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A manager at a hotel receives an alarming number of complaints from her guests that they have to wait too long for elevators. So she requests quotes for installing an additional elevator. Turned down by the price tag of that solution, the manager seeks an alternative and decides to give her guests something to do while they wait for the elevator, by installing mirrors or televisions or providing magazines.
How can psychologists and other social scientists interested in making a difference become more fully and effectively engaged in the policy world? To address this question, in-depth interviews were conducted with 79 psychologists who were asked to describe their policy experiences over the course of their careers, with particular focus on a major policy success.
Currently, the United States is at war and the nation’s future can be at risk. It’s the war on student achievement gaps, one that has waged for decades and proven extremely difficult to fight and complex to understand. Is American education system losing its war on achievement gaps?
There are times when it feels like Anthony Trollope’s Irish novels might just as well have fallen overboard on the journey across the Irish Sea. Their disappearance would, for the better part of a century, have largely gone unnoticed and unlamented by readers and critics alike. Although interest has grown in recent times, the reality is that his Irish novels have never achieved more than qualified success, and occupy only a marginal place in his overall oeuvre.
Volkswagen shocked the world. The world’s largest automaker admitted to creating software that would deliberately generate false exhaust emission information on many of its popular cars. Making matters worse, Volkswagen’s top leadership seemed unsure about how to respond to the crisis as it threatened the company’s reputation, operations, and long-term strategy.
Planet Earth doesn’t have ‘a temperature’, one figure that says it all. There are oceans, landmasses, ice, the atmosphere, day and night, and seasons. Also, the temperature of Earth never gets to equilibrium: just as it’s starting to warm up on the sunny-side, the sun gets ‘turned off’; and just as it’s starting to cool down on the night-side, the sun gets ‘turned on’.
What role does international law play in addressing global problems? How can international lawyers innovate to provide solutions? How can they learn new approaches from different legal systems? Which fields require greater research and expertise?
In order to hypothesize about the evolutionary origins of grammar, it is essential to rely on some theory or model of human grammars. Interestingly, scholars engaged in the theoretical study of grammar (syntacticians), particularly those working within the influential framework associated with linguist Noam Chomsky, have been reluctant to consider a gradualist, selection-based approach to grammar.
The Edwardian seer and futurologist, H. G. Wells, wondered whether aircrafts would ever be used commercially. He did the calculations and found that, yes, an airplane could be built and, yes, it would fly, but he proclaimed this would never be commercial.
There is a good deal of historical evidence for women’s leadership in the early church. But the references are often brief, and they’re scattered across centuries and locations. Two interpretations of the evidence have been common in the last forty years.
Since roughly the middle of the last century, there has been a thriving philosophical debate about the nature of action. What is it that makes us agents rather than patients? What makes us responsible for the things that we do rather than the things that happen to us?
In my 22 years of teaching and writing about Arabic and Islamic Studies, I have probably heard every kind of naive and uninformed comment that can possibly be made in the West about Islam and Muslims. Such remarks are not necessarily all due to ill will; most of the time, they express bewilderment and stem from an inability to find accessible, informed sources that might begin to address such widespread public incomprehension. Add that to the almost daily barrage of news and media commentary concerning violence in the Middle East and South Asia, two regions viscerally connected with Islam and Muslims.
Today marks the forty-sixth anniversary of Prince Charles’s formal investiture as Prince of Wales. At the time of this investiture, Charles himself was just shy of his twenty-first birthday, and in a video clip from that year, the young prince looks lean and fresh-faced in his suit, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasping and unclasping as he speaks to the importance of the investiture.
Argentina, 1976. On the afternoon of 3 August, Fr. James Weeks went to his room to take a nap while the five seminarians of the La Salette congregation living with him went to attend classes. Joan McCarthy, an American nun who was visiting them, stayed by the fireplace, knitting a scarf. They would have dinner together and discuss the next mission in Jujuy, a Northwestern province of Argentina, where McCarthy worked. Suddenly, a loud noise came from the door. Before McCarthy could reach it, a mob burst into the house. Around ten men spread all over the house, claiming to be the police, looking for weapons, guerrilla hideouts, and ‘subversive fighters.’
Investigations into the nature of epilepsy, and its effects on those diagnosed with the disorder, can be traced back for almost 2,000 years. From associations with lunar cycles, to legislation preventing those with epilepsy to marry, the cultural and scientific record on epilepsy treatment is one of stigma and misunderstanding.
“Why are there missionaries in America? This is a Christian country!” “We send missionaries out. We don’t bring them in.” “Missionaries in America… I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
These were some of the comments I encountered as I conducted research on the phenomena of missionaries in America. Despite these protests, missionaries from outside of the West do come to the United States, seeking to revitalize and evangelize Americans. Listed below, I provide seven reasons for why missionaries—particularly those from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—are sharing the gospel in “God’s country.”
(1) “We did not come to just enjoy eating beef and butter.”
However they may have entered the United States, there are many theologically conservative and devoted immigrant evangelicals in America that view themselves as a “chosen” people with a divine mission. They believe that they should not just enjoy their lives in America eating “beef and butter” and socializing only with other immigrants in ethnic enclaves. Instead, they should strike out and be the “salt and light” of America and evangelize both locally and internationally.
(2) The United States is the “Great Nation”.
The United States is a top destination for emigrants. It is also a prime destination for self-supporting “lay” missionaries. The factors that draw immigrants to the United States also draw missionaries to America. When asked why missionaries are in America, one of the directors of a large “reverse” mission church explained: “If you are looking for an answer other than spiritual reasons . . . there are various reasons like children’s education, the desire to see the world’s best country, the wealthiest country . . . Almost everyone wants to come to America.” Everyone wants to be in the “great nation,” including missionaries.
(3) The United States is the “Modern Rome”.
Missionaries do not come to America just because it is a “great nation” for immigrants, but also because it is the “modern Rome,” the most powerful nation in the world. Centering one’s mission work in the most powerful nation in the world is simply strategic. The United States is the superpower and therefore a logical base for launching a world mission movement. Once you make it in America as a mission movement, you can also make it elsewhere. You have more power, prestige, and legitimacy if you base your mission movement in the “modern Rome” of our world.
(4) Evangelize America, evangelize the world.
Living in the global nation of nations, missionaries in America don’t have to go far to participate in world missions. The world is at their doorstep. If they evangelize in America, they can reach people from all four corners of the world, including China and Muslim nations. The United States is therefore a most important mission field.
(5) The United States is a “Christian” nation in trouble.
Missionaries in America view the United States as a “Christian” nation in trouble. America has lost its spiritual fire with growing materialism, secularism, humanism, and sexual immorality. It is no longer a “city on a hill” or a “beacon of light,” and may even become like the now secular and “dark continent” of Europe. Although the United States is a predominately Christian and a dominant missionary-sending nation, it is framed as a nation that has lost its foothold as a leading Christian influence. Its churches are great in number, but they are weak in “Spirit.” Missionaries are therefore needed to bring spiritual revival in America.
(6) Create a positive “spiritual trickle-down” effect for world Christianity.
In the world of spiritual warfare, all of Christianity would be in jeopardy if the United States fell as a dominant Christian nation. If, however, the United States is resuscitated and exerts its power as a leading “beacon of light,” there will be a positive “spiritual trickle-down” effect for all Christians of the world. The United States is a most important spiritual territory that missionaries must safeguard for Christianity to be the dominant world religion.
(7) How can you be a history maker? Save the history makers.
What happens if people from the formerly colonized and less powerful nations send missionaries back to the western nations that have been the dominant imperial and missionary-sending nations of the last few centuries? What happens if you save the people of the United States, the superpower nation that has been the modern history-making country? You and your country can be history makers as well. If you save the history maker, you can be a history maker and thereby become a spiritual conqueror on the world stage.
Disseminating scholarship is at the heart of the Oxford University Press mission and much of academic publishing. It drives every part of publishing strategy—from content acquisition to sales. What happens, though, when a student, researcher, or general reader discovers content that they don’t have access to?
For example, while a majority of Oxford Handbook Online (OHO) and Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) users have access through their institutions, not everyone does; sometimes even those who do need to conduct research at home or while on leave, when they aren’t connected to their campus networks. To facilitate such research, Oxford has partnered with the Copyright Clearance Center to begin offering chapters on a pay-per-view basis. Pay-per-view is a well-established business model in journal publishing but is only recently gaining traction for book-based content.
Beginning in October, unauthenticated users of Oxford Handbooks began seeing buy buttons on articles. Clicking the button will allow them to purchase 24-hour access or, for a premium, unlimited perpetual access. And starting in the New Year, just in time for the start of the new term, this option will be available at the chapter level in Oxford Scholarship Online.
As with any change, we didn’t take this lightly. Oxford, like any other publisher, needed to fully weigh the risks against the benefits. Our partnership with the Copyright Clearance Center is focused on expanding access while maintaining our robust global institutional partnerships. The benefits were clear from the start: allowing more users to access our content—from any device at any hour of the day—and in a multitude of currencies. A student rushing to finish a paper at the end of the term or a researcher away from her library can have full access to the best scholarship with just a few clicks and a credit card. They can cite with confidence.
With just a few months under our belt, the early results are incredibly encouraging. Customers from around the globe are accessing award-winning content—some for just 24 hours, others choosing to retain the article in perpetuity. We’re working with these users throughout to learn more—from their geographical location to the ease of the transaction. All of this feedback helps us further develop this new access model, our platform, and the overall user experience. Over the next year, we will further experiment with discounting, personalization, and recommendations to make the most of this important project.
In the end, we hope to have learned great deal about getting the best research into the hands—and minds—of as many users as possible. That, after all, is our mission.
Antarctica is a polar desert almost entirely covered by a vast ice sheet up to four km in thickness. The great white continent is a very apt description. The ice-free areas, often referred to as oases, carry obvious life in lakes and occasional small patches of lichen and mosses where there is sufficient seasonal melt water to support them. The majority of ice-free areas lie on the coastal margins of the continent, but there is a large inland ice-free region called the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
On the face of it Antarctica would appear to offer little in the way of excitement for anyone interested in the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of lakes. However, surprisingly Antarctica possesses the most diverse array of lakes types on the planet. The ice-free areas, which are bare rock, carry freshwater lakes and saline lakes, some as salty as the Dead Sea. Between land and ice shelves there are remarkable so-called epishelf freshwater lakes, that sit on seawater or are connected to the sea by a conduit and are consequently tidal. Underneath the vast ice sheet there are numerous subglacial lakes, around 380 at last count, of which Lakes Vostoc, Whillans, and Ellsworth are the best known. Ice shelves that occur around the edge of the continent overlying the sea, carry shallow lakes and ponds on their surface, and there are lakes on many of the glaciers. Some of these are short-lived and drain through holes called moulins to the glacier base, while others are several thousands of years old.
Antarctic lakes are extreme environments where only the most robust and adaptable organisms survive. Temperatures are always close to freezing and in saline lakes can fall below zero. While there is 24-hour daylight in summer, in winter the sun does not rise above the horizon, so the Sun’s light energy that drives the growth of the phytoplankton through photosynthesis is much lower on an annual basis than at our latitudes. The food webs of these lakes are truncated; there are few zooplankton and no fish. They are systems dominated by microorganisms: microscopic algae, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses. All of the lakes apart from the most saline have ice covers, that can be up to five metres thick. Lakes on the coastal margins usually lose part or all of their ice covers for a few weeks each summer, but the inland more southerly lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys have thick perennial ice covers that contain rocks and dust that have blown off the surrounding hills. This ‘dirty’ ice allows very little light to penetrate to the underlying water column, so the photosynthetic organisms that live there are adapted to extreme shade.
Miers Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys area. Photo by Saxphile. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It would be reasonable to assume that during the austral winter biological processes in lake waters shut down. However, that is not the case; life goes on even in the darkness of winter. Bacteria manage to grow at low temperatures and many of the photosynthetic microorganisms become heterotrophic. They eat bacteria or take up dissolved organic carbon and are described as mixotrophic (meaning mixed nutrition). In this way they can hit the deck running when the short austral summer arrives and they can resume photosynthesis. Even the few crustacean zooplankton stay active in winter and don’t exploit resting eggs or diapause. They are crammed full with fat globules, which together with any food they can exploit takes them through the winter. Their fecundity is very low compared to their temperate relatives, but with no fish predators they can sustain a population.
Shallow lakes and ponds on ice shelves and glaciers freeze to their bases in winter. Thus their biotas have to be able to withstand freezing and in the case of saline ponds, increasing salinity as salts are excluded from the formation of ice.
The most topical and currently exciting lakes are the subglacial lakes kilometres under the ice sheet. These represent the modern age of polar exploration because gaining entry to these lakes presents major logistic challenges. One of the major issues is ensuring that the collected samples are entirely sterile and not contaminated with microorganisms from the surface. Subglacial lakes have been separated from the atmosphere for millions of years and potentially harbour unique microorganisms. In the past few years the US Antarctic programme has successfully penetrated Lake Whillans and demonstrated that it contains a diverse assemblage of Bacteria and Archaea in a chemosynthetically driven ecosystem (Christner et al. 2014). The British attempt to penetrate Lake Ellsworth was unsuccessful, but there are plans to continue the exploration of this lake in the future. In the coming years these extraordinary aquatic ecosystems will reveal more of their secrets.
The delicate surface lake ecosystems of Antarctica appear to respond rapidly to local climatic variations and where there are long-term data sets, as there are for the McMurdo Dry Valleys, to global climatic change. Unlike lakes at lower latitudes they are removed from the direct effects of Man’s activities that have changed catchment hydrology, and imposed industrial and agricultural pollution. Antarctic lakes are subject to the indirect anthropogenic effects of ozone depletion and climate warming. The impact of these factors can be seen without the superimposition of direct man-made effects. Consequently polar lakes, including those in the Arctic, can be regarded as sentinels of climate change.
Headline image credit: Lake Fryxell in the Transantarctic Mountains. Photo by Joe Mastroianni, Antarctic Photo Library, National Science Foundation. CCO via Wikimedia Commons
One of the more interesting recent developments in film studies is the recognition that what has seemed to be separate histories — documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking — are, once again, converging. I say “once again” because the interplay between documentary and avant-garde film has long been more significant than seems generally understood.
An intersection of an avant-garde artistic practice and a documentary impulse helped to instigate the dawn of cinema itself. When Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey were discovering and exploring the possibilities of photographic motion study, they were the photographic avant-garde of that moment. And their subject was the documentation of the motion of animals, birds, and human beings, presumably so that we could know, more fully, the truth about this motion. And at the moment when W. K. L. Dickson perfected the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope and the Lumière Brothers perfected the Cinématographe and the projected motion picture, they in turn became the photographic avant-garde; and their primary fascination, too, was the documentation of motion, specifically human activity, first, in the world around them and soon, in the case of the Lumières, across the globe.
Flaherty’s Nanook (1922) was both a breakthrough documentary and an avant-garde experiment in collaborative filmmaking; and the City Symphonies that emerged in the 1920s (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1926, e.g., and The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) were documentary interpretations of reality and avant-garde experiments.
During the 1940s, the most important development for independent cinema in the United States was the emergence of a full-fledged film society movement. The leading contributor was Cinema 16, founded by Amos and Marcia Vogel in New York City in 1947. At its height, Cinema 16 had 7,000 members, and filled a 1,500-seat auditorium twice a night for monthly screenings. Cinema 16’s programming was an inventive mixture of documentary and avant-garde film.
The development of light-weight cameras and tape recorders, more flexible microphones, and faster film stocks during the late 1950s created additional options that in one sense, drove documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking apart, but in another sense, created a different kind of intersection between them. Sync-sound shooting expanded the options available to filmmakers committed to documentary, instigating forms of cinematic entertainment that functioned as critiques of Hollywood filmmaking and early television. Drew Associates, D. A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, and the Maysles Brothers fashioned engaging melodrama out of real life in Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), Don’t Look Back (1967), Hospital (1968), and Salesman (1968).
During the same decade, avant-garde filmmakers were producing very different forms of documentary, often by abjuring sound altogether. Stan Brakhage was committed to the idea of cinema as a visual art, and created remarkable—silent—confrontations of visual taboo such as Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1972)—now recognized as canonical documentaries. These films could hardly have been more different from the cinema verite films, but we can now see that Brakhage shared the mission of the cinema verite documentarians: the cinematic confrontation of convention-bound commercial media.
In 1955, Francis Flaherty, Robert Flaherty’s widow, established a symposium to honor her husband’s filmmaking oeuvre and to promote his commitment to filmmaking “without preconceptions.” In recent decades “the Flaherty,” as the symposium has come to be called, has attracted dozens of filmmakers, programmers, teachers, students, and other cine-aficionados for week-long immersions in programs of screenings and discussions. Modern Flaherty seminars have often been driven by an implicit debate about what the correct balance between documentary and avant-garde film should be at the seminar.
Since the 1940s, avant-garde filmmakers have found ways of exploring the personal, first by psycho-dramatizing their inner disturbances (Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks are landmark instances), and later by filming the particulars of their personal lives. Brakhage documented dimensions of his personal life in many films, as did Carolee Schneemann, in Fuses (1967), and Jonas Mekas, in Walden (1969) and Lost Lost Lost (1976). And during the 1980s, avant-garde filmmakers Su Friedrich (in The Ties that Bind, 1984; and Sink or Swim, 1990) and Alan Berliner (in Intimate Stranger, 1991; and Nobody’s Business, 1996), used experimental techniques learned from other avant-garde filmmakers to directly engage their family histories.
What has come to be called “personal documentary” (basically, the use of sync-sound to explore personal issues) was instigated in the early 1970s by Ed Pincus’s Diaries (filmed from 1971-1976; completed in 1981), Miriam Weinstein’s Living with Peter (1973), Amalie Rothschild’s Nana, Mom and Me (1974), Alfred Guzzetti’s Family Portrait Sittings (1975). By the 1980s, several of Pincus’s students at MIT were contributing to this approach, among them Ross McElwee, whose films, including Sherman’s March (1986), Time Indefinite (1994), and Photographic Memory (2011) are an on-going personal saga.
Globalization and the standardization of so many dimensions of modern life, along with threats to the environment, have created a desire on the part of many filmmakers to pay a deeper attention to the particulars of Place. Since the early 1970s, contemplations of Place have been produced by avant-garde filmmakers Larry Gottheim (Fog Line, 1970; Horizons, 1973), Nathaniel Dorsky (Hours for Jerome, 1982), James Benning (13 Lakes, 2004), Peter Hutton (Landscape (for Manon), 1987; At Sea, 2007), Sharon Lockhart (Double Tide, 2009) and many others. A fascination with Place, or more precisely, people-in-place, also characterizes the documentaries coming out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), including Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass (2009), Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2013), and Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2014). Indeed, the films of Hutton, Benning, and Lockhart, in particular, have been shown regularly at the SEL.
The interviewees in Avant-Doc reveal a wide range of ways in which their own work and the work of colleagues function creatively within the liminal zone between documentary and avant-garde and the ways in which the intersections between these histories have played into their work.
Headline image credit: Camera. Public domain via Pixabay.
I vacation in a small town on a lovely bay in the northwestern corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula. This summer my stay coincided with the run-up to the state’s primary elections. One evening, just down the street from where I was staying, the local historical society hosted a candidates’ forum. Most of the incumbents and challengers spoke pragmatically of specific matters of local concern, of personal traits that would make them good officeholders, or of family traditions of public service they hoped to continue. Some promised to be allies in disputes with the state government in Lansing. One incumbent claimed to have persuaded the state department of environmental quality to drop its longstanding objections to a wing dam that would spare a marina costly dredging. But just when I was ready to conclude that the Tea Party movement had run its course, another candidate, who identified himself as a lawyer and an expert in constitutional history, used his time to develop the claim that bureaucracy was unAmerican and that as it grew so did liberty diminish. I may have seen fewer approving nods than followed the other candidate’s tale of the wing dam, but most in the audience appeared to agree with him.
Several historians have already engaged the popular antistatism I encountered that evening. Some have argued, as Progressives did in the early twentieth century, that, after the rise of vast and powerful corporations, public bureaucracies were needed to make freedom something other than the right to be subjected to the dominion of the economically powerful. Others have taken aim at the claim that bureaucracy was incompatible with America’s founding principles. The University of Michigan’s William Novak blasted this as “the myth of ‘weak’ American state.” Yale University’s Jerry Mashaw has recovered a lost century of American administrative law before the creation of the first independent federal regulatory commission in 1887.
Elk Rapids at sunset. Photo by Joy S. Ernst. Used with permission.
What such accounts miss is a long tradition of antistatism and its shaping effect on American statebuilding. Alexis de Tocqueville was an early and influential expositor. Although Americans had centralized government, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that it lacked centralized administration. And that, he argued, was a very good thing: if citizens of a democratic republic like the United States ever became habituated to centralized administration, “a more insufferable despotism would prevail than any which now exists in the monarchical states of Europe.” The builders of the administrative state were not heedless of Tocqueville’s nightmare, but they were convinced that their political system was broken and had to be fixed. They believed they lived not in some Eden of individual liberty but in a fallen polity in which businessmen and political bosses bargained together while great social ills went unredressed.
The most important of the statebuilders was no wild-eyed reformer but an austere, moralistic corporation lawyer, Charles Evans Hughes, who, as Chief Justice of the United States, would later out-duel President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Neither Hughes nor anyone else thought that government would control itself. Instead, he and other judges reworked the ancient ideal of the rule of law to keep a necessary but potentially abusive government in check.
Tales of thoughtful people working out intelligent solutions to difficult problems are not, I know, everyone’s idea of a good read. I bet that candidate who imagined himself battling for liberty and against bureaucracy prefers more dramatic fare. Still, I think the story of how Americans reconciled bureaucracy and the rule of law might appeal to residents of that small Michigan town, once they remember that the same department of environmental quality that sometimes balks at wing dams also preserves the water, land, and air on which their economy and way of life depend.
Featured image credit: ‘Alexis de Tocqueville’ by Théodore Chassériau, painted in 1850. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
If you think about big public health challenges of our day — the Ebola virus in Africa, the rising rates of suicide among the middle-aged in the United States, the HIV epidemic everywhere — religions are playing a role. When I speak, I ask audiences, “What was the first thing you heard about the Ebola crisis?”, and they always say “The missionaries who got it were taken to Emory.” “That makes my point,” I say. “You didn’t know anything about it up until that moment, but they did.” Those missionaries, and the faith-based organizations they worked for (Samaritan’s Purse and Serving in Mission) were already there on the ground along with other faith-based organizations, volunteering their time, putting their lives in danger, and providing valuable resources of equipment, supplies, and knowledgeable helping hands to try to contain the outbreak.
In another challenge, the crisis of rising suicides among US veterans and Baby Boomers, religion’s role is more in the background, but no less important. Since sociologist Emile Durkheim first studied the subject in late 19th century France, researchers have consistently found that individuals with more social ties – particularly to religious groups — are more protected from suicide. Religious ties provide caring, support, warmth, and intimacy — the “carrots” of social interaction. They also provide rules for living and guidance for behavior that often require individuals to sacrifice their self-interest for the good of the group. These are the “sticks” of social interaction, which Durkheim argued were just as necessary as the “carrots” in keeping individuals from taking their own lives. So here are two quite different roles that religions play in public health: first in the foreground, deploying resources and religious social capital as partners with public health authorities in countries around the world, and also in the background, providing the sustenance of social integration and regulation that prevents the tailspin of suicide.
But religions are complicated, and in the HIV epidemic we have seen faith traditions playing all of these roles and other less helpful ones as well. One positive thing that religions do — very effectively through religious ritual and practice — is to give individuals a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves; they bestow a social identity that marks individuals as valued members of a group, with all of that group’s rights, privileges, and responsibilities. But group membership by its very nature implies that there are other individuals and groups — outsiders — who are not members, who may be less valued. This is an obvious source of conflict around the world and can lead to violence on a small or large scale. This too, sad to say, is an instance of religions taking a role in determining the health of populations, but not in a good way. And at a less extreme level, if an individual violates the norms of the group, or breaks its rules, it can lead to sanctions, punishment, or even being cast out from membership. So in the HIV epidemic, individuals who were victimized by the disease first, in many cases experienced a secondary victimization of being stigmatized by religious groups who perceived that the disease was a sign of forbidden behaviors, and therefore a just punishment.
Public health organizations and religious organizations are both looking to promote the well-being of their communities. In many cases those interests are perfectly aligned and the two institutions function, implicitly or explicitly, as partners. When they do not, it makes sense that two powerful forces should identify all of the ways in which they can work together, finding a way around the contentious issues to leverage each other’s constructive responses. Religion, along with income inequality, education, and political structures, is one of the social determinants of public health in countries around the world, despite its usual exclusion from the public health paradigm.
We all have a great deal of resources at our disposal most of the time, we look things up on our tablets and phones immediately, and are able to retrieve information on almost any topic at any time, almost anywhere. We’ve never been so connected globally. As a marketer, I’m intrigued and excited by engaging with this global community; working in global online product marketing, I’m keen to embrace new technologies and digital resources so we can fulfill our aim to disseminate content to everyone and anyone who wants and needs it. I think about digital resources a lot, mulling over the best way to use new technologies to tell people that these resources exist, reflect on how I can best show people what they can do, and ponder what they have to offer students, academics, and professionals. (You just haven’t lived the full life of a marketer until you wake up thinking of how to best run a digital advertising campaign.)
This is because I work in the online product marketing department at Oxford University Press and am responsible for the marketing of several online products, including Oxford Scholarship Online and University Press Scholarship Online.
I started my OUP life in the medicine marketing department. It was here that I learnt about how to market a list of books. And not just any old books, but ones that help save lives. I learnt about how to pick out the key features and benefits in order to draw the reader into what the essence of the book is about, I learnt about what makes a good book-jacket design, how to produce creative and engaging material to tell our audience about these books. I traveled abroad to all sorts of conferences to show doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists directly the academic content we had to offer.
In the almost four years I’ve worked at OUP a not insignificant shift has taken place towards an online environment, as more and more people begin their research online (who doesn’t start everything with a Google search?), connect with colleagues and peers through social media, and increasingly use online resources in their teaching to be able to reach students across the globe. As a result of this shift more and more of our books were placed onto various online resources (in medicine this largely took the form of Oxford Medicine Online) and as marketers we relish rolling with the changes, adapting, embracing, and championing this new way of providing content to people.
It was a big shift and involved a change in the way we thought about our lists and marketing. But the skills and aims at the heart of what we do remained the same: how can we best engage with you, our audience?
This has led to our ways of working continually changing with this shift to digital (and this is true of all marketing departments and companies everywhere). We are now able to reach and interact with a global audience through our digital campaigns, no longer having to solely rely on printing and mailing thousands of leaflets without knowing if anyone ever read them. We now tweet, post on Facebook and Tumblr, create podcasts, videos, write blog posts, and encourage authors, contributors, librarians (the wonderfully named Tumblrians spring to mind) to join our communities and get involved. The way we relate to our audience has changed; there is an increased desire for a dialogue between publishers and users of our content. We want to talk and listen to our community — we are closer to people than we’ve ever been before. In this brave new world people can tell you what they think in hardly any time at all via a Facebook post or tweet — a scary, but exciting prospect.
As for what the future holds for marketing, I think the communities that continue to grow and evolve are vital. It is the people who use and value what we make who are going to be sharing, commenting, contributing, and making us better.
I can’t wait to see how we’ll be communicating in another ten years’ time!
The twelfth of August marks the Feast of the Prophet and his Bride, a holiday that commemorates the marriage of Aleister Crowley and his first wife Rose Edith Crowley in the religion he created, Thelema. Born in 1875, Crowley traveled the world, living in Cambridge, Mexico, Cairo, China, America, Sicily, and Berlin. Here, using Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism as our trusted guide, we take a closer look at the man and his religion.
In 1898 Alesiter Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as Frater Perdurabo. The teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were based upon an imaginative reworking of Hermetic writings further informed by nineteenth-century scholarship in Egyptology and anthropology. The order was structured around the symbolism of the kabbalah and organized into temples that were run on strictly hierarchical lines. Authority was vested in leading individuals, and initiates were given a rigorous and systematic training in the “rejected” knowledge of Western esotericism. They studied the symbolism of astrology, alchemy, and kabbalah; were instructed in geomantic and tarot divination; and learned the underpinnings of basic magical techniques.
Aleister Crowley as Magus, Liber ABA. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Crowley’s magical self, Perdurabo, was a part of his concept of selfhood. In his own words:
As a member of the Second Order [of the Golden Dawn], I wore a certain jewelled ornament of gold upon my heart. I arranged that when I had it on, I was to permit no thought, word or action, save such as pertained directly to my magical aspirations. When I took it off I was, on the contrary, to permit no such things; I was to be utterly uninitiate. It was like Jekyll and Hyde, but with the two personalities balanced and complete in themselves.
The base camp of 1902 expedition for K2. Aleister Crowley is in setted in the middle. By Jules Jacot Guillarmod. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1902, Aleister Crowley was a part of the team who made the second serious attempt to climb the world’s second highest summit, K2.
Frontpage from a published versions of Liber AL vel Legis. By Ordo Templi Orientis. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In the spring of 1904, while on his honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt, he received a short prophetic text, which came to be known as Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. The book announces the doctrines of a new religion called Thelema, with Crowley—referred to in the book as “the prince-priest the Beast”—as its prophet.
The most important book of The Holy Books of Thelema, The Book of the Law is a channeled text that consists of 220 short verses divided into three chapters.
Aleister Crowley as Magus, Liber ABA. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The core doctrines of this new creed of Thelema were expressed in three short dictums: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” “Love is the law, love under will,” and “Every man and every woman is a star.”
Thelema Abbey in Cefalù, Sicily, by Frater Kybernetes. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Thelema Abbey was established in the small Italian town of Cefalù in the period between 1920 and 1923. It consisted of one large house occupied by a small number of Crowley’s disciples and mistress(es). Life at the Abbey was for the most part Crowley’s attempt to translate his magical and Thelemic ideas into social reality. For the participants, the regime of life involved a great deal of occult and sex-magic activity as well as experiments with various mind-and mood-altering substances, such as hashish, cocaine, heroin, and opium.
Alyssa Bender is a marketing coordinator in Academic/Trade marketing, working on religion and theology titles as well as Bibles. She has worked in OUP’s New York office since July 2011.
Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr, is the first comprehensive examination of an understudied thinker and figure in the occult.
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On 11 April 2013, inmate Calvin Lee stabbed and beat inmate Javaughn Young to death in a Maryland prison. They were both members of the Bloods, a notorious gang active in the facility. The day before Lee killed Young, Young and an accomplice had stabbed Lee three times in the head and neck. They did so because Lee refused to accept the punishment that his gang ordered against him for breaking “gang rules.” Lee didn’t report his injuries to officials. Instead, he waited until the next day and killed Young in retribution.
While this might seem to provide evidence that gangs are inherently violent, that’s not so. The story is more complicated. Gangs enforce a variety of rules that they design to establish order. Lee violated these rules by giving his cellmate—who had a dispute with a rival gang—a knife. Many inmates would see this as encouraging violence, which gangs seek to control. The situation provides a glimpse at a major role played by prison gangs. They don’t form to promote chaos, but to limit spontaneous acts of violence.
Many people are surprised to learn about the extent to which gangs regulate inmate life. Not only do many inmates feel they must join a gang, but gangs even issue written rules about appropriate social conduct. These include who you may eat lunch with, which shower to use, who may cut your hair, and where and when violence is acceptable. One gang gives new inmates a written list of 28 rules to follow. Many gangs even require new inmates to provide a letter of introduction from gang members at other prisons. Moreover, gangs also encourage cooperation within their group by relying on elaborate written constitutions. These often include elections, checks and balances, and impeachment procedures.
Besides setting rules, prison gangs promote social order by adjudicating conflict. Inmates can’t turn to officials to provide this when dealing in illicit goods and services. An inmate can’t rely on a prison warden to resolve a dispute over the quantity or quality of heroin. They can’t turn to officials if someone steals their marijuana stash.
In short, prison gangs form to provide extralegal governance. They enforce property rights and promote trade when formal governance mechanisms don’t. The provide law for the outlaws.
Yet, gangs’ dominance today stands in stark contrast with the historical record. In California, the prison system existed for more than a century before prison gangs emerged. If gangs are so important today, then why didn’t they exist for more than 100 years?
A major cause of the growth of prison gangs is the unprecedented growth in the prison population in the last 40 years. The United States locks up a larger number and proportion of its residents than any other country. This amounts to about 2.2 million people (707 out of every 100,000 residents). With such large prison populations, officials can’t provide all the governance that inmates’ desire. Mass incarceration thus creates fertile conditions for the rise of organized prison gangs.
Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is a vast and rapidly-expanding research library, and has grown to be one of the leading academic research resources in the world. Oxford Scholarship Online offers full-text access to scholarly works from key disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, science, medicine, and law, providing quick and easy access to award-winning Oxford University Press scholarship.
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Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) launched in 2003 with 700 titles. Now, on its tenth birthday, it’s the online home of over 10,000 titles from Oxford University Press’s distinguished academic list, and part of University Press Scholarship Online. To celebrate OSO turning ten, we’ve invited a host of people to reflect on the past ten years of online academic publishing, and what the next ten might bring.
By Kathleen Fearn
It may be hard for some of us here at Oxford University Press to imagine a life without Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), but even though it has reached the grand old age of 10 years old, it is still only a baby in comparison with some of our other venerable institutions. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary first published in 1884, 130 years ago, and the Oxford Almanack 340 years ago in 1674; even our celebrated duck pond is almost 200 years old. OUP employees in our Great Clarendon Street building are used to bumping into history in the most unexpected corners; my most recent find has been the story of the Oxford University Press Voluntary Fire Contingency, our very own fire brigade formed in 1885, with photos and artefacts displayed in a cabinet created from the space previously used to store the fire hoses. We even have an OUP Museum, open to the public (by appointment) and well worth a visit.
Yet even though OSO has existed for only a decade among centuries, for those of us working on book production, it has been a time of unprecedented change. My career at OUP began in 2006, when OSO was in its infancy, and my first impression of the office was, well, that I couldn’t see very much of it beneath the piles and piles of paper: manuscripts, galley proofs, first proofs, second proofs, final proofs, on desks, shelves, often even on the floor. At each stage of production, we diligently photocopied the pile just in case the courier should misplace our precious bundle. Production Editors faced the constant health hazard of paper cuts, to be feared only a little less than that dread moment when the padded envelope containing the author’s proofs splits on opening, sending an explosion of sticky grey dust over desk, floor, and clothes. The end of the production process came with the delivery of a box of (hopefully) pristine advance copies and the eventual recycling of a wall or two of our paper fortress.
The development of digital publishing was, of course, well under way, and as more and more modules were added to OSO, the production teams began to get involved in the delivery of titles online. We have worked from the start to create our online content using XML, and although the words and spaces on the screen may be the same as those in the print book, there’s actually an awful lot going on behind the scenes, as it were. Abstracts and keywords, for example, make it much easier for the reader to find what they’re looking for online, and these, together with other bits of metadata generated during the publication process, make it possible to link up each title with other relevant resources. One of our biggest challenges was, and to some extent still is, making sure that what works in a print book also works on a PC – and now on a tablet or mobile phone too. There’s no point in referring a reader to a picture overleaf when there are no pages to turn, and it’s not at all easy to create working cross-references using that old print standard, ibid.
During OSO’s life, the days of paper in the office have also passed. If you visit us today, it’s a lot easier to spot the team at their desks, as most of the production processes are now carried out on-screen. (Since we’re enjoying the benefits of a paper-light life, we’re glad that OSO readers can also save those 400 metres of shelf space freed up by reading online.) And although we still look forward to opening those advance copies, we don’t stop there, as we’ll often also be delivering the same content as an e-book and for online publication. No one knows exactly what the digital world will look like when OSO reaches its twentieth birthday, but even if our paper proofs have been consigned to the museum with the hot metal typesetting, we’ll still be producing great OUP content in whatever format our readers want and need.
Kathleen Fearn is the Content Operations Manager for Oxford University Press’s Law, Academic, and Trade books in the UK.
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Image: Urval av de böcker som har vunnit Nordiska rådets litteraturpris under de 50 år som priset funnits by Johannes Jansson/norden.org. CC-BY-2.5-dk via Wikimedia Commons.
