All posts by clux

Graphic History: COVID-19, Speculative Fiction, and Illustrating the Archive

By Ivan Gonzalez-Soto, Doctoral Student, UC Merced

Prior to COVID-19, I used critical race and ethnic studies, history, and environmental studies to frame my research on water, racialized labor, and agrarian capitalism in the 20th-century US west. Recently, I’ve added another lens through which to understand my research questions: the graphic novel. Allow me to illustrate.

During the Spring 2020 semester, I enrolled in a graduate seminar titled “Race, State, and Power” and met once a week with peers to discuss books on global insurgencies, racial capitalism, and the nation state. Unbeknownst to me then, our course readings—which paired critical history with speculative fiction—would set two creative projects in motion which helped me cope with the state of the world while pushing the limits of what I thought reflected a good/traditional dissertation project.

Over the past months, I’ve used art and speculative fiction to cope with declension narratives and doom and gloom statistics that envelope the present moment. Fiction by Octavia E. Butler, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, and Fernando Flores have shown me how to interpret the past, present, and future in ways I had never imagined. Their stories, albeit odd, offered respite when I needed it most. Most importantly, their novels helped me hang on to a future in which things eventually do get better. I imagined I could be, as the non-profit online magazine Grist eloquently writes, “working toward a planet that doesn’t burn, a future that doesn’t suck.” 

The closure of archives during the pandemic resulted in unexpected changes that challenged me to brainstorm other research methods for my work. All the while, I searched for opportunities to broaden the scope of my work through creative perspectives. This has manifested as a creative outlet wherein I illustrate scenes from the archive. Examples, like my illustrations below, merged mid-twentieth century black and white archival photographs in the public domain with colorful renditions that brought the archive to life. The sample illustrations below are creative drafts in which I incorporated storyboards, dialogue, and historical references to emphasize key elements in the histories I’m exploring for my dissertation. 

I will still write my dissertation in the academic prose expected of doctoral research. However, the graphic novel component I’ve envisioned has the potential to reach an entirely new audience that may not have an interest in reading standard, double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman, linear text. Together, the traditional dissertation and artistic renditions offer an innovative form of storytelling. 

In line with the creative aspect of this work, I’m using graphic history to share my work while imagining alternatives for a better future through speculative fiction. That is, I’m blending history with imaginative fiction to think of how problems of the past can be addressed and abolished in the future. In this way, I am able to explain past issues while imagining alternative futures in which things get better. Themes such as labor exploitation in agricultural fields, environmental degradation due to toxic pesticides, and the expansion of prisons and militarized border walls can be written out in the speculative futures I’m writing about. This helps me find hope through abolitionist alternatives to get to the world I want to be a part of. And while it may seem idealist, the pandemic has reminded me that I must imagine alternatives with a better future to stay hopeful.

By Ivan, spring 2021. Digital drawing over an online Library of Congress photograph.

Unlike the archival photographs that captured Imperial Valley farmworkers as nameless and faceless subjects (see original photograph here), my illustrations help breathe new life to the workers’ struggle by centering their lives in local history. This approach speaks against dominant discourse and regional histories which alienate and render workers invisible to the land. This erasure is a trend in mainstream history, but I believe the workers’ stories in the Imperial Valley are out there—even if their stories aren’t necessarily preserved in the traditional archive. As a creative project, I’m formulating the past through speculative historical fiction to center the agency of Imperial Valley’s working class alongside a brighter future. Indeed, the workers have a story to tell; they’re there—even though the archive suggests otherwise.

Other illustrations, like the special collections box below, have the potential to communicate the research behind my work. While I couldn’t take my readers to the archive reading rooms, I can illustrate what and how I saw the archive in ways that a footnote simply could not. There’s hope in the dissertation-research-turned-graphic-novel approach because it helps the public visualize the past to shape a better and more just future. In the process, the speculative approaches in this work might help speak more just futures into existence.

By Ivan, fall 2020. Digital drawing over personal photograph taken at UCLA archives in 2019.

Because many archives closed temporarily or were shuttered completely, I was forced to adapt my research into something more accessible. And to cope with declension narratives that enveloped this last year, I’ve turned to art and speculative fiction to make sense of my research through new angles. I’ve since collaborated on a reader-friendly environmental justice comic book on the right to clean drinking water based on a fictional town in California’s Central Valley. It explores my research through fictional characters in ways that bar graphs, charts, and conference presentations could not. That little comic book is now a resource for rural communities of color in the San Joaquin Valley and it’s publicly available through eScholarship.   Projects like these are the result of finding ways to cope with the pandemic while getting creative in the process, and I hope to connect with others out there interested in similar work.

By Ivan, 2020. Early draft of a storyline I was crafting for a comic book based on a segment of my research.
By Ivan. Graphic rendition of my dissertation: “Water is King—Here is its Kingdom: Race, Labor, and the Environment in the Making of California’s Imperial Valley, 1900-2000.”
By Ivan. Graphic rendition of my dissertation: “Water is King—Here is its Kingdom: Race, Labor, and the Environment in the Making of California’s Imperial Valley, 1900-2000.”



Plan B: Recruiting Latino Immigrants for a Qualitative Study… From Home

by Fabiola Perez-Lua, Public Health Doctoral Student, UC Merced

I joined the COVID-19 and Latino Immigrants in Rural California (CLIMA) Study in the summer of 2020 and I was ready to leverage my background as a young, Latina student, born and raised in the Central Valley, to recruit Latino immigrants living in Tulare and Merced Counties for this important study. I had been away from the community for seven years, but people knew me, and I knew where to go to find them. I imagined myself posting CLIMA Study flyers in laundromats as children ran around behind me, or being greeted by the sweet smell of pan as I entered the panadería with a recruitment flyer for the señora in the apron behind the glass counter that housed colorful arrays of pan dulce. I made lists of the places I would go – Orosi, Lindsey, Exeter, Selma – the places where I had spent my weekends as a teenager working with my dad, sipping a warm cup of coffee, and conversing with the vendor next door. My dad, excited to have me back in town, would offer to visit farmworker friends and tell them about our study. Nostalgia and excitement filled me as I imagined the conversations in my head:

“Haven’t seen you around?”

“Just moved back… working on this study…”

Solo dame el número para llamar, mija. Nosotros te ayudamos con tus entrevistas...” (“Just give me the number to call, sweetheart. We will help you with your interviews…”)

Then, Governor Newsom announced the stay-at-home order. Flea markets closed. Grocery stores flooded with panicked people. Breaking news headlined every channel on TV. Schools closed, one after another, like falling dominos. In-person contact suddenly became a near-death experience.

“Novel virus!”

“Six feet apart!”

“Wear a mask!”

“Work from home if you can!”

Work from home. Suddenly I had to work from my small apartment in Merced, where the only social interaction I was allowed to participate in was through a screen. It was in this virtual space where our CLIMA research team began to design a “Plan B Recruitment Plan.” It was a recruitment plan that did not involve posting flyers in laundromats, going to the panadería to advertise the study, stopping by vineyards, or recruiting old vendor-friends at the flea market. Plan B was outlined as follows:

  • Step 1: Identify local and national organizations that serve your study population

Google search local and national immigrant-serving organizations. Create an Excel sheet that lists the names and information of these immigrant-serving organizations and any others you know of or have worked with in the past.

  • Step 2: Contact organizations

Decorate your excel sheets with bright colors that keep track of who needs to be contacted (red), who has been contacted but hasn’t responded (yellow), and who has provided numbers of individuals who are interested in becoming participants (green). Make a total of three attempts to reach each organization: the first attempt should introduce the study and ask for their assistance with the recruitment process. The two follow-up emails (or calls) should be sent a few days apart as reminders. Don’t worry if organizations don’t get back to you – it’s a pandemic!

  • Step 3: Contact individuals

Compile a second excel sheet that includes the names and numbers of individuals who are referred to you by the organizations who are assisting with the remote recruitment process. Decorate this sheet with colors indicating who needs to be contacted (red), who has been contacted but hasn’t responded (yellow), and who is scheduled for an interview (green).

  • Step 4: Snowball sampling

Before the interview ends, ask the participant to refer you to other individuals they may know who may also be interested in participating in the study. They may distribute your name and number to friends and family.

The plan was simple enough. But the execution? That was a whole different story. Immigrant-serving organizations were busy functioning above capacity to support their communities during these difficult times. Reaching Latino immigrants by phone was challenging; folks worked long hours, many were taking care of children at home, and phone numbers changed often. On top of that, voicemails weren’t always set up and calls dropped in the middle of conversations. These were just a few of the issues we were experiencing with “remote recruitment.” I so badly wanted to drive down to Lindsay and stand outside of the Mercado Sol del Valle and talk to people. I wanted them to see my face, to trust that I was a young student, an aspiring researcher, born-and-raised in the community and interested in supporting Latino immigrant health. But instead, I was a “researcher at the university who will give you a call with information about the study.”

So, how did we adapt? With patience, outreach, and trust. We made peace with the fact that the recruitment process was going to be slower than expected. Rather than occupy our minds with worries about the project timeline, we used the time to reach out to community leaders in our region and develop trusting relationships. These new relationships led to the creation of a Community Advisory Board that brought diverse perspectives about the various issues that faced immigrants in the community as we conducted interviews and gathered qualitative data. Together, we produced a policy brief with our findings and disseminated it to a far wider audience than we could have reached alone. The need to adapt to a new research environment under COVID-19 highlighted the importance of community engagement and collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge and employ the expertise of community leaders. We are continuing to stay connected with, and expand, our new network of advocates to support Latino immigrant health. While it was unfortunate that my first year as a graduate student researcher experience did not unfold as I had imagined it, I have learned to adapt quickly, build community in the face of disaster, and reach rural Latino immigrants in innovative ways that will only enhance my ability to conduct Latino immigrant health research in the future.

Ripe for Change: Adaptation, Care, and Environmental Studies

By Shiloh Green Soto, Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Student at UC Merced                                                 

I’ve experienced a deep bout of imposter syndrome since the first day of graduate school, and this largely has to do with the fact that I’m a first-generation college student from a working-class family attempting to exist in the academy’s definitively not-first-generation, affluent environment. Unlike many in the academy, I don’t have relatives to teach me the etiquette for how to speak or do academe, so I’ve largely relied on generous intel from other working-class graduate students who have paved the way. Yet, my anxiety about being found out as a fraud led me to overcompensate in my efforts to be the graduate student I thought I was expected to be. I applied to too many conferences and overtheorized my project which led to a state of early burn out because I didn’t know enough about the academy to be able to gauge what level of effort was enough. As a result, I spent too much time trying to form my project into something I thought would be impressive to colleagues, faculty members, and future hiring committees. My personal goals collided and conflated with objectives I thought I was expected to own.

Then 2020 happened. My students suddenly experienced loss of family members, and other students had to single-handedly financially support their chronically ill parents. Some students dropped out of school entirely because it was all too much to handle. Cities, near and far, urban and rural, erupted in agony over the murders of George Floyd and numerous Black and Brown folks. People took to the streets in a stand against white supremacy, racial capitalism, and police brutality, with Black women and femmes largely at the helm. The West Coast was on fire for several months, producing the most expansive wildfires in multiple state’s histories. At the same time, folks campaigned to turn out the vote for a renewed chance at democracy. 2020, in sum, was a chaotic, anxiety-inducing, never-ending rollercoaster.

I spent quite a few feeble months struggling to cope with what felt like a crumbling society. At the same time, I knew deep down this moment shouldn’t be wasted—that these months of “down time” could be put to good use. In addition, I possess a certain amount of privilege (as a white person, someone with relatively decent health, someone with university support, someone with stable-enough income, and so on) that allows a silver lining in this crisis. Through this recognition, I decided that feeling helpless was no longer an option. If I wanted meaningful change like I claimed, I needed to get to work. Motivated by newfound energy, my outlook was suddenly ripe for change. Inspired by efforts people all over the country made to remedy our collective situations, I harkened back to the environmental justice work of my past.

My undergraduate years were filled with action, care, and community; and fulfillment was a regular reality—one need not search for it. My past activist work and Environmental Studies training enables me to think through the parallels of a larger system that overpowers the environment, People of Color/Indigenous people, poor and working-class people, non-human animals, and so many Others for purposes of capital accumulation. Initially, my dissertation was planned to be a postwar development story of Southern California’s Irvine Ranch region through an examination of immigration law, environmental movement, and policing. Yet to uncover this history, I would need access to Orange County’s archives, most of which remain closed into 2021.

In the wake of the pandemic, as schools, businesses, and archives closed, I reorganized my methods to craft an original project through oral histories, personal archival collections, and digital sources. My dissertation project has also taken on an even greater interdisciplinary approach than previously planned. With creative adjustment in mind due to myriad limitations on traditional historical work, I am punctuating the interdisciplinarity of my project through cultural analysis, political and legal analysis, media analysis, spatial analysis, and oral history methods.

I also expanded the geography of my research to include Northern Orange County as a means to not only compensate for dissertation length, but also because I cannot tell a development story without thinking about its regional costs. To supplement this work, I began volunteering in 2020 with Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), an organization that addresses pollution in Santa Ana’s predominantly low-income Latinx communities. As a member of OCEJ’s Soil Lead Committee, I am working beside local residents, community activists, and UC Irvine researchers to locate sources of soil lead pollution, develop community outreach and education about OCEJ’s findings, and highlight possible routes for remediation. We’re also contextualizing the history of the city’s soil lead pollution through a review of greater Orange County historic development. Predicated on participatory-action research, I get to work alongside OCEJ to better understand environmental pollution in Santa Ana. My work with communities in Santa Ana informs a major portion of my research, especially as it relates to understanding the costs of development in Southern Orange County (Irvine) and its impact on Northern Orange County (Santa Ana).

At this point, as I descend upon exams, I can confidently say I’m glad to be where I am. I’m thankful to get to work with inspiring people and to do a project that means something to both me personally and to other working-class people. It also feels good to have returned to my first true passion: environmental justice. Things have come full circle for me and, though it is unfortunate that it took a crisis to force reflection, I’ve adapted my research plans, cultivated a project of care, and focused on what matters most. This last year was debilitating, but if there’s anything it taught me, it’s that once we do the work that matters, the sooner those echoes of imposter anxiety start to fade. They’ll never fully disappear, but we can learn to turn the volume down, if even for a little.

Juntxs: How to learn from the communities of care that helped us survive the COVID-19 pandemic

By Alma Alvarado Cabrera, Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Student, and Semajay Cleaver, English Major at UC Merced

As a child, my mother would tell me stories of when, in her youth, she left her small village to work in the tomato fields in Sinaloa, Mexico. It was a short yet impactful time in her life. The stories that she would share with me are about how a group of older women took care of and mentored her. My mother profoundly cares about friendship and providing care for her children, godchildren, and anyone she encounters. Yet, she struggles with what we call self-care, among other things. 

My mother gave me that first mode of care. Let us call this model the señora system: a group of women, usually older, sharing useful information, resources, and care among themselves and those they see mostly need it. After meeting Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison through their writing, I expanded my mother’s model to include self-care, or as these authors redefined it, “self-preservation” and healing. This señora and poetic model of care has been helping me navigate graduate school and the COVID-19 pandemic. A daily manifestation of this model is a text message group called the “Ph.D. Squad,” which has been around since the Fall of 2019 and is composed of four beautiful, resilient, and caring women: Jamie, Camille, Karla, and me. 

Image created by Alma Alvarado Cabrera

Physically, we have not seen each other for almost one year yet are in constant communication through text messaging and social media. Our conversations touch on graduate school life but are not limited to our student or educator lives. Before and throughout the pandemic, we speak of our need to heal multiple personal traumas or academic-specific traumas like impostor syndrome. We remind each other of the importance of rest, setting boundaries, and eating dessert! As expected during our sociopolitical climates, we also vent and complain in the group. And memes are frequently shared! 

“Working in Isolation,” photo by Alma Alvarado Cabrera

When coping with physical isolation, the Ph.D. Squad is a reminder that we can be with each other. It is a reminder that we can practice listening, caring, healing, and grieving together without being in the same physical space. It is also a space that reminds us of what could be once we can be in the same physical places. It is an invitation to dream and imagine a classroom, offices, or community spaces where healthy communication and care continue to be centered. Shouldn’t care and healing always be a priority when working with underserved communities? 

I am inviting you to pay attention to the communities of care that help us cope with the challenges of the pandemics we experience. What makes them communities of care? What makes them sustainable? Let us take note of what makes these communities of care so that we can replicate them. What can we learn from them? And how can we ensure that they continue thriving? We will eventually return to our work or gathering in places. Do we want these communities to continue? Systems of care were not perfect before the world was shocked by COVID-19 and other socioeconomic pandemics. The violence that these pandemics exposed will not go away with the vaccine. 

Conversations surrounding care, the active practice of allyship, and highlighting students’ agency should continue by providing our students with a flexible syllabus and reminding them of their agency. To imagine this future, I collaborated with Semajay Cleaver, my friend and former student. We virtually met amid the pandemic when I was a Teaching Assistant for English 102, a class under Dr. Felicia Lopez’s leadership. The conversations on care and healing have continued beyond our class discussion. We have been experiencing the pandemic alongside our students, and I hope we can invite them to speak of imagining new models of care. Semajay Cleaver is my brilliant and creative collaborator, who wrote this poem to encourage our commitment toward a continuous conversation about practicing care: 

I care,
Dreaming that we can bring comfort in the communities we share,
My well-being is like a jewel hidden at the bottom of a systematic pyramid guarded by traps,
I’ve tried all I could to get back,
To our roots.
Of comfort, love, hope, and understanding
It’s time we start planning, to provide a safe space
A place,
For all, no matter the gender, size, or race
It’s time to make the people in charge aware,
That underserved communities deserve their care… to be highlighted,
A place where all are invited,
Plenty would be delighted, to be reminded, that they matter.
No more acting as if you’d be indicted for focusing on your mental and emotional stability
Focus the mind, relax the soul, and allow tranquility
Centrémonos en el cuidado mental y emocional
Y lo haremos tradicional
Imagine all that we could be,
More than just you and me,
Heal and rebuild the self-care community
Growth is a result when there’s care
Longevity spreads through the air,
As if a seed has been planted at the base of your fingers and sprouting from the roots of your hair
I care,
I will no longer allow you to suppress yourself in the darkness of any kind,
You shine,
Listen to these words of mine,
Eres una estrella, brillando intensamente, se dirige lejos
You are loved.
Selfcare should come above… anything you believe matters more.
There’s always a closed door,
But there’s also an open window waiting for that leap of faith,
And if you’re still unsure, take a chance, close your eyes, and I promise you’ll soar.
I care,
For you, and so many more,
In hopes that we can return,
Love and appreciation into ourselves
The self-care community is screaming for help.

I Care 

“Flying,” photo by Alma Alvarado Cabrera

Piracy and Protection

by Rina Faletti

In 1924, Harvard Law Review editors wondered: “Is the crime of piracy obsolete?” Today, in a new century and a new millennium, when 90% of global commerce travels by sea, practices of piracy and counter-piracy are pertinent. Research on maritime piracy by Dr. Jatin Dua, socio-cultural anthropologist from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, traces ways in which piracy practices developed in the 19thcentury in the Western Indian Ocean region. He focuses on the Somali coast, one of the busiest merchant port regions in the world. Dua presented “Encounters at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean,” in a bi-weekly seminar series on water hosted by the Center for the Humanities.

Dua explores maritime piracy within frameworks of protection, risk and regulation as he moves among the apparently disparate worlds of coastal communities in northern Somalia, the global shipping industry, and maritime insurance adjustors in London. He locates ideas of protection on a broad continuum between what seem to be polar opposites: of danger and safety, piracy and protection, hospitality and hostility, trade and raid, intimacy and estrangement, patrimony and ownership. He proposes that these “opposites” are “stuck together” as the pirate, the counter-pirate, and the victim of piracy each lay a variable claim to the right to protect the slice of water through which each travels. Here, the “free and open sea” is “far from an empty space of circulation,” but rather a landscape of “forms of territoriality” that variably govern relationships of interchange and conflict at sea.

Dua focuses historical analysis on regional effects of imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century, when interests of imperial ideologies clashed with, and ultimately overran, local sovereignties in maritime transport and governance. His analysis of 19th century Protectorate ideology delineates native protection (whose claim is on an immediate and individualized prospect) from colonial political protection (which claims a global prospect). Dua points out that while colonial-style rhetoric expressed an aspiration toward peaceful and productive co-existence, this was accomplished through “civilizing” practices that disbanded native sovereignties, bringing them under institutionalized control and creating the dichotomy that defined the “Other.”

These points resonate in Dua’s discussion of his current ethnographic work on piracy in the Indian Ocean in recent years. In a discussion of abaan, a cultural institution of protection for itinerant traders in caravans on land, Dua finds that the on-land caravan concept extended culturally into sea trade. Traditionally, protectors of caravans were exalted in ancient poetry; similarly, the rise of piracy into the current century results in an industry of protection from piracy. Today in Somalia, piracy has developed into a highly capitalized practice, where a great deal of money goes into capture, kidnap, and ransom aboard large ships, and where everyone operates in modified modes of protection.

At base in this work, practices of protection hinge on limits of recognition in power relationships. Who is recognized as needing protection, and who as being able to provide it? Where do paradigms of protection fit into assumptions about “civilization”? And, how are the interests of both protector and protected insured in these relationships? Who has the right to be protected? Jatin Dua’s work demonstrates that questions of piracy and protection are far from obsolete.

Ways of Water

by Kim De Wolff

If you google “Maya Khosla” you will find an Indian poet living in America, the co-director of the Turtle Diaries film project, and a Senior Field Biologist. And you will likely be impressed to learn that they are all one and the same person. In her seminar, “Ways of Water, Lives of Those Who Depend On It,” Maya Khosla demonstrated this accomplished breadth in a presentation of prose, poetry and film surrounding her work on sea turtles. Both project and approach reach across divides between researchers and publics, science and art. In what follows I pull out three themes that emerge in and from her work that help us grapple with questions about the practice of being interdisciplinary in a time of ecological crisis.

  1. Communicating “More Than” Science

Though trained as a biologist, Khosla explicitly leaves space for something “more than” science. She writes that arribada, “defies logic, and to some extent, defies scientific understanding,” and deploys scientific concepts as poetic metaphors. The ecotone, for example, as transition area between two bioregions, between land and sea; and as a kind of transcendent boundary space, something bigger and older than humans, than science. The project assumes a natural world that sometimes exceeds our capacities to understand it, and demonstrates a commitment to environmental communication that requires more than the conveyance of measured facts. This stands in contrast to approaches that privilege scientific understanding alone; it is a kind of resistance against the tendency to reduce problems in the word to matters of scientific accuracy (This is an interesting contrast to our first presenter of the seminar, Emmanuel Vincent, who emphasized accuracy and/as credibility as crucial components in climate change science communication).

Like all interdisciplinary endeavors, however, there are tensions between ways of making and sharing knowledge. In an interview, Khosla acknowledges this outright, pointing to the delicate balance between science and values and pushing toward a broader set of questions: what are the relationships between ways of knowing, caring, and acting? Does accuracy matter if it precludes action? Is awareness enough?

  1. Making Ourselves Present

Another way we can think about these tensions is by looking at the variations in writing styles between two short pieces. The Arribada article, for example, leans more toward the conventions of science or environmental writing. It presents a phenomenon in the world: the wonders of turtles coming to nest; a threat to this continuing as returning turtle numbers decline; and the researchers trying to understand it all. The author, as the researcher-writer is a mostly outside observer, describing what is happening on the beach. The article is written in past tense, and even draws on bits of passive voice.

Where the Arribada article opens with images of turtles and turtles alone, the fieldnotes article in Flyways begins with the writer herself very much present: she is “shin-deep” in ocean and turtles and darkness. It is unapologetically written in first person, opening with a declarative sentence that effectively says: “I am here.” Where the Arribada article gives a sense of how the beach looks, here we get a sense of how it feels: little claws digging into human skin and grains of sand that stick to everything; the excitement of scientists and the rubbery smell of baby turtles. The writing is far more emotional, and the author so very human: someone who hopes and cares and struggles and fails. This is perhaps best encapsulated by the devastating moment where a night of successfully leading baby turtles toward the sea by flashlight, ends in the daylight revelation of just how many more remain disoriented and exposed.

Faith. Doubt. Failure. All of these things, of course, are not standard fare in natural science writing where they would be seen to undermine the project of sharing objective knowledge. When and why do we write ourselves in and out of our work? What disciplinary or generic conventions and politics are enacted as we make ourselves and our experiences of research, of interpretation, of emotions, present or not?

  1. From Awareness to Global Change

My final big point returns to the question of the ‘how’ of rasing awareness. Sea turtles are an example of what biodiversity and science and technology scholars (among others) call Charismatic Megafauna: the kinds of species more likely to get attention from publics and policymakers than others. They tend to be large, cute mammals with big eyes. Think pandas, baby harp seals, polar bears. Anything that makes a good plush toy. Like their furry counterparts, a turned around baby turtle being torn apart by a crow – has the capacity to elicit urgent emotional responses in a way that the slow and dispersed effects of ocean acidification cannot. There’s no question, that these are effective strategies for raising awareness, and in the case of organizations like Greenpeace, significant funding. In theory, this funding is then used to protect whole ecosystems.

Yet, as poster-creatures for the ocean, charismatic species like turtles are more likely to be studied, protected and positioned prominently in environmental campaigns than say, the blobfish. Which, if you haven’t seen one, looks like a sad-faced melting pile of pink slime . In response, we could simply adopt the blobfish as our mascot, like the Ugly Animal Preservation Society (Yes, that is for real). But this kind of thinking still leads toward single species-specific problems and solutions. You can see this in the last question asked by the interviewer from Flyways: what can we do to save the turtles?

My final question, then, (and it is a big one) is how do we move from awareness to global change? From having more people on beaches with flashlights to turtle populations that do not need human intervention to thrive. And how do we move from saving specific turtles to addressing the much broader challenges – of climate change, of inequality, of capitalism – at the root of the threats themselves? I do not have the answers – but if it is turtles all the way down, then turtles are an excellent place to start.

Following the Tracks of Yu

by Danielle Bermudez

Water can often be seen as a source of life, but it can also lead to loss. In this seminar, Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor of History at UC Merced, explores how water may have led to immense change of landscape and life in eleventh century China. While research is still being conducted, Mostern provides fascinating insights about the soil of the Yellow River and how this impacted the defensive strategies of the Song dynasty. These dynamics may have altered the environmental history of the region, based on the timing and scale of loess plateau fortification, leading to numerous disaster floods during the eleventh century.

The Yellow River, or Huang He, is the third-longest river in Asia, and is the sixth-longest river in the world, with an estimated length of 5,464 km. It flows through nine provinces, and empties in Shandong province. During the eleventh century, military strategy was important, and ambitious fortification with garrisons, as well as the presence of more than half a million soldiers, had an immense impact on an ecologically fragile region.

According to Mostern, the natural landscape of the Yellow River is prone to soil erosion without vegetation cover. Fortifications in Northern Song were strategically built near the edges of the Yellow River. The exposed erosion-prone sand and soil made its way into the Yellow River, and ultimately drove disastrous flooding downstream. This resulted in one of the most rapidly rising sedimentation rates in history.

Flowing with our ongoing theme of “water,” seminar participants agreed that the environment is not a fixed place, it has agency, is dynamic, and ever-changing, but what is the scale of that change? As the seminar came to a close, participants lingered on the following central question: how do humans shape the natural environment, and conversely, and how does the environment continuously shape us?

al-Karaji’s Hidden Waters

by Danielle Bermudez

Al-Karaji’s treatise has inspired stories worldwide about famous “hidden waters”. The 1,000 year old ancient text has stirred a 2009 children’s book called Water Scientists, as well as a 1950s Persian story called Blind White Fish. The 1950s story even prompted a group of western academics to conduct an excursion in search of the rare fish species mentioned in al-Karaji’s treatise.

While there is an Orientalist fetishization of al-Karaji’s treatise, Abigail Owen, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in World History of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, contends that al-Karaji’s work should be celebrated as one of the oldest texts of its kind in the field of hydrology. Al-Karaji was a mathematician and engineer from the late 10th century-early 11th century. Of Persian origin, he spent an important part of his scientific life in Baghdad where he composed ground breaking mathematical books. In fact, most scholars regard him for the beginnings of freeing algebra from geometry.

One of his most recognized works is his technical treatise on the extraction of hidden waters, which contains complex and profound understandings of different kinds of natural water systems, proper care of tunnel construction and maintenance, methods of water level measurement, the description of instruments for surveying, the construction of conduits, their lining, protection against decay, their cleaning and maintenance, as well as a structure of ethics based on specific social and cultural notions of law, property, and ownership.

Owen and her research team attempt to translate al-Karaji’s 1,000 year old treatise into English, a challenging process of carefully decoding words, images, and meanings. Al-Karaji’s ancient treatise has been translated before, such as from Arabic to Persian, and from Arabic to French. Oftentimes, however, translations of the treatise have obscured particular meanings of fresh ground water, such as with the origins and use of the word “qanat.”

Owen’s research on al-Karaji’s treatise demonstrates how meanings of water are fluid and dynamic across space and time. She makes evident how al-Karaji’s treatise serves as an important form of representation of knowledge about the environment, through a complex understanding of water systems, encouraging us to take up ongoing questions regarding the urgent need and use of water in our society – past, present, and future.

Climate Feedback and Media Coverage

by Danielle Bermudez

Only 23% of people living in the United States say that they have enough information to make up their minds about climate change[1]. How does media coverage affect our understandings about climate change? And, what if scientists could provide their own feedback on climate media coverage?

These are some of the questions that led Emmanuel Vincent, Project Scientist for the Center for Climate Communication at the UC Merced, to create the website climatefeedback.org. This online platform allows the scientific community to annotate and comment on climate media coverage, while giving the public access to this information.

Vincent’s talk was the first UC Merced Seminar in the Humanities of the academic year, launching the Center for the Humanities’ biennial research theme on “Water” for 2015-2017. In his presentation, Vincent reiterated that oftentimes climate media coverage can be confusing, and that the climate feedback website is intended to be a community resource both for scientists and the public alike. The process of the website includes (1) identifying a media piece on climate change, (2) matching scientists to evaluate the article, (3) having scientists annotate the article (includes highlighting, adding figures, charts, and images, commenting, etc.) and (4) assigning an overall rating on the media piece. Members of the public can then access these annotated articles on the climate feedback website and read the annotations and comments provided.

With contributing scientists from prominent research institutions all over the world (over 50+), the climate feedback website has led to media modifying their articles to reflect the comments provided by scientists. The website is intended to make an impact on journalists, concerned members of the public, and has garnered enthusiasm from scientific experts worldwide.

Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor of History at UC Merced, served as a respondent to Vincent’s talk, raising important questions of authority, power, and access. How do communities become permeable? Who can comment on these platforms? Whose voice becomes validated? Who is authorized to provide validation? And, what is the meaning of “expertise”?

Mostern discussed the creation of communities of practice, meaning, and discourse as exemplified through the climate feedback website and as a continuation of ancient practices of annotation and commentary on texts deemed worthy of attention. Mostern discussed both ancient and modern expressions of annotations and commentary, such as hypothes.is, open source and open code platforms, annotations on maps, and other social media websites. The climate feedback website has become a mechanism of community-building within and beyond the scientific community, as a form of public scholarship; as well as a form of publicly and socially engaged work, through the use of common domains and shared language and expertise.

[1] Leiserowitz et al (2011) Climate change in the American Mind. Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

The World Turned Upside Down: Changes in Representations of the World in Medieval Eurasian Maps: Seminar with Hyunhee Park

by Chancellor Dorothy Leland

My role is to say something that helps open up conversations, and I need to confess two handicaps from the beginning.

First, I am not a historian and hence do not have the expertise to critically assess the analyses and arguments that Professor Park presented us with today.

My second handicap is that I am map impaired.

By map impaired, I mean that I often struggle to successfully use the conventions for understanding the maps that I encounter in my daily life. I most frequently experience this handicap with navigational road maps, which appear to me as a dizzying array of highways, streets, and intersections that fail to correspond to the world as I inhabit it. I am a country girl who learned to find my way using a set of physical landmarks—the old oak tree in front of the yellow house, Mr. Miller’s orchard, the dirt path that meandered between fenced pastures to the spot, sheltered by a stand of eucalyptus trees, where I boarded the school bus. To this day, I rarely pay attention to street names and instead look for navigational beacons in the landscape that surrounds me—churches, billboards, dwellings, tree clusters, and others icons that over time orient me in my environment.

Of course, I could draw navigational maps that more closely correspond to my own sense of place, and indeed I sometimes do so to supplement standard street directions for people who want to visit me. And as a child I liked to create maps that took me to fictional treasures or navigated me through imaginary worlds.

The point is that maps are human representations, symbolic depictions of place and relationships within place. Depending on the map, their features are informed by individual psychology, geographical knowledge, religion, politics, and many other factors. As such, maps provide fertile soil for insight from multiple disciplinary perspectives into the human symbolic imagination and the influences that shape it across cultures and historical periods.

The so-called upside down world maps provide a compelling locus of inquiry regarding map-making conventions and history.  These maps place the labeling on a map so that south is up, north is down, east is left, and west is right. As a consequence the Southern Hemisphere appears at the top of the map rather than at the bottom in contrast with mapping conventions that prevail in our own time and culture.   Indeed, it is only from within our own representational convention of orienting North to the top that maps with the South up appear upside-down.

As Professor Park noted in her presentation, the decision to orient maps according to a single prime direction varies across cultures, and there is no purely geographical reason why one direction supersedes others. In looking at the geographical understanding and techniques for mapping the world across different cultures and time, she finds the geographers “all drew observations from the Eastern rising and western setting sun to orient their maps along an east-west axis and north-south axis that followed the position of the North Star or the mid-day sun. Yet geographers of different societies presented this orientation in different ways according to the symbolic and sacred values held by their traditions.”

Although Professor Park reviews several hypotheses that may explain why, for example, the Islamic world adopted a south-up mapping convention, the focus of her study is not on this particular question but rather to trace the transfer of certain mapping practices and views from one society to another and to show how this influenced people’s geographic understanding.  I found her discussion of the influence of Islamic world maps in both China and Europe fascinating and a compelling example of how our understanding and symbolic representation of place, whether it be the world or something much smaller, can shift over time through contact and the selective blending of traditions.

Consider the case of China. Apparently, the earliest extant maps placed north on the top, consistent with Greco-Roman mapping and in contrast to Islamic world mapping. As Professor Park suggests, this may have been to indicate the primacy of a sacred direction based on a traditional Chinese idea that envisions the emperor as sitting in the north looking southward as if down on his subjects. This might also have been because the Chinese placed value on the North Star as a fixed star indicating the geographic pole used for voyages. These maps apparently also focused on drawing Chinese territory to the neglect of the larger world, and consistent with Chinese cosmology, which viewed the earth’s shape as a quadrangle under a spherical sky, maps were drawn within a rectangular frame. The impetus for change, according to Professor Park, was the political need for maps with a broader Eurasian perspective when China emerged as the center of the Mongol empire. Islamic maps and astronomical instruments became available as scholars migrated from Central Asia and Iran to China in the early thirteenth century, and this, combined with a strong political motivation, led to a new Chinese world map incorporating important Islamic influences.

But while there is a clear story to tell about the Islamic influence, Chinese map-making during this period apparently did not incorporate some important elements of the Islamic tradition—including, perhaps, the Islamic concept of the geographical round globe and the south on top orientation of Islamic maps. And the influence of these and other aspects of the Islamic tradition were not strong enough to stick over time and through changing political circumstances. When the Mongol empire failed and was replaced by the native dynasty, Chinese map-making for the most part continued in the earlier mapping tradition.

I have summarized this portion of Professor Park’s presentation because it holds broader questions that interest me—and perhaps you as well. Professor Park opened her presentation by noting that, “historians can often detect important political or cultural shifts caused by a change in perspective that allowed people to see things in a new way.” And although astute historians, armed with appropriate historical documents, can trace these shifts, it may be more difficult to understand the factors that determine or predict when a change of perspective is more likely than not to become firmly embedded as part of the dominant representational framework of a culture or society. In the case of China after the Mongol empire failed, what were the pulls back to the older, more traditional map-making conventions?

I suspect that the explanation does not belong to the province of history alone but rather requires, in addition, political, anthropological, sociological, and psychological modes of inquiry and explanation. Deep cultural change is notoriously slow and unstable in the absence of pervasive and practical, political, or religious influences to motivate the change.

My interest in this question is related to the ways that the study of the past from multiple disciplinary perspectives can inform our understanding of the present and possible future. I wonder, for example, what might be capable of dislodging the reification in the modern western world of the north-on-top map orientation. The question is speculative but also relates more broadly to questions about how traditions of representation get lost, how they might be recovered as part of our active framework for understanding the world, and how deep, lasting changes in the dominant representational frameworks of a culture or society manage to occur.

We know that any given map-making tradition represents only one of many possible ways of depicting place or world. With respect to world-maps, no curved surface like that of the Earth can be projected in two dimensions without some distortion, and different methods of projection are better for conveying elements such as shape or size, compass direction, etc. than others.   The political firestorm that emerged several decades ago over the methods of projection created in 1569 by Mercator, a Flemish mathematician and cartographer, rested on complaints that the distortion of territory that resulted from his method of projection (still widely used at the time) reinforced Eurocentric bias and western imperialism. Even earlier, several surrealists used representational hyperbole to expose the Mercator projection’s supposed Eurocentric bias by shrinking Europe and eliminating some of its countries. Of course, the Mercator map projection was created for navigational purposes by representing lines of constant compass bearing and not as a representation of the relative size or importance of world states, territories, and regions.   But it became over time, due to its widespread use for non-navigational purposes, the standard map projection for many westerners. Its distortion of large sections of the world might indeed have reinforced notions of Western superiority.

Contemporary upside down map enthusiasts point, similarly, to the way in which simply turning the North-up map upside down can jar us out of our complacent sense of place in a world that we have come to see through map-making conventions that dominate the modern western world. It has thus entered classrooms as an educational tool.

I cite these examples as an illustration of the fact that maps, like other forms of human representation, are rich with historical, cultural, anthropological, religious, political, and practical significance. Professor Park has helped us to see the chain of influence between several different cultures during a specific time period that resulted in significant changes in local geographic understanding and world map conventions.