Domestic Landscape Research Articles

Savage Gardens: Balancing Maintenance, Aesthetics, and Ecosystem Services in the Biodiversity Crisis Era

The escalating biodiversity crisis, coupled with the increasing frequency of droughts and anticipated water shortages due to climate change, necessitates a shift towards biodiversity-led landscape architecture, including domestic gardens. Traditionally viewed as high-maintenance spaces emphasising tidiness, domestic gardens can significantly impact urban green infrastructure and species richness. This paper explores the concept of ‘savage gardens’—untamed and natural spaces representing a fourth nature approach, incorporating wild gardens and neglected areas. Despite potential challenges in public appreciation, it is argued that savage gardens offer substantial benefits, such as reduced maintenance, increased biodiversity, and enhanced resilience to climate change. By reframing the perception of ‘savage’ from biophobic to a reconnection with nature, savage gardens are proposed as a viable solution for balancing aesthetics, maintenance, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in domestic landscapes, promoting a more sustainable future in the face of the biodiversity emergency.

A Comprehensive Survey of 2024 Funding for Radiation Oncology Visiting Medical Student Electives.

Visiting electives provide an opportunity for medical students to engage with radiation oncology (RO) programs, likely influencing residency match outcomes. However, some student's out-of-pocket costs may be prohibitive, and in attempts to offset the financial burden of visiting electives, particularly for students underrepresented in medicine (URiM), some institutions offer scholarships. Here, we characterized the current domestic landscape of funded RO electives. Visiting electives were identified through the FREIDA and VSLO databases in April 2024. Funded elective availability and departmental characteristics were identified via internet search by two independent reviewers. Fisher's exact test was used to determine whether there was a difference in the distribution of scholarships across the US due to the small sample size. Ninety-two visiting electives were identified, with 40 programs offering URiM elective scholarships (43.5%). Twelve (30%) were funded specifically by RO departments, and 28 (70%) were part of broader institutional URiM scholarship initiatives. The median stipend provided was $2000 (IQR $500), range $1000-$5000. Analysis of scholarships by US census division and metro area revealed unequal distribution. Electives in New England, Mountain, and East North Central divisions had higher funding proportion compared to electives in the East South Central, West South Central, and Middle Atlantic divisions. Only 1/9 electives in New York City were funded compared with 4/6 in Los Angeles. Departments with funded electives had more faculty physicians and medical residents. In our review of the 2024 landscape, over 40% of RO electives offer financial support. However, we identified geographical disparities in the distribution of scholarships, highlighting the need for interventions to address unequal access to a wide array of training programs. Our study represents a valuable resource for students interested in RO and highlights the continued need to positively contribute to increasing diversity in the field. Future work exploring the impact of funded electives is needed.

SilenceTop: An Interactive Microarchitecture Responding Socially to Nonsocial Silences

Abstract SilenceTop is an interactive microarchitecture that reinterprets the traditional Korean soban table. This project aims to create a new form of interaction through silence by emphasizing nonlinguistic cues for interaction. SilenceTop challenges established notions of solitude and awkward conversational gaps while reshaping the domestic landscape. By harmonizing architectural and furniture dimensions, SilenceTop fosters interactivity among objects, spaces, and humans. The design offers easy assembly, adapting seamlessly to domestic settings with diverse spatial functions. Each seating side is positioned 75 cm apart, striking a balance for interaction in relationships both intimate and formal. The project focuses on silence, redefines object-space-human interactivity, and enriches the experience of person-environment engagement.

Efficient IoT -Machine Learning Based Smart Irrigation Using Support Tree Algae Algorithm

The utilisation of irrigation, one of the most water-intensive agricultural techniques worldwide, has grown in popularity over time. Smart irrigation methods are comparatively innovative technologies that improve domestic landscape irrigation plans, reducing water usage and potential contamination. The primary determinant of agricultural output is soil moisture, and irrigation management depends on a precise estimate of this criterion. The decision-making tool for Irrigation Schedule Prediction available in Machine Learning (ML) plays a crucial role. The drawbacks of traditional machine learning techniques are that they don't predict future values, reduce relative error, and decrease the effective estimation of soil moisture. To overcome the above-said drawbacks, we proposed a machine learning-based SupportTree Algae Algorithm (STAA) to presage soil wetness for smart irrigation. Our proposed STAA method consists of a hybrid approach of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree (DT)classifier incorporated with Artificial Algae Optimization. Our proposed method simulated and achieves 99.5% accuracy, 98.4% precision, 97.5% specificity, and 99.2% Sensitivity when compared with existing methods, namely Random Forest (RF), Fuzzy Logic, and K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN). As a result, a novel STAA method ensured better performance concerning Precision, Sensitivity, Accuracy, Relative Error, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Squared Logarithmic Error (MSLE), and Specificity over existing methods.

Yams (Dioscorea spp.) in shellmounds and swiddens: ancient history in Babitonga Bay, Santa Catarina State, southern Brazil

BackgroundIn Babitonga Bay, southern Brazil, records of yam consumption exist among shellmound builders from at least 4000 years ago. Shellmounds (sambaquis) are anthropogenic structures in the form of mounds with layers of shells associated with other faunal remains, as well as with charcoal, artefacts and burial. Larger sambaquis are considered to be funerary monuments. The indigenous Jê and Guarani people also lived in the region before the European invasion and cultivated yams. Currently, exotic and domesticated yams are cultivated in the region by farmers. Our aim is to describe the long-term history between the people and Dioscorea in the Babitonga Bay region based on its consumption and occurrence in shellmounds and swiddens.MethodsSurveys of Dioscorea spp. and host were carried out in the vegetation of shellmounds and in the surrounding area using visual detection through intensive searches in transects using the walking method. The survey of Dioscorea species used and cultivated in the precolonial, colonial and current periods was carried out based on the literature. In the present study, only Dioscorea trifida cultivations were recorded.ResultsDioscorea cayennensis, Dioscorea chondrocarpa, Dioscorea dodecaneura, Dioscorea laxiflora, Dioscorea olfersiana, and Dioscorea scabra, all recorded in associated vegetation of shellmounds, in different combinations of the species. In swiddens, D. trifida is most common, followed by Dioscorea alata and, to a lesser extent, Dioscorea bulbifera and D. cayennensis. Records of food use prevail, but they are used as medicinal plants. Yams are integrated on anthropogenic soils of shellmounds and in swiddens in monoculture systems or in intercropping with Zea mays or Colocasia esculenta. The presence of exotic food trees and D. cayennensis in some shellmounds indicates the influence of colonizers on the composition of the vegetation. In sambaquis, there are overlapping processes of construction of cultural niches by different human groups at different times.ConclusionsThe sambaquis and the associated vegetation and swiddens form part of a domesticated landscape. The native species of Dioscorea recorded in shellmounds and surrounding vegetation do not depend on human action to perpetuate themselves in the environment. However, this does not rule out human influence in the past, but it does not indicate horticulture among the Sambaquianos. Greater investment in genetic, archaeobotanical and ethnobotanical research can contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between people and yams over thousands of years.

Defining the Anthropocene tropical forest: Moving beyond ‘disturbance’ and ‘landscape domestication’ with concepts from African worldviews

How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans – whether ancient or modern – are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just vision of tropical forests, accepting anthropogenic influence on biodiversity, would combine ‘disturbance’ with other concepts that capture human agency and intentionality. Landscape domestication proposes that humans can shape ecology and plant and animal population demographics, making the landscape more productive and congenial for humans, upgrading or degrading the biodiversity of tropical forests. Herein, forest peoples shape the Anthropocene itself through their ‘domestication’ of the forest. Yet this approach can overdetermine culture, ignoring non-human agency, whilst human impacts can be seen as the outcome of intentional modifications to increase landscape productivity, at worst a disavowed projection of ‘economic man’. Using the convivial scholarship framework of Nyamnjoh, we argue that these ideas give incomplete views of tropical forests in the Anthropocene and can be enriched by concepts derived from African worldviews with ‘relationality’ and ‘wholeness’ at their core. These are expressed in ohanife, deriving from Igbo language, ubuntu, from the Nguni language and ukama, a notion from Shona culture. Together these concepts evince an ‘eco-bio-communitarianism’ embracing humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals and inanimate beings in a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology). This is consonant with Indigenous Amazonian worldviews, such as that of Kopenawa. Approaching human-nature relations from Nyamnjoh’s idea of conviviality, we elaborate a less incomplete and more just perspective on the cultural and natural shaping of Anthropocene tropical forests.

Aquaculture in the Ancient World: Ecosystem Engineering, Domesticated Landscapes, and the First Blue Revolution

Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food sector and accounts for more than 50% of the world’s fish food supply. The significant growth in global aquaculture since the middle of the 20th century has been dubbed by the Blue Revolution. However, it is not the first Blue Revolution to take place in human history. While historically classified as low-ranking, seasonal, or starvation resources in the archaeological discourse, marine foods were vital resources that ancient communities developed and exploited using a vast array of strategies. Among these aquatic strategies was aquaculture. This first Blue Revolution was initiated during the Early Holocene, some 8,000 years ago in China, with archaeologists now documenting aquaculture across the globe. This review considers the commonalities between ancient aquacultural systems including evidence of ecosystem engineering and the development of domesticated landscapes as production systems. People of the past constructed agroecosystems to not only enhance and diversify aquatic resources, but to control the reliability of key subsistence foods and to meet the demands of ritual practice and conspicuous social stratification. These aquaculture systems were maintained for centuries, if not millennia. Worldwide research conducted on ancient aquaculture can provide critical insights into developing more ecologically sustainable, resilient, and diverse marine production systems for coastal communities today, thus, achieving industry sustainability and limiting negative environmental impacts to the world’s shorelines and overexploited fisheries.

Malaysia’s National Role Conceptions and Transitions of Foreign Policy From Tunku to Mahathir

Reviewing the history and trajectory of Malaysia’s foreign policy, this article highlights national role conceptions (NRCs) during Tunku’s premiership between 1957 and 1968 and the first and second Mahathir tenures of 1981–2003 and 2018–2020, respectively. Malaysia’s foreign policy and its fundamentals have remained reasonably stable over prolonged periods but NRCs, which define foreign policy, have witnessed shifting nuances and noticeable changes under different premierships. Foreign policy under succeeding Malaysian governments has seen major shifts occurring in the transition of foreign policy in tandem with changing NRCs. Malaysian foreign policy is articulated within the constraints posed by the global and regional environments and that of a highly politicised, often divided domestic landscape. In the Tunku era, Malaysia was decidedly a Western ally, symbolised by NRCs of being “pro-West” and “anti-communist”. Since then, Malaysia’s relations with major powers and regional countries have shown a stable, neutral and non-aligned stance and it emerged as a “regional neutral strategist” under the premiership of Tun Abdul Razak. This article argues that the shifts and revisions in Malaysia’s NRCs under Mahathir as a “global champion of the South”, exemplar of “Looking East” and “champion of moderate Islam” were not all just outcomes of elite preferences but reflected political agendas of elites and political agents within the domestic political game. Drawing on some examples of domestic contestations over NRCs and foreign policy, the article points to the re-definition and even the abandonment of policy directions which were not consonant with the imperatives of the domestic political game.

Lush aftermath: Race, labor, and landscape in the suburb

This article takes up labor and landscape in the wake of war in an unlikely place: an agricultural suburb of Greater Miami. In Homestead, Indigenous Maya migrants displaced during and after scorched earth counterinsurgency work in ornamental plant and palm nurseries, filling U.S. subdivisions and yards with verdant plant life. These flourishing plants produce and stabilize suburban property regimes across the country. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nursery workers and owners, community organizers, and suburban developers, this article asks: what grows after war? I show how the entanglement of state-sanctioned violence, racialization, and property produces a lucrative and injurious environmental order that emerges after war’s formal end—what I call a lush aftermath. Thinking collaboratively with migrant justice movements, this conception of a lush aftermath illuminates how domestic landscapes are transnationally produced through inner and outer wars of U.S. empire.

Matvi : An Eco-Cultural Tradition of Wildflower Decoration from Rajapur Tehsil, Ratnagiri Dist., Maharashtra, India

Various worships are associated with plant parts such as leaves, flowers, and fruits. These parts are harvestedfrom wild and domesticated landscapes used in socio-religious ceremonies in India. The present study was carriedout in the Konkan region of Maharashtra to document a lesser-known practice of ‘matvi’ followed during theGanesh festival. Matvi includes the ceremonial decoration of a wooden canopy with seasonal plants. A review ofprimary and secondary sources of information revealed that the matvi tradition is strongly linked to the socioecologicallandscape of the Konkan-Malabar eco-region. A survey conducted in eight villages of Rajapur tehsildocumented plant species used in matvi. This article also discusses the practice's geographical, ecological,economic, and cultural aspects, including collection sources, local trade, and people's perceptions. However,changing nature of the tradition indicates a probable threat to this human-nature relationship.

조경학 연구에서 자연성 개념의 다의적 체계 연구†

In landscape studies, the concept of naturalness was vast in its categories from physical space to cognitive systems, making it difficult to define terms at once. Therefore, this study summarized the concept and evaluation attributes of ‘naturalness’ used in the literature through systematic review (SR), and identified the scope of individual attributes that constitute the meaning of naturalness. In addition, the individual attributes classified in previous studies were identified as the meaning chain, one of the cognitive linguistic research methods, and applied to papers targeting naturalness among domestic landscape studies to organize a polysemous meaning system. Meaning chain is a suitable method for grasping words whose meaning expands in a chain due to family resemblance around prototypical meaning, and the dimension is classified according to the classification of naturalness evaluation items and a multi-semantic chain system of naturalness concepts discussed in domestic academia. The results of the study are as follows. First, the attributes of naturalness extracted through foreign landscape literature were classified into four areas: nature perceived as wilderness, nature as non-artificiality, nature as visual landscape, and nature as experience, and 13 detailed attributes. Second, these detailed attributes are generally consistent with domestic landscape studies, but their specific cases were different, and a Korean context was presented in perception of time accumulation, also they suggested that there may be a mutual conflict between naturalness attributes.

Children in Hong Kong interacting with relatively wild nature (vs. domestic nature) engage in less dominating and more relational behaviors

Might interacting with relatively wild forms of nature help move our world away from its largely domination-oriented and destructive sensibilities? Toward broaching this question, this study used an Interaction Pattern Approach to model child-nature interaction in a Hong Kong nature program. Observational video data were collected of 54 children (mean age 4.8 years) while they were playing in relatively wild or domestic landscapes. In total, 708 interactions were coded and categorized based on 37 distinct interaction patterns. Based on this modeling, we then tested two hypotheses: (1) that in the more domesticated nature areas, children would engage in more domination interaction patterns (e.g., catching wild animals), and (2) in the more wild nature areas, children would engage in more relational interaction patterns (e.g., cohabitating with wild animals). Both hypotheses were supported statistically. Discussion focuses on the importance of interacting with relatively wild aspects of nature, even in urban areas.

ADAPTING THE FOREST: A SPATIAL MODEL OF SUSTAINABLE MAYA PRODUCTION AT EL PILAR

If one considers the Maya forest as a domesticated landscape, as an alternative to what prevailing views of “shifting agriculture” have posited, a new view of the Classic Maya landscape is envisioned. The milpa cycle is a land use system first encountered during the Spanish conquest that ensures consistent availability of resources when envisioned over a 20-year cycle. The cycle includes open fields emphasizing annual crops, perennial succession focused on products used in home and maintenance, and closed-canopy forests for fruits and products used in construction. Recognizing that land use is dependent on knowledge, skill, and labor, we consider the whole production cycle in providing sustenance and shelter, as well as a habitat for wildlife. Modeling the milpa cycle presents an example of the Maya transformation and adaptation of their landscape to provide for burgeoning populations amidst the tropical woodlands. To test the limits of the cycle and its viability in a real-world context, we create a spatial model of land use covering an 18 square kilometer settlement area at El Pilar using ArcGIS and knowledge of Maya dietary requirements. The results guide a discussion of the sustainability and sufficiency of the milpa cycle within the Maya forest.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2022

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2022

The Broad-Spectrum Revolution at 50: Increasing dietary diversity reflects the heterogeneity of domesticated landscapes

The area of North-East Poland was in prehistory, and still is today, an area with easy access to amber as a raw material, as is evidenced in part by numerous Late Neolithic (3rd millennium) amber workshops located in the Gulf of Gdańsk and Żuławy Wiślane (Vistula Fens). Given this fact, it is surprising that only a few finished amber products have been recovered from this area. Among them are unique ornaments from the Late Neolithic sites Ząbie 10, Supraśl 3, and Supraśl 6. The preliminary analysis showed that these amber artifacts differ from the products manufactured by local groups located in the territory of modern Poland. The selected artifacts were subjected to in-depth stylistic and technological analysis to identify their provenance, taking also into consideration the type of raw material used in their production by means of FTIR analysis. Stylistic analysis showed that several specimens have analogies amongst the amber beads known from the Bell Beaker phenomenon. However, most of the beads under study are unique, and there are no analogies among any Neolithic ornaments in Europe. In addition, it was found that the specimens from Ząbie 10, Supraśl 3, and Supraśl 6 had perforations drilled with a metal tool, not a flint drill bit, which was previously unheard of in this part of Europe. The FTIR analysis revealed the use of local amber, including its different varieties i.e., succinite, gedano-succinite and gedanite. It also revealed its varying state of preservation. This may be useful for exploring the environmental context in which these artifacts were deposited.

Hybrid places

Abstract This article is about adaptations to the regimentation of public and private living through the reorganisation of domestic space and time routines a year into changeable Covid-related restrictions. The discussion is based on narratives and audio-visual artefacts generated by participants from 20 UK households through the methodology of photovoice and that articulate domestic-related boundary-making processes and forms of space hybridisation in the ongoing changes caused by the pandemic. In the article, Covid-19 signage is represented by language and other semiotic markings that engender an inside spatial and social semiotics and that stands in a dialogic relationship with the outside spatial and social semiotics as dictated by the pandemic, and where domestic landscapes articulate forms of transmedia code-mixing that invest written words, sounds, and screens.

도시 가로수 관리 품셈 개선에 관한 연구†

This study aims to provide basic data for high-quality street tree management by setting reasonable management items and appropriate unit prices by reviewing the adequacy of current street tree management. Currently, street tree management items, except for street tree pruning, use general landscape tree quantity per unit for the street tree management quantity per unit. KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation) applied pruning items from standard electric production infrastructure and carried out the activities at an average unit price of 51% lower for heavy pruning and 39% lower for light pruning than the standard estimate. This was judged to be a level that could not maintain or increase the quality of street tree management. It was determined that an appropriate standard unit price for street tree management was necessary. To improve the quantity per unit for the proper management of street trees, it was necessary to review costs in the field. However, due to the absence of data on actual construction costs in the domestic landscape field, detailed items of the US RSMeans Building Construction Cost Data (RSMeans) were reviewed, and the actual construction costs were calculated by applying personal domestic expenses. As a result, the standard of the estimated unit showed a good ratio of 107% for heavy pruning of street tree pruning compared to the actual construction cost, but light pruning was underestimated with a 59% ratio. Shrub pruning was 82%, weeding was 92%, tree fertilization was 87%, and windbreak wall installation was 91% under-engineered. In addition, it was also confirmed that the watering by sprinkler trucks and chemical spraying were over-designed compared to the actual construction cost at the rates of 118% and 124%, respectively. Due to the specificity of the street trees, the increase in personal expenses and the input cost of equipment, such as road safety controls, were judged to be the main cause of the underestimation of items. Therefore, it is necessary to add items related to street trees and general landscape trees to the landscape maintenance items of the standard of the estimated unit.

Planetary‐scale change to the biosphere signalled by global species translocations can be used to identify the Anthropocene

AbstractWe examine three distinctive biostratigraphic signatures of humans associated with hunting and gathering, landscape domestication and globalization. All three signatures have significant fossil records of regional importance that can be correlated inter‐regionally and help describe the developing pattern of human expansion and appropriation of resources. While none have individual first or last appearances that provide a globally isochronous marker, all three signatures overlap stratigraphically, in that they are part of a continuum of change, with complex regional patterns. Here we show that during the later stages of globalization, late nineteenth to twentieth century records of species translocations can be used to build an interconnected web of palaeontological correlation with decadal or sub‐decadal precision that dovetails with other stratigraphic markers for the Anthropocene. This palaeontological web is also a proxy for accelerating species extinction and of a state shift in the biosphere in the twentieth century.

A Further Study and Assessment on Geographic Information System: From Highway Ecological Landscape Environment Angle of View

With the development of the national economy, our country’s highway construction is developing in a more advanced and humane direction. On the basis of meeting traffic needs, people have begun to pay more attention to the construction of highway landscapes. Based on the understanding and integration of domestic and foreign landscape evaluation system research, this paper constructs a new type of highway landscape evaluation model and selects Zhangjiakou, one of the co-host cities of the Winter Olympics, to analyze and verify the model. We use the designed evaluation model to analyze and evaluate the three highways in the Zhangjiakou area. First, based on the analytic hierarchy process, the combination of qualitative and quantitative evaluation indicators is selected, and then, the GIS geographic information system is used to obtain the basic data of the quantitative indicators and the questionnaire method is used. The grade evaluation of three highways is realized, and the optimization measures and construction strategies for the landscape quality along the highway are proposed. The results show that the research results of this evaluation system are of great significance to the landscape construction along the line, the protection of landscape resources, and the development of tourist roads.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Diane C. Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park This special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies presents a wide range of scholars raising critical questions about the work of Asian American studies. The guest editors, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, and Paul Spickard, invited scholars to wrestle with the inter/discipline of the field at the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for Asian American Studies in 1979. Several of the essays began as presentations at the 2018 AAAS, and all had drafts completed before the pandemic. COVID-19 disrupted this special issue, as it did all our personal, professional, and collective lives. Many authors revised their essays in 2021, revisiting their ideas through the lens of the urgencies of the global health pandemic as well as the intensified focus on anti-Asian racism and antiblack state violence. The seventeen scholars in this special issue interrogate—from different disciplines, methods, and perspectives—the work of Asian American studies, not as a static field, but as one responsive to scholarly theorizing and to interventions and changes in the material and discursive society in which we are embedded. The essays vary widely. But taken as a whole, this issue makes explicit and implicit inquiries about the kinds of questions that frame Asian American studies and what this then obscures. They wonder whether the original goals of the field—with its focus on, as the guest editors note, "communities, partnerships with activism, solidarity with other communities of color, and defense against racism and gender and class oppression"—ought to be the primary mechanisms animating the field, or in what ways these ideas have shifted and towards what new formations. This is not to suggest that there is a disavowal of the original goals of the field. In fact, many authors suggest that the ideas and critiques and activist struggles that established the field either remain or, having shifted away, are now being revisited. While some might assume that Asian American studies [End Page v] is "designed for the advancement of Asian-raced people," it is, as Kandice Chuh states, "a way of bringing to bear the critique of power as the energizing force of the field." Her essay invites us to re-evaluate the meanings of what we think we understand about the field and its interrogations of power. Several of the essays work to critique and expand the field, and, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, some "newer" ideas actually reactivate ideas permeating the field's founding. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, in her article in this issue, looks at the ways critical refugee studies demands the global study of race, imperialism, and war, beyond the domestic landscape of what some consider Asian American studies. Lisa Yoneyama invites the field to consider how transpacific critique, as well as Native Pacific Islander studies and Southeast Asian studies, shapes Asian American studies. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, borrowing from Roderick Ferguson, asks what it means when we replace redistribution power with representational frameworks. She uses her own experiences at the university to critique narratives of success and to explore what is gained and what is lost through institutionalization. Naoko Shibusawa similarly uses compelling examples from her own experiences in various campus struggles to offer reflections on solidarity. She delves into the tensions swirling today among people centering antiblackness and Afro-pessimism to the exclusion of other kinds of racisms. Her musing on the specific and nuanced ways in which anti-Asian racism manifests (as a "sucker-punch" in her formulation) reminds us of Mitsuye Yamada's widely circulated essay, "Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster." Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman, and Douglass Ishii in a separate essay, share candid reflections on the life of contingent labor in the university and what is being asked of a field that claims to center critiques of power and work for transformative justice. We are proud to have redesigned the journal's cover to feature artwork, and view the cover's visual image as evocation of the themes in this issue. The artist, Cece Carpio, identifies as an Asian American, Filipina Indigenous immigrant who specializes in creating public art locally, nationally, and internationally. Her...