Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics

As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened.

Troubled by the often-misinformed efforts to make institutional change that we saw around us, we wanted to take action that was both specific to our disciplinary context and wide-reaching in its effects. We started with an article in the flagship linguistics journal, Language, calling for the centering of racial justice within the discipline. That article was the lead piece in the journal’s Perspectives section and was accompanied by a range of responses from linguists worldwide, which we responded to in turn.

We wrote with the hope that institutional change could start from the individual and (especially) collective actions of linguists. We were also motivated by the hope that the discipline our students will enter will be radically different from the one that we have spent our careers within. This hope fueled our work for the next several years, as we collaborated with linguists within and beyond linguistics departments and throughout the academy to create concrete, specific, and action-centered models for how to do the work necessary to transform the discipline. The results of this intensive collaborative process are two companion volumes, Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, and their websites, which provide additional information and resources. 

Some linguists, particularly those for whom linguistics is structured and whom it best serves, may be asking themselves, “What’s so bad about linguistics in its current form?” Many linguists we interacted with as we embarked on this project were defensive, baffled, or even outright hostile. Fortunately, many others were curious and eager to learn how the discipline could do better and what they could do to help. Most importantly, the people for whom we do this work—those who have been made to feel unwelcome in linguistics and who have been shut out, pushed out, or relegated to the disciplinary margins, as well as those who have succeeded despite rather than because of linguistics-as-usual—understood and welcomed our project. Many of these current, former, and would-be linguists have been engaged in like-minded efforts of their own.

Some critics see our work as “politicizing” linguistics. But these commenters miss the point that linguistics (and academia) has always been political. The discipline has its roots in empire and the colonizing practices of categorizing and classifying languages in order to control those who use them. As the discipline has taken shape over the centuries to the present day, linguistics has become a field limited by its own exclusionary practices and ideologies—a field that, in our view, is simply too small. In Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, we envision and work to build a linguistics that is capacious and welcoming, particularly to those whose lived experiences give them fresh and much-needed insights into the kinds of questions linguistics should be asking, the kinds of methods it should be using, and the kinds of real-world impacts it should be making.

Inclusion in linguistics

Most linguists are familiar with the concept of inclusion through institutional discourse in academia and elsewhere, particularly the acronym DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) or its many variants. Too often, however, inclusion is used to mean recruiting members of formerly excluded groups into often hostile institutions, without making significant changes to the workings of the institutions themselves. True inclusion is not a matter of making space within existing institutions for new people to do the same old thing. Instead, true inclusion requires the transformation not only of who is in institutional spaces but what they do, how, and why. Transformation demands that we ask ourselves who is and isn’t present in linguistics, whether they have full and equitable access, and whether the community of linguists will value their full humanity, rather than treating them merely as sources of linguistic data or as token representatives and spokespersons for the groups to which they belong.

Inclusion in Linguistics offers abundant examples of how linguists can and already are creating genuine inclusion within the discipline. The authors challenge limited notions of who gets to be included, calling attention to a wide range of groups who remain marginalized on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender identity, disability, geography, language, class and caste, and more. The authors issue a powerful call for a linguistics that does not simply make space for but purposefully centers those who have been excluded. We collectively urge linguists to think bigger, to abandon long-cherished ideological investments in what is and isn’t legitimate within linguistics, and to build a discipline that doesn’t hide in the ivory tower but engages with the world and makes it a better place.

Decolonizing linguistics

Compared to inclusion, decolonization may be a less familiar concept to many linguists. Some academics in the US may have first encountered the idea, along with related concepts like settler colonialism, through student activism on their campus in recent years and months. (In fact, the New York Times recently published an explainer on the term settler colonialism, assuming—no doubt correctly—that its predominantly white, liberal, and highly educated readership is not well versed in decolonial theory and activism.)

We chose the title Decolonizing Linguistics to invoke the long and ongoing history of linguists’ global academic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people and the discipline-based extraction of their languages for professional and economic gain. Contributors identify some of the forms of colonialism that linguistics has taken and continues to take. We emphasize the importance of Black-centered and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in undoing colonizing structures. We also highlight community-driven collaborative projects that provide a comprehensive picture of the powerful social and scholarly impacts of an unsettled, decolonized linguistics.

Both volumes offer specific roadmaps and pathways for how to advance social justice, through programs, partnerships, curricula, and other initiatives. Our work is a necessary first step toward institutional and disciplinary change: a linguistics built by, around, and for groups that have confronted colonization, oppression, and exclusion—that is, precisely the people whose languages so often fascinate linguists—is also a linguistics that prioritizes the new ideas and practices that these groups bring to the discipline and recognizes these new directions as precisely where linguistics needs to go.

We do not consider Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics as definitive statements but rather as an invitation for others to join us in ongoing conversations. We invite linguistics scholars and students, educators and higher education leaders, around the world to engage with the ideas in both volumes with an eye toward what you can do in your own local context, what we have inevitably left out, and how you might build on, adapt, and push us forward to create the kind of inclusive, decolonized, and socially just linguistics that you would like to be part of.

_{Featured image by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art via Unsplash.}

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Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity. Left behind for 20 years while Odysseus spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and then a further ten years on his meandering journey home to Ithaca, Penelope is faced with multiple challenges in her husband’s absence. Her story, although it comes from a millennia-old tale set in a mythical past, echoes some of the experiences undergone by military spouses in contemporary society. We can also find in Homer’s Penelope an ancient archetype for the idealised image of the ‘model military wife’ which still persists in the modern world.

In her husband’s absence, the Odyssey’s Penelope is faced with a whole array of emotional and practical struggles, many of which modern-day military spouses might recognise. The poet describes how she has trouble sleeping, worries crowding her mind as she lies in bed at night (Odyssey 19.513-17), and frequently throughout the poem she is to be found weeping, overwhelmed by the grief and stress of her situation. This mythical waiting wife has no idea whether her husband is alive or dead—he is what we might describe today as ‘missing in action’—and if or when he might return home to her. Modern military spouses often talk about the dread of the ‘knock on the door’ bringing bad news while their partner is in a war zone: Penelope too is simultaneously desperate for news of Odysseus but living in constant fear of what that news might reveal. At the same time, she must deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of being home alone: parenting the child, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy, and managing the household alone. In this patriarchal ancient society, the absence of the male head of the royal household is felt especially strongly. Nonetheless, there are parallels here with contemporary situations; when a partner is away on active duty, their spouse must often take on domestic responsibilities which would ordinarily be shared.

Penelope’s already difficult situation is exacerbated by the presence of 108 suitors, who are vying for her hand in marriage—a marriage which would also grant them Odysseus’ kingly power, his possessions, and his estate. It is her response to this situation which cemented her reputation for fidelity in the ancient world; that response also enables her to demonstrate her resourcefulness. In her hope that Odysseus will eventually return, and in order to buy time, Penelope deploys what in the ancient world is a typically feminine stratagem: she tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What her suitors don’t know is that she is unpicking each day’s weaving in secret every night. The shroud trick not only keeps Penelope occupied during much of Odysseus’ absence, but it also represents a life which has been placed on hold while he is away. Both the notion of ‘keeping busy’ as a coping strategy and the feeling of being unable to move forward with their own lives—with career plans or education, for example—while awaiting the return of a serving partner are recurring elements of the first-hand accounts of modern-day waiting wives.

Yet it is not merely some of the day-to-day elements of Penelope’s life that might feel familiar to contemporary military spouses. There is a broader sense in which this ‘myth’ of the model military wife is fundamental to upholding the patriarchal structures which still endure in some military institutions. In modern UK and US contexts, the armed forces still rely heavily on the support of the spouses of personnel. Those spouses are still overwhelmingly female, despite the fact that women and same-sex couples are now eligible for military service. The feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her 2000 book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, set out a lengthy list—which still holds up almost 25 years after first publication—of the ideal characteristics of today’s ‘model military wife.’ This is someone who, among other things, is unfailingly supportive and content for all aspects of her life to be subordinated to her husband’s military role, and who, like Penelope, is both faithful and resourceful in coping alone for long periods of time while her partner is away on deployment.

Moreover, the model military wife is expected to do all of this without complaint. The focus of policy-makers, media reporting, and the military itself, still rests predominantly on combatants themselves. The voices of those whose lives are also profoundly affected by their partners’ career choice are often silenced. Similarly, in the Odyssey Penelope is given little room to share her experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the poem than when the couple are finally reunited. Here only four lines (Odyssey 23.302-5) are set aside to summarise Penelope’s story; by comparison, despite the fact that the majority of the poem’s 12,000 lines describe Odysseus’ exploits, 32 lines (Odyssey 23.310-41)—eight times as much space—are devoted to recalling his adventures. If at times the warrior’s wife takes up less space, both in Homer’s poetry and in the minds of the public today, that should merely make us more determined to give her more of our attention.

_{Featured image: ‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons}

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A spotlight on Native American language and religion [podcast]

The October release of Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon has thrust the sordid history of America’s treatment of its indigenous peoples back into the public eye.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, the last for 2023, inspired by the themes in Killers of the Flower Moon, and in celebration of National Native American Heritage Month in the United States, we spotlight two aspects of Native American culture that transcend tribe and nation and have been the recent focus of OUP scholars: language and religious beliefs.

For our first interview, we were joined by Rosemarie Ostler, author of The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, to speak about the Native American English dialect, how English became more widely spoken amongst Native Americans, and current programs to preserve Native American languages. We then spoke with Gregory Shushan, author of Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions about near-death experiences, Native American myths, shamanism, and religious revitalization movements across indigenous cultures in North America.

Check out Episode 89 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

You can read the chapter “Ethnic Dialects” from Rosemarie Ostler’s book, The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, which presents the evolution of American English not as a dry collection of linguistic facts, but as an ever-changing story that’s part of the country’s larger cultural and political history.

Read the chapter exploring near-death experiences (NDEs) in “North America” from Gregory Shushan’s book, Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, which examines the role culture plays in how people experience and interpret NDEs, and reveals how afterlife beliefs often originate in such extraordinary experiences.

You may also be interested in the chapter “Possession and dispossession: religion in Native America”, from Timothy Beal’s Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous languages, keep an eye out for Lyle Campbell’s upcoming title, The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: History and Classification, and Nicholas Limerick’s Recognizing Indigenous Languages: Double Binds of State Policy and Teaching Kichwa in Ecuador.

_{Featured image: Arapaho Ghost Dance, 1900, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)}

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Why global museums amassed the ancestral dead, starting in Peru

It is a time of worldwide reckoning for museums that display or contain ancestral dead.

Although scrutiny of looted art dates to Britain’s 1816 inquest over the Parthenon marbles, it has taken far longer for museums of anatomy, anthropology, and natural history to address their “specimens” of peoples killed, disinterred, and dissected in colonial contexts. The dam broke in the 1980s, when Native North Americans pressed the U.S. Congress to pass two acts that required museums receiving federal funding to notify descendants of the ancestors in their collections and attempt their “repatriation.” Museums exploited the laws’ loopholes leading descendants and decolonizing nations around the world to press for wider returns. In 2020, the global George Floyd protests extended to the museums and monuments that had their origins in scientific racism, settler colonialism, and the afterlives of slavery. Here in Pennsylvania, where I write, Finding Ceremony is working for the descendant-controlled rehumanization and return of the skulls of black Philadelphians collected by the white supremacist Samuel George Morton, today possessed by the University of Pennsylvania.

Why, though, did museums and scholars systematically amass the dead to begin with? In the early nineteenth century, prominent anatomists like Johannes Friedrich Blumenbach collected skulls but were satisfied with exemplifying their physical differences via the discussion of single types (a “Tungusae” skull to represent the “Mongolian” or “yellow race,” for example). A century later, institutions sought as many crania as they could. To explain that difference, historians and critics of bio-racism observe that the nineteenth century was European colonialism’s high watermark, and that anatomists like Morton used the settler violence and disinterment that it caused to prove the unprovable—that the collection and measurement of more and more crania could establish the existence of separate and unequal races.

But the specific story of the collection of Andean ancestors charts a different origin for this global process, and it asks us to think with more nuance regarding what to do with the museums it created. Using scholarly publications from the sixteenth to twentieth century, and the correspondence and fieldnotes of anatomists and anthropologists in at least 26 museums and archives in Peru, the United States, Spain, and Great Britain, Empires of the Dead offers four new ways of thinking about that story, and why it matters.

1. The European collection and display of the non-European dead began in sixteenth century Peru, inspiring the global invention of “mummies.”

Although Europeans examined the Indigenous dead since Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, it was Spain’s encounter with Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, that led to the invention to “ancient” and racialized human remains as a scientific category. In Tawantinsuyu, Spaniards met the Incas’ own hierarchy of sacred and well-preserved ancestors and in 1559 tried to conquer them by displaying them as objects of anatomical knowledge. Besides illustrating how the collections of other peoples’ ancestors has always been about violence and science, this early museumification of Inca and Andean ancestors had global consequences. By the eighteenth century, European scholars conjectured that the Incas, and not just the ancient Egyptians, made “mummies,” and that the Americas’ racialized past might be studied using Peru’s pre-colonial dead.

2. South American patriots encouraged the Andean dead’s collection and study for their own scientific and nationalist reasons.

This “mummification” of the Andean past mattered to Peru. In 1821, shortly after declaring Peru’s Independence, the South American patriot José de San Martín sent King George IV of England an “Inca mummy,” hoping it would enter the British Museum. Over the next century, thousands of “ancient Peruvian” mummies and skulls followed, in part because republican Peruvian scholars and collectors studied the Andean dead in the belief that they embodied the new nation’s “ancient” sovereignty and science of embalming. Although the Peruvian state tried to halt the export of “antiquities” from 1822, human remains were largely exempt, reflecting a wider disdain for the ancestors of Peru’s living Andean peoples. Only in 1929 did the Peruvian state declare that its ownership and protection of “artifacts” extended to Andean ancestors.

3. The largest single population in America’s museums is the pre-colonial Andean dead, and it facilitated the collection of other groups worldwide.

This is in part why there are more Andean remains in American museums than any other single “racial” group. Taking advantage of Peruvian scholarship and looting, foreign anatomists and early anthropologists moved to amassing large and more statistically useful series. Samuel George Morton was central to this process. For his seminal Crania Americana (1839), he measured more Andean skulls than any other American group; when he died, “ancient Peruvians” were his largest population. To debate Morton, other scholars and museums collected them as well. The largest population today at the Smithsonian are the 4,851 individuals from “Peru,” as I recently wrote in the Washington Post. This process benefitted from European colonialism but transformed it scientifically. American anthropology’s Andean core justified the collection of similarly large groups of other Indigenous peoples.

4. Peruvian scholars and Andean communities have also used the collection of ancestors to contest scientific racism.

Inca and Andean peoples survived colonialism and independence, however, and have long engaged in their own anti­-colonial collection and reinterpretation of the dead. From the seventeenth century to the present, Andean scholars have insisted that the dead represent ancestry, not idolatry, and care, not race. Some communities honor the pre-colonial dead to this day, seeing them as an essential part of society. Still other Andean individuals have tried to steer anthropological collection to anti-racist ends. My book closes with Julio César Tello (1880-1947), considered “America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist,” who proved Andean skill at cranial trepanation—the world’s oldest surgery, it has been suggested—in part by selling his collection of his Andean skulls to Harvard. Tello built Peru’s first three anthropological museums, each centered around the other “scientific ancestors” he excavated.

The result of these four new ways into this history?

The collection of ancestral remains worldwide is indeed a product of European colonialism. But it is also the result of the centuries-old challenge of non-colonial ways of interpreting the dead: as embodiments of history, sovereignty, science, and the sacred that are not so easily deactivated by being placed in a museum.

For that reason, the world’s museums must listen to the descendant peoples seeking their ancestors’ return. But it also explains why Peruvians, for example, have not sought the mass return of “ancient Peruvians” as they did the return of the Machu Picchu collection from Yale, as I detailed in my first book, Cradle of Gold. Since the sixteenth century, “ancient Peruvians” have made the Andes a beachhead onto a more global anthropology and history. Some Peruvians and descendant communities will undoubtedly call for the return of ancestors made to fight that battle and should be supported in those efforts. But others may conceivably call for their retention in the many places Andean peoples have migrated to and worked to call home. In those cases, and possibly others, the restitution of ancestral remains may require something even more basic than repatriation or return, which museums have sometimes used to wash their hands of the colonial past. It may demand revelation and representation of the ways that other peoples’ ancestors continue to move and make us.

_{Feature image: Machu Picchu in Mist by Pedro Lastra. Public domain via Unsplash.}

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Infrastructure, public policy, and the Anthropocene [podcast]

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss the state of human infrastructure in the Anthropocene with a particular focus on how research can best be used to inform public policy.  

First, we welcomed Patrick Harris, co-editor-in-chief of the new transdisciplinary journal, Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, to speak about the aims and scopes of OOIH, how OOIH is poised to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, and the kind of research the editors are seeking. We then interviewed Jonathan Pickering, co-author of The Politics of the Anthropocene, the winner of the 2019 Clay Morgan Award Committee for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. We spoke with him about how the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene has affected our core infrastructure systems and how good governance can help us mitigate the many challenges we’ll face in the future.

Check out Episode 88 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Upon the initial launch of Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, co-editors Evelyne de Leeuw and Patrick Harris penned this blog post on the OUPblog, introducing the journal and detailing how OOIH will provide a link between infrastructure and both (inter)planetary and human health.

OOIH’s opening editorial, also written by the co-editors, elaborates on their vision for OOIH, provided greater context for the intersection between infrastructure and well-being, and presented the foundations of what future research published by the journal will need to include.

Human activities have a decisive causal influence on the Earth system, but to date the responses of the social sciences to the challenge have been inadequate. It is necessary to do better. Delve into the scholarship of our guest, Jonathan Pickering, and his co-author John S. Dryzek as they unravel the good, the bad, and the inescapable of our new epoch in this chapter from their book, The Politics of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene will not recede, and the central question of environmental management will be whether we can develop ways to reflexively and sustainably manage ecosystems, habitats, and human needs. This chapter examines four possible normative underpinnings for such management, from The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory.

The Anthropocene has emerged as a powerful new narrative of the relationship between humans and nature. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction draws on the work of geologists, geographers, environmental scientists, archaeologists, and humanities scholars to explain the science and wider implications of the Anthropocene. This chapter explores why we should accept that a new chapter of Earth history might indeed be unfolding, with humans playing a leading role.

This response to the editors’ essay by Phil McManus offered a clarification on what is termed infrastructure, and examined the history of urbanist programs as a means to inform today’s relationship between health and infrastructure as their intersection is more clearly defined.

The Anthropocene is not only a geological event but also a political, philosophical, and theological one. This chapter, from Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, proposes that key to its undoing is decolonization, including of lands, waters, minds, and spirit, by drawing upon unjustly discredited knowledges, including Indigenous ontological conceptions of spiritual meanings that recognize the awareness and being of all terrestrial life, the inherent value of matter and the agency of Nature-Earth.

Explore the following Open Access articles from our journals:

• “The Paradox of Anthropocene Inaction: Knowledge Production, Mobilization, and the Securitization of Social Relations” by Madeleine Fagan in International Political Sociology (February 2023)
• “Ecosystems and Ordering: Exploring the Extent and Diversity of Ecosystem Governance” by Cristiana Maglia and Elana Wilson Rowe in Global Studies Quarterly (June 2023)

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Revisiting toxic masculinity and #MeToo [podcast]

Globally, an estimated one third of all women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence; however, out of fear and socio-economic disenfranchisement, less than 40% of women who experience such violence seek help. In the United States alone, one in four women have suffered rape or attempted rape in their lifetime; for men, this figure is closer to one in 26.

The disparity is staggering; statistics on gendered violence reveal men are more likely to commit violence crimes, whereas women are far more likely to be the victims of violence.

Despite greater visibility and awareness of crimes against women, notions derived from what is understood to be “toxic masculinity,” and its proponents, are a growing influence over men, and especially young males.

In 2022, the US Secret Service released a report detailing the rising threat of domestic terrorism from males identifying as “involuntary celibates,” better known as “incels,” a network of mostly young males who uphold the misguided belief that sex with women is an entitlement to which they’ve been denied. This report considered misogyny not only a threat to women, but to national security itself.

So how do we stop the tide of violence and hate-speech stemming from the circulation of such misogynistic rhetoric, and how can we move forward while best supporting its victims?

On today’s episode, we explore two recognizable components in contemporary conversations on gender and gendered violence: that of “toxic masculinity” and of the #MeToo movement, the awareness campaign that came to global prominence in October 2017 after the public downfall of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

First, we welcomed Robert Lawson, the author of Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints, to share how language intersects with masculinities in media spaces and how it may be our best weapon in combatting rising misogyny, especially online. We then interviewed Iqra Shagufta Cheema, the editor of The Other #MeToos, who spoke with us about the origins of the #MeToo movement, how it has been received around the world, and how it has changed—and will continue to change—to meet the needs of the victims for which it advocates.

Check out Episode 85 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

In his interview with us, Robert Lawson discussed positive masculinity as represented by the various characters on the American sitcom, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Read this chapter from Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints an in-depth look at how the characters subvert and destabilize hegemonic forms of masculinity through their use of language in building relationship with each other. Language and Mediated Masculinities is part of the Studies in Language and Gender series.

Read this chapter by Asmita Ghimire and Elizabethada A. Wright from The Other #MeToos on protest signs and placards written in Global English that allow women from very different contexts to identify with each other and builds on how people in non-dominant spaces can engage in semiotic reconstruction to adapt dominant languages for their individual needs. The Other #MeToos, edited by Iqra Shagufta Cheema, is part of the Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations series. 

This chapter from Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy by Sarah Sobieraj explores how women who attempt to participate in public discussions about political and social issues online confront a hostile speaking environment analogous to the hostile work environments identified in policies addressing sexual harassment in the workplace.

Why is it the case that men perpetrate the vast majority of all violence against women and girls? This chapter from Jacqui True’s Violence against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know® explores the argument that masculinity is in fact dynamic, rather than fixed by biology or any other factor, and that it is the social constructions of masculinity within and across almost all societies that have encouraged and rewarded male aggression and violence toward themselves and others.

Read the following Open Access articles from our journals:

• “Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed” by Elizabeth Pearson in International (November 2019)
• “Online Abuse of Feminists as An Emerging form of Violence Against Women and Girls” by Ruth Lewis, Michael Rowe, and Clare Wiper in The British Journal of Criminology (November 2017)
• “Retweet for justice? Social media message amplification and Black Lives Matter allyship” by Jessica Roden, Valerie Kemp, and Muniba Saleem in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (January 2023)
• “’This Patriarchal, Machista and Unequal Culture of Ours’: Obstacles to Confronting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence” by Anne-Kathrin Kreft in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society (Summer 2023)
• “Promoting positive masculinities among young people in Stockholm, Sweden. A mixed-methods study” by M Salazar and A Cerdán-Torregrosa in European Journal of Public Health (October 2022)

_{Featured image: Mihai Surdu, CC0 via Unsplash.}

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The great gun conundrum [podcast]

With estimates of nearly 400 million privately-owned firearms in the United States and more than 40,000 deaths due to gun violence each year, guns and gun ownership have become polarizing issues. Forty-eight percent of Americans view gun violence as a major problem, with more than half of US citizens favouring stricter gun laws. The prevailing arguments, both for and against greater gun ownership restrictions, incorporate a range of issues, from party lines and political agendas to the influence of media coverage and the role of police in combatting violence—but what does recent scholarship reveal, and how might this scholarship inform policy for the better?

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we explore the history of gun ownership in the United States and practical solutions for resolving contemporary gun violence. First, we welcomed Robert J Spitzer, the author of The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights, to share new historical research on America’s gun law history as it informs modern gun policy disputes. We then interviewed Philip J Cook, the author of Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem, who spoke with us about utilising the police as a strategic resource for reducing gun violence.

Check out Episode 84 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Read the first chapter from Robert Spitzer’s book, The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights, which explores the policy dilemma of a public strongly supportive of stronger gun laws, and overwhelmingly supporting of existing laws, while gun rights advocates press to repeal existing gun laws by expanding the definition of gun rights.

Read the second chapter of Philip J. Cook and Anthony Braga’s book Policing Gun Violence, which explores the social burden of gun violence. The authors explore the widespread fear and trauma that stem from the threat of gun violence and the required vigilance to avoid victimization, addressing the statistics of the communities that are most affected. 

The fourth chapter of The Silent Epidemic of Gun Injuries by Melvin Delgado approaches gun violence interventions as establishing a foundation using the latest thinking and data. A social perspective on gun injuries allows for casting a wide net in capturing this phenomenon, helping readers develop a wide lens for gun injury. Grasping the social meaning of guns is essential in coordinating public health campaigns on the outcomes they cause.

Read the introduction to Mark R. Joslyn’s The Gun Gap: The Influence of Gun Ownership on Political Behavior and Attitudes, wherein the gun gap is defined to refer to differences in political behavior and attitudes between gun owners and nonowners. In addition, the introduction establishes why the gun gap is important for understanding modern mass politics.

This chapter from Pained: Uncomfortable Conversations about the Public’s Health by Michael D. Stein and Sandro Galea explores how states with stricter firearm legislation have fewer fatal police shootings—defined as the rate of people killed by law enforcement agencies. Also assessed is the relationship between different types of legislation and rates of fatal police shootings, showing laws that strengthen background checks, promote child and consumer safety, and reduce gun trafficking are linked to lower rates of fatal police shootings.

Read the following Open Access articles from our journals:

• Social media response to mass shootings in the United States provides an important window into the nature of public mourning and policy debates in the wake of these tragedies: “Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012–2014” by Yini Zhang et al, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (July 2019)
• Social movements pushed to reconceptualize intimate partner violence (IPV) as a social problem deserving of intervention rather than a private family matter, but political ideology and affiliation shape support for disarming the abuser or arming the victim: “Polarized Support for Intimate Partner Violence Gun-Related Interventions” by Anne Groggel, Social Problems (January 2023)
• Within the business of organized crime, guns are mostly used as a threat or to maim or kill but they also serve the more basic masculine requirement of protection, giving them a symbolic meaning as well as serving as a resource for achieving power: “Masculinities on the Continuum of Structural Violence: The Case of Mexico’s Homicide Epidemic” by Jennie B Gamblin and Sarah J Hawkes, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society (Spring 2018)
• Taking a long view of police shootings from 1970 to 2020 lessens the stochastic effect of shootings over shorter time periods and reveals that the frequency of police shootings has increased in both jurisdictions over this period, despite police not being routinely armed with firearms: “Police Shootings in New Zealand and England and Wales: A Cross-National Comparison” by Ross Hendy and Darren Walton, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (April 2022)

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Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse, editors of The Age of Agility, offer valuable insight into the concept of “learning agility” and strategies that promote more effective leadership. They are both experts in the field of leadership practical experience developing healthy skills that help both individuals and organizations to thrive. 

Why is “learning agility” an important trend in organizations? 

There are several reasons. First: the pace of change. Most will agree that the world of work is a turbulent place. It only takes looking back at the COVID pandemic to recognize how quickly our world can be turned upside down! Then we can think of such recent trends as quiet quitting, AI, the virtual workforce, the mental health crisis, and on and on. Consequently, both leaders and organizations are recognizing that survival of the fittest equates to “survival of the agile.” Organizations that cultivate leaders who are learning agile are much better prepared to deal with change.

A second important reason is that organizations need high performing leaders. Challenges with an adequate leadership pipeline consistently show up on surveys as one of the things that keeps CEOs up at night! And the evidence is clear that learning agility is one of the most robust predictors of leadership success as measured by: 

• leadership potential
• performance 
• levels of effectiveness 
• promotions 
• advancement 
• international assignments
• salary increases 
• faster speed to competence in a new role

In fact, a meta-analysis conducted by Ken in 2019 found that learning agility is a stronger predictor of leadership performance than IQ, EQ, or job experience. It is not just hyperbole to say that the effectiveness of leadership in organization depends on the levels of learning agility among their leaders.  

Third, we believe the development of learning agility can help in diversifying the leadership pipeline. Research indicates that learning agility when properly assessed does not disproportionally screen out women, minorities, individuals over 40, or other marginalized groups. Organizations increase their objectivity and level the playing field for all employees and applicants alike. Supporting the development of learning agility shows promise for not only expanding but increasing the diversity of leadership pipelines.

Is learning agility a new concept? 

Although agility is a term that is clearly trending, the concept of learning agility does have considerable history. At least dating back to the early 1980s, organizations began to recognize the importance of identifying individuals with the potential to learn from their experiences and adapt to changing circumstances. Dr Morgan McCall and his colleagues at The Center for Creative Leadership published the now-classic book The Lessons of Experience in 1988. Veronica’s own dissertation in that same year focused on how successful leaders learn from their experiences rather than solely in a classroom (Schmidt, 1988).

The specific term “learning agility” was first coined more than two decades ago by Drs Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger (2000). They agreed with McCall that a primary indicator of leadership potential is learning agility, aptly describing it as “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.” While learning agility is a relatively new compared to some other psychological constructs, it is not simply a “shiny-new-object” that is likely to become irrelevant any time soon.

How would you describe learning agility to someone unfamiliar with the concept? 

Researchers have used a number of different definitions. And, like many complex constructs, there are differences in opinion among them. The following two definitions are frequently used: 

1. “The ability and willingness to learn from experience and then apply those lessons to perform well in new and challenging leadership situations” (De Meuse, 2017) 
2. “The self-regulated behaviors, strategies, and habits that enable learning at an accelerated pace, facilitate more agile adaptation to dynamic conditions and result in more effective leadership” (Harvey & Prager, 2021).

Despite multiple definitions, as we describe in Chapter 19 of The Age of Agility, there is considerable consensus among researchers and practitioners alike that learning agility is a “metacompetency.” One can think of learning agility as a “whole body exercise” involving (a) how we perceive things—the perceptual; (b) how we process information—the cognitive; (c) how we regulate our emotions, and (d) how all of these are manifest in our observable behavior. Learning agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experiences and the attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral flexibility to apply those lessons to perform effectively in current and new leadership roles.

What are the most successful methods of developing agility in employees and organizations? 

As part of writing Chapter 6 for The Age of Agility, Veronica and her colleague Raphael Prager and took a deep dive into reviewing the literature on developing learning agility. As a result, an evidence-based model was that focuses on five sets of behaviors and strategies that can be learned:

• Observing includes mindful awareness of situations and experiences as well as the ability to scan and forecast what will be needed in the future.   
• Doing includes seeking information and experiences, experimenting with different behaviors, and deliberately practicing new ways of responding.  
• Connecting involves learning with and from others by asking for help, observing role models, learning through coaches and mentors, and seeking feedback.  
• Thinking includes cognitive strategies such as reflection, understanding the mental filters that may be biasing our actions, approaching situations with curiosity, and adapting a learning mindset.
• Mobilizing involves learning to set goals, regulate emotions, maintain focus and discipline, and recognize when resilience and periods of renewal are needed.

How do we develop and support the next generation of leaders in a more remote world? 

As we explore new ways of working, one of the best ways we can support the next generation of leaders is to accurately identify them by assessing for learning agility along with other predictors of leadership. Then once identified, offer them numerous opportunities to develop their learning agility. It is incredibly empowering to have confidence in one’s own capability to learn what to do no matter what life may throw at you. A colleague Anna Marie Valerio and Veronica recently published an article in the Consulting Psychology journal on “Coaching to Develop Learning Agility.” It is likely one of the most critical things that leadership coaches can do! 

How does increased learning agility impact employees and organizations? 

The negative impact a poor leader can have on a team and in an organization is hard to overstate. The proper application of learning agility can help minimize such mistakes. Moreover, the promotion and hiring of effective leaders (regardless of age, gender, or minority status) sends a powerful signal to all employees that they matter and management has their back!

What do you think the world of work will look like in 10 years?

One thing that is certain is that it will look considerably different than it does today! It is impossible to predict with any precision what those change will be. However, we do feel certain that those leaders with strong learning agility will be better equipped to successfully respond. Perhaps, Alvin Toffler said it best in his book Future Shock (1970), “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” And he wrote it more than 50 years ago!

Visit the Rethink Work hub for more organizational psychology insights

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Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future [podcast]

Scholars continue to explore the role of sexuality in private lives—from the retrospective discovery of transgendered people in historical archives to present questions of identity and representation in social media—with the understanding that those who identify as LGBTQ+ have always existed and have fought tirelessly to advance their rights.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss LGBTQ+ privacy through both historical and contemporary lenses. First, Simon Joyce, the author of LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, shared his argument for revisiting Victorian-era thinking about gender and sexual identity. We then interviewed Stefanie Duguay, the author of Personal but Not Private: Queer Women, Sexuality, and Identity Modulation on Digital Platforms, who spoke with about digitally mediated identities and how platforms, such as social media and dating apps, act as complicated sites of transformation.

Check out Episode 83 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

You can read the introduction from Simon Joyce’s book, LGBT Victorians, which reimagines and complicates our understanding of the Victorian period by thinking about how British thinkers and writers assessed and responded to larger international movements, including European sexology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and late-century French erotica. Joyce also wrote about “LGBTQ+ Victorians in the archives” on the OUPblog last fall. 

Read the prologue from Stefanie Duguay’s book, Personal but Not Private, which explores how queer women share and maintain their identities across social media platforms despite overlapping technological, social, economic, and political concerns. You can explore more of Duguay’s research at the Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab, where she serves as director.

Learn more about the origins of Pride in the introductory chapter of Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation by Perry N. Halkitis.

Explore LGBTQ+ online identity mediation in our Open Access articles:

• “Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives” by Lin Song and Shangwei Wu in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)
• “Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism” by Lucas Amaral Lauriano in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)
• “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World” by Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and Danah Boyd in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (May 2018)
• “Predictors of self-harm and suicide in LGBT youth: The role of gender, socio-economic status, bullying and school experience” by V. Jadva, A. Guasp, J. H. Bradlow, S. Bower-Brown, and S Foley in Journal of Public Health (March 2023)

_{Featured image: Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Adrienne J. Colella and Eden B. King

Introducing the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Workplace Discrimination: Adrienne J. Colella is Professor and the McFarland Distinguished Chair in Business at Tulane University, and Eden B. King is Associate Professor of Industrial Organizational Psychology at George Mason University. Their work synthesizes research across psychology, sociology, and management, and inspires a new era of scientific practice on understanding and reducing workplace discrimination.

Adrienne and Eden share their insights on workplace discrimination and the future of work. 

What can organizations do to tackle workplace discrimination?

Workplace discrimination cannot be eradicated by a single policy or process. Instead, organizations need to develop strategic, comprehensive initiatives that cut across levels, units, and talent management cycles. Aligned with such strategy, leaders need to be visibly committed and held accountable to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Ongoing transparent assessment and accountability for DEI will help to ensure positive change. Finally, organizations need to create and sustain a culture where respect, empathy, and justice are core values.  

How can academic research practically reduce discrimination within organizations?    

Academic research can help to inform practice by providing robust evidence regarding the unique experiences of people who face discrimination as well as the strategies that are most effective in addressing these issues. In other words, good science can inform good practice. 

How do we develop and support the next generation of leaders in a more remote world?

Leader development requires the opportunity to engage in a variety of challenging tasks and to receive feedback about performance. The specific nature of the experiences, and the ways in which feedback is transmitted, are constantly evolving with technology and the environment. At the core, then, leader development will be the same—challenging tasks and feedback—but the conditions will evolve. It is yet to be seen whether the nature of leadership and the traits and behaviors which make leaders effective will also change in a more remote world. 

How does increased flexibility impact employees and organizations?

Like most things, the increase in remote work has both positive and negative implications. On the positive side, many people have found flexibility for opportunities to engage with family and leisure activities. In addition, people with disabilities and chronic health conditions have found better access to work. On the negative side, however, remote work can create challenges for human connections, increase loneliness, and blur the lines between work and home in a manner that is exhausting. And, of course, many types of work (especially low wage jobs) cannot be done remotely, potentially exacerbating socioeconomic divides. Experience and evidence in the upcoming months and years will help us understand for whom, how, when, and where flexibility can yield the most positive effects.

What do you think the world of work will look like in 10 years? 

Given the rapid, unexpected changes we have experienced in the last few years, this question is really difficult to answer. We expect that rapid advances in technology will come with both unforeseen advantages and disadvantages for employers and employees and that the notion of “going to work” will change. Beyond this, we can’t predict. 

Visit the Rethink Work hub for more organizational psychology insights

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An inflation-proof methodology to measuring policy effects on poverty

Europe’s soaring inflation and energy prices highlight the need to measure poverty and policy responses in non-monetary ways. 

Hard times continue for those on tight budgets in Europe and elsewhere. Despite the end of COVID-19 lockdowns and a return to a new normal economy, soaring prices for necessities such as food, housing, and energy are eating up the purchasing power of households’ incomes with every purchase and bill payment. 

Non-monetary indicators of poverty such as the European Union’s (EU) Material and Social Deprivation (MSD) indicator are exceptionally well suited to register the pinches and punches delivered to the purchasing power of households with relatively low resources and/or high needs. 

The MSD indicator measures whether households cannot afford items that are considered by most people to be necessary for an adequate living standard. Examples of items are a household’s financial ability to keep their home adequately warm, to have two pairs of properly fitting shoes for every member, and to have an internet connection. A household and its members are considered deprived when they cannot afford 5 out of 13 such items.

The EU’s official income poverty indicator cannot capture the effects of the current crisis on households’ living standards. This is because inflation and soaring energy prices decrease consumption, not income. 

During the consecutive crises hitting Europe between 2007 and 2012, the MSD indicator already proved its use registering marked increases in material deprivation and, as recovery took hold, accounting for the lion’s share of the EU’s improvement towards its 2020 social inclusion target. 

The MSD indicator will therefore again be the center of political attention and it will show which households are hit hardest. When households cannot influence their income enough to make up for lost purchasing power, rising costs will force them to choose between necessities, which is exactly what the MSD indicator measures.

However, whereas measuring the effect of policies on households’ income is routine practice in governments and among researchers and interest groups, the same does not hold for assessing the effects of such policies on material deprivation. 

It is a problem when potentially substantive policy effects are going unmeasured because it could lead to less support for those in need and thus less progress on the reduction of poverty and social inclusion overall. For instance, when policies appear more costly relative to their beneficial effects, decisionmakers may not find them worthwhile of pursuit. Or policies may benefit certain groups in need (e.g., those with a low income) while excluding other groups with similar or higher needs (e.g., those with a higher income and higher needs). Or policies that have a measurable effect on income poverty may appear more effective than policies that reduce the need for households to spend money out of pocket. 

A reason why policy effects on material deprivation have gone unmeasured is that, despite the rising use of material deprivation indicators, there was no established methodology to measure such effects. A recently published study showcases a new methodology that estimates the effect of a small increase in income on material and social deprivation in 32 European countries. 

The study quantifies the impact of a small universal income transfer and shows that the transfer’s effect is considerably higher in the most deprived countries and among the most deprived persons in a country. 

Figure 1 below shows that a very modest transfer of 150 Euro per year, adjusted for differences in purchasing power across countries (PPS), would contribute to reducing MSD rates across Europe. The reductions are sizeable for countries with lower average living standards, with the largest reduction of one percentage point in Romania. 

Figure 2 below furthermore shows that the same transfer has a bigger difference for those households experiencing more deprivations in each country. The average marginal effect (AME) of the transfer reduces the average number of deprivations among households experiencing one deprivation is 0.02 in the Czech Republic whereas it is 0.03 for household experiencing five deprivations. This effect is present in all countries, regardless of their living average standard.

These results demonstrate that progressiveness should not just be thought of in terms of income, while also underlining the importance of a progressive social transfer system everywhere. 

The same research shows that the impact of extra income depends on the type of social transfers received. Compared to households not receiving transfers and those receiving pension transfers, those in receipt of non-pension transfers, on average, experience the largest decrease in the number of deprivations in Europe. Non-pension transfers include transfers such as child benefits, housing allowances, social assistance, and unemployment or disability benefits. In some Eastern European countries, however, those receiving pensions or both pensions and non-pension transfers also benefit more than average. Such results inform which parts of the social safety contribute to reducing material deprivation and where additional transfers are likely to make the biggest difference. 

The methodology developed in this study can be applied to many microdata contexts, including microsimulation datasets. A non-linear regression technique estimates the relation between the number of deprivations and predictor variables such as income, debt burden, and other household characteristics. The methodology can be used to predict effects of potential policies, as was done in the above-mentioned study. It can also be used as part of multivariate techniques that evaluate the effects of policies implemented.

In the context of the current affordability crisis, European countries have implemented policy packages involving measures such as income support, social tariffs, in-kind support, and a cap on energy prices. As many of these measures work either through increasing income or reducing expenditures, they have a “money equivalent” value. Using that monetary value, the new methodology enables estimating the effect of such measures on social and material deprivation. 

Finding out by how much such policies reduce poverty and social exclusion, who benefits (most), and by how much is an extremely relevant research effort in a policy context in which there is limited scope for expansionary fiscal policy. And now it is possible to do so.

Read the journal article in Socio-Economic Review: “Reducing poverty and social exclusion in Europe: estimating the marginal effect of income on material deprivation”

_{Featured image: Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash (public domain)}

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Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]

Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.

On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?

Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023. 

If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.

In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.

You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.

You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:

• Chapter 8: “Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt” by Kanta Dihal
• Chapter 9: “Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control” by Will Slocombe

Other relevant book titles include: 

• Relationships 5.0: How AI, VR, and Robots Will Reshape Our Emotional Lives by Elyakim Kislev
• Human-Centered AI by Ben Shneiderman (Read Chapter 16: “Social Robots and Active Appliances” for free until 31 May)

You may also be interested in the following journal articles: 

• “AI ethical bias: a case for AI vigilantism (AIlantism) in shaping the regulation of AI” by Ifeoma Elizabeth Nwafor from the Autumn 2021 International Journal of Law and Information Technology
• “My AI Friend: How Users of a Social Chatbot Understand Their Human–AI Friendship” by Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Marita Skjuve, and Asbjørn Følstad from the July 2022 Human Communication Research (Open Access)
• “Persuasion in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Theories and Complications of AI-Based Persuasion” by Marco Dehnert and Paul A Mongeau from the July 2022 Human Communication Research

_{Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.}

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Gandhi weaves: lyrical beauty in Mahatma Gandhi’s writing

I have a favourite volume of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG): number 98, the Index of Subjects. I’ve made my way through it often over the past few years—sometimes purposefully; sometimes without an agenda—coming away more firmly convinced each time of one simple truth: Gandhi is the binary opposite of a monolith. No single story can ever contain the multitudes he was and continues to be to those of us who flock to him still. He retains the ability to surprise with the catholicity of his interests, and—to my mind, exquisite—ability to synthesise copious amounts of information and ideas gleaned with scant regard for trifles like academic disciplines or geographies. 

To illustrate this, one example should suffice. While working on Walking from Dandi: In Search of Vikas, I spent some time with volume 98 when I was attempting to decipher the aesthetics of Gandhi’s walks. I started by reading through the entries under “art” (according to the CWMG, he doesn’t seem to have used the term “aesthetics”). The first entry under this heading—indexed perfectly as pertaining to art and “beauty”—fairly took my breath away. Now I’ve read my Gandhi: admired and argued in equal measure with the obduracy (and didactic albeit prophetic quality) of Hind Swaraj (1909/1910); read on in fascination as the page-turning entertainer that is Satyagraha in South Africa (1928) played itself out; walked with him in growing companionship through the aching honesty of the Autobiography, which I read in Mahadev Desai’s soaring translation (1929), and while I’ve always found his writing incredibly coherent and often inspired, I haven’t necessarily thought of it as lyrical. I realise now that this is because I had not known where to look for such a vein tapping into the sublime before I found the entry on art and/as “beauty.”

The setting is this: it is early 1925, and Gandhi is undertaking multiple “tours” around the Gujarat region. The following extract is from his “Notes” about a series of conferences he has recently attended around Vedchhi. He goes into what can only be described as raptures over the arrangements for the Kaliparaj Conference:     

I cried out unwittingly: “I have seen many conferences, but in point of unstudied beauty, I have not seen one like this.”…It seemed as if nature herself had invisibly arranged everything. In my opinion, true art consists in learning from nature without struggling against it…Ordinarily a field is chosen as the site of the Conference. Our artists looked around and chose a spot which was filled with natural beauty. A river named Valmiki flows near Vedchhi. It dances along between rows of hills adorned by trees…The main rostrum was placed in the flowing water and, just as branches spring out of a tree, the seats for the delegates were arranged in front of the main rostrum. As it was winter, and, moreover, as the water was cool, this artistic expert argued that not only did the delegates not require any shade but the afternoon sun at 2.00 p.m. would be welcome to them, hence the golden sky provided the dome of the pavilion and the river sand, the seats…The canopy above the rostrum was made of bamboos and green leaves. A broad pathway led right up to the rostrum. Bamboos had been used for this purpose too and creepers of the arum plant had been entwined on the path. The first step leading to the rostrum was made of a sack filled with sand. There was not a single picture here and not a single strand of cotton was used for decorative purposes. One need not add that even decorations made of yarn cannot enhance the beauty of such a spot. Yarn is man-made and is in place in a house. Where the sky is the ceiling and sand the ground, only trees and leaves harmonize with the scene.

(CWMG 26: 41-42; emphases mine) 

Who is this poet, even? There is nothing staid or inscrutable about the writer’s feelings. This passage is why, when I read about Gandhi (even as he was beautifully described as a proto-environmentalist) as being someone who was too “practical” to have the kind of feel for the natural world which marks the work of other writers who have thought closely about this earth, and all us upon it (Guha and Martinez-Alier make this argument in their seminal Environmentalism of the Poor), it struck me as sounding incomplete. It is true that Gandhi isn’t given to routine outbursts such as the one I cite above. But they are there, if we follow the strand that leads us from art as one node to nature as another, with beauty as the bridge that brings them into conversation.

In this conception, nature is not a background against which life is lived and conferences are organised; neither is it merely a “resource” to be extracted for human “use.” To read these downright poetic invocations is to trace the webs of Gandhi’s weaving. This we can do when the light catches these seemingly diaphanous motifs just so, stretching out in the form of volume 98, for example. They are how we get from Henry Salt (proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism who befriended Gandhi as a young student in London) to Dandi; from Ruskin—whose Unto This Last was fundamental to Gandhi’s conception of the self-sustaining social unit—to Sabarmati ashram; the Bible to the Gita; and, “true music” being implicit in “khadi and the spinning wheel,” which Gandhi said in a speech for the National Music Association in 1926. They are how we learn that there is also music in walking, and that to walk is to think and en-act change which can only come from “turning the searchlight inward” (the title—and thrust—of one of Gandhi’s most evocative Dandi March speeches in 1930)—for what is the worth of “raj” of any kind without the necessity of owning up to the self-reflexive “swa” prefacing it? There is music in his swaraj, and this is what it sounds like.     

Anyone who would walk with the old man awhile would do well to play with Volume 98. What is uncertain is where you’ll go. Or how you’ll get there. But wander yet, for there are to be found here domes of golden skies, and if you’re lucky, trees and leaves harmonizing with the scene, reminding us to tread lightly upon this earth, and bidding us that we calibrate anew our relationship with kin, in all forms of life.

_{Featured image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain}

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The intertwined history of state lotteries and convenience stores

This past summer, millions of Americans were transfixed by the prospect of becoming billionaires. After weeks with no winner, the jackpot for the multi-state lottery game Mega Millions rose to $1.3 billion before being won by an as-yet-unnamed gambler who purchased the winning ticket at a Speedway gas station in Des Plaines, Illinois. Or, more specifically, at the convenience store portion of the gas station, where customers can purchase gas, food, drinks, cigarettes, and, of course, lottery tickets.

It is unsurprising that the winning ticket was purchased at a gas station convenience store. As recently as 2020, nearly 70% of total lottery sales nationwide were made at convenience stores (including convenience stores attached to gas stations). What may be surprising is just how intertwined the history of state lotteries is with the history of the American convenience store. The two emerged at roughly the same time, convenience stores helped lotteries become a $90 billion-a-year industry, and lotteries helped convenience stores secure their place at the heart of modern American commerce. 

The first wave of state lotteries spread over the Northeast and Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s, where states initially strove for respectability. Tickets were sold in a variety of retail businesses and nonprofit organizations, from barbershops to union halls. This strategy was born of necessity: states wanted to meet potential players where they already gathered and to legitimize a consumer product that had long been underground and associated with organized crime. 

The rise of the convenience store changed the game for state lottery commissions. In 1959, there were just 900 convenience stores across the entire United States. By 1977 there were 27,000 and in 1990 there were 71,000. A number of factors contributed to the quick rise of quick shopping. Convenience stores opened earlier and closed later than grocery stores. As more women entered the workforce, households compensated by making fewer grocery trips and picking up goods at a corner market, even if the prices were somewhat higher. 

Another factor was the consolidation of the grocery store industry. In Chicago, the number of grocery stores declined from over 13,000 in 1954 to 3,600 by 1987. A result was entire communities with little access to healthy food, known as “food deserts.” For many, especially in minority urban neighborhoods, the choice to patronize a newly-opened convenience store was a last resort born of financial and logistical necessity.

The spread of convenience stores was especially significant for state gambling officials because these retailers shared a primary customer base with lotteries. Convenience store clientele consisted primarily of blue-collar men, many of whom were drawn to the stores’ prepared foods, their expanded operating hours, their large number of locations, and their sale of alcohol and tobacco. Nationwide, as many as 70% of 7-Eleven’s customers in the late 1970s were men. Similarly, studies show that men are more likely than women to play the lottery, and, on average, they gamble more. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that lottery tickets were a major convenience store item. By 1997, roughly 65% of convenience store customers nationwide purchased lottery tickets at least occasionally, and 55% said the availability of lottery tickets was important to their choice of shopping destination. In 1984, administrators from nine state lotteries were asked their preferences for type of lottery retailer. Liquor and convenience stores were the most preferred, followed by drug stores and newsstands

For their part, retailers were more than happy to add lottery tickets to their inventory. Stores receive a cut on each ticket sold, generally around 5%. While the margin on lottery tickets is lower than for most other products, and though periods of lottomania created havoc at overwhelmed ticket counters, lottery players typically purchased other goods when they bought their tickets. 

As a result, in some states, convenience store chains helped lobby for the passage of lottery legislation. In Virginia, 7-Eleven provided 22% of the funding for the state’s 1987 lottery referendum. 

The profits explain why. In Virginia, 7-Eleven accounted for over 30% of total lottery sales in 1991, amounting to over $14 million in commission profits. In the mid-1990s, convenience stores in the nation’s 37 lottery states sold $18 billion worth of lottery tickets. By contrast, tobacco sales at convenience stores across all 50 states totaled $17 billion.

State lotteries, then, might not be as big as they are without convenience stores, and convenience stores owe much of their continued profitability to the enduring popularity of lottery tickets. While the nation waits with bated breath to see who—if anyone—will come forward with the winning ticket, all we know about this lucky person is that they visited an Illinois Speedway in late July. Their patronage of this outlet represents another reminder of how both lottery tickets and convenience shopping have only in the last few decades become ubiquitous parts of the American commercial landscape. 

_{Feature image by Josh Chiodo on Unsplash, public domain}

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Distrust in institutions: past, present, and future [podcast]

Research shows that American distrust in government, scientists, and media has reached new heights, and this distrust in institutions is reflected in much of the world.

In his play, Orestes, Euripides opines, “When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” Might we still overcome this onslaught of misinformation and preserve our trust in the very institutions that have governed and enriched us, in some form or another, for centuries?

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we spoke with Brian Levack, author of Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America, Robert Faris, co-author of Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, and Tom Nichols, author of Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy and The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, to discuss the past, present, and future of institutional distrust, with a particular focus on the contentious 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.

Check out Episode 76 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

To learn more about the themes raised in this podcast, we’re pleased to share a selection of free-to-read chapters and articles:

Here you can read the Introduction to Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America by Brian Levack.

Network Propaganda, by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, is fully Open Access, but we wish to highlight “Chapter 1: Epistemic Crisis” and “Chapter 8: Are the Russians Coming?”.

Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy, has written numerous blog posts and quizzes for the OUPblog, including “Reality check: the dangers of confirmation bias” and “The news media: are you an expert?”.

Additional articles and blog posts on distrust, conspiracy theories, election fraud, and public health disinformation can also be found on the OUPblog, such as:

• “How conspiracy theories hurt vaccination numbers” by Michael Stein and Sandro Galea
• “The fight against fake news and electoral disinformation” by Bente Kalsnes
• “The Black Death: how did the world’s deadliest pandemic change society?” by Mark Bailey

And in journals, such as:

• “From Bad to Worse? The Media and the 2019 Election Campaign” by Dominic Wring and Stephen Ward, from the September 2020 issue of Parliamentary Affairs
• “Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in COVID-19 Misinformation” by Erik C Nisbet and Olga Kamenchuk, from the Autumn 2021 issue of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

Lastly, the Open Access articles “State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation” by Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann, and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, and “You Are Wrong Because I Am Right! The Perceived Causes and Ideological Biases of Misinformation Beliefs” by Michael Hameleers and Anna Brosius, can be found in the journals International Affairs and International Journal of Public Opinion Research, respectively.

_{Featured image: “United States Capitol outside protesters with US flag” by Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr/Wikimedia Commons.}

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Formerly incarcerated women of color face worse health in later life

In 2021, Harlem-based activist Shawanna Vaughn stated during a Forbes interview: “Walking into prison at 17 was the most traumatic experience of my life…As a person who suffers from the remnants of mass incarceration, I am very clear that the trauma starts before prison and lingers forever until there is help.”  

Incarceration takes a heavy toll on one’s mental and physical health. The conditions of jails and prisons in the United States have long been known to increase risk of infectious disease and erode mental health. However, even among formerly incarcerated adults, we observe stark health disparities including higher rates of chronic diseases and premature mortality, which suggests that incarceration has far-reaching health consequences.  

Starting in the 1970s, major shifts in legal policies, including harsher drug penalties, led to an explosion in the penal population. In two short decades, the number of Americans incarcerated nearly quadrupled, with disproportionate representation of racial and ethnic minorities. This rapid growth in incarceration has since been dubbed “mass incarceration.” The US now holds the distinction of having the highest incarceration rates in the world—with the vast majority of incarcerated people being convicted of nonviolent crimes.  

As a result, a growing share of older adults are now aging with incarceration histories and poor health. We are just now seeing the long-term health consequences of mass incarceration policies—the “remnants” that Vaughn described. However, this trend will continue as the cohorts most affected by mass incarceration are growing older. Although men are incarcerated at higher rates, women experience greater health burdens following incarceration. This is doubly true for older women of color. 

Previous research posits that women’s health declines following incarceration are attributable to institutional sexism and racism within the penal system. These health declines have been well documented in younger samples, but little research has explored whether the effect of previous incarceration varies by gender and race/ethnicity among older adults. To fill this gap in the literature, we used data from a nationally representative sample of Americans over the age of 50 to examine differences in mental health, measured as number of depressive symptoms, and physical health, measured as number of physical limitations like difficulty walking, by incarceration status, gender, and race/ethnicity. With nearly 12,000 respondents from the 2012/2014 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we were able to document important health disparities among older adults. 

We found that formerly incarcerated older adults had worse mental and physical health than their peers who had not been incarcerated. Moreover, formerly incarcerated women reported worse mental and physical health than formerly incarcerated men—even after controlling for a host of social, economic, and early life factors. When we investigated differences by gender and race/ethnicity, we observed startling disparities among formerly incarcerated women of color. On average, formerly incarcerated women of color experienced an additional depressive symptom and physical limitation to the next highest group (formerly incarcerated white women) and more than triple the number of depressive symptoms and physical limitations as the healthiest group (non-incarcerated white men).  

In Figure 1, we present the age-adjusted marginal means for depressive symptoms (range=0-8) by respondents’ incarceration, gender, and race/ethnicity status. Controlling for age, formerly incarcerated women of color reported nearly three-and-a-half depressive symptoms when surveyed; whereas, formerly incarcerated white women and formerly incarcerated men of color reported about two-and-a-half depressive symptoms. A similar pattern emerged for physical limitations (range=0-9). In Figure 2, formerly incarcerated women of color reported having approximately 4.7 physical limitations. For context, the average number of physical limitations for the entire sample was two physical limitations. These high levels of depressive symptoms and physical limitations put formerly incarcerated women of color at greater risk for clinical depression and self-care disability. 

This research highlights how sexism and racism lead to unequal health following incarceration. The results of this work indicate that older adults aging with incarceration histories experience worse health; however, formerly incarcerated women of color face the greatest health disadvantage among all the formerly incarcerated groups. These health inequities are the result of decades of policy choices that have disproportionately harmed women of color.

The implications for public health policy are clear. By specifying those groups that are rendered especially vulnerable, we can better direct resources, such as targeted mental and physical health interventions for formerly incarcerated women of color. Because men are incarcerated at higher rates than women and more attention is paid to early-life incarceration experiences, formerly incarcerated older women may be an overlooked population who have not benefitted from current initiatives aimed at improving the health of formerly incarcerated adults.

Furthermore, we encourage policymakers, healthcare providers, and community organizations to take a life course perspective to incarceration and health. Re-entry or transitional programs for post-incarcerated people are often short in duration and do not recognize the need for consistent care and support into later life—possibly long after incarceration has taken place. Our work also suggests that decarceration and abolition should be key priorities for public health. Critical scholarship in the social sciences has only confirmed what post-incarcerated people like Shawanna Vaughn know from experience: that prisons do not (merely) punish crime, but also exacerbate inequality through the production of poor health.

_{Featured image by Ye Jinghan via Unsplash, public domain}

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Equity in health care [podcast]

There are many factors that affect our ability to be healthy and we unfortunately do not all have the same access to care. Barriers can be related to cost, discrimination, location, sexual orientation, and gender identity – to name just a few.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we complement Oxford Academic’s extensive “Health Equity” collection of journal articles, book excerpts, and online resources by speaking with two medical experts, Dr Jon Rohde, formerly of the South Africa EQUITY project, and Dr Don Dizon, Director of the Pelvic Malignancies Program at Lifespan Cancer Institute, Head of Community Outreach and Engagement at The Cancer Center at Brown University, and Director of Medical Oncology at Rhode Island Hospital. In addition to caring for patients, they have each dedicated their careers to addressing inequity in public health.

Check out Episode 74 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

To learn more about the themes raised in this podcast, we’re pleased to share a selection of free-to-read chapters and articles:

We have curated content from OUP’s many books, journals, and online resources on equity and health care, which can be found in this “Health Equity” collection. The collection is further broken down into the categories “Social Determinants of Health” and “Physical Access.” We will be sharing a collection on Law and Policy later this summer. Follow Oxford Medicine on Facebook and Twitter for updates.

Dr Jon Rohde’s article “Ten Lessons From a Career in Global Health” Guidance to Those Considering a Life Working With the Poor Countries of the World” can be found in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Global Public Health.

Dr Don Dizon has written numerous blog posts for The Oncologist, including “Cancer Care an Ocean Away: Support and Engagement all the same”, “When a Pandemic Hits Your Homeland”, “Home is Where the Heart Is”, and “Caring for Transgender Patients with Cancer.”

Lastly, we recommend these two Open Access articles, “The Health Inequalities Assessment Toolkit: supporting integration of equity into applied health research“ from the Journal of Public Health and “Trends in the Incidence of Human Papillomavirus-Associated Cancers by County-Level Income and Smoking Prevalence in the United States, 2000-2018“ from JNCI Cancer Spectrum, as well as the chapter “Needs of child refugees and economic factors“ from the Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry.”

_{Featured image: Oluwaseyi Johnson, CC0 via Unsplash.}

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Were you prepared for this pandemic?

Did you have a stock of fitted, unexpired N95 masks in your closet and a six-month supply of non-perishable foods in the pantry? Pretty much nobody was fully prepared, including me. Were you relying on the healthcare system to keep supplies on hand? In this case, the healthcare system was itself rapidly overwhelmed and close to collapse. Should we expect better preparedness from ourselves and our society?

“Way back” in 2003/4, with the SARS outbreak in Toronto, we were also surprised. We were not at all fully prepared for an outbreak of these proportions. Justice Archie Campbell, in his investigation of this, pointed out deficiencies in the system. These were not recommendations for treatment of patients. He made specific recommendations regarding systemic improvement. These improvements were only partially implemented, and the COVID-19 pandemic was as much a surprise in Ontario as it was elsewhere. His most important recommendation/suggestion/warning was that the precautionary principle was needed in future, in that “reasonable efforts to reduce risk need not await scientific proof.”

It may be that an expectation of full coordination, cooperation, communication, and logistical nimbleness is too much to ask of healthcare, public health, and societal systems that are not as much of an organized “system” as is believed. So, let’s leave that out of the discussion for now, and focus on the precautionary principle as the most important element of preparedness, as Campbell suggested.

In 2003 in Toronto, we were initially advised to take full airborne precautions; we wore N95 masks, with gowns and gloves. Why? Because the organism and the disease were totally unknown, and public health was taking few chances. What of the precautionary principle 19 years later? An article in Nature in April 2022 by D. Lewis pointed out several reasons why it took the World Health Organization (WHO) two years to declare that COVID-19 is airborne. A number of these reasons invoked a failure to use the precautionary principle. This required significant disregard for the WHO’s own documents and recommendations from two decades earlier. Ministers of both Health and Environment, for the Member States in the WHO European Region “way back” in 2004 declared: “We reaffirm the importance of the precautionary principle as a risk management tool, and we therefore recommend that it should be applied”. As well, another WHO publication from 2004 dealing entirely with the precautionary principle stated that, “If used intelligently, imaginatively and daringly, the precautionary principle will support efforts to strive towards a healthier and safer world”.

The precautionary principle had its origins in environmental protections in the 1970s. Although there is no universal definition, at its simplest, the precautionary principle means that when there is serious risk, one should not wait for scientific confirmation before taking action. There is a mistaken impression that the precautionary principle calls for jumping from the frying pan without scientific evidence of the characteristics of the fire. One may take action without waiting for scientific confirmation of the size of the fire, the number of BTUs produced, and the radius of the fire ring, if the frying pan is getting hot. Without full knowledge, there is indeed a risk of landing in the fire. However, if there is an estimate of the fire, then jumping may be a much safer alternative than waiting in the frying pan. The truth is that the precautionary principle is a clarion call for scientific evidence, as noted by Dr Martuzzi: “Thus, precaution requires more and better science.”

It seems reasonable to make preparations for catastrophe, if there is some evidence of impending catastrophe, even if the precise nature and extent of the catastrophe is not yet fully delineated. Should it turn out that there was no catastrophe, or that the risk was not great, “minimizers” look brilliant, having predicted the outcome correctly. As bets go, that would be a good bet—catastrophes are rare. In the process, they manage to fully protect the comfort of many people by minimizing danger and worry. More importantly, they also fully protect their budgets. A Forbes article in 2020, called the precautionary principle “Anti-Science” on the basis that it held up developments of medical advances whose releases were postponed, awaiting more scientific proof. This article, or its ilk, are worth consideration, but I do not agree that it is cause to outright reject the precautionary principle.

Should, in the end, there be no catastrophe, those who issued warnings using the precautionary principle will be assailed on the basis of having disturbed both comfort and budgets. On the other hand, should it turn out that the catastrophe was inevitable, those who used the precautionary principle do look very good. Regarding COVID-19, in January 2020, I said to my hospital staff “here we go again—maybe—take care.” A year later, the nurses were asking, “how did you know?” I knew because of my experience in Toronto in 2003/4. The accurate prediction of the possibility brought me no joy. I didn’t know the precise risk, but I knew there was a risk, and I thought information using the precautionary principle was important to communicate.

Why does the precautionary principle apply to pandemics? Because the downside of refusing to apply the precautionary principle to pandemics is dire. We have not yet left the current COVID-19 pandemic behind us, but it is a certainty that the next pandemic is coming. We don’t know where or when, but it is coming. Are you prepared? Are we all prepared? Are we prepared to face the costs of being prepared?

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The possibility of a world without intimate violence

This is an extract from chapter seven, “From Hysteria to Justice,” of Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women by Anne P. DePrince.

A century and a half ago, doctors averted their collective gaze from the intimate violence in women’s lives to blame hysteria on women themselves. Meanwhile, violence against women continued to be wielded as a weapon of social control, tearing at the fabric of Indigenous and Black communities in the United States. In the 1970s, the women’s movement ushered in an age of awareness that promised change. Awareness-building led us down interconnected paths of criminalization and medicalization. Along those paths, gun laws have saved lives but focusing on criminal legal responses hasn’t deterred violence against women overall. Effective treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) relieved suffering even as the root causes of violence against women persist.

One step forward, two steps back. This has been our dance for decades.

Today, stopping violence against women falls to few. The criminal legal system is charged with enforcing laws. A school delivers prevention programming to the children in attendance that day. A doctor privately addresses a survivor’s pain.

And still, every 90 seconds a woman is sexually assaulted. Another is abused by an intimate partner.

We are not fated to this pattern, though. A world without intimate violence is possible, as much as that sounds like science fiction. After all, social change is science fiction, according to organizer adrienne maree brown. To end violence against women would be to imagine into existence a world that none of us has known and to persuade people that the actions they believe impossible are actually the only and best way forward.

To realize that transformation, we’re going to need a vision that is more compelling than the status quo.

A compelling reason

Our compelling vision starts with finding an irresistible reason for change.

In recent history, we’ve had no shortage of reasons proffered to end violence against women. Protect women. Law and order. Reasons like these get bandied about when intimate violence makes the headlines. Inevitably, some politician—usually a man—stands up to tell us that they care about ending violence against women because they have a daughter, sister, mother, and/or wife.

If stopping violence against women simply required having a daughter, sister, mother, and/or wife, though, we’d have ended it already. Since we haven’t, let’s assume knowing or being related to a woman isn’t a compelling reason for social change.

Personally, I’d prefer we end violence against women and address its many impacts because it’s the right thing to do. Because girls and women, like all human beings, deserve to live lives free of violence and abuse. Because there’s no dignity in being abused, abusing others, or being the person who does nothing despite the knowledge that a woman is harmed every 90 seconds in our communities.

However, we’re not going to stop violence against women because it’s the right thing to do, because we know the facts, or because we’re altruistic. We know this from nineteenth-century France and the many #MeToo moments that have passed us by. We know this from watching interrelated movements to end racism and other forms of oppression where facts and altruism don’t change systems.

What, then, is our compelling reason to move from awareness to action?

Our reason is right there in the interconnections between the issues we each care about: violence against women is inextricably linked to the issues that stoke our greatest passions and affect our communities. Each trip to the emergency room for an injury from intimate violence adds an entirely preventable cost to overburdened healthcare systems. Gun violence in public spaces is often rooted in violence against women. Traumatic stress from witnessing and enduring violence against women disrupts learning in schools, from kindergarten to college. Women fleeing intimate violence in home countries thousands of miles away risk sexual assault during migration only to find a perilous political and legal landscape when they seek asylum in the US. Violence against women costs billions of dollars each year, contributing to widespread poverty even as economic uncertainty makes intimate partner abuse more likely. All the while, justice remains out of reach in today’s legal systems.

This complicated picture means that each of our paths to reshaping the world must pass directly through violence against women. Whether our passion is to improve healthcare access, end school-to-prison pipelines, increase the gross domestic product (GDP), build an immigration system that respects the dignity of human beings, or create pathways to justice—all of that work requires ending and responding effectively to violence against women.

Ending violence against women, then, is in each of our self-interests, in our collective interest. Ending violence against women is the only and best way forward to create transformative change on the most pressing problems of our time.

_{Featured image by Michelle Ding on Unsplash, public domain} 

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The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

The Very Short Introductions Podcast offers a concise and original introduction to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves. From ageing to modern drama, Pakistan to creativity, listen to season three of the podcast and see where your curiosity takes you!

Ageing

In this episode, Nancy A. Pachana introduces ageing, an activity with which we are familiar from childhood, and the lifelong dynamic changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning associated with it.

Listen to “Ageing” (episode 43) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Pakistan

In this episode, Pippa Virdee introduces Pakistan, one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947 but has a deep past covering 4,000 years.

Listen to “Pakistan” (episode 42) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Henry James

In this episode, Susan Mizruchi introduces American author Henry James, who created a unique body of fiction that includes Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Listen to “Henry James” (episode 41) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Secularism

In this episode, Andrew Copson introduces secularism, an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe that is more complex than simply “state versus religion.”

Listen to “Secularism” (episode 40) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Demography

In this episode, Sarah Harper introduces demography, the study of people, which addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact certain factors will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

Listen to “Demography” (episode 39) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Psychopathy

In this episode, Essi Viding introduces psychopathy, a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound.

Listen to “Psychopathy” (episode 38) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Modern drama

In this episode, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr introduce modern drama, the tale of which is a story of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through hostility and contrarianism.

Listen to “Modern drama” (episode 37) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Slang

In this episode, Jonathon Green introduces slang. Slang has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today’s vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases.

Listen to “Slang” (episode 36) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Creativity

In this episode, Vlad Glăveanu introduces creativity, a term that emerged in the 19th century but only became popular around the mid-20th century despite creative expression existing for thousands of years.

Listen to “Creativity” (episode 35) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

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The color line: race and education in the United States [podcast]

Black History Month celebrates the achievements of a globally marginalized community still fighting for equal representation and opportunity in all areas of life. This includes education.

In 1954, the United States’ Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional for American public schools in “Brown v. Board of Education.” While this ruling has been celebrated as a pivotal victory for civil rights, it has not endured without challenge.

On today’s episode, we spoke with Zoë Burkholder, author of An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North and Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954, and Nina M. Yancy, author of the upcoming How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America, examining issues around education, integration, and segregation through their scholarship. In particular, we discussed segregation in northern schools and a recent case study from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Check out Episode 69 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

In this episode, we discussed Nina M. Yancy’s How the Color Line Bends and Zoë Burkholder’s books An African American Dilemma and Color in the Classroom.

Zoë Burkholder is also the co-author of Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education. Here you can find the introductions to An African American Dilemma and Integrations. Burkholder also wrote a blog post for the OUPblog entitled “Which is better: school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools?”

In 2019, Nina Yancy wrote an article in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics called “Racialized Preference in Context: The Geography of White Opposition to Welfare“, which reported some of her research for How the Color Line Bends.

You can also check out Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy, which offers a systematic study of state takeovers of local school districts.

Additionally, you can visit The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education for entries such as “Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Methodology in Education” and “Critical Whiteness Studies.”

_{Featured image: Photo by CDC on Unsplash.}

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How research abstracts succeed and fail

The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. It’s freely available on the publisher’s website and in online databases. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. 

Alas, not all abstracts succeed. 

Some take the notion of abstraction to extremes. This example is from a physics article:

Unitarity and geometrical effects are discussed for photon-photon scattering.

It has just ten words. Fortunately, most abstracts say rather more, though it’s possible to say too much. The next example, from a geology article, has over 370 words. It starts:

Diagenesis of the Holocene-Pleistocene volcanogenic sediments of the Mexican Basin produced, in strata of gravel and sand, 1H₂O- and 2H₂O-smectite, kaolinite, R3-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R1-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R3-kaolinite (0.75)-2H₂O-smectite and R1-1H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite. Smectite platelets…

It continues in a similar vein for a further 350 words, accumulating more and more detail. The reason for the work is hinted at, but only becomes clear in the full article, at which point it’s too late.

Some abstracts introduce citations to previous research to provide background, contrary to the expectation that abstractions stand alone. In practice, citations can block the reader’s progress, as in this example from a remote-sensing article: 

The purpose of this paper is to extend the stationary stochastic model defined in [1] to a time evolving sea state and platform motion.

The reference pointed to by “[1]” isn’t attached to the abstract, and the source article is obviously elsewhere. Yet without it, the rest of the text is difficult to appreciate. Similar problems can occur with abbreviations explained only in the article.

Some abstracts confuse their remit by summarizing the paper rather than its content. The shift to meta-reporting can lead to uninformative boiler-plate text. This example is from a medical education article:

Implications of these results are discussed.

It’s uninformative because readers already know that most research articles contain a discussion section where, by definition, results and their implications are discussed.

Some abstracts expand their remit to include personal research plans. This example is from a clinical article:

We plan to investigate why general practitioners are not complying with the pathway.

It’s common to find research aspirations in internal reports and in research grant applications, where they have a specific function. But published in an abstract, they can present a reader working in the same area with a difficult choice.

Some abstracts expand their remit even further with a self-evaluation of the research. This example is from a finance article:

We believe this study will benefit academics, regulators, policymakers and investors.

The problem is that the reader may not see these pronouncements as truly impartial, with the result that the authority of the article is weakened, not strengthened.

Abstracts can of course fail in many other ways, for example, omitting caveats, adding new information, exaggerating certainty, or providing no more than an advertisement, a piece of puffery.

How to write a successful abstract

In the light of all this, what should go into a successful abstract? Some clinical journals settle the matter by imposing a structured format. But most journal and conference proceedings don’t and may offer little or no detailed guidance to the author, who may be left confused about what’s needed.

One starting point is to think of the abstract not as a condensed version of the paper that preserves the original structure and proportions, but as a mini- or micro-paper in its own right, with certain basic elements:

• the context or scope of the work
• the research question or other reason for the work, if relevant
• the approach or methods
• a key result or two
• a conclusion, if appropriate, or other implications of the work.

Naturally the weight given to each element depends on the research—whether it’s experimental, observational, or theoretical, and whether the expected audience is general or specialized. How much to write about each element is then a balance between including detail and retaining the reader’s interest. 

Within those constraints, it’s important to identify any critical assumptions, non-standard methods, and limitations on the findings so that the scope and potential application of the research is clear. The reader shouldn’t discover on reading the article that the abstract was misleading.

Here’s an example of a well-written abstract from a neuroscience article: 

An unresolved question in neuroscience and psychology is how the brain monitors performance to regulate behavior. It has been proposed that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), on the medial surface of the frontal lobe, contributes to performance monitoring by detecting errors. In this study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine ACC function. Results confirm that this region shows activity during erroneous responses. However, activity was also observed in the same region during correct responses under conditions of increased response competition. This suggests that the ACC detects conditions under which errors are likely to occur rather than errors themselves.

From C. S. Carter et al., Science 1998, 280, 747-749. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Successive sentences describe the context, the reason for the work, the methods, some results, and an implication. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, the article has been cited over 2,500 times.

Encapsulating a body of research so effectively usually takes repeated rewriting. The timing, though, can be a challenge, since the abstract is often prepared last, when the main sections of the paper have found a settled form. It then risks being rushed while material is assembled for submission for publication. 

Despite these pressures, the abstract needs as much attention as any other section of the paper. After all, if it doesn’t do its job, the reader may turn to other abstracts that do. And the published article may languish unretrieved and unseen, waiting in vain for the recognition it deserves.

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Police-free schools: the new frontier in ending the school-to-prison pipeline

On 25 October 2015, a Black high school student named Niya Kenny filmed a white school police officer body slamming her classmate, a Black sixteen-year-old girl, to the floor at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Deputy Sherriff Ben Fields placed Shakara in a headlock, flipped her desk over, and then dragged and threw her across the classroom floor, all for allegedly refusing to hand over her cell phone. Yet it was Niya and her classmate who were arrested, charged with criminal “disturbing school,” and sent to juvenile detention.

Niya’s video went viral. Students across the country involved in the Alliance for Educational Justice and local groups working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline wrote and delivered love letters to Niya at a national youth power conference. The movement delivered a petition with 150,000 signatures to drop the charges against Niya and Shakara, and the incident served to accelerate the growing, but at the time little known, movement for police-free schools.

Community organizing and police-free schools

Riding the wave of mass protests against police violence and racism in 2020, Black and Brown parents and students won their first victories in defunding or removing police from schools. Since even before the Niya Kenny incidents, these local activists had been patiently organizing for police-free schools for many years. They had built a base of student and parent leaders knowledgeable about the issue, had developed and even submitted policy proposals, and had been lobbying school board members. When the protest wave opened up new opportunities, these organizing groups were ready. They won some quick and early victories and sparked a movement that spread across the country.

Long-established organizing campaigns won quick victories in 2020, cutting the school police budget by 35% or $25 million in Los Angeles in 2020 (and by another $25 million in 2021), ended the contracts between the Madison and Denver school districts and their police departments, and entirely eliminated the Oakland Schools Police Department, reinvesting its $6 million budget into a non-carceral safety plan. Since June 2020, over 138 school districts have announced that they will remove police from schools.

Police do not make students safe

Police-free school advocates spent years developing the argument that school police, also known as school resource officers (SROs), do not make schools safe. There is, in fact, no research-based evidence that demonstrates that police improve safety in schools.

As opposed to promoting safety, school police target students of color and those with disabilities, which starts them on the road to prison. During the 2017-18 school year, nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement, with about a quarter leading to arrests, often for minor behavioral issues. In schools with police presence, students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged than students in schools without SROs. Overall, Black students are twice as likely to be arrested in school as white students. Many young people have their first encounter with police in schools. One study found that in North Carolina, school-based referrals make up about 40% of the referrals to the juvenile justice system and most of these referrals are for minor, nonvio­lent offenses.

The rise of armed security personnel in schools came with zero tolerance approaches to the so-called war on drugs in the 1980s and escalated in the 1990s as part of the move towards mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, which Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow.” In the late 1970s, there were fewer than one hundred police officers in schools in the US. By 2003, there were almost 15,000 and the proportion of schools with armed security continued to grow.

The fact of the matter is that public schools in low-income communities of color invest in systems of discipline, control, and punishment rather than student support. The result is that 1.7 million students attend schools with police but no counselors; 10 million students attend schools with police but no social workers.

Alternatives to zero tolerance and policing

Advocates working to end zero tolerance and create police-free schools are organizing for alternative approaches to criminalization like restorative justice. When students misbehave or fight, rather than being disciplined or arrested, school staff and student peers hold restorative circles—dialogic processes that get at the root causes of the issue and help resolve conflicts. The main problem, however, may not be student misbehavior. Rather, when teachers start to learn about restorative justice, it often leads them to realize that they must break with zero tolerance mentalities and practices that result in punishing and criminalizing students rather than supporting them. In this way, the movement for police-free schools seeks to create supportive school climates and to reimage public schooling as safe, humane, and empowering for low-income students, students of color, and all students.

The movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline

In the early 2000s, a new movement arose to challenge the school-to-prison pipeline. Its focus was primarily on ending zero tolerance school discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color and those with disabilities at high rates, pushing them out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Black students were and still are three times as likely to be suspended as white students; in Texas, over 75% of Black students are suspended at some point in their high school years.

When parents and students of color first named the school-to-prison pipeline and called for an end to zero tolerance, few were listening. After fifteen years of organizing, in 2014, the US Departments of Education and Justice issued joint guidance calling for an end to zero tolerance and warning school districts against racially discriminatory discipline practices. Organizing groups won a rolling series of victories in states and districts across the country that ended zero tolerance discipline policies. As a result, suspension rates have begun to fall, in some places dramatically. In Los Angeles, a coalition of organizing groups won a series of victories in campaigns to reduce exclusionary discipline, culminating in the end to suspensions for “willful defiance” in 2011. Lost days of instruction due to suspensions fell from about 75,000 in 2007-18 to 8,300 by 2013-14 and fewer than 5,600 lost days in 2017-18.

Ten years ago, the Black Organizing Project in Oakland declared the goal of completely removing police from schools by 2020. Few were listening. Now, the demand for police-free schools is gaining momentum across the country. It is the new frontier of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and transform public education towards racial equity and educational justice.

_{Featured image by NeONBRAND via Unsplash.}

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Why depth interviewing is essential to understanding individuals and institutions

From scraping “big data” from the internet to the analyzing genomic information about individuals and social groups, today’s researchers have a dizzying array of new methods for studying the social world. One consequence of this explosion of options has been to obscure the value of tried-and-true ones. Depth interviewing is a case in point. Once assumed to be a core research tool, many of today’s researchers have cast a skeptical eye on it. While past debates centered around whether we could rely on insights drawn from a limited number of people, new concerns have arisen from those who advocate direct observation, whether in natural or experimental settings. These skeptics express doubt that social researchers can trust the information gleaned from self-reports, pointing especially to the ways that depth interviewing may elicit accounts that are internally inconsistent or that contradict what people actually do. Such doubters argue that since people are prone to express ideas, beliefs, or behaviors that contradict one another, their self-reports are neither credible nor useful.

These critiques reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about what depth interviews can accomplish and how, when designed and carried out well, they are uniquely suited to gathering crucial insights about the nature of human consciousness and the relationship between thought and action. One-on-one interviewing creates a setting in which the “unobservable” becomes visible. Life history interviews allow people to describe and reflect on how prior experiences have led them to their current circumstances and outlooks, including what key events propelled them to devise life strategies and make consequential life choices. Focusing on the present, depth interviews provide a safe space where people are invited to share their most private experiences, thoughts, and feelings. While it is not be possible to observe a wide range of intimate activities, from sexual encounters to all sorts of dyadic interactions, interviews allow participants to describe and reflect on such events. And whatever the topic, interviews allow people to explore the meanings they attach to their actions and beliefs and to reveal the processes by which their social contexts created experiences that prompted ensuing responses.

Indeed, a key contribution of depth interviewing lies in its ability to uncover the contradictions that people express. Rather than accepting such accounts at face value, our research (and that of many others) demonstrates that we ignore contradictory thoughts and actions at our peril. Contradictory accounts as well as inconsistencies between “saying” and “doing” are central to human thought and action. Depth interviews provide an opportunity to delve into the nature of such beliefs and behaviors and explore the reasons people hold inconsistent views or act in apparently inconsistent ways. In addition to unearthing the meanings people imbue to their contradictory thinking or behavior, interviews can also discover the social contexts that give rise to them. When people express inconsistent beliefs or reveal conflicts between their values and choices, they alert us to look for the social contexts and cultural formations that create conflicts for which there are no simple or straightforward ways to respond. 

Given the complexity of twenty-first-century life, it has become even more crucial to understand how people navigate the tensions created by conflicting institutional arrangements. In the context of a rapidly changing world, interviews shed light on the interplay between incompatible options and the evolving responses people craft to cope with them. Paying close attention to the different layers of meaning within each interview and carefully analyzing the patterns that emerge across all the interviewees enables depth interviewers to understand how social structures and cultural schemas shape human endeavors and how, in turn, social actors participate in constructing and potentially changing the world they inherit. By eliciting contradictory accounts and using them to delve into why people hold inconsistent beliefs or act in contradictory ways, depth interviews illuminate complex social patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.

Whether the goal is to chart how structure and action interact as individuals build their life paths, to learn about intimate experiences that cannot be observed, to uncover how people give meaning to their own and others’ practices and beliefs, or to understand how social arrangements prompt people to hold contradictory views and take inconsistent actions, depth interviews are the best, and possibly the only, method for learning about such core social dynamics. When interviewers ask probing questions, listen carefully to their participants’ answers, and analyze their findings with an eye firmly focused on discovering the patterns that emerge from the complex material they gather, interviewing enlightens us about the many dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to numbers, biological factors, or observable behavior. As we rightfully seek to expand the social science toolkit, it would be ironic if we lose sight of a method that offers unique access to the hidden dimensions of personal and social life. Instead, we must renew our commitment to a research technique that places human consciousness at the forefront.

^{Featured image by Christina@wocintechchat.com via Unsplash}

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New pathways through later life: redesigning later life work and retirement

In March of 2020, for many Americans and older workers especially, what it meant to go to work changed in an instant. As some workers moved their offices into their homes, others had to go to work and face significant risks to their health each day. Older Americans faced more significant health risks than younger adults, leaving many feeling they had to walk away from work temporarily or permanently, a tradeoff of protecting their health despite a financial need to work. Others chose to enter retirement earlier than anticipated without a clear plan for this new phase of their lives. Given that older workers who lose their jobs face significantly longer periods of unemployment before being re-employed if they desire to work, older workers are likely to lead the way in reshaping what our post-COVID-19 work lifestyles look like.

It will be years before we can look back on the pandemic and fully evaluate the ways that our work lives changed in March 2020. However, the Great Recession that rocked the world during the last few months of 2007 set the stage for how we are defining work and retirement pathways today. For example, the gig economy became a way that everyday people could work without the structure of a typical job, and freedom to choose when and how much to work. It also led to accelerated declines in retirement savings, leaving more individuals without the means to leave work permanently despite reaching traditional retirement ages. How did these and other structural changes shape work pathways in later career stages?

My colleagues and I identified the most prominent work and retirement patterns from 2008 to 2014 among US older workers who left full-time jobs in 2008. Our research showed:

• More than half (58%) of people who left full-time work in 2008 returned to work for some period of time.
  • 9% transitioned to part-time work only to return to a less intense full-time job and remain employed full-time for a number of years.
  • 10% transitioned to part-time work and continued to decrease their work engagement over time until eventually leaving work.
• However, most individuals identified themselves as retired but continued to work in some capacity.
  • 14% transitioned to jobs that were less than 20 hours a week on average and remained half-time employees for an extended period,
  • 25% transitioned to half time work and decreased employment hours with each passing year until they fully phased out of the work force.

Although it is not known whether these post-Great Recession work patterns will persist in a post-COVID-19 world, there is good reason to expect that most older workers will remain engaged in paid work in some way for many years after traditional retirement ages. In fact, older workers report a preference for transitioning to less intensive paid work before retiring rather than a sudden departure. The problem is that we haven’t developed a clear infrastructure for these kinds of work transitions, so older workers have had to piece together post-retirement employment opportunities on their own. Although there are more options than there used to be, most older workers are unable to phase out of their full-time jobs, and, part-time work rarely includes much needed work benefits like health insurance and matching contributions from employers in retirement savings accounts. Older workers also face the challenge of having a higher likelihood of facing family care needs, and many employers do not offer jobs that provide flexibility for workers to carry out their jobs while also caring for their loved ones.

Although a post-COVID-19 world may push employers to take a new look at career models that include part-time work and flexible work options that allow older workers to stay employed, we need more intentional federal policies that incentivize employers to create non-full-time work options that support the career pathways. For example, a new optional federal retirement savings program could be created for non-full-time workers, and optional early access to Medicare could be provided for part-time workers aged 50+. Such programs may lead to new kinds of work lifestyles that are not only in line with the preferences and needs of older workers, but also among those in other phases of life who need or prefer non-full-time work career paths that allow them to obtain benefits, potential for upward mobility, and meaningful and challenging work.

October is National Retirement Security Month, a time to re-evaluate what retirement means in a post-pandemic world. Across the globe, the average age of the population is increasing. With a decrease in younger, working aged individuals in the US, delaying retirement as a means to retain older workers’ talents will become increasingly critical. Cultivating meaningful, alternative forms of work and retirement pathways has potential to ensure that older workers are valued as important ingredients in a vibrant economy and culture. As we transition to a post-pandemic society, now is the time to rethink the structures that differentiate work and retirement periods so that we can be more inclusive and more flexible in addressing the needs and preferences of all workers.

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