PhD student

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:35:43 +0000

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/12/2024 - 12:35

Rachel Sauer

On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence

Almost every night, Tyler Nuckols can hear fireworks and shouting—not celebrating a holiday or marking an occasion, but trying to drive elephants back into the forest.

In Ruam Thai, Thailand, where Nuckols is conducting socio-ecological fieldwork as he pursues a PhD in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, elephants emerge from the trees of Kui Buri National Park almost every night in search of pineapple.

Over many years, elephants have learned that an easy and accessible meal is in farmers’ fields—to the detriment of those fields and farmers’ livelihoods. As farmers lose their source of income and means of supporting their families, elephants risk injury or worse as farmers—also risking injury or worse—try to deter them.

�� Boulder PhD student Tyler Nuckols (left, conducting research in Thailand) and Karen Bailey, assistant professor of environmental studies, emphasize that human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation.

For a lot of people—mainly those who don’t coexist with elephants—this may not seem like much of a problem. Elephants, after all, are among the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals, credited with an emotional range that some claim matches or even exceeds that of humans. People visit a zoo and return home daydreaming about backyard elephants.

But on World Elephant Day, being celebrated today, Nuckols emphasizes that the challenges and successes of human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation that communities and populations worldwide are tackling as climate change fundamentally reshapes how humans coexist with wildlife.

“We’re interested in supporting and partnering with local communities to look at solutions to human-elephant conflict beyond the predominant approaches of ‘Where do you farm? What do you farm? How much money do you make farming?’” Nuckols explains. "Our research and community-based conservation approach looks to explore a more complex focus related to factors like identity, access to resources and historical and political factors, among many more layers that may shape how households can engage in solutions to human-elephant conflict and participate in the first place."

Studying coexistence

Nuckols has been working with elephants for more than 10 years, starting with the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia—an ethical sanctuary and retirement home for elephants that had worked in tourism or logging. After earning a master’s degree at Colorado State University, and after COVID curtailed his plans to return to Cambodia to study mitigation techniques to prevent elephants from entering agricultural fields, he began working with Karen Bailey, a �� Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies who leads the WELS (well-being, environment, livelihoods and sustainability) Group.

Bailey completed postdoctoral research in southern Africa with communities living outside protected areas “who were living with the threats of climate change and the impact of sharing the landscape with wildlife,” she says. “Some of the impacts of crop raiding by elephants in southern Africa were significant predictors of potential food insecurity. When that’s combined with the threats of changing seasons and changing climate as well, the realities of human-elephant coexistence in communities in and outside of conservation areas become really pronounced.”

Tyler Nuckols (second from left, blue shirt) and colleagues from Bring the Elephant Home in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

As part of the Human Elephant Coexistence Through Alternative Agricultural Research (HECTAAR) working group with the human-elephant coexistence research organization Trunks & Leaves, Bailey and Nuckols partner with researchers and conservation groups from around the world to study the reasons for conflict between agriculturalists and elephants, as well as develop and test interventions that support livelihoods and work to rebuild community resilience and landscapes in different countries and cultures.

Nuckols began researching in Thailand in 2022, partnering with NGO Bring the Elephant Home to study human-elephant conflict and how elephants interact with different types of agricultural crops. Nuckols’ research also focuses on environmental justice and resilience, and how communities define ecological justice for both humans and elephants.

The community where Nuckols’ research is based is not only a human-elephant conflict hot spot, but also a success story for conservation and community-based tourism.

“But despite the positive impacts of tourism and some grassroots efforts, conflict occurs every night,” Nuckols says. “You can hear fireworks and shouting and people trying to get elephants back into the forest every night. So, one of the ideas that community members are evaluating is crop transition. Research has shown that elephants won’t eat lemongrass, ginger, chili, citronella, so farmers are interested in growing these crops, but the community is asking how to ensure it’s sustainable and equitable.

“Changing crops is a high-risk decision, when they know they can sell monocrop pineapple that they’ve been growing for decades.”

Risk vs. reward

A significant challenge in human-elephant coexistence is the disconnect between people actually living with or near elephants and the rest of the world that is watching and loves elephants, or at least the idea of elephants.

“Even in Thailand, there’s a huge disconnect between major urban centers like Bangkok and rural provinces,” Nuckols explains. “These farmers are often villainized or portrayed as invaders. They’ve been told they should just pack up and give elephants back their habitat, but that’s not feasible or tenable or just for those people who are being told to leave. It’s very grim, but we’ve had people die in our community from negative encounters with elephants, victims who’ve been attacked in the night while they were guarding their crops.”

Almost every night, farmers in Ruam Thai, Thailand, deal with elephants in their pineapple fields. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

Bailey notes that while the world may be watching and feeling invested in the plight of elephants, “there’s an inherent framing of environmental justice that we more equally share the costs and benefits of the environment. We as people globally benefit from elephants existing—we get a warm feeling when we think about them—but we have to remind people that there are costs. We have to think about how to more equitably share the costs and benefits. Anyone who loves elephants and might call themselves an elephant person should know and should be clear that elephant conservation simply will not work if we don’t think about those humans and elevate the human components.”

A complicating factor in some climate change discourse is the argument that humans caused it and animals are blameless in it, so animals should be prioritized in human decision making. “The important nuance is that the rural farmers in Thailand didn’t do this,” Bailey says.

“It’s the wealthy individuals all over the world who are, per capita, emitting many more tons of carbon. There’s an inherent inequity in who is causing the environmental problems, and often the people and communities experiencing the realities of environmental change aren’t key drivers of this change.”

In the community where Nuckols is studying, which is in the rain shadow of a mountain range, drought is a very serious concern. During the last dry season, the reservoir that supplies water to the community nearly dried up. Many farmers in the area grow pineapple for many reasons, one of which is that it’s considered a crop that can survive in high-heat and low-water conditions.

“In the past few years, though, temperatures in the field can soar to 43, 44 (Celsius) and so even now pineapple is struggling to survive,” Nuckols says. “Those conditions are also driving elephants more and more to the edge of the national park, where a lot of the habitat restoration has been funded by large corporate subsidiaries that don’t have time to trek into the forest and dig a water hole.

Elephants at the edge of Kui Buri National Park in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

“So, you get a concentration of elephants on the edge of the forest, and as climate change gets worse, as resources get more sparse in the forest, elephants are going to go for high energy, high reward crops like pineapple. In a short hour they can devour an entire patch of pineapple that gives them the nutrients and sugar they would spend days foraging for in the dry forest. It’s basic risk versus reward.”

Just listen

In researching the complex factors influencing human-elephant conflict and coexistence, Nuckols emphasizes that a foundational principle of the work is that it’s community-driven and community-led.

“We’re involved in study and data collection, but we do everything in a framework of participatory action research,” Nuckols explains. “We pilot everything we do with focus groups in the local community, we run everything by a group of trusted stakeholders like the village chief and elders working with our organization. We ask them, ‘Is this appropriate?’ and a lot of things were thrown out the window because they’re like, ‘No way.’

“The whole group that’s growing and testing alternative crops now, which is 16 people, are community members who created a collective and are working together. We as researchers act as a bridge to help support the trial, to help find funding. We use our skills to elevate the work that this community is already doing.”

Bailey adds that the lessons learned in researching human-elephant coexistence—though the details can vary broadly between cultures, countries and regions—may inform human-wildlife coexistence in other areas, including Colorado.

“There are tons of parallels and tons of lessons to be learned that we can apply more broadly,” Nuckols says. “One of the biggest is just to listen to community members and help empower those community members. Don’t ever go in assuming you know best. Spend time in the community and pilot your work before you go in and think anything is going to work within a community. Make sure community members feel heard, have a meaningful seat at the table and feel empowered to solve these problems.”

Top image: Asian elephants living in Thailand's Kui Buri National Park (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

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On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence.

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Jim Halpert is looking at all of us

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:21:18 +0000

Jim Halpert is looking at all of us Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/05/2024 - 14:21

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published paper, �� Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look'

A couple of years ago, Cooper Casale was dating a woman who loved the American version of “The Office.” Despite having watched seasons two and three on repeat in middle school so he’d have something to talk about with a girl he liked, a decade had passed and he wasn’t really a fan anymore.

“But I end up being sucked into it,” recalls Casale, a PhD student in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English. “I watched all the way through multiple times—it becomes a kind of hypnosis. It was just always on.”

Through nine seasons and repeated watching, Casale began to wonder: Is Jim Halpert looking at me?

In a newly published paper, �� Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale argues that the Jim Halpert gaze represents the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism.

In the 650 times that Jim Halpert (played by actor John Krasinski) looks at the camera through those nine seasons—there’s even a 10-minute compilation video of them on YouTube—Casale began considering what or who he was seeing in the Jim Halpert gaze: the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss or the fascist father? Or perhaps all three?

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Casale considers how the Jim Halpert gaze is also the fascist look.

“The Fascist Look enlists its subjects into their make-believe hero's service, a role audiences want to occupy,” Casale writes. “They want to please Halpert, as the worker wants to please the foreman. Their peculiar loyalty partly explains ‘The Office's’ remarkably enduring popularity…

“Halpert's Gaze arms people against their feckless bosses, slovenly neighbors and annoying coworkers. At the same time, his frozen glare, his pranks and his sarcasm represent the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism. Halpert does not critique his corporate arrangement but merely masters it. He becomes its boss, and viewers enamored by his cruel fiction but powerless to act it out, choose, in Halpert, a more nightmarish boss than they had before. Furthermore, viewers are thankful because he reminds them that the great can still overcome the small.”

Microdosing work

First, though, a sorry-not-sorry: While Casale appreciates a lot of the humor in “The Office,” he increasingly resents its popularity now that remote work is so common. He wanted to understand how the “almost liturgical pattern in which some people watch it” has become a sort of surrogate to having an in-person, so-called work family, he explains. “There are some who never turn it off. When I was in publication for this paper, my editor was like, ‘You can’t prove that,’ and I can’t, not yet, but there’s an observably strange practice in people watching this show on rotation all the time.

“So, the initiating question was ‘Why do people come home from a 9 to 5 and immediately watch a show about 9 to 5?’ Theodor Adorno wrote about this in his essay ‘Free Time,’ about how free time is itself a kind of work. We have to spend those hours after work preparing to return to work, so people watching ‘The Office’ is almost like microdosing having to go back to work.”

In the character of Jim Halpert, Casale says, “The Office” established an everyman protagonist—a frustrated dreamer and creative type who somehow ends up in a meaningless job at the world’s most boring business. When he looks directly at the camera, he conveys that he recognizes the absurdity and ridiculousness around him and that he is somehow above it.

Citing another Adorno work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” which observes that enlightenment and barbarism are often linked, Casale notes that “Jim Halpert represents this enlightened corporate subject. He’s presented as smarter than everyone else, but we see how fast that enlightenment has to express itself through barbarism or violence in the pranks he’s constantly pulling on Dwight.

Actor John Krasinski played the character Jim Halpert in "The Office" and looked directly at the camera 650 times over nine seasons. (Photo: NBC Universal)

“Dwight’s biggest crime in the whole show is that he likes his job. He’s presented as naïve, sentimental, he likes beets and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and because of his sentiment he must be punished. We’re meant to believe that Jim really deserves to be somewhere else, and he’s only there because he’s unlucky, but it’s everyone else’s fate to be there. Kevin will never do better, Stanley will never do better, but it’s Jim’s fate to overcome the circumstances of his life. We’re meant to find his cruelty affable.”

“The Office” reaffirms the strange hierarchies of corporate America but sells them as quirky, Casale says. Its documentary style becomes a two-way mirror between Jim Halpert and viewers—in Jim’s disgust, annoyance, resentment or bemusement, viewers have a proxy in lieu of their own documentary camera recording their reactions to the clowns and fools around them.

Interrogating power

The Jim Halpert gaze becomes the fascist look when considered through the lens of power, Casale says: “We have this TV show teaching me that the best way to express my power is to lend it to somebody else who can punish people in my stead. It’s similar to how a vote for an autocrat is a vote to not have to vote anymore. We see it in the working class voting for Donald Trump, who’s only going to give tax breaks to the rich. But because they want to be rich, there’s an aspect of living out their dreams through him.

“I think people always struggle with how members of the working class can vote against their self-interest. Part of it, I think, is that people’s resources to express themselves or express some kind of autonomy are so impoverished that their last opportunity to be free is to live in surrogate through someone else. If Jim Halpert can prank these people and humiliate all his coworkers, then I can live vicariously through Jim Halpert.”

Casale adds that rather than interrogating the structures of power and capitalism that Jim Halpert ostensibly gazes against, “The Office” emphasizes a message that mimicking the behaviors of power will lead to having power. In “The Office,” Jim Halpert is in control—not Michael, not Dwight, nor any of the other characters to essentially serve as his minstrels.

“I think that’s the fascist myth,” Casale says. “It’s a desire to be dominated so I can learn the procedures of how to dominate others. In my own domination, I learn what it feels like and how I can do it. We see this with any kind of autocrat, including Jim Halpert. When Donald Trump says he wants retribution, there are thousands upon thousands of regular, pretty nice people who say, ‘I want retribution, too.’ And because they won’t direct their anger to capitalism, the real culprit, they have to have proxy wars about DEI, gender, immigration, whatever else, so they won’t have to focus on the real cause of their powerlessness.”

Top images: NBC Universal

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In a recently published paper, �� Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look.'

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Making the case for President Average Joe

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:40:59 +0000

Making the case for President Average Joe Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/10/2024 - 08:40

Bradley Worrell

�� Boulder doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters

As the U.S. presidential campaign heated up in 2020, Kate Arnold-Murray’s friends started sharing social media posts that simultaneously poked fun at Joe Biden while also promoting him as a much better alternative to Donald Trump.

One such post on Instagram compared Biden to a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, with the accompanying tagline “Unappetizing but still edible.” Another post showed Biden preparing to swing a baseball bat, with the tagline “Because a foul ball is better than a strike,” while a third post showed Biden taking a knee in front of a chalkboard, with the tagline “Because a C+ is better than an F.”

“My friends started sharing these, what I would call memes, on Instagram—and I thought they were absolutely hilarious,” says Arnold-Murray, a doctoral student in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Linguistics.

Kate Arnold-Murray, a �� Boulder PhD student in linguistics, was intrigued by the "Settle for Biden" campaign, in part, because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

“I also felt (the ads) were impactful, because my friends were sharing them as a way of saying, ‘Hey, I’m not thrilled about it, but I’m voting for Biden, and you should, too.’ That was a really powerful messaging strategy when Biden wasn’t really liked by a lot of progressives, or when people on the left had a hesitancy with Biden in a way I didn’t see with people sharing they were voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Arnold-Murray says the social media campaign—dubbed “Settle for Biden”—intrigued her, in part because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

Meanwhile, the way in which the campaign stumped for its preferred choice for president—as someone who is less than ideal but still much better than the alternative—was something that captured her attention as someone who studies the effect that language and visuals can have on an audience. That, in turn, prompted Arnold-Murray to write the paper “Settle for Biden: The scalar production of a normative presidential candidate on Instagram,” which was published online by the journal Language in Society earlier this year.

Recently, Arnold-Murray spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about insights she gained from examining the verbiage and visuals from the Settle for Biden campaign, her view on the pros and cons of promoting a candidate as mediocre but safe and her thoughts on whether such a campaign can be successful a second time around, now that Biden has an established presidential track record. Her answers have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: Why did you think ‘Settle for Biden’ would be a good topic to explore in a research paper?

Arnold-Murray: Since Trump first ran for president, the U.S. has been in such political turmoil, and in my opinion, the political left has been a mess. We have had a really hard time figuring out how to respond to Trump and how to message.

What I saw—and what I’m still seeing—is that the left is constructing this new strategy. This campaign (Settle for Biden) was doing something that I hadn’t seen before. Usually, when people are running for office—and you’re advocating that people should vote for them—you’re saying, ‘He is the best of the best.’ ‘She has the highest level of education.’ ‘He has done so much to help people.’ ‘She’s an incredible person.’

We haven’t historically seen (a campaign for a politician) that says, ‘Because a C+ is better than an F’ or ‘Because a foul ball is better than a strike.’ We don't see people saying, ‘Our candidate, we don’t love them, but we are going to support them.’

And I think that’s something that needed to happen in 2020 among a divided Democratic Party, or especially with progressives feeling divided from the Democratic Party—to get people onboard against a common enemy.

"The (Settle for Biden" campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win," says �� Boulder researcher Kate Arnold-Murray.

Question: It seems like an underlying goal of the Settle for Biden campaign is to get people to pick Biden as the safe, if mediocre, candidate?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, definitely. This is why I chose to use this kind of scalar theoretical framework, because in each post we really have three candidates: We have the nonexistent, nonrealistic, ideal candidate for young progressives. But in a two-party system—and especially in 2020—that candidate did not exist, at least in terms of having chance of winning.

So, in that scenario, we have the home run or A+ candidate; then we have Joe Biden in the middle, as a foul ball or C+; and then we get to Donald Trump, always portrayed as the worst possible thing.

In constructing that scalar world, the campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win.

Question: In your paper, you talk a lot about ‘scalar normativity.’ What does that mean?

Arnold-Murray: It’s a somewhat new theoretical framework for thinking about normativity. When we talk about normativity in the social sciences, usually we’re talking about things that are viewed as so normal that they usually fly under the radar. … I was looking at how this campaign was appealing to centers of authority, like with the Dairy Queen example, to say, 'What is normal to the middle class?' Well, maybe it’s like a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, because you can eat it, but you don’t necessarily love it.

Question: In the Settle for Biden memes you highlighted, Trump isn’t named, but there’s the assumption that the audience is going to understand whom Biden is being compared to, correct?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, Trump is always there in every post, and I think that’s always true of an election between two people. When you are campaigning and saying things about yourself, it’s known and assumed that you are going against this other person. For the most part, in the posts I examined, the campaign did not mention Trump at all—but he’s kind of this haunting presence.

For example, in the post ‘Joe Biden knows how to pronounce Yosemite,’ even if you did not know that Trump had mispronounced it earlier, you would be able to infer it, based on how the campaign talks. So, the other guy must have done it wrong if Joe Biden is doing it right.

And when we get these two positionalities, in the post that claims ‘Because of C+ is better than an F,' the caption says, ‘Joe Biden isn’t the A we wanted … but four more years of Trump would certainly mean failure.’ So, you know who the F is.

Again, I very much view (Trump) as almost kind of haunting this campaign, and at least for me personally, I found it a really effective strategy. As someone on the left, I just didn’t want to see pictures of Donald Trump; I didn’t want to hear his voice; I didn’t want to read his words in my daily life, because it was just so toxic. This strategy of calling Trump in, therefore, gave a wary audience a way to engage with him less directly.

�� Boulder scholar Kate Arnold-Murray notes that the "Settle for Biden" campaign might not land as well in the 2024 presidential election.

Question: Is there any way to gauge whether the Settle for Biden campaign actually helped get progressives to vote for Biden on election day?

Arnold-Murray: The campaign’s director, Sam Weinberg, ended up doing quite a few interviews that got a fair amount of media attention. And they (Settle for Biden) ended up partnering with organizations that were dedicated to motivating young voters to vote and helping people register to vote.

I would have loved for there to have been a poll (about the campaign’s effectiveness) but that doesn’t seem to exist. So, I can only judge things based on the media coverage it generated and the work that the group was able to do because it had this platform to support on-the-ground efforts.

Question: Do you think the campaign can be successful a second time if progressives don’t believe Biden has been sufficiently liberal during his first term in office?

Arnold-Murray: The resonance of an average Joe, after he’s been in office for four years, might not land as well the second time around. I think the Settle for Biden campaign might need to give more props for what Biden has done, because I think he actually has accomplished a lot. …

But with some of Biden’s actions and policies, especially with Israel, being so unpopular on the left, does that idea really stack up anymore? Does good enough still work? It’s a fair question.

Then again, it’s still the same opponent he faced four years ago. So, for me personally, I’m hoping the campaign is going to figure out how to make Biden the much better choice for progressive voters.

Question: Have you received any reaction to your paper?

Arnold-Murray: My most exciting feedback that I’ve received on the paper has been when I shared it on Facebook or on Instagram. Hearing from people who are not linguists or academics or anthropologists, who were able to read and understand it and enjoy it, was rewarding.

For me, that’s a big win, because I feel like I was doing a couple big things with theory that were a little complicated, but at the same time, I really tried to make it something that’s accessible for people to engage with. And the Instagram posts themselves are interesting and entertaining.

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�� Boulder doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters.

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Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution

Anonymous — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:28:05 +0000

Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/28/2024 - 10:28

Rachel Sauer

�� Boulder PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis

In the past year, Clare Gallagher has gotten very interested in ghost gear, which she admits is “a really depressing Google search” if you’re not already familiar with it.

Ghost gear is the umbrella term for lost, abandoned or discarded fishing gear that contributes to the crisis of plastic pollution in Earth’s oceans and can trap fish and marine mammals, causing them to die by suffocation or exhaustion. In the upper Gulf of California, for example, abandoned gillnetting has contributed to the vaquita porpoise nearing the brink of extinction.

When Gallagher, a PhD student in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, joined an observer delegation at the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution April 23-29 in Ottawa, Canada, she learned that fishing gear is included in a proposed international treaty on plastic pollution that would be discussed at the weeklong gathering.

Clare Gallagher, a PhD student in the �� Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, by a sculpture outside a U.N. treaty negotiating session in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

However, after attending several all-day—and sometimes into the night—negotiating sessions, “I learned that fishing gear is almost like a side note to the greater problem. Single-use plastics are so nefarious, and this is the next climate change fight,” Gallagher says.

“To be able to go sit in conference room for 14 hours a day for nine days straight—and the final meetings went until 3 a.m.—I was pretty in awe of the dedication of the people in these meetings. But then at the same time, it was also incredibly frustrating when there’s not a lot of progress made. It’s just the way of global geopolitics, and I was getting a crash course in this—there will be some countries or blocs of countries that don’t want strong treaties, like oil-producing countries, just as there are countries that have been against strong environmental treaties for the last several decades.”

The gathering Gallagher attended was the fourth session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution and focused on the marine environment. The committee’s stated goal is to have a completed treaty written by the end of the year.

For Gallagher, attending the session not only was eye-opening to the intricacies of global geopolitics, but also brought several other key insights, including:

Abandoned fishing gear is one problem of many in the crisis of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans

“Microplastics were a huge, huge topic at the treaty discussions,” Gallagher says. “From a health standpoint, I was really surprised to see so many endocrinologists there. The endocrine destruction from chemicals that are being added to plastics is linked to the obesity epidemic, to the epidemic of anxiety and depression. It’s actually pretty terrifying.”

Among the discussion topics were plastic pellets, sometimes called nurdles, which are commonly used as a raw material for making plastic products. They are frequently shipped via container, and if pellets ever spill from those containers into a marine environment, the environmental damage and harm to living creatures can be devastating.

“So, some of the discussion was about classifying them as hazardous waste,” Gallagher says.

However, abandoned fishing gear is a big problem

“Ghost gear is the colloquial term,” Gallagher explains. “The more scientific term is abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear, or ALDFG, and it’s just a terrible thing. Let’s say you a have huge vessel that’s fishing tuna in the Pacific and use purse seines, which are these crazy kilometer-wide nets that can cinch up entire schools of tuna.

“Say that net gets lost or is intentionally cut by crew or just gets stuck on something or there’s a full-on accident. That net will continue to fish whales, dolphins, turtles, you name it after it’s lost contact with the vessel. That’s why we get term ‘ghost,’ because fishing continues to happen in a worst-case scenario.”

Gallagher notes that purse seines typically are made of nylon, which sinks in water because of its density, so they’re not a significant contributor to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now about the size of Alaska. However, lighter density nets and fishing line made of high-denisty polyethylene wash up on shorelines around the world, “so it’s pretty incredible that this treaty is trying to address fishing gear as its own plastic pollution sector because almost all commercial fishing nets and lines are made of plastic polymers, so this treaty could address industrial, global and local fishing economies.”

�� Boulder PhD student Clare Gallager attended the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution as an observer. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

Many perceive plastic pollution as a symptom a bigger issue

“The biggest thing is production,” Gallagher says, “stopping primary plastic production. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about this treaty process, because it’s almost the same story, it’s the same players, it’s the same perpetrators as the international debate over fossil fuel emissions.”

In fact, Gallagher notes, the Center for International Environmental Law analyzed the affiliations of registered attendees for the session and found almost 200 lobbyists for the fossil fuel and chemical industries were registered.

The problems of plastic pollution are daunting, but there’s room for hope

“I felt, not being a United Nations treaty expert, pretty overwhelmed by the scale at which countries around the world need to compromise and work together to create any international treaty, especially environmental treaties,” Gallagher says. “It’s pretty overwhelming to think this is how humanity governs itself at the top level.

“That being said, I have hope that the most ambitious countries will continue to push for a strong treaty on plastic pollution. I don’t know if remorse is right word, but there is sadness that many of the countries suffering the most from plastic pollution are not producing the plastic. They’re the ones that have to deal with plastic trash and plastic pollution, the ones that have to fight for a strong treaty, and there’s a real power imbalance that I find so disgusting and disturbing.”

Gallagher says one of the most impressive coalitions she observed at the session was the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS): “There was a woman from Easter Island, which, granted, is part of Chile, and she told a story about how every time her young son goes surfing, which is like every day, she has to wash his hair because there’s so much microplastic in it when he’s done.

“People from some of the smallest, poorest countries repeatedly said, ‘This is not complex. We don’t want your trash; we need to stop this.’ I think that bravery and that fight—these Davids taking on Goliaths, as seen in the Rapa Nui Declaration—is what is going to make the world a better place.”

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�� Boulder PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis.

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Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society

Anonymous — Fri, 24 May 2024 15:05:33 +0000

Physicist’s dissertation gets top marks from American Physical Society Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/24/2024 - 09:05

Blair Seidlitz, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, studied near-collisions of nuclear beams at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and he did so despite having severely limited vision

Blair Seidlitz, who earned his PhD in physics in 2022 from the University of Colorado Boulder, has won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation, the society announced.

Seidlitz’s dissertation research was on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider, hosted at the international CERN laboratory in Switzerland. His �� Boulder research group, led by Professors Dennis Perepelitsa and Jamie Nagle, works in experimental nuclear physics—it collides nuclear beams (“ions") at the LHC to study the fundamental forces of nature under extreme conditions.

The major advance of Seidlitz’s dissertation was to use these nuclear beams at the LHC in an unusual way. “He was interested in the processes not where the beams slam into each other … but instead the cases where the beams just barely miss each other,” Perepelitsa said.

�� Boulder physics PhD alum Blair Seidlitz won the American Physical Society (APS) Dissertation Award in Hadronic Physics for his dissertation research on the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider.

“It turns out that in these cases, a photon emitted by one ion can strike the other, and thus result in rare and unusual ‘photo-nuclear’ collisions …. The ATLAS detector was not set up to take this kind of data by default. So Blair had to do a lot of work to develop the ‘trigger’ (the algorithms that decide which data to even record), to get access to this rare dataset.”

Perepelitsa said this kind of work is unusual for a graduate student; many graduate students work with existing infrastructure or use well-established procedures in research like this. “But Blair really took his idea from the conception stage, to implementing it himself, and helping to deploy it in person during data-taking at CERN,” a bustling scientific community at which Seidlitz spent significant time.

Once Seidlitz had collected the data, he then did a very careful analysis, which necessitated developing some new methods because nobody had really done this kind of thing before, Perepelitsa added.

The surprising result was that these sparse “photo-nuclear” collisions exhibited a collective “flow” behavior among their produced particles—“something you might only expect in the collisions of large nuclei where there are many, many particles that are produced and interact.”

“His measurement has come at a time when the scientific community is asking big questions, such as: Just how few particles can one have to still exhibit many-body collective motion? Blair’s thesis work, by paving the way to experimentally access these unusual datasets, is addressing these open questions head on!”

Seidlitz is now a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. He still works at ATLAS, but he now also works at a new experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, in which Perepelitsa and Nagle’s group at �� is closely involved. “So we are pleased that we can continue to collaborate with Blair very closely,” Perepelitsa said.

Seidlitz said he hopes to build on his graduate school work. “There are actually distinct categories (or types) of photon-nucleus collisions. My thesis work did not sort the different types, but studied them as a whole. In principle, it should be possible to sort these, although it has never been done. That way, we could study the ‘flow’ properties of each type individually, which would be really interesting.”

Seidlitz said that he and his colleagues will be able to study these types of collisions at the Electron Ion Collider, which is scheduled to be completed in the 2030’s at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York.

Seidlitz said he was surprised to win the APS dissertation award. “They called me while I was in the sPHENIX control room (an experiment at BNL). I don't usually pick up my phone, but it seemed to not be spam, and as fate would have it, it was an official from APS saying I had won.”

Seidlitz has charted a successful academic career even though he has Stargardt's disease, a rare form of macular degeneration that leaves him with approximately 1/20th the visual acuity of average people.

A wheel in the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider. Blair Seidlitz's dissertation research focused on near-collisions of nuclear beams in ATLAS. (Photo: CERN)

His vision posed many challenges, he said. “I guess the first challenge was learning as much as I could and getting through courses without being able to see the black board or projector, where I did most of my learning through textbooks.”

Seidlitz said disability service centers at �� Boulder and at his undergraduate institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “really made it possible for me to succeed, from scanning old textbooks to make PDFs, to scanning students' homework so I could grade it when I was a TA and recommending assistive technology.”

Another challenge was finding a field of research that would work for him. “Because physics that revolves around particle accelerators is so big and complicated, large collaborations are formed and the work is shared. Some people build the detectors—something I could not do—and others set up data analysis and reconstruction, which is a lot of software to take the signals from individual detectors and turn it into a measurement of a photon with a particular momentum, for example,” Seidlitz explained, adding:

“This is something I can do! I would say there are still challenges day to day, but they are manageable, and I am very grateful that I am in a place where I can contribute and do valuable work.

Seidlitz grew up in Wisconsin and earned a BS in engineering physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in plasma physics with Cary Forest, applying optical emission spectroscopy techniques for measurements of the electron temperature in the Plasma Couette Experiment and the Madison Plasma Dynamo Experiment.

The American Physical Society is a nonprofit organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.

APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Top image: The eight toroid magnets surrounding the calorimeter in the ATLAS detector. The calorimeter measures the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the center of the detector. (Photo: CERN)

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Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 15:20:11 +0000

Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/21/2024 - 09:20

Daniel Long

Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impact on pesticide use is fully understood. Claire Powers is doing her part to change that.

Powers, a PhD candidate in environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has co-authored a paper published today in Science. Powers and co-authors Ashley E. Larsen of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia investigate how organic agriculture influences the pesticide use of neighboring farms. Does it increase it? Decrease it?

The answer, they learned by analyzing thousands of field observations, is it depends.

Claire Powers, a �� Boulder PhD candidate in environmental studies, and her research colleagues found that farms neighboring organic fields both decrease and increase pesticide use, depending on the type of agricultural operation.

Location, location, location

“We found that conventional fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to increase their pesticide use,” says Powers, “and organic fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to decrease their pesticide use.”

Precisely why this is the case is unclear, but Powers, Larsen and Noack suspect it has to do with how organic farms—many of which use pesticides, albeit organically approved ones—implicate the larger ecosystem.

“Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests,” says Powers.

These natural enemies and pests then venture onto neighboring fields for shelter and food. If those fields are conventional, farmers will likely have to increase their pesticide use, and if they’re organic, farmers will likely be able to decrease their pesticide use.

This may sound like a win for organic farmers, but not so fast.

When organic and conventional farms are distributed randomly across a landscape—meaning there’s no specific reason why one type of field sits next to another—it’s often both conventional and organic farmers who lose, Powers explains.

“I have not talked to farmers specifically, but I think that, from a conventional farmer’s perspective, it can be a bummer to be adjacent to organic fields, because it means that you will spend more on pesticides. Similarly, organic farmers with neighboring conventional fields may have smaller populations of natural enemies and so larger populations of pests to treat.”

Yet thanks to Larsen, Noack and Powers’ paper, this predicament may someday be a thing of the past.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields,” says Powers. Doing so will likely reduce pesticide use overall and thereby benefit both the environment and farmers’ bank accounts.

A data dilemma

Completing this research was not without its challenges, says Powers. One was finding usable data.

“You have to be able to identify specific fields in a spatial data format, link that spatial data to each field’s pesticide-use rates, and also determine which fields are organic and which are conventional,” says Powers, adding that this information comes from several sources that are tough to combine and that annual agricultural spatial data and pesticide use aren’t particularly well tracked, especially outside of California.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields," says �� Boulder researcher Claire Powers.

But Powers, Larsen and Noack were able to find one county that kept such detailed records and made them publicly available: Kern County, California, an agricultural belt of land at the southern tip of the Central Valley and, as far as Powers and her co-authors were concerned, the golden ticket of the Golden State.

“Kern County has annual spatial data for their agricultural fields that can be linked to the two other crucial datasets—pesticide use and organic-crop producer IDs—which is really rare,” says Powers.

Yet the rareness of this data created a separate challenge: convincing the reviewers of the Science paper that it was enough. How reliable could data from just one county in just one state be?

Pretty reliable, says Powers. For one thing, Kern is a high-crop-producing county with many farms, which gave her and her co-authors a lot of room to check for pesticide spillover across a decent sample size. For another, its mix of organic and conventional farms closely resembles that of the nation, making it a useful case study.

Plus, Larsen and Noack put the data through a series of “robustness tests”—tests designed specifically to assess the data’s strength and generalizability—all of which it passed.

Nevertheless, Powers admits that she would jump at the chance to expand the research from the Science paper outward to other counties in California as well as to other states.

“It would be awesome to be able to do that.”

Past, present and future

Powers began this research while a master’s student at the Bren School at UCSB, where Larsen was one of her professors. Since coming to �� Boulder to pursue her doctorate, she has moved in a different direction, focusing on the impact of climate change on several species of alpine plants.

Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests.”

Yet the thread holding all her work together, Powers believes, is her interest in land conservation and management.

Growing up in Santa Paula, California—in “ag land,” as she calls it—Powers spent a lot of time on farms. She wasn’t a farmer herself, she’s quick to point out, but many of her family members and close friends were, and that gave her an appreciation for the outdoors.

Her passion for conservation then crystalized while she worked for five years as a field instructor for NOLS, an outdoor education provider, which took her across the United States and around the globe, including to places like India and South America.

“That got me interested in thinking about land management in a way that is inclusive and recognizes the need for working landscapes that support wildlife and native plants,” she says.

That interest drives her to this day, pushing her to ask questions, conduct research and publish papers like the one in Science, which she calls “a small step forward” on the long and winding path of scientific discovery.

“And there are lots more steps to take.”

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Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together.

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Scientist gleans human lessons from bacterial immune systems

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:56:40 +0000

Scientist gleans human lessons from bacterial immune systems Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2024 - 11:56

Rachel Sauer

�� Boulder PhD student Emily Kibby has won the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in recognition of her work researching bacterial immune responses

There are certain advantages to being a one-celled organism with no nucleus. In general, reproduction happens fast, and thus evolution does, too.

Take bacteria, for example: A bacterium can be invaded by a phage, which is a virus that infects and replicates only in bacterial cells, and within several generations—which can emerge in a single day—the bacteria may have evolved immunity to that virus.

“We’re so evolutionarily outclassed by bacteria,” says Emily Kibby, a PhD candidate in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Biochemistry and member of the Aaron Whiteley Research Group. “They can evolve so much faster, and they’re the real biochemical innovators of life on this planet. I think we have so much to learn from them.”

�� Boulder PhD candidate Emily Kibby has been recognized with the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences.

In fact, since joining Whiteley’s research group in 2020 for her graduate studies, that’s exactly what Kibby has done—work to understand how eukaryotes (organisms whose cells contain a nucleus encased in a membrane), including humans, have acquired and adapted bacterial immune proteins for their own purposes.

Her work recently was recognized with the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, given by the Fred Hutch Cancer Center to honor outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences. Kibby and her fellow winners were chosen for the quality, originality and scientific significance of their research and will be honored at a symposium May 3 in Seattle.

“Emily is highly deserving of the Weintraub award because she is a dedicated scientist whose fearlessness and innovative thinking have allowed her to open new research areas in my lab,” says Aaron Whiteley, a �� Boulder assistant professor of biochemistry.

“One of the most impressive aspects of her thesis work was a decision in her fourth year to undertake a new project in computational biology. She demonstrated independence and resourcefulness, seeking out necessary expertise from other investigators and in the literature. It can be very hard to break into new disciplines, and I am extremely proud of her accomplishments. I expect nothing short of amazing things to come!”

Bacterial origins

Kibby credits excellent AP biology and AP chemistry teachers at her Wisconsin high school with nurturing her ever-growing interest in science. It also helps that both of her parents are teachers, she says.

So, when she was considering what to study as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, “I decided to head down the middle between biology and chemistry,” she says. “I’ve just always been fascinated by the molecular mechanisms that make life possible. We have this incredible amount of molecular detail on cellular processes, but there’s still so much more to learn. That’s always what’s been so exciting to me, that we know so much but there’s this vast amount still to learn.”

She fell in love with bacteria during her undergraduate summers working in Helen Blackwell’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an aim is to devise novel chemical tools to decode and interfere with bacterial communication pathways.

After joining the Whiteley Lab, Kibby delved into research about bacterial immune systems and host-pathogen interactions. In studying the constant conflict between bacteria and phages, Kibby explored the wide range of immune pathways bacteria use to counter phage infection.

Kibby and her research colleagues homed in on proteins containing a NACHT module, which are present not only in prokaryotic bacteria, but in eukaryotic cells as well. These genetic overlaps demonstrate that elements of the human immune system originated in bacteria, Kibby says.

I’ve just always been fascinated by the molecular mechanisms that make life possible. We have this incredible amount of molecular detail on cellular processes, but there’s still so much more to learn."

“Rather than NACHT modules evolving out of thin air, it’s more likely they came to us from bacteria,” she explains. “At some point early in the history of human evolution, an ancient eukaryote interacted with a bacterial cell that had evolved this type of immunity and was able to adopt that for its own protection.”

The incredible diversity of bacteria

After four years of research, Kibby and her colleagues published their findings about how these bacterial proteins protect against phage. She then pivoted to research using AlphaFold Multimer to predict protein-protein interactions: “I shifted to this new approach in part because our mammalian NACHT proteins that have this great example of recognizing specific proteins,” Kibby says. “So, I thought I would learn something new and see if I could use computational tools to predict similar interactions in bacteria.”

AlphaFold Multimer is a tool that emerged from Google DeepMind, one of Google’s artificial intelligence think tanks, and has proven extremely good at predicting the structures of proteins from just an amino acid sequence, for example. It also can predict the interactions between multiple different proteins.

After learning the computational underpinnings of these predictions, Kibby is now doing lab work with actual proteins to determine whether the predictions are correct—do the proteins actually do what the computer says they will?

“I hope what we’re doing now helps set a standard for how to integrate protein predictions with wet lab validation,” Kibby says. “AlphaFold Multimer is really just another screening tool. It’s amazing and it’s shattering all the barriers of what we had been able to do before, but you will always have to have your controls and always have to validate your hits.”

In the midst of this research, Kibby hopes to defend her thesis in September and receive her PhD in December. She then aims to do postdoctoral research and ultimately earn a role at a university that allows her to research and teach, because guiding people through the fascinating universe of bacteria is one of her passions.

“The way I explain it is, everything is infected by viruses, and we have evolved number of ways to protect ourselves from these threats,” she says. “A lot of times, we think of bacteria as threats to our own immune system, and that’s true, they can be. But bacteria are also threatened by virus, and just like us, to protect themselves they have also evolved immune systems.

“If you look at CRISPR, for example, it’s revolutionizing medicine and research, but in the wild CRISPR is a bacterial immune system that protects bacteria from phages. There are very practical human applications for understanding the incredible diversity of bacteria.”

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�� Boulder PhD student Emily Kibby has won the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in recognition of her work researching bacterial immune responses.

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Legal rights and legal reality diverge for single women in Nepal

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 18:29:58 +0000

Legal rights and legal reality diverge for single women in Nepal Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/13/2023 - 11:29

Pam Moore

�� Boulder PhD candidate Tracy Fehr’s research examines the intersecting identities limiting Nepali women’s access to disaster relief funds following the devastating 2015 earthquakes

The devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal affected nearly 30% of the country’s population, causing an estimated 9,000 deaths, displacing 2.8 million people and destroying or severely damaging more than 800,000 homes.

In the years following the disaster, entrenched cultural, political and economic inequalities and social practices meant post-disaster recovery did not happen uniformly among those affected. Nepal’s National Planning Commission even acknowledged in a 2015 report following the earthquakes that differentiated gender norms and divisions of labor for women in Nepal—including a narrow asset base, the burden of domestic labor, limited access to economic resources and a lack of alternative livelihoods—could lead to a longer and more difficult recovery.

For many widows, or single women, in Nepal’s mid-hill region, existing social stigmas were often exacerbated following the earthquakes.

�� Boulder researcher Tracy Fehr (right) with a single woman who lives in Gorkha, Nepal.

However, newly published research by Tracy Fehr, a University of Colorado Boulder PhD candidate in sociology, shows that the complexities and contradictions of post-earthquake recovery for single women in Nepal is only part of the story. With more than 125 caste and indigenous nationality groups, Nepal is one of the most diverse countries on earth. And the widows’ experiences reflect that heterogeneity.

Despite housing reconstruction relief often being predicated on citizenship and property ownership, precluding many single women, the post-earthquake development context “provided an opportunity to create local women’s centers that provided space for single women to unite in a collective identity, facilitating a shift of longstanding stigma and an emerging renegotiation of what it means to ‘be a widow’ in Nepal,” Fehr wrote.

Observing inequality

Following the devastating earthquakes in spring 2015, Fehr volunteered with Women for Human Rights Nepal (WHR), an non-governmental organization (NGO) helping single Nepali women—including widows and women who are separated, divorced, are unmarried after the age of 35, or whose husbands are disappeared—gain socio-cultural, economic and political rights. The organization also provided post-disaster relief and support for single women across the country.

During her time in Nepal, Fehr observed how difficult it was for many single women to get relief funds. And she noticed that their access to resources often depended on the intersection of various aspects of their identities.

Motivated, in part, by what she learned and observed volunteering with WHR, Fehr returned to Nepal in 2018 as a graduate student and researcher to formally study how social factors intersect to inform Nepali widows’ post-earthquake experiences.

“I think there’s this monolithic story of widows in Nepal as victimized and non-agentic,” she says. But through 33 interviews and three focus groups, Fehr’s research told a different story—one that was more nuanced and more accurate. “In fact, each woman’s experience is dependent on so many different intersecting identities and social factors beyond marital status,” she explains.

Social factors influencing women’s experiences

In response to the earthquake’s widespread destruction, the government of Nepal created an “owner-driven” housing reconstruction (OHDR) program to offer financial assistance to those who had to rebuild their homes. Under the program, only Nepali people with citizenship and documentation of property ownership were eligible for assistance.

But while the law stipulates that widows have the right to their deceased husbands’ property, many women have found it difficult or impossible to take ownership of it—which cut off their access to the government assistance that they desperately needed. “There’s statutory law, which is what’s on the books, and then there’s customary law, which is what’s actually happening,” says Fehr.

Factors like education and location played major roles in women’s access to relief resources. “Education allowed women to understand more about what their rights were and how to access them,” Fehr says. Meanwhile, the farther women lived from the district center, the harder it was to access services. For example, government services and NGOs had difficulty reaching rural communities, which often lacked roads, says Fehr.

The hope is that with a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of legal and cultural forces on women’s lived experiences, government relief programs can become more effective and inclusive, now and into the future.”

At the same time, Fehr found that women’s experience in the public sphere—or lack thereof—also impacted their access to aid. Women who worked, whether as teachers, merchants, or manual laborers, were generally more comfortable navigating social spaces, a skill that helped them go through the appropriate channels to utilize relief funding.

Complicating matters further were women’s relationship with their in-laws, says Fehr. Because Nepali women typically live with their husband’s family, many widows were socially and financially dependent on their in-laws. Some experienced conflict with their in-laws in relinquishing the deceased husband’s property—especially if they were young enough to remarry. Meanwhile, many higher-caste families adhere to stricter gender norms, which in some cases made it more difficult, if not impossible, to assert their rights or challenge their in-laws for property, says Fehr.

Implications for children

While Nepali social norms have shifted significantly over the past two decades—women can now inherit property without the consent of involvement of a male relative, and they can document their citizenship without requiring permission from a male—there is still progress to be made, Fehr says. “One of the most pressing concerns at the moment for single women is the legal right for Nepali women to confer citizenship to their children, which is a legal right for men in Nepal.”

This issue came up in several interviews during her research, because citizenship will significantly affect access for single women’s children to future post-disaster relief and government services.

“Although legal changes are slow to be reflected in day-to-day life, having laws in place does provide some legal and political leverage for single women,” says Fehr. “The hope is that with a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of legal and cultural forces on women’s lived experiences, government relief programs can become more effective and inclusive, now and into the future.”

Top image and images below by Tracy Fehr

�� Boulder PhD candidate Tracy Fehr’s research examines the intersecting identities limiting Nepali women’s access to disaster relief funds following the devastating 2015 earthquakes

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Your brain remembers what your fingers used to do

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:50:58 +0000

Your brain remembers what your fingers used to do Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/02/2023 - 08:50

Rachel Sauer

New �� Boulder research demonstrates that, with practice, older adults can regain manual dexterity that may have seemed lost

Despite what ads for wrinkle cream would have us believe, there’s no magic reversal for aging. As the years pass, a certain amount of change is inevitable but not, it turns out, inexorable.

Fingers that feel less nimble in doing the normal tasks of life—buttoning a shirt, writing a list—are not doomed to stay that way, new research shows. It also demonstrates that, to some extent, age is just a number.

Researchers in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Integrative Physiology—first author Sajjad Daneshgar and Taylor Tvrdy, both PhD students, and Professor Roger Enoka—worked with more than two dozen study participants ages 60 to 83 to understand whether manual dexterity can improve with time.

Sajjad Daneshgar, a PhD student in the �� Boulder Department of Integrative Physiology, conducted research that found manual dexterity can improve with practice in older age.

Over six sessions, participants completed a pegboard exercise multiple times, and after the sixth session, data showed that the average time it took to complete the pegboard had decreased for all participants.

“We saw that in older adults, training can improve hand function to a level it was at in middle age,” Daneshgar says. “In a way, practicing helped them go back a decade or two. Most people believe that aging has many negative challenges in terms of function in the hands, but this study shows that what you achieved in the past can really help you as you get older.”

Simple puzzle, complex process

For the study, Daneshgar and his research colleagues recruited right-handed older adults with no history of neurological disease. After an initial familiarization session and evaluation session, participants completed a grooved pegboard test 25 times in each of six sessions.

The test required participants to fit small, keyhole-shaped metal pegs into 25 holes on a board as quickly as possible. The keyholes had different orientations on the board, so participants not only had to manipulate the pegs with their fingers to get them situated correctly, but then fit them correctly.

“At first glance, this looks like a simple puzzle or game, but it’s actually a very complex process,” Daneshgar says. “Your mind is controlling your physical function—and we’re doing a lot more studies on this physical function and what’s going on in the muscles, in the nervous system—and we’re seeing that cognition of the mind, how you learn things, is connected to the muscles and how dexterous you are.”

For example, one of the study participants was a 67-year-old woman who played the piano in her youth. While the average time to complete the pegboard was between 40 and 50 seconds, she could do it in 36—a time faster than some of the researchers could achieve.

“Even though she wasn’t regularly playing the piano during the study, that tells us that perhaps the memory your brain has of controlling those muscles still exists,” Daneshgar says. “Some activities that people do—playing a musical instrument, rock climbing—can be very beneficial for manual dexterity, and even if they’re done earlier in life, the brain may remember controlling those muscles.”

During the research, study participants fit small, keyhole-shaped metal pegs into 25 holes on a board as quickly as possible.

Practice leads to improvement

However, those who reach their later years without a longtime history of guitar-playing or bouldering shouldn’t despair. Wherever study participants started at baseline—even if their initial times for completing the pegboard were comparatively slow—each saw improvement in their times by the sixth session.

“Manual dexterity can be improved by the brain,” Daneshgar says. “It’s not just at the level of the fingers. Signals from the brain are controlling function and practicing aids learning. This study shows that, as far as function in the limbs and hands, learning in terms of muscle training never ends. Whatever level you’re at, you can go back to this training and practicing to see improvement in function.”

Another important outcome from the research is demonstrating that categorizing people’s performance based on chronological age during their later years may not be the best way to understand manual dexterity.

“Whatever you learned in the past is going to be a main player in performance in older age,” Daneshgar says. “Of course, not all people in older age are going to have the same performance, but people who had better practice in the past can, in older age, practice and get to a place where they perform better than middle-age adults.

“But we also showed that practice helps everybody. It doesn’t matter if you have particular experience earlier in life, practice helps all people to do better with no exception.”

Manual dexterity is one of the National Institutes of Health Toolbox biomarkers of neurological health and motor function across the span of life. Daneshgar notes that the research demonstrates manual dexterity is not something that must inevitably worsen over time. With practice, the brain can remember what the fingers once did.

“Manual dexterity relates to our ability to button a shirt or hold a pen,” Daneshgar says. “These are the activities of daily life that we want to be able to do throughout our lives, and they’re abilities that we don’t need to lose.”

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New �� Boulder research demonstrates that, with practice, older adults can regain manual dexterity that may have seemed lost.

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Budding philosopher makes a (qualified) defense of monogamy

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:14:40 +0000

Budding philosopher makes a (qualified) defense of monogamy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/25/2023 - 12:14

Bradley Worrell

In a recently published paper, �� Boulder PhD student highlights some of the benefits of being in a monogamous relationship, for those who are so inclined

“It would be morally fine for you and your partner to be monogamous. You don’t have to be. You can be non-monogamous if you want. Either option is permissible.”

With that introduction, University of Colorado Boulder PhD student in philosophy Kyle York begins his paper, “A Couple of Reasons in Favor of Monogamy”—a lighthearted defense of having just one relationship partner, if you want—which was recently published online in the Journal of Social Philosophy.

In his paper, York says the ethics of monogamy and non-monogamy is a fairly new area of systematic research, one in which much of the writing on the subject has been critical of monogamy. In fact, he says some philosophers have gone as far as to say that monogamy is “immoral.”

How so?

Kyle York is a PhD student in philosophy whose areas of interest include the ethics of love.

“I can’t speak for all of them, but with some writers, there is the idea that, with monogamy, you are restricting your partner” in a way that’s akin to asking a partner not to have additional friends, York says. As an example, he mentions papers published by philosopher Harry Chalmers. “If you choose to look at it that way, then it (monogamy) is going to seem like an immoral practice, or at least one that we should grow out of.”

York says he doesn’t see it that way, but at the same time he’s quick to add that he’s not advocating that everyone must be on Team Monogamy.

“I should just mention, because I don’t want to come off the wrong way, that I’m not saying non-monogamy is bad,” he says. “I’m saying they’re both good, in different ways. And so, one of them isn’t a flawed version of the other. They both have valuable things to them.”

York recently spoke with Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine about the case for monogamy, why the topic interests him and how monogamy fits into his larger focus on the ethics of love. His responses have been edited for space constraints and lightly edited for style and clarity.

Question: Can you summarize what you see as some of the main arguments in favor of monogamy, as outlined in your paper?

York: The first one is practicality. I think that might be one of the biggest ones. Practicality can include things like being able to move around together (with a monogamous partner), because, alternatively, if you have multiple partners, and some of them move to different places, then it’s not clear who you’re going to be with or who you should move with. So, it can be simpler to plan a life with just one person. Every other person that you add to the mix is going to make it that much harder to plan out together.

There’s also the issue of time constraints. You might get more time with someone if you have less partners, and that might tie in a bit with the second reason, which is intimacy. One part of intimacy is mutual influence, which includes the frequency of contact you have with that person and also the diversity of ways in which you interact. If you are sharing your life with one person, there’s going to be a greater diversity of mutual influence, or how many ways in which you influence each other.

Another reason is specialness. In my paper, I give the example of meeting (the musician) Beck at a party, and he invites you to play guitar on his new album. So, in one case, you show up at the studio and there’s just Beck waiting there, and you and he record a song together. In the other version, you show up and there’s 100 other guitarists there. Then you’re like, ‘OK, well, I guess he selected me on the generic grounds that I’m a guitar player.’

So, you’re likely to feel more special if Beck selected you as the one rather than one among 100. I’m not saying that non-monogamous people don’t select each other out with some exclusive criteria, but this is also because specialness and exclusivity go together to a certain degree.

And the last example is jealousy, although I don’t think that’s one of the most important reasons. And the example I give there is a couple contemplating visiting a sex club (separately). It doesn’t necessarily threaten the practicality—or, in their case, the specialness—of the relationship, but the couple might decide the pleasure they would receive from it isn’t worth the jealously they would go through. So, then it seems reasonable to say, ‘Well, let’s just not do it then.’

Question: You previously published another paper that also defended monogamy. Why have you chosen to focus on this topic?

York: The first paper I wrote, the one before this one, was because I didn’t see many (philosophical) defenses of monogamy. There have been some defenses of monogamy to the extent of: How is it compatible with a loving attitude?

So, I tried to offer reasons why people might want to be monogamous, such as to preserve a greater amount of intimacy or maybe it just makes commitment easier. And maybe there’s a certain specialness that is easier to get being monogamous. …

This is something that I had (personally) thought about for a long time. I think that I had a desire to be monogamous but couldn’t exactly figure out why. And where I was at, the values of non-monogamy were often extolled, which made me think hard about whether there could be distinctive reasons for monogamy. Some ideas also came from conversations with my partner, now wife, about the topic.

Question: You make several arguments in favor of monogamy in your paper, but one argument you don’t make is to be monogamous simply because it’s what society expects.

York: There is a writer whose work I like, Natasha McKeever, and I refer to her in my paper. She argues that monogamy should be less of a norm, just because then, if people do decide to be monogamous, they do it for the right reasons, which makes sense to me.

I don’t have a strong opinion about what the norm should be, exactly. …

People should be able to write their own contracts for what they want out of their relationships, within reasonable limits. I do think there are some things that you can’t forbid your partner from doing, such as, I can’t tell my partner, ‘Don’t talk to other men.’

But I think the limits of monogamy are things like, we can agree not to have sex with other people or go into romantic relationships with other people. That seems reasonable.

Question: For you, it seems like the subject of monogamy is part of a larger focus on the ethics of love.

York: A little bit. I think that love is really interesting. I once wrote a little article for Blackwell’s Pop Culture and Philosophy series website, specifically about the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (in which a middle-aged laundromat owner becomes able to access parallel universes and the more glamorous and exciting lives she could have led). And there’s this great scene where she tells her daughter, “No matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”

I think that’s a great illustration of how, when you love someone … that love kind of grabs on to them—to a significant extent— independently of whatever desirable qualities that they might have. The beloved person is non-fungible—they can’t just be replaced by someone with similar but better qualities.

That’s why I love that movie—because it shows that she (the main character) has all these alternative lives and alternate universes with maybe even better versions of her family, but there’s just something about her daughter and her husband being her daughter and husband that makes her say, ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else except here with you.’

That’s a part of love that I find interesting.

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In a recently published paper, �� Boulder PhD student highlights some of the benefits of being in a monogamous relationship, for those who are so inclined.

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