Matter In Ways Research Articles

Cloud seeding Los Angeles: Elements of an Unsettled City

AbstractIn February of 1978, heavy rain brought major flooding to the Los Angeles region. Attention quickly turned to the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, which had activated its cloud seeding program just prior to the storm. This event provides a focal point for examining ways in which the physicality of clouds informs an elemental approach to urbanism that is at once epistemological and material. Suspended vapor or ice crystals that might precipitate or disperse, clouds offer an understanding of ways of being and knowing in motion. The materiality of water, wind, mud, and concrete in Los Angeles comes to matter in ways inflected by that of clouds. Like clouds, these are moving, phase‐shifting forms of matter that destabilize and elude modes of classification. As a material form for thinking through phase shifting processes more generally, clouds attune us toward an unsettled city.

Unveiling the power of critical multimodal literacy: exploring cultural difference in children’s literature through ‘The Proudest Blue — a Story of Hijab and Family’

At a time when difference is being actively diluted in the service of standardisation and conservative views of nationhood, stories about difference, and their semiotic and multimodal elements, provide rich grounds for critical engagement. This is especially the case with stories about highly visible cultural symbols, such as the hijab, worn in many school classrooms in countries like Australia. In this paper, we explore the use of critical analysis of multimodal elements as matters with which to think about cultural difference, through the picture book, The Proudest Blue — a story of Hijab and family by Ibtihaj Muhammad with art by Hatem Aly, 2020. This story presents to young people the notion of being strong in cultural difference via the symbol of the hijab. Our analysis draws on Cappello et al.’s 2019) Critical Multimodal Literacy approach to explore four dimensions: communicating with multimodal tools; re-storying, representing and redesigning; acknowledging and shifting power relationships and leveraging multimodal resources to critique and transform socio-political realities. We identify the range of multimodal tools the author and illustrator put to use to re-story and critique common misconceptions about the wearing of the hijab as a religious symbol. Making links between multimodal composition and critical analysis is a powerful way to affirm the significance of children’s literature that addresses difference, a term often conflated with diversity which references dominant norms. It can also inspire children to story their own matters in ways that critique notions of cultural homogeneity.

Reclaiming public service ethics through algorithms: Implications for teaching and development

The use of algorithms and automation of public services is not new, but in recent years there has been a step change in processing power and a decrease in the price of these technologies, which means we are seeing more widespread use. These advances are reframing our perception of what matters in ways that impact the ethical dimensions of day-to-day life. In turn, these changes challenge long-standing assumptions about public service ethics and how it is taught. In this multidisciplinary authored paper, we argue that public service leaders must be attentive to ethical questions that converge around adopting “data-driven” techniques, including algorithmic decision-making. Algorithmic and technology focused ethics question assumptions about the current deficits within public service ethics pedagogy in public service programs and university programs and the future direction of the discipline. To do so raises longstanding but neglected questions about the public services’ role in the state and recovering what Rohr refers to as the ‘ethics of the office.’ This, we argue, will have implications for teaching public service ethics.

Apparatuses of observation and occupation: Settler colonialism and space science in Hawai'i

This paper examines two space science infrastructures in Hawai'i, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). It considers how scientific observation and colonial occupation are co-constituted through the production of apparatuses – extensive material practices and arrangements that iteratively produce subject–object relations. By analyzing TMT and HI-SEAS as apparatuses, we show how both involve the active ordering of space, time, and matter in ways that are dependent upon existing settler colonial relations while enacting specific subject positions key to the projection of settler colonialism across space and time. TMT materializes the Archimedean point, or view-from-nowhere, on which Western scientific “objectivity” depends, while HI-SEAS works to produce ideal colonizer-subjectivities and orient their bodies to the spatialities of the colony. Engaging Native Hawai’ian, Indigenous, and allied anti-colonial critiques, we argue that social science of outer space research must critically address the colony, as its basic logics are foundational to the practices of contemporary space science and imaginaries of space exploration.

Low-intensity frequent fires in coniferous forests transform soil organic matter in ways that may offset ecosystem carbon losses.

The impact of shifting disturbance regimes on soil carbon (C) storage is a key uncertainty in global change research. Wildfires in coniferous forests are becoming more frequent in many regions, potentially causing large C emissions. Repeated low-intensity prescribed fires can mitigate wildfire severity, but repeated combustion may decrease soil C unless compensatory responses stabilize soil organic matter. Here, we tested how 30years of decadal prescribed burning affected C and nitrogen (N) in plants, detritus, and soils in coniferous forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains, USA. Tree basal area and litter stocks were resilient to fire, but fire reduced forest floor C by 77% (-36.4 Mg C/ha). In mineral soils, fire reduced C that was free from minerals by 41% (-4.4 Mg C/ha) but not C associated with minerals, and only in depths ≤ 5cm. Fire also transformed the properties of remaining mineral soil organic matter by increasing the proportion of C in a pyrogenic form (from 3.2% to 7.5%) and associated with minerals (from 46% to 58%), suggesting the remaining soil C is more resistant to decomposition. Laboratory assays illustrated that fire reduced microbial CO2 respiration rates by 55% and the activity of eight extracellular enzymes that degrade cellulosic and aromatic compounds by 40-66%. Lower decomposition was correlated with lower inorganic N (-49%), especially ammonium, suggesting N availability is coupled with decomposition. The relative increase in forms of soil organic matter that are resistant to decay or stabilized onto mineral surfaces, and the associated decline in decomposition suggest that low-intensity fires may promote mineral soil C storage in pools with long mean residence times in coniferous forests.

Breakdown of Ergodicity and Self-Averaging in Polar Flocks with Quenched Disorder.

We show that spatial quenched disorder affects polar active matter in ways more complex and far reaching than heretofore believed. Using simulations of the 2D Vicsek model subjected to random couplings or a disordered scattering field, we find in particular that ergodicity is lost in the ordered phase, the nature of which we show to depend qualitatively on the type of quenched disorder: for random couplings, it remains long-range ordered, but qualitatively different from the pure (disorderless) case. For random scatterers, polar order varies with system size but we find strong non-self-averaging, with sample-to-sample fluctuations dominating asymptotically, which prevents us from elucidating the asymptotic status of order.

Survivors' Songs in Opera: What the Vulnerable Voice Can Do

Survivors' Songs in OperaWhat the Vulnerable Voice Can Do Olivia Bloechl (bio) Stories matter, and it matters how they are told. When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford described her sexual assault before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2018, the trauma she had experienced was communicated by the vulnerability in her voice and expression as much as by her words themselves. I was among the millions of people, especially women, who felt compelled to watch the proceedings, in my case livestreamed to my office computer. Feminists, survivors, and activists watched her testify and admired her strength, but they also braced for the backlash that Professor Anita Hill's courageous testimony nearly three decades earlier, in 1991, had taught two generations of us to expect. If we were prepared for the backlash, "what we weren't prepared for," in the words of journalist Joanna Weiss, writing in Politico, "was the quaking. The quivering voice, the shy affect, the facial expression of abject terror."1 While stories of sexual harassment and assault are all too familiar, their telling matters in ways that go well beyond the immediate purposes of Hill's and Ford's congressional testimonies.2 When survivors tell their stories publicly, the act of testifying changes a community's sense of what can be said in a range of settings. More troublingly, their manner of narrating their experience, including their vocal manner, influences what survivors can effectively communicate about their [End Page 33] violation and how credible they seem to listeners.3 In Ford's case, her manifest vulnerability—the "quivering voice" and "shy affect"—underscored the sincerity and plausibility of her testimony, even for observers not inclined to believe her.4 Scrutinizing survivors' embodiment and affect to determine their credibility is deeply problematic, as is underscored by the long history of victimblaming in rape cases and the variation in survivors' responses to their assault.5 Yet the prevalence of such scrutiny points to the importance of bodily, affective communication. Like it or not, survivors' voices often come in for scrutiny, especially vocal sound associated with vulnerable states. Indeed, those who show vulnerability in recounting their assault fit expectations of rape victims, reflecting and reinscribing widespread cultural narratives that define rape as irreparably traumatic.6 Vocal sounds signaling distress often strike observers as a particular "tell," because modern listeners tend to presume that trauma embeds itself in the body and that the body can override a person's conscious control under stress, disrupting their ordinary vocal production.7 On the other hand, listening to survivors' stories and bearing witness to their experiences—including their strength, anger, and lingering precarities—are reparative practices familiar to many women, femmes, and queer people, as well as to members of First Nations and communities of color that are structurally more exposed to sexual violence.8 For me, listening to Ford narrate her rape and its aftermath on television recalled other transformative experiences listening to survivors I have known personally and, in a different modality, listening to survivors' stories in music, including in popular music and especially in the opera repertories I know and love.9 In fact, some of the most powerful survivors' stories I know are [End Page 34] told in operas that, when performed and produced well, can make these stories felt, can make them matter here and now.10 While it may not seem intuitive to compare actual survivors' testimonies with their performed operatic counterparts, opera offers a chance to think about how vulnerable embodiment and affect matter in narrating survivors' experiences. In this essay, I consider the intersubjective exchange that occurs in performing and listening to narratives of sexual menace and violation performed in opera, focusing on several contemporary operas created by female BIPOC artists. Sexual violence and the emotional responses it elicits have been a pervasive trope in Western opera across its four-hundred-year history, as feminist musicologists have shown.11 Naturally, artists' treatment of this trope has varied historically, depending on the social mores of the time and the expressive resources available to them. Even so, most operas devote some stage time to states of distress associated with sexual violation, such as shock, fear, pain...

Rules and Commitment in Communication: An Experimental Analysis

We investigate models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion, in a unified experimental framework. Our umbrella design permits the analysis of models that share the same structure regarding preferences and information, but differ in two dimensions: the rules governing communication, which determine whether information is verifiable; and the sender’s commitment power, which determines the extent to which she can commit to her communication strategy. Commitment is predicted to have contrasting effects on information transmission, depending on whether information is verifiable. Our design exploits these variations to explicitly test for the role of rules and commitment in communication. Our experiments provide general support for the strategic rationale behind the role of commitment and, more specifically, for the Bayesian persuasion model of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). At the same time, we document significant quantitative deviations. Most notably, we find that rules matter in ways that are entirely unpredicted by the theory, suggesting a novel policy role for information verifiability.

When the people are not reasonable: Multiculturalism and realistic normative theory in the contemporary era

In this piece, I offer an original and fundamental critique of a range of approaches to multiculturalism that have dominated the field of Anglo-American political theory since first-wave debates conducted in the 1990s/2000s. I suggest that the politics of the early twenty-first century, and especially the widespread rise of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments among citizens of liberal democratic states throughout the world, requires political theorists who seek feasible solutions to real-world political problems to reject these theories. I focus on two approaches in particular: political liberalism and the politics of difference. Neither offers a vision of politics that is tenable in the early twenty-first century, I argue, as they both require citizens to deliberate about political matters in ways that they cannot. In discussing these approaches, and finding them wanting, it is revealed that political theorists face a choice. They can present a theory which is realistic in the sense that it takes account of political reality and offers a strategy which might be used to genuinely inform a process of reform. Alternatively, they can abandon realism and also the desire to produce an operational normative theory which can resolve real problems in actually existing states. I lay out the nature and importance of this choice and explain some of its implications for the discipline and for our current political predicament. I suggest that the choice is unavoidable and that making it requires political theorists to make a more fundamental decision about the purposes of normative political theory itself.

Depression, Risk Preferences and Risk-Taking Behavior

Depression affects the way that people process information and make decisions, including those involving risk and uncertainty. Our objective is to analyze the way that depressive episodes shape risk preferences and risk-taking behaviors. We are the first to address this issue using large-scale, representative panel data that include both behavioral and stated risk preference measures and a theoretical framework that accounts for the multiple pathways through which depression affects risk-taking. We find no disparity in the behavioral risk preferences of the mentally well vs. depressed; yet depression is related to people's stated risk preferences and risk-taking behaviors in ways that are context-specific. Those who are likely to be experiencing a depressive episode report less willingness to take risks in general, but more willingness to take health risks, for example. We investigate these patterns by developing a conceptual model – informed by the psychological literature – that links depression to risk-taking behavior through the key elements of a standard intertemporal choice problem (e.g., time preferences, expectations, budget constraints). This motivates a mediation analysis in which we show that differences in risk-taking behavior are largely explained by depression-related disparities in behavioral traits such as locus of control, optimism and trust. Overall, we find that there is no overarching tendency for those who are depressive to engage in either more or less risk-taking. Instead, the decision-making context matters in ways that largely align with our theoretical expectations.

Does US presidential rhetoric affect asymmetric political violence?

ABSTRACTAlthough political violence has proven to be difficult for governments to manage, predict or control, previous research on the impact of relevant federal government actions and US presidential rhetoric on terrorist attacks and hate crimes demonstrates that what the US government does matters in ways that are both expected and unexpected. In the US, government counterterrorism strategies changed rapidly in response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US. The Bush administration formed a new executive department, centralised intelligence agencies, invested in tangible counterterrorism measures, implemented two invasions and occupations, and spoke publicly about terrorism on a near-daily basis. Yet much has changed since that research, as the US has since elected a president whose presidential campaign relied upon espousing antagonism towards Muslims, immigrants and other minority groups. Further, President Trump’s administration has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to isolate and suppress Muslims as a strategy to combat Islamist extremism in contrast to previous administrations’ more cooperative approaches. This article considers what existing research tells us about whether and how the different actions of the Trump administration may fuel both Jihadi and far-right extremism.

Beyond the Certification Badge—How Infrastructure Sustainability Rating Tools Impact on Individual, Organizational, and Industry Practice

Sustainability consideration in designing, constructing, and operating civil infrastructure requires substantive action and yet progress is slow. This research examines the impact third-party infrastructure sustainability rating tools—specifically CEEQUAL, Envision, Greenroads, and Infrastructure Sustainability—have beyond individual project certification and considers their role in driving wider industry change. In this empirical study, engineering and sustainability professionals (n = 63) assess and describe their experience in using rating tools outside of formal certification and also the impact of tool use on their own practice and the practices of their home organizations. The study found that 77% of experienced users and 59% of infrastructure owners used the tools for purposes other than formal project certification. The research attests that rating tool use and indeed their very existence has a strong influence on sustainability awareness and practice within the infrastructure industry, providing interpretation of sustainability matters in ways that resonate with industry norms. The rating tools impact on individuals and their professional and personal practice, on the policies and practices of infrastructure-related organizations, and more widely on other industry stakeholders. The findings can be used to increase the value gained from sustainability rating tool use and to better understand the role such tools play in creating cultural change within the industry.

Introduction to the themed issue: Wildfire and Geomorphic Systems

AbstractWildfires alter fluxes of water, sediment, solutes, and organic matter in ways that can be transient or persistent. Alterations in material flux then impact geomorphic processes and landforms in a manner that can also be transient or persistent and that can involve complex response. This themed issue includes papers that document distinctive geomorphic responses in the upland and channel components of forested landscapes in southern Europe, northern Australia, and the western United States. Among the themes that emerge from the collected papers are: (i) the importance of ongoing technological developments, including real‐time instrumentation, ground‐based and aerial remote sensing, isotopic ratios, and numerical models of landscape processes, for documenting and predicting fire‐related geomorphic processes; and (ii) the great uncertainties about future landscape change in a global environment of rapidly changing climate and growing human populations that encroach onto remaining wildlands in fire‐susceptible regions. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil WarBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil WarDefining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home FrontCivil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil WarBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil WarDefining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home FrontCivil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? An Integrated Model of Urban Policy Interdependence

This article explores local fiscal policy interdependence by proposing and testing a particular spatial modeling method to examine how different expenditure domains interact with neighboring jurisdictions. The analysis examines the extent of spatial interdependence by policy domain and explores the most robust way of determining neighbors for spatial analysis. It concludes that space matters in ways that need to be taken into account in the development of models explaining local spending and that different functional domains of expenditures have different scales of spatial effects. The extent of spatial interdependence varies by spending domain based on the amount of local government discretion and control over the policy area.

A exposição (Darstellung) poética na metafísica do belo de Schopenhauer

Para Schopenhauer, a arte poética apresenta uma natureza diferenciada em relação as outras artes no que tange aos meios estabelecidos pelo filósofo para a sua exposição (Darstellung) e a relação entre tal exposição e a intuição genial que a precede. Afinal, como admitir que para a poesia também vale a concepção de que, sendo essencialmente intuitivas, as Ideias seriam por ela expressas de forma límpida e vivaz, se o material com o qual o poeta trabalha são conceitos abstratos? Ou seja, como conciliar esta condição da arte poética com o pressuposto da metafísica do belo schopenhaueriana segundo o qual “o conhecimento da Ideia e necessariamente intuitivo, não abstrato”? Com o presente artigo, pretendemos evidenciar como Schopenhauer, logo no início do §51 do Tomo I de O mundo como vontade e como representação, se esforça para indicar algumas saí das para a questão. A principal delas é a defesa de que o poeta só conseguiria fazer o ouvinte intuir as Ideias da vida com a ajuda de sua [do ouvinte] própria fantasia. O filósofo apresenta também outras observações sobre o modo com que os conceitos teriam de ser reunidos para que a fantasia do ouvinte seja posta em movimento, assim comosobre o ritmo, a rima etc., questões de exposição poética que aparecem ainda mais especificadas nas Preleções sobre a Metafísica do belo(1820).

Using ultrasonic energy to elucidate the effects of decomposing plant residues on soil aggregation

Water-stable soil aggregates are generally formed following the addition of organic materials in soils. This process is mediated by the interaction between microbes and soil organic matter in ways that are still not completely understood. To get insight into the effects of decomposing plant residues on aggregate dynamics, a clay soil with an inherently low soil organic carbon (SOC) content, was amended with two different sources of organic matter (alfalfa, C:N=16.7 and barley straw, C:N=95.6) at different input levels (0, 10, 20, & 30gCkg−1 soil). These were incubated for a period of 3 months over which soil respiration was assessed using the NaOH capture method, water aggregate stability was determined with the mean weight diameter (MWD) by wet sieving, and the relative strength of aggregates exposed to ultrasonic agitation was modelled using the aggregate disruption characteristic curve (ADCC) and soil dispersion characteristic curve (SDCC). As expected, the quality and quantity of organic matter added controlled the respiration rate, with alfalfa (0.457g CO2Cg−1C for total respiration rate) being greater than barley amended samples (0.178g CO2Cg−1C) at any C input rate. Both residue quality and quantity of organic matter input also influenced the amount of aggregates formed and their relative strength. The MWD of soils amended with alfalfa residues was greater than that of barley straw at lower input rates and early in the incubation (e.g. at 28 days of incubation and at a rate of 10gCkg−1 soil, MWD was 575μm and 731μm for barley straw and alfalfa, respectively). However, in the longer term (84 days of incubation), the use of ultrasonic energy revealed that barley straw resulted in stronger aggregates, especially at higher input rates despite showing similar MWD as alfalfa. The use of ultrasonic agitation, where we quantify the energy required to liberate and disperse aggregates allowed us to differentiate the effects of C inputs on the size of stable aggregates and their relative strength.

Quantum Sustainable Organizing Theory

We draw on quantum physics ideas of “entanglement” and “indeterminism” to introduce and develop “Quantum Sustainable Organizing Theory” (QSOT). Quantum entanglement points to the interconnectedness of matter in ways that defy Newtonian physics and commonsense assumptions that underlay conventional organizing theory. Quantum indeterminism suggests that uncertainty is an inherent feature of reality and not simply a lack of information that impedes rational decision making. Taken together, these quantum ideas challenge the assumptions of conventional organizational theorizing about the boundaries between a firm and its natural and social environment, the importance of self-interested individualism and (sociomaterial) financial measures of performance, the emphasis on competitiveness, and the hallmarks of rational theory and practice. We discuss implications for sustainable organizing in particular and for organization theory more generally.

Epistemological disjunctivism and easy knowledge

Stewart Cohen argues that basic knowledge is problematic, as it implies that subjects can acquire knowledge or justified beliefs about certain matters in ways that are supposedly too easy. Cohen raises two versions of the problem of easy knowledge, one involving the principle of closure and the other track-record style bootstrapping reasoning. In this paper I confront the problem of easy knowledge from the perspective of epistemological disjunctivism about perception. I argue that disjunctivism can do a better job than dogmatism at responding to the version of the problem involving closure. I also argue that while disjunctivism would permit subjects to bootstrap their way to justified beliefs about the reliability of their perceptual powers, the disjunctivist can distinguish in a principled manner between this sort of bootstrapping and instances of it that we should agree are objectionable.

Sustaining the unsustainable: Wearable technologies as informing running-practice in urban schools

Using wearable technologies in educational research and in relation to group-running, this paper inquires into new methodological landscapes through posthumanist and new materialist theories and methodologies. Embedding practice in an urban school in Canada, this paper particularly engages with the material and materiality of environments as a way to flesh out a methodology that attends to the complexity of technologically-mediated bodies in movement. This understanding suggests that technologies matter in ways that are generative of the ‘realities’ in cities, communities, and what is learned in schools. Concluding with a questioning of data and what might become of it, I suggest that a re-valuation of data, method, and methodology – as that which is part of a continuum – might redraw new cartographies in educational research.