Decades-long Career Research Articles

The Father of the School Choice Movement

ABSTRACT Milton Friedman is widely considered the intellectual father of the school choice movement. While Friedman deserves much credit, Father Virgil Blum stands out as an influential figure in the nascent school choice movement. Using archival research, this paper examines Blum’s contributions to the movement. From his 1954 doctoral dissertation, which made the legal case for funding religious schools, to his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education, and his decades-long career as a professor, Blum was a tireless advocate for educational freedom. While Friedman made the market argument, Blum made the legal, moral, and religious freedom arguments for school choice.

Le Judas Confedéré: James Longstreet’s surprising alliance with Black politicians in New Orleans

ABSTRACT In a remarkable political about-face, Confederate general James Longstreet embraced Congress’s Reconstruction Acts in 1867 and thereby became a pariah among unreconstructed white Southerners. Longstreet’s conversion launched him on a decades-long career as an influential Republican operative and iconoclastic critic of his own society. Historians have overlooked the most significant aspect of Longstreet’s postwar career: namely his alliances with Black politicians during Reconstruction. Those alliances reveal the depth of Longstreet’s commitment to the Republican party; the source of the white-hot animus against him on the part of conservatives; and the ultimate limits of white Southern Republicans’ tolerance for transformative change.

The Speed of the Land: An Interview with Karen Jamieson

Settler scholar and artist Alana Gerecke interviews settler choreographer Karen Jamieson about her decades-long career making site-based and community-engaged dances. In particular, Jamieson reflects on what she has learned about the complexities of orienting dance practice toward deepening connection with land, and of working with Indigenous collaborators in a respectful and non-extractive way.

Doctorji the Divorcé

Using newspaper articles and previously sealed court records, this article analyses Bhagat Singh Thind through his almost entirely overlooked short and turbulent marriage to Inez Buelen, a marriage that occurred less than a year after the Supreme Court decision that ruled Thind ineligible for American citizenship and only months into his decades-long career as a metaphysical lecturer. In contrast to the prevailing view that Thind’s sense of his own race was unknowable, or that he defined himself as White as part of a legal strategy or a matter of expediency in gaining citizenship, I argue that the marriage and subsequent divorce show that he consistently claimed Whiteness for years after his Supreme Court case, both in public and in private, and on the basis of descent, geography, caste, racial science, previous court rulings, and his own blood.

Observing Evolution: Peppered Moths and the Discovery of Parallel Melanism

Observing Evolution: Peppered Moths and the Discovery of Parallel Melanism

The Ternary Object: On Shinichiro Kurimoto’s Theory of Levels

This brief article has two objectives. First, it aims to provide a concise and lucid elucidation of Theory of Levels, an ontological system which the veteran Japanese thinker Shinichiro Kurimoto first invented in the early 1980s and has ever refined through the course of his decades-long career. Second, it intends to demonstrate with cogency that the discourse, albeit having been buried in oblivion for quite a while, carries a potential to help one to obtain a new perspective from which to freshly and positively interpret the existential dilemma between our natural sense that each one of us is a unique existence and the sheer reality that every one of us is merely a trivial strand of diverse larger structures.
 In order to achieve the objects, the argumentation proceeds in the following order. Taking a survey of the papers in which Kurimoto’s Theory of Levels makes an appearance, the initial part confirms that, though it fis not the case that all academicians have completely disregarded the theory, as yet none of them has conducted a sufficiently comprehensive dissection thereof. Consulting, or rather reconstructing Kurimoto’s laconic account in his 2013 booklet entitled The Last Lecture of Shinichiro Kurimoto, the second part clarifies that the theoretical singularity of Theory of Levels consists in that it enables one to deem an existence to be a ternary object and thereby to get over the apparently insuperable quandary mentioned above. The third part concludes the discussion by indicating that decades after Kurimoto some researchers in natural science come to discuss from their own scientific perspective some views that hold a quite high degree of intimacy with Kurimoto’s theory. The authors of this paper are fully convinced that the Theory of Levels and/or fields upheld by the researchers
 mentioned in this paper are worth academic efforts to be scrutinized to close in on the ontological essence of mankind and every other existence alike.
 Keywords: Shinichiro Kurimoto, Theory of Levels, Japanese Thought

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Nancy B. Jackson dies at 65

Nancy B. Jackson, former president of the American Chemical Society, died Jan. 3 at age 65 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jackson served as ACS president in 2011. Jackson earned a BS in chemistry from George Washington University in 1979. After college, she worked in the ACS education department before leaving to pursue chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned an MS in 1986 and a PhD in 1990. In 1991, she started a decades-long career at Sandia National Laboratories, first as an energy researcher, then as manager of the Chemical and Biological Sensing, Imaging, and Analysis Department, and later as deputy director of the International Security Center. She retired from Sandia in 2017 as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. Jackson had Seneca heritage and served for 2 years as Sandia’s tribal government liaison. She worked with tribal colleges to expand their science programs and helped

Race Records

Race Records

Review: Switched-On Bach, by Roshanak Kheshti, and Wendy Carlos: A Biography, by Amanda Sewel

Review: <i>Switched-On Bach</i>, by Roshanak Kheshti, and <i>Wendy Carlos: A Biography</i>, by Amanda Sewel

A BETTER WAY

A BETTER WAY

Transmogrifying Guadalupes, Transmogrifying Selves: The Queer Inhumanist Aesthetics of Gloria Anzaldúa's Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro

Transmogrifying Guadalupes, Transmogrifying Selves:The Queer Inhumanist Aesthetics of Gloria Anzaldúa's Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro Marcos Gonsalez (bio) Altered by a storm and subsequently repaired by an arborist with a saw, a Monterey cypress tree takes the shape of the Virgen de Guadalupe off the coast of California. Or perhaps this is the Virgen de Guadalupe herself taking the shape of a tree. This miraculous scene of the divine in the ordinary takes place in GLORIA ANZALDÚA'S posthumously published dissertation, Light in the Dark ⁄ Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). In this work she intended for publication but couldn't complete in time due to her passing in 2004, the queer Chicana anthologist, writer, and activist recounts witnessing this Guadalupe tree: [End Page 631] I suddenly saw her coming out of the hollowed trunk: It was la Virgen de Guadalupe, head tilted, arms extended, halo spread all around. From a distance, the bright live tans and browns of the raw newly cut wood and dangling trunk fibers looked like the folds of her robe. … But once I saw la Virgen emerging from the tree, my imagination picks her out every time I walk toward her, no matter how age, storm, or sea alters the cypress's trunk.1 The description becomes even trickier in determining if, upon subsequent visits, the tree is La Virgen de Guadalupe, or if she emerges from it, animatedly inhuman. Regardless of how the tree's shape ages or alters, Anzaldúa bears witness to the Virgen de Guadalupe each time she encounters the arboreal entity. This Guadalupe tree is both divinity and tree in Anzaldúa's phrasing, and parsing distinctions of form, matter, and species becomes difficult. Later on, further difficulty arises when Anzaldúa herself transforms into the tree, both becoming one, human and nonhuman at the same time. Such slippages in imagery and form reveal how perceiving the world is a shifting, transmaterial, and embodied experience in Anzaldúa's unfinished dissertation manuscript. Like her other published and unpublished writings she produced in her decades-long career, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro merges the theoretical, spiritual, Catholic, and Indigenous iconography with the autobiographical. These dissertation chapters range from reflections on 9/11 and U.S. imperialism, diaristic ruminations on the labor-intensive work of drafting a piece of writing, narrating a visit to a 1992 museum exhibition on Aztec culture, and other expository chapters touching on her ideas about healing and composing identities. Anzaldúa worked on Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro for well over a decade, producing various outlines and drafts, and there are many iterations of the project that scholar AnaLouise Keating pieced together and published after Anzaldúa's death. The scene of the tree as Guadalupe and the Guadalupe as tree is not unusual as Anzaldúa's onto-epistemic aesthetic practice generally makes these assemblages quotidian, part of the very fabric of reality and consciousness. Yet Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro is a unique contribution to her oeuvre, critical thought, and autobiographical writing because the manuscript draws particular attention to scenes of unwieldly, indeterminate, and shapeshifting transformations of being-knowing, and instances depicting the pleasures and intimacies of human and nonhuman becomings. This uniquely multispecies, transmaterial aesthetic, coupled with the unfinished quality of Light in the [End Page 632] Dark ⁄ Luz en lo oscuro, advances what I am identifying as a queer inhumanist transmogrificatory aesthetic. Queer inhumanist transmogrificatory aesthetics is a useful framework with which to track the uncanniness of multispecies, transmaterial becomings in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, which challenge colonial paradigms and liberal humanist logics. How does, for instance, a Guadalupe tree on a cliff shape our reality, or the potentiality for other realities? How does such an unusual transmogrifying entity in Anzaldúa's critical-creative autobiographic writing animate another kind of ethico-political sensibility that is not dependent on settler coloniality and capitalist imperatives? The Guadalupe tree she references across Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, for example, is a queerly inhuman anticolonial entity that proffers ways of...

Pictures of You

In the wake of Douglas Crimp's passing in July 2019, Johanna Burton reflects on her still-evolving intellectual and personal relationship with this figure so crucial to histories of art, activism, and critical writing. Briefly tracing the various areas of thinking with which Crimp was associated over his decades-long career, Burton argues that the sum of Crimp's trajectory of thought is much greater than any of its formidable parts. Crimp has perhaps been most often associated with the onset of a particular tenet of postmodernism, namely the formation of the “Pictures Generation,” (including artists like Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman). Yet Crimp, dissatisfied with the limits of this discourse, moved in the early 80s purposefully away from it toward other evolving dialogues: first around the AIDS crisis, and later into film, dance, memoir, and beyond. Ultimately, Crimp's legacy, Burton argues, is defined by his desire to unseat rather than produce or maintain established thinking. He models theoretical paradigms that anticipate their own eventual irrelevance in order to make space for others.

Camouflaged Histories

Lei Yan 雷燕, whose artistic practice was shaped by a decades-long career in the Chinese military, began a period of transition through participation in a 2002 restaging of the Communist Red Army’s 1934 Long March as a multi-sited international art project. Her resulting encounter with US feminist art icon Judy Chicago raised questions about the potential neocolonial influence of global feminist art. The work Lei subsequently produced performs an autoethnographic excavation of the sociohistorical categories—woman soldier, military artist, and woman artist—that made her as both artist and woman. She works from within a national representational corpus, subjecting it to various experiments to reveal the fields of violence it has enacted from the Sino-Vietnamese War to the Great Sichuan earthquake. Lei Yan’s meditation through photography upon national, revolutionary iconography evolved into soft sculpture objects in cloth and paper. Their arrested ephemerality decenters the human subject, drawing attention to haunting absences in conventional stories of art, feminism, and nation. In comparison with the monumental work of Ai Weiwei 艾未未, who also created pieces in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Lei’s art serves not to admonish but to bring back into consciousness lost lives and camouflaged histories.

On the Edges: Influences, Encounters, Relations, and Conviviality

The essays gathered in this special issue pay tribute to Rebecca West and her four decades-long career in Italian Studies. Two award-winning studies plot prime coordinates in our esteemed colleague...

North Dakota's Geologic Legacy: Our Land and How It Formed by John P. Bluemle

Reviewed by: North Dakota's Geologic Legacy: Our Land and How It Formed by John P. Bluemle Lydia Tackett North Dakota's Geologic Legacy: Our Land and How It Formed. By John P. Bluemle. Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 2016. vii + 376 pp. Maps, charts, photographs, notes, sources and recommended reading, index. $39.95 paper. North Dakota's unique geologic story is primarily that of glaciers, representing one of the youngest glacially shaped regions in the country. The importance of Cenozoic glacial research is enormous—the climatic shifts that resulted in the growth and recession of "Ice Age" glaciers provide vital information about long-term trends in order to understand and predict how our climate will change in the near future. North Dakota is one of the best regions in the country to recognize glacial geomorphology; however, the landforms created by glacial erosion, deposition, and subsidence can be subtle and difficult to identify for nongeologists, and many common features to the North Dakotan landscape which formed as a direct result of glacial movement are not widely recognized as attributable to glaciers. In North Dakota's Geologic Legacy, John Bluemle skillfully describes various North Dakota regions that have been sculpted by glaciers or blanketed by their sediments in language that can be understood by any reader. In addition to the glacial features, Bluemle relates peripheral, underlying geologic features which connect to surrounding states and Canada: the Bakken basin to the north, the Badlands to the southwest, the buttes of the Cannonball and Hell Creek formations to the south, and the younger Red River Valley to the east. Each of [End Page 96] these structures can be related to geologic histories in a broader context, linking more familiar, widespread geologic features with the glacial history of the state. Bluemle divides the state into several large swaths to describe the formation and subsequent erosion of each region, providing color photographs of specific landforms that illustrate the processes he has outlined. Many descriptions and photographs are accompanied by charming personal stories of his time as state geologist of North Dakota, interacting with people in the state over the course of his decades-long career. In this way, the book is sometimes like a memoir, and anyone who has spent time in North Dakota will recognize the characters he describes. Bluemle's photographs of the region are often spectacular, and he typically includes information about how to get to the off-road features and what they look like today, if significantly altered since the taking of the image. The book also includes excellent diagrams that would be useful to any teacher of geomorphology or related topics. North Dakota's Geologic Legacy strikes a great balance between science, exploration, and history of the state of North Dakota, and is a great companion book for those looking to learn more about the region. Lydia Tackett Department of Geosciences North Dakota State University Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

In memoriam: Adele L. Boskey, PhD

The orthopaedic and musculoskeletal research communities this year lost one of the pioneers, great mentors, and leaders of our field: Adele L. Boskey, Ph.D. Adele was a crystallographer by training and she applied that expertise to advance both knowledge of fundamental musculoskeletal biology as well as clinical knowledge for the benefit of patients. She received her B.S. in chemistry from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Boston University and launched her career with a post-doctoral fellowship at the Imperial College in London. Adele was a passionate and dedicated researcher for more than 45 years at The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. During her tenure at HSS, she held the Starr Chair in Mineralized Tissue Research and in addition to professorships in the Weill Cornell Medical College, the Weill Graduate School of Medical Science, CUNY and, Cornell University. She also served as Director of Research from 1993 to 2002 and is credited as having initiated and led a research renaissance at HSS. She was President of the Orthopaedic Research Society in 1996–1997. Adele is best known for her contributions to our fundamental understanding of biomineralization and to our understanding of bone disorders such as osteoporosis and osteogenesis imperfecta. She demonstrated that imaging techniques such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy could be applied to biological tissues to better understand their chemistry and composition. As evidence of her outstanding abilities and passion for her research, she was continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health throughout her decades-long career. Many of her nearly 300 publications form a seminal and enduring body of literature on biomineralization. Adele was also an extraordinary mentor and leader. She mentored untold numbers of students, residents, post-doctoral fellows, and new investigators. Adele was generous with her time and gracious with her constructive and valuable wisdom, be it about a scientific hypothesis or work-life balance, or everything in-between. More tangibly, Adele was the first woman to serve as president of the Orthopaedic Research Society. She and Linda Sandell, the second woman to be president, furthered the advancement of inclusive excellence in the society by founding the Women's Leadership Forum of the ORS. In all that she did, Adele set an extraordinary example through her quiet yet effective leadership that clearly and emphatically valued ethical behavior, equitable opportunity and respect for pursuit of the highest quality musculoskeletal research. For her scholarship, mentorship, and leadership, Adele was recognized with many of the highest honors that can be received in our field. She received an AAOS/ORS Kappa Delta Award, the ORS/AAOS Alfred R. Shands, Jr. Award, the Lawrence G. Raisz Award of the ASBMR, and Distinguished Investigator Award of the ORS/OREF and the Pioneer in Orthopaedics Award of the ORS. On a more personal note, we both had the great fortune to have known and collaborated with Adele. Barbara and Adele formed an enduring friendship with Adele when they were postdoctoral fellows, both funded by the National Institute for Dental Research to investigate aspects of biomineralization. It was not long before they involved Cathy Raggio in their work and a research partnership was born. As always, Adele's generosity was in evidence. She brought Barbara into the ORS and soon Clare Rimnac was added to the team. For years, these four women shared their personal and scientific aspirations, meeting at the ORS as roommates and colleagues. Adele had a force of character that brought people together. She was a sister and mentor to all of us in ORS.

“A Good and Necessary Thing”: Genre and Justice in Octavia Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories

Abstract Widely recognized as a science fiction writer, and one of a number of prominent black science fiction writers publishing in English, Octavia Butler's “work needs to be understood within the context of the traditions of the genre” of science fiction, a point Patricia Melzer makes in her book, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Discussing Octavia Butler's fiction and its genre, however, means going beyond simply using the term science fiction to describe the many literary works she wrote over her prolific and decades-long career.

The Anemic Cinemas of Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own movie camera in 1920 but would produce only a single complete film, Anemic Cinema (1926), over the course of his decades-long career. Scrutiny of written sources and other archival materials reveals significant experimentation with the moving image in other formats and media, particularly after his relocation to the United States in the 1940s. Avoiding standard filmmaking, the artist interrogated period conceptions of the cinematic medium and spectatorship through a series of filmic and nonfilmic works, including Discs (ca. 1945–47), Please Touch (1947), and Étant donnés … (1946–66).

Thinking meat: On Gu Dexin’s May 2, 2009

Abstract In 2009, the reclusive artist Gu Dexin finally bid farewell to the art world after a decades-long career with a sweeping installation that centred on two declarations: ‘we have killed people’ and ‘we can go to heaven’. This work, May 2, 2009, recalls both phases of his career, including his early investment through collaborative projects in diagrammatic abstractions as well as his continuous sculptural practice, which often comprised accumulations of decaying organic matter. This article proposes to understand this final work – and, relatedly, his two bodies of work – as continuous rather than distinct, through the lens of meat as a form of thought, as a relation of predation or nutrition rather than an object. In Gu’s peculiar materialism, butchery functions as analysis and ingestion as synthesis, and then ultimately approaches a kind of rationalism. In this light, I end with a suggestion about the relevance of new strains of speculative materialism for a reappraisal of experimental artistic practices in China from the 1990s on with their philosophical ambitions in mind.