack Russell Terrier | 3 |
| Bull Terrier | 2 |
| Cane Corso | 2 |
| Husky | 2 |
| Doberman | 1 |
| Alaskan Malamute | 1 |
| Lakeland Terrier | 1 |
| Presa Canario | 1 |
| Chow Chow | 1 |
Again, without baseline information about how common these breeds are, one must be cautious about extrapolating from this list to draw conclusions about the dangers of specific breeds. Yet what is clear is that, with the exception of Jack Russell Terriers and a single Lakeland Terrier (responsible for killing three newborn infants), small dogs do not tend to kill people. Dogs that end up inflicting injuries sufficient to kill people tend to be powerful types, which have been selectively bred for guarding, fighting or hunting.
These dogs don’t deserve to die
One unfortunate refrain used by critics including the RSPCA and British Veterinary Association is that dogs deemed to belong to a banned breed and which do not qualify for an exemption, despite showing no previous signs of aggressive or dangerous behaviour, do not deserve to die. Yet this seems to mischaracterise what the Breed Specific Legislation is intended to do. It is clearly not intended to hand out punishment to ‘bad’ dogs, but instead to act as a preventative measure, to stop injuries in the first place. Indeed, since dogs are not moral agents it is entirely inappropriate to punish them on the basis that they ‘deserve’ it. We should of course treat dogs kindly and not cause them unnecessary suffering. But to suggest that Breed Specific Legislation is a form of undeserved punishment of ‘innocent’ dogs is misleading. Even the destruction of dogs that have seriously injured or killed people should not be construed as punishment: the justification for such actions is to protect people from future attacks from a dog proven to be dangerous.
Banning breeds implies that all other dogs are safe
Commentators suggest that, by banning certain breeds, the government sends the message that only these breeds are dangerous, that dogs belonging to other breeds are never dangerous, and that it is breed alone (rather than circumstances, handling, training, etc.) that makes a dog dangerous. Yet I wonder if this is really the case. It hadn’t crossed my mind that only those banned breeds were (potentially) dangerous, and I would be surprised if other people concluded this from the legislation. Indeed, it seems equally plausible that banning specific breeds would raise awareness of general dangers posed by all dogs.
A vet writing for the British Veterinary Association states “there has never been an onus on anyone, young or old, to behave sensibly and respectfully around dogs.” The problem is that many serious bites – particularly those resulting in fatalities – happen to children. 31 of the 64 fatalities in the UK since 1980 listed on the Wikipedia page were in children under 12. They include a number of babies, one of whom was 5 days old when she died. Children are particularly vulnerable to dog attacks: they are small (and thus injuries may be more severe and they are less able to escape or protect themselves if attacked); they are more likely to provoke dogs through excitement or rough treatment; they are more likely to miss the signs that a dog feels threatened and may attack. But there is a limit to what small children can be taught or the extent to which parents can control their behaviour, and we inevitably place them at risk by putting them in shared spaces with dogs. Of course there is an onus on people to treat dogs carefully and kindly, and to ensure those without the capacity to do this are protected. Yet focusing on whether or not children or their parents could (or should) have behaved differently once again seems to attend to questions of blame and desert, rather than the core matter: how best to prevent injuries in the first place.
Whilst it may well be a good idea to provide training and support to people regarding how to safely handle and act around dogs, this is not incompatible with Breed Specific Legislation. We need not accept the supposition that people are too stupid to simultaneously appreciate that poor training, irresponsible handling, stressful circumstances and the inherited predispositions and physical characteristics of a dog can all contribute to how likely it is to bite and injure someone.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
An interesting argument presented in criticism of Breed Specific Legislation is that the law is implemented based on the extent to which a dog fits the breed standard of a banned breed. This raises complaints from the RSPCA and British Veterinary Association for failing to use, for instance, genetic testing to determine whether or not a dog belongs to a particular (banned) breed.
But isn’t this disingenuous? First of all, if it is physical attributes that play a part in how severe a dog bite may turn out to be, then using physical attributes as a guide to which individuals should be restricted seems not unreasonable. Second, I do not think that, were the legislation to be enforced via genetic testing rather than breed standard, the RSPCA, British Veterinary Association or any of the other opposed groups would be any happier with it. Third, it’s not clear what additional information a genetic test will give you beyond the visible phenotypes that are used in the current system to determine breed. From my Crufts-watching days, the judges were looking at how well the dogs matched up against the breed standard. Of course, genes are partially responsible for what dogs end up looking like, but the relevant thing for dog breeds seems to be what they are actually like rather than what their genetic make-up is. The ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’ claim seems to be a piece of rhetoric rather than a genuine complaint about how the legislation is enforced.
A plea for better communications
As I said, I don’t want to defend Breed Specific Legislation. But it’s hard to evaluate the value of a policy on the basis of communications that are so clearly aimed at achieving a particular outcome (scrapping the legislation) rather than providing informative arguments. At the moment, the arguments made by the RSPCA, the British Veterinary Association and others could apply as equally to wolves as to any other dog breed. If I want to keep a wolf then, extrapolating from the above claims, I could defend myself against accusations I was risking others’ safety by saying “any dog can bite, and no one has shown me evidence that a wolf bite is worse than any other dog”. Indeed, none of the lethal attacks on humans by dogs in the UK in the last 50 years came from wolves. As long as the wolf hasn’t bitten anyone else yet, subjecting it to restrictions would be equivalent to ‘punishing the innocent’. Children just need to treat wolves respectfully and then they should be fine; there should be more of an emphasis on (potential) victims of wolf attacks to avoid putting themselves at risk, rather than restricting people’s freedom to keep wolves. Even though it looks and behaves exactly like a wolf, it’s not fair to say it’s a wolf unless this has been genetically proven.
Is this really the argument the RSPCA, British Veterinary Association and others want to make? It seems to me it would be vastly preferable to present the best evidence in support of their claims, and acknowledge where uncertainty lies so people can form a sensible and well-informed view on Breed Specific Legislation.
As we seek new members to join our network, we want to share with you more of the inner workings of Humanities Commons and how we understand our work as part of a collective movement. Today, our community development manager, Zoe Wake Hyde, shares a vision of the future of the web that our team wants. If it resonates with you, we encourage you to consider becoming a Humanities Commons Member.
—
We live, as they say, in interesting times. The dawn of the internet is within living memory for many, and its different phases of growth and adoption are familiar to most. Whether you’ve gone from Tumblr to TikTok, reminisce fondly about RSS or are all in on AR, the only constant in our experiences of the web has been change.
In the scholarly world, the emergence of online publishing has led to exponential growth in the amount of content available. Traditional publishing systems have reacted by restricting access and trying to maintain scarcity, while the open access movement has gained momentum as a way of leveraging the web’s affordances to break down barriers to access. In turn, the major publishers have pivoted to data as currency, and there is increasing consolidation across the scholarly infrastructure landscape, leading to a concentration of power.
So what drives this change? The reasons are as complex and diverse as human behaviour itself, but two of the major contributing factors are money and power.
Where money is invested and power is leveraged has an enormous impact on our everyday lives on the internet. Unfortunately, much of that impact has been used to position us as consumers and commodities, to be bought and sold to, with our attention becoming the price of participation. That perhaps paints a grim picture, but it’s one we must confront head on.
The good news is that money and power can be used to change things for the better. Investment in technologies that catalyze different kinds of interactions in digital spaces, and the right kind of influence on policy and structural mechanisms can make a difference.
So, why does this matter to Humanities Commons?
We see our role in the online ecosystem as creators of an alternative. We resist the idea that human interactions should be commoditized and used as a means to a profitable end. Instead, we seek to facilitate meaningful connections that lead to the creation of new knowledge to be shared openly. We approach designing our tools as an act of service, where our only interest is to benefit users. And we do this work in the domain of knowledge creation and dissemination because we believe in its value to the world.
We also see ourselves as just one piece of a very large puzzle of actors pursuing the same goal, and aim to ally ourselves with others dedicated to creating the same kind of future for online, digital scholarly work. Together, we seek a more just and equitable knowledge ecosystem, where many kinds of knowing are shared and valued.
That’s the web we want.
But to get there, we have to come back to the question of money and power. To change the dominant logic of the web, we have to invest in the people and products that make it happen.
While we may not have venture capital-level funds available, our combined might as institutions, societies, nonprofits and other invested actors shouldn’t be underestimated.
In our next post, we will explore the role academic institutions have to play in this change.
Become a sustaining member of the Humanities Commons network and support us to build the web we want. Find more information or book a call via calendly.com/zwhmsu.
Orans are sacred lands in the Thar Desert that are are being developed for wind energy projects. Nisha Paliwal argues that while wind energy is considered sustainable, it is experienced as violent extractivism by nearby village communities.
The post The Problem with Wind Farming on Rajasthan’s Sacred Lands appeared first on Edge Effects.
As we seek new members to join our network, we want to share with you more of the inner workings of Humanities Commons and how we understand our work as part of a collective movement. Today, our founder, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, tells of how we have come together as a team, united by a shared purpose and shared values. If these resonate with you, we encourage you to consider becoming a Humanities Commons Member.
—
Since early 2020, Humanities Commons has been working toward a sustainable future. Key to that future is the generous support we’ve received from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and a range of other funders and donors, that has allowed us to build a flourishing team to support the network. But building that team has not been solely a matter of searches and onboarding; we’ve also put a lot of collective labor into ensuring that we’re working together in the most generative ways possible.
We began that work late last August by bringing our all-remote team (minus a few of our more recently hired colleagues) together in Lansing for a two-day retreat. Over the course of those two days, we began the process of getting to know one another, laying the groundwork for the ways we’d work together, and thinking as expansively as possible about our goals and expectations. We all left energized, if a bit daunted by how much work we had mapped out for ourselves and how vast the possibilities seemed. All of us took heart, though, in a sentence that Zoe Wake Hyde (our community development manager) shared with us: “We can’t do everything, but we can do anything!”
Figuring out which things would comprise our *anything* required a lot of collective thinking. During the retreat, we undertook a modified version of the HuMetricsHSS values framework exercise, starting to articulate what most matters to each of us in the work we do. We also began the process of developing a framework for the Commons’ purpose and goals, enabling us to shape our work around the vision of transformation in collective knowledge production that we hope to effect.
But the retreat was only the start. Over the next several months, the team met for regular working sessions — twice a week, at first — to continue thinking together about who and how we wanted to be. Each of our working sessions was facilitated by a different member of the team, often using a Miro board to ensure that everyone’s thoughts were captured. By late 2022, we had collectively developed a statement of purpose and a statement of values for the network, which we circulated to our governing council and to our user advisory group for feedback.
Today, as part of our sustaining membership campaign, we’re posting these statements publicly, and we invite your thoughts about them.
Our purpose is to cultivate open spaces for diverse communities to connect, create, share, and experiment. Together we work to transform global knowledge systems.
The values that guide our work are: Experimenting, Cultivating Community, Nurturing Trust, and Supporting Open Exchange of Knowledge
For a more in depth look, read our full statement of purpose and our full values statement, and we invite you to share feedback by commenting on this post or tagging @[email protected] on Mastodon.
These statements undergird our work as a team, but also our work with the Commons community. In the weeks ahead, as we bring more members into the community of organizations and institutions supporting our work, we’ll share more about how we plan to support that community, how we hope to facilitate self-governance within it, and more.
It’s been a long process leading to this point, but given that our goal is nothing short of transforming our global knowledge system, taking time for reflection, response, and revision is crucial. We very much look forward to hearing from you, and to thinking with you as we move into our next phase of development.
A silicon wafer, a thin material essential for manufacturing semiconductors, at a chip-packaging facility in Santa Clara, Calif.
Article tags
Improving accessibility in all areas of our work is fundamental to our ambition to create more just and equitable scholarly communications. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we here at Humanities Commons wanted to let you know about some of the work we’re doing behind the scenes to both improve accessibility for site users and to learn and grow as a team. Here are four ways we are putting our commitment into action:
We’re excited to share with you more in each of these areas as we continue to meet and grow as a team. And, of course, we’d love to hear from you if you have ways that you’d like to see our site improve!
If you know Humanities Commons well, you know that we are committed to a more just and equitable future of knowledge creation. We take our place alongside other incredible people and organisations working towards the same goal, knowing the only way to make true, transformational change is to leverage our collective power.
Right now, we are seeking new members to join our network and help shape the future of the Commons. Our members are critical to our success and keep us connected with the needs and priorities of our community. By becoming a member, you are not only supporting our existing work, but creating new possibilities by contributing your unique perspective.
Yes! But also no! Individual users of the Commons are members of our community, but more often, we’ll refer to you as our users. In this context, we are talking about members of our network of participating organisations.
Humanities Commons’ purpose is to cultivate open spaces for diverse communities to connect, create, share, and experiment, in the service of transforming global knowledge systems together. If this ambition speaks to you, membership is a way to help us work towards that purpose. Member contributions enable us to build the necessary infrastructure for a vibrant knowledge commons, developing exciting new features for individual and organisational users. Member support also helps us to continue to offer our free Humanities Commons site, which benefits everyone invested in open humanities scholarship. In future, we also plan for membership to subsidise the participation of organisations who serve communities most marginalised in conventional knowledge systems.
Just as importantly, membership is, to us, a relationship we seek to foster with our allies and collaborators. These relationships are what will ultimately drive us forward. We seek to be in relation with those who are investing in academy-owned infrastructure designed for a more connected knowledge ecosystem. Who are working towards a future where there are viable alternatives to the closed, proprietary systems that dominate, where we are building the web we want, and where people are treated as more than consumers and commodities. Truly, these relationships are an opportunity for us to lean into our collective power and imagination to build the future we envision.
Membership in our network is not simply transactional. Members will be asked to, as much or as little as they can, participate in our evolving governance structures, offer feedback on strategy and direction, advocate for the Commons in the spaces they occupy, and participate in other efforts such as promotional activities and user research. Our goal is to create many avenues for members to contribute in the ways that make the most sense to them, and are always open to new ideas. As our network grows, we expect to develop additional opportunities, including research and funding collaborations.
In addition, all members receive:
Membership is open to any organisation, department, research center, institution, or consortium who wishes to engage with our work.
Until June 30, 2023, we are offering a one-time option for members to join at US$5000 per year, with the possibility of signing on at that rate for up to 5 years. However, if you are interested in becoming a member, but have a different budget in mind, please reach out, as we’d love to talk through different options.
The first step is to set up a call with our community development manager, Zoe Wake Hyde, at calendly.com/zwhmsu and she will guide you from there!
Find more information about membership and a short FAQ here.
Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
FreshRSS