Daily Archives: July 25, 2020

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. Middlebury College faculty and staff authors have again put forth a slate of books representing a diversity of interests and scholarship. Although the annual reception celebrating the authors could not take place this year, Jim Ralph, dean for faculty development and research,notes the importance of recognizing the dedication of those who have published books.

This years list of books, published in 2019, points to the remarkable imaginative and analytical powers of Middlebury Colleges faculty and staff, said Ralph.This listwith titles on topics ranging from history to geochemistry to pressing contemporary issuescould serve as a terrific starting point for readers seeking to expand their liberal education.

Books continue to be an important vehicle for conveying knowledge and stimulating insight on a topic, says Ralph. I know I speak for our community when I say how proud we are all of their achievements. The publication of these books also shines a light on the intellectual and creative vitality of our community.

Following is a list of books published by Middlebury faculty and staff in 2019:

Tara Affolter,Through the Fog: Towards Inclusive Anti-Racist Teaching.Charlotte, NC: IAPInformation Age Publishing, Inc, 2019.

Drawing from over 20 years of teaching experience in the U.S., ranging from prekindergarten to postgraduate, Affolters work illustrates personal, practical, and theoretical ways for teachers to grapple with the complexities of race and racism within their own schools and communities and develop as inclusive anti-racist teachers.

Matthew Dickerson,The Voices of Rivers: On Places Wild and Almost Wild. Boston, MA: Homebound Publications, 2019.

This work of creative narrative nonfiction interweaves elements of nature writing, personal narrative, outdoor writing, and environmental writing. In 2017, Dickerson was selected to be artist in residence at Glacier National Park (Montana) for the month of June, and then in 2018, he was selected to be artist in residence at Acadia National Park (Maine) for the month of May. This collection contains essays written in those times and places as well as essays set in some national forests, national parks, and state parks of Alaska from 2015 to 2018.

Elizabeth Endicott,Mongolia 19782017: Memoirs of a Part-Time Mongolist.Manchester Center, VT: Shires Press, 2019.

This memoir is a personal account of the authors 14 trips to Mongolia spanning the years 1978 to 2017. The book offers observations on the Mongolian way of life as it has evolved from the socialist period to a new post-socialist reality. Over 150 of the authors photographs document the social and cultural transformations in the Mongolian countryside and in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city.

Natalie Eppelsheimer,Roads Less Traveled: German Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya, 19331947. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019.

Drawing on archival sources in Kenya, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S., as well as other literary, governmental, journalistic, and historical sources,Roads Less Traveledexamines the experiences of German Jews who managed to escape from Nazi Germany to the British colony of Kenya. This study explores the historical background of Jewish emigration to Kenya, analyzes first-person accounts of former refugees and descriptions of life in the colony, and pays special attention to the experiences of refugee children in Kenya.

Irina Feldman,P. Baker, F. Lagos, and R. Pareja(Eds).Latin American Marxisms in Context: Past and Present.Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.

The opposition to neoliberal development patterns in Latin America has gone beyond social-democratic reformism to a revival of Marxist theoretical perspectives and political practices in the beginning of the 21st century. This book provides an insight into the rich diversity of Latin American Marxism, historically and contemporarily. Given the global interest in the revival of radicalism in Latin America, it should appeal to non-Marxist as well as Marxist scholars with interests in topics from political economy to cultural theory.

Irina Feldmanand A. M. Lopez-Zapico(Eds).Resistiendo al imperio: Nuevas aproximaciones al antiamericanismo desde el siglo xx hasta la actualidad.Madrid, Spain: Slex Ediciones, 2019.

This volume revisits discourses and practices from Latin America, Spain, and the United States labeled as anti-Americanist, analyzing these political and cultural phenomena as practices of resistance in the face of imperial advances of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Felicia A. Grey,States and Non-participatory Memberships in the WTO.London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

This book examines non-participatory memberships, or why states choose not to use the benefits of international institutions to which they belong. To investigate this question, the author explores why states choose not to litigate within the World Trade Organizations Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). The research contributes to the literature on global governance and institutions generally, and of the WTO specifically. Additionally, the project includes comparative case analysis of WTO agreements and international disputes: China and Jamaica; Guatemala and Mexico; the United States and Mexico. This volume will interest policy makers, trade professionals, academics, and anyone who is interested in development studies.

Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell,Catherine Grant,The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy.Online:http://videographicessay.org, 2019.

This digital open-access book, adapted from a print version previously published in 2016 and revised for 2019, collects a series of writings, conversations, and examples of videographic criticism that emerged out of the ongoing Scholarship in Sound and Image summer workshops that have been offered at Middlebury since 2015. In recognition of the pedagogical work discussed in this online resource, Keathley and Mittell were awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies inaugural Innovative Pedagogy Award in 2020.

Gary Margolis,Time Inside.Peterborough, NH: Bauhan Publishing, 2019.

A book of poems.

Michelle McCauley,J. J. Dickinson, N. Schreiber Compo, R. N. Carol, B. L. Schwartz (Eds).Evidence-Based Investigative Interviewing: Applying Cognitive Principles.Routledge Press, 2019.

Evidence-Based Investigative Interviewingreviews the application of cognitive research to investigative interviewing, revealing how principles of cognition, memory, and social dynamics may increase the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. It provides evidence-based applications for investigators beyond the forensic domain in areas such as eyewitness identification, detecting deception, and interviewing children.

Bill McKibben,Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?Henry Holt and Co., 2019.

Falteris an account of our current peril on a hotter planet, and the way that rampant inequality, spurred by libertarian market fantasies, has left us in a particularly weak place to meet the crisis. It argues that nonviolent social movements might offer a way out. A New York Times bestseller, it was named by the Washington Post as one of the 10 best books of the year.

Laurie L. Patton,Who Owns Religion? Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Who Owns Religion? focuses on a periodthe late 1980s through the 1990swhen scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves.

Lana Dee Povitz,Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

In the late 20th century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement, organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, and lobbying city officials. Stirrings uses the political history of food advocacy organizations to explain why such groups focus almost exclusively on feeding hungry people rather than on addressing the root cause of that hungerpoverty.

Peter Crowley Ryan,Environmental and Low-Temperature Geochemistry, Second Edition. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN: 978-1-119-56858-2, 2019.

Environmental and Low-Temperature Geochemistrypresents conceptual and quantitative principles of geochemistry in order to foster understanding of natural processes at and near the earths surface, as well as anthropogenic impacts and remediation strategies. It provides the reader with principles that allow prediction of concentration, speciation, mobility, and reactivity of elements and compounds in soils, waters, sediments, and air, drawing attention to both thermodynamic and kinetic controls. The scope includes atmosphere, terrestrial waters, marine waters, soils, sediments, and rocks in the shallow crust; the temporal scale is present to Precambrian, and the spatial scale is nanometers to local, regional, and global.

Paula Schwartz,Today Sardines Are Not for Sale:A Street Protest in Occupied Paris.

Oxford University Press, 2020. (This book was intended for release in late 2019, so it is included on this years list.)

Based on a rich documentary record, together with the oral testimony of surviving participants and witnesses, Today Sardines Are Not for Saleuses a microhistorical approach to probe multiple dimensions of a single short-lived event and its repercussions over time. The author shows how gender shaped an illegal public protest action under a French collaboration government and German occupation.

Yoko Ogawa.The Memory Police.Stephen Snyder, trans. New York: Pantheon, 2019.

The Memory Policeis a fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss. The English-language edition was a 2019 National Book Award finalist, was named one of the New York Times's100 Notable Books of the Year, and is currently a finalist for the Booker International Prize.

Allison Stanger,Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump.New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE award in the category of Government, Policy, and Politics.

Max M. Ward,Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Thought Crimeexplores the development of the Japanese Peace Preservation Law (Chianijih) from its initial passage in 1925 to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism to its expansion into an elaborate system to ideologically convert thousands of political criminals throughout the Japanese Empire in the 1930s.The book illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the laws application over its 20-year history.

Richard Wolfson,Essential University Physics, 4th edition. Pearson, 2019.

This is the fourth edition of the less is more calculus-based physics textbook thats designed to give students a concise, progressive text with a lively writing style and real-life applications; it costs less and weighs less than standard university physics texts.

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Faculty and Staff Authors Compile Impressive List of Works - Middlebury College News and Events

As I write this article, the threat of continued COVID-19 spread and subsequent disruption to our economy persists. As face-covered individuals continue to scramble to grocery stores to stock up on needed supplies, stores are challenged with keeping stocked shelves. While shelves are being emptied, growers and dairies are forced to dump certain commodities because restaurants, hotels, and schools are shuttered, creating ripples in the wholesale/retail supply chain.

The situation has improved compared to this spring, but many question whether or not there will be a food supply shortage in the near future. Based on observations at North Carolina Cooperative Extension, there has been an increase in home food production and preservation.

According the United States Department of Agriculture, There are no nationwide shortages of food, although in some cases the inventory of certain foods at your grocery store might be temporarily low before stores can restock. Food production and manufacturing are widely dispersed throughout the U.S. and there are currently no widespread disruptions reported in the supply chain (https://www.usda.gov/coronavirus/food-supply-chain).

This is great news for now. But it also highlights the importance of a stable food supply in the future.

Many farmers would argue the challenges have outweighed the successes in recent years. Lets not even mention the 2020 growing season! There is one challenge that I keep seeing, lurking around somewhat quietly in the background, waiting to one day rear its ugly head and threaten our stable food supply. land.

According to the 2017 United States Department of Agriculture Ag Census, 50-59% of the land in Robeson County for agricultural production is rented or leased by farmers. This means that nonfarming landowners have a significant control to the access of needed land to support our food system. With the average age of Robeson County farmers at 58 many with no successor and a downward trend in young farmers following this career path, a significant challenge awaits. At the same time, generational land is being transferred at a rapid pace to vacant landowners. I receive phone calls frequently at the office from children or grandchildren of deceased landowners inquiring about what to do with inherited farmland, lease agreements, and how to find someone to rent their property. Unfortunately, many turn to the option of selling for nonfarming development. Connecting landowners and interested farmers is critical.

To address this issue, NC State Extension has developed a valuable resource called NC FarmLink. This program is focused on connecting landowners, farmers, and service providers across North Carolina to help maintain our $89 billion agricultural industry. You can find a database of available farmland or farmers, much like a classified ad. Whether you need to find someone to take over your farm operation, find a new tenant, or find resources to help guide you through the process, NC FarmLink is here to help.

As a landowner, you will play a critical role in our future food supply. If you were concerned about the empty grocery store shelves recently, think about what it could be like in a decade or more as farmers continue to feed a growing population with less land and available resources.

Lets start making some connections. You can find out more about the program at https://ncfarmlink.ces.ncsu.edu/.

For assistance or more information, call 910-671-3276, send an email to [emailprotected], or visit http://robeson.ces.ncsu.edu/.

Mac Malloy is an Extension Field Crops agent with North Carolina Cooperative Extension, Robeson County Center. He can be reached by calling 910-671-3276 or by email at [emailprotected]

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Landowners have crucial role in a stable food supply - The Robesonian

Covid pandemic is unprecedented in human history. Any disaster including the Spanish Flue of 1918 which infected 500 million people and claimed about 20 million lives, did not affect so many countries. The Second World War saw the death of about 70 million people, but did not involve every country in the world. The covid-19, despite lower death rates, about half a million so far, disrupted social lives and national economies in countries and regions of the world.

Disruption of lives in multiple dimensions and of such huge magnitude has forced a serious rethinking on how we run our lives, states and societies. The debate between lives and livelihoods is raging in many countries. Before the pandemic, the focus of economies has been on enhancing GDP, as a measure of a countrys growth and power. In developing countries, ensuring ease of doing business was the priority of planners. That has now to be replaced by ease of living. Such shifts in approaches call for a change in roles of the institutions that govern as well as serve the people.

There are three kinds of institutions in any country-state or government, market or business, and civil society. The state produces citizens, the market creates consumers, and the civil society comprises communitarians. The roles of running people lives have been handled either by state or market, or jointly, whereas civil society has been a bystander. Under globalization, in the last three decades, the market has dominated peoples lives more than the state. Consequently, we have had more consumers than communitarians or conscientious citizens. The practices of individualism and consumerism overrode the values of compassion, solidarity and interdependence.In fact, the state has been in retreat since the heydays of Ronald Reagan in USA and Margaret Thatcher in UK. Reagans wisecrack in 1986, I am from the government and I am here to help would not generate any ridicule today. As covid-19 delivers shocks to systems of unparalleled magnitude, people would like their governments to turn up and rise to the challenge of this pandemic.

Reagans approach of diluting the state and according primacy to the market became an orthodoxy that coincided with globalization. The idea that gained currency worldwide was, the state should roll back and reposition itself, it should not try to control inequality and help the disadvantaged.

Admittedly, we have been on such a trajectory for over 30 years. Only a few social democratic states like those in Scandinavia tried to maintain some role of the state in minimizing inequality and in providing safety nets for the less fortunate and the marginalized. Or else, the individual consumer preceded the collective interest. But this pandemic tells us to go backs to the community-ness where people pulled together.The passion for high-growth led by the market has let us down massively. Nature, bio-diversity, ecological balances have been destroyed. In the pursuit of profit, the critical services like healthcare, sanitation and education have been neglected, which, in turn, has diminished the prospects of people earning sustained livelihoods.

The development economists like E.F. Schumacher, in his pioneering work, Buddhist Economics strongly advised looking after the people not the capital. This is where we need the state. Elected by the people and representing them the state should retrieve and re-assert it role.

India, like other developing countries, put emphasis on ease of doing business. Now it should shift to promoting ease of living. People would like first to live before they become richer through higher growth. The debate between lives and livelihoods is sterile. Both are complementary. People cannot survive without livelihoods, and likewise, unless they are healthy and skilled, they cannot eke out a living. Depending on doles which come in dribs and drabs or not come at all, is not an option.

At the same time, not all activities are best run by the market model. Many professional spheres like education, science, or medicine need not be run as commercial enterprises, suggested by economists like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, or Milton Friedman. The former socialist French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin once famously said, We are not against the market-based economy, but market-based society.

Remember, the states with stronger healthcare systems managed the covid epidemic better-Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan etc. Also countries with special universal safety nets like those in Scandinavian region and Germany dealt better with poorer sections of their societies than the countries without such welfare schemes.Now, in the wake of this system- threatening pandemic, people demand from their states rights to lives and livelihoods, the natural and constitutional human rights. The states can provide those only with people-centered planning and strategies. Needs of human beings must precede the needs of business. Societal well-being must be the goal of economies, not the size of GDP.

There have been initiatives and experiences of putting people first. The Bhutanese king Jigme Singye Wangchuk coined the concept in 1979 of GNH in lieu of GDP. Gross National Happiness (GNH) should the measure of a countrys development, he suggested. Recall Helena Norberg Hodges experience in Ladakh based on dependence on local resources than global technology. Her books, Local is our Future: Steps to an Economic Happiness (2019), and Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh, published in 1991, which speak for localization, not globalization, are models to look at. She forcefully argued that globalization has no future, climate chaos is intensifying, stress and anxiety disorders are of epidemic proportions. Why are we in thrall to the global market? Why do we cling to the wreckage? These are the questions we must address after the horrifying trail of panic and pain left the world over by covid-19.

A call for greater role of the state may give rise to statism of another kind, more a big brother state than a great society. The governments may want greater control of civil liberties and political rights and entrench themselves in power, like Victor Orban did in Hungary. Chinas response to criticism of mishandling covid has been suppression of dissent, and elimination of dissenters. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi too has ignored the Opposition in dealing with the pandemic. Therefore, in redefining the role of the state, we should talk about state capacity, not state power.

Furthermore, the Government as the representative body of the people having their mandate should play as team leader, not the leader. The society is greater than the government which comprises the majority of a certain party or an alliance. It is again a procedural majority, not an absolute one. At any time, we advocate a partnership between the government, the market and the civil society and the partnership is needed more in such emergencies as the present pandemic. The state has limited outreach and its resource is stretched in disaster situations, hence it must rope in the business for augmenting resources and the CSOs for reaching out to the unreached.

Finally, one would advocate a state based on pluralism-technological, economic, social and political. Switching back to local leading to isolationism or dirigisme is not the antidote. The state should play the role of a balancer or reconciler of multiple ways of planning and living. Such pluralism as well as synthesis have been our heritage, and let us preserve them.

Prof. D.K.Giri is the Secretary General of the Association for Democratic Socialism (ADS), New Delhi. ADS is a non-party political think tank doing research and advocacy on progressive politics.

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Covid Redefines the State | DK Giri - Mainstream