Zoonoses. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with noses. It hardly has anything to do with zoos either. Then what are zoonoses? And how do you pronounce the darn word? Technically, the term zoonoses follows the same pattern as other disease related terms, like mycoses. In it’s singular form, zoonosis is pronounced as zoo-o-no-sis. The –osis suffix is Latin from Greek expressing a state or a condition, or disease. In this case, a zoonosis is an infectious disease that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Transmission can be facilitated by a vector, which makes vector-borne diseases a subset of zoonotic diseases.

But the zoo- root of the word, meaning “animal,” is misleading. It implies that it is the solely by the paws or claws of the animal that the disease has become a problem, when in reality the blame can be more equally or heavily placed on humans and their activities. The root can also literally mean “living being,” however, and if we take this version instead we may get a better sense of the word zoonosis in a wider context.

Man’s best frenemy

The definition of zoonosis is one that is quite simple and easily explained. The implications of zoonoses, however, takes a bit more time to uncover. The story behind the word is that we as a species can share diseases with animals, even ones that are farther removed from us. However, it is another story whether we can accept this in our worldview and adapt to new events of zoonotic diseases.

Diseases have most likely been passed between humans and the animals they live in close proximity to ever since the time when humans began domesticating the animals. It is still a shock, or at least the media plays it out to be one, whenever a new disease passes from animals into people. The idea that people can die from something acquired from animals is still shocking and new for many. This point of view keeps us from ever being fully prepared for such an event.

Domestic animals can be divided into two purposes: pets and livestock. Pets are loved worldwide, and, while some pets cross the world to be with their owners, but they are still animals. Wildlife trade is dominated by the demand for wildlife as “exotic” pets, but the associated health risks to humans are not well known.

Another aspect of this is that demand for wildlife as pets creates jobs for people to collect wildlife from the wild. This requires humans entering natural areas, and extracting living beings to be shipped elsewhere. The people who do this as a living are not only exposed to their target animals, but also other animals that share the same habitat. The constant demand for wildlife pushes more and more people to take to the forests and bring home to the village (or town or city). More trips in and out could mean more chances to interface with animals, and then other humans.

Albeit we are more at risk of contracting diseases from mammal pets, we can still contract diseases from birds, fish, and other vertebrate taxa in extreme cases. This is not to say that we should not have pets, but perhaps the thing that we are purchasing from the shop should be viewed as a living, breathing entity (capable of carrying and transmitting disease) rather than an item that simply fulfills our wants or needs.

Life(stock)blood

The other group of domestic animals, livestock, are a vital group of animals that have supplemented the human diet and allowed for population growth. As much as they have been domesticated, they are still animals that have biological connections to non-domesticated animals. They can share food preferences, habitats, resources, parasites, and pathogens. Cross-species transfers of infectious diseases can lead to significant losses in livestock, and even in human lives. For example, Nipah virus crossed over from bats to pigs, and led to massive culling of pigs and several deaths in humans exposed to sick pigs. Once the interface between bats and pigs was cut off, the number of spill over events dropped to nearly zero, and human cases because even more rare.

You could argue that the entire world has become what it has because we as a species were able to get the necessary nutrition from animals that were domesticated for consumption. Traditionally, humans shared their villages and spaces with fowl and fauna that have now become the common chickens and cows. It’s a symbiotic relationship of sorts. However, rapid intensification of livestock raising has led to more immune-comprised animals, smaller living quarters, and less contact with natural areas.

While this system might feed more people, it creates a hotbed for disease transmission. A bird need only defecate to the cage below to expose a fellow chicken to disease. Disease can spread, and the natural systems to handle disease may not be equipped to handle it. The infected birds can make people sick, even if they haven’t started showing symptoms. It needn’t come down to a question of animal welfare, because it is already a question of human health.

To Nature: You’re great, but let’s just be friends

This theme is harkens to the view that animals are inherently different from humans, and that humans are special on this earth. It could be said though, from the point of view of pathogens, that humans are just another species to be conquered. The barrier for transfer of pathogens between animals and humans is lower than we would like to believe, in addition to our immune system being naïve to pathogens that evolved within animals. The fact that we can receive these pathogens and become sick is a fair sign that we are not as far removed as we tend to allow ourselves to believe.

Another fallacy is that only animals that look sick are a danger to people. Bats are some of the best sources of new viral infectious diseases, and yet they often do not exhibit signs of disease. Also, take for example avian influenza. It is a disease that can pass between wildfowl and domestic birds, and mutates often. Wildfowl often carry influenza, but do not get sick from it. They’ve coevolved with the viruses, and may also be more able to adapt to them as mutations and changes occur in the viral species. Domestic birds, however, may be vulnerable because of their lack of history with influenza viruses. Furthermore, because of lack of exposure or genetic implications of breeding for domestication, populations of domestic birds (livestock like chicken) can get sick and die off from the viruses before any evolutionary interaction with the viral species can occur.

This is not to say that wild animals are a direct danger to humans, and definitely does not mean we should kill them off. It just means that the relationships between wild and domestic are more complicated than just fencing in some animals and keeping others out. However airtight biosecurity operations may be, borders may still be permeable and imperfect. Immune systems of livestock, often overloaded with antibiotics, may still succumb to a novel pathogen. It is also arguable that we shouldn’t wish to have a perfect barrier, when maintaining one would cost bucket loads and even then would not be guaranteed. Rearing livestock to have better health and stronger immune systems could be a valid and robust defense. This would probably also be better for the people eating food products derived from the livestock (but that is yet another story).

Even in urban settings, zoonotic diseases are important to consider. Burgeoning metropolises are not immune to outbreaks, like dengue in Singapore, and, although wildlife are more unseen (by design or by cultural blindness), they are there and are active in the ecosystem. Or we may consider even the simple idea that urban areas are ecosystems too. This could get into a discussion about the fallacy of a boundary between civilization and nature, where the belief that there is clear separation is a failure to recognize that ecosystems are continuous not contiguous.

The idea that we can break ourselves off from Nature, and remain “just friends” whom we see on occasion, is just plain false.

Last thoughts

It is not such a new concept that diseases can pass between living things of different species, even though the term may be new to many people. Perhaps it is an artifact of a media industry that feeds on hot topics and then serves it out to the public. Scientists have been researching in this area for quite a while now, though they may only make it in the news when something major happens. In an industry is built on a competition among various interests, there is bound to be residual misinterpretations, overstatements, understatements, and the like. For instance, infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases can’t share the same limelight, AIDS and tuberculosis seem to compete with other big name diseases like malaria, and funding agencies tend to focus on measurable results that make good sound bites. Altogether, there is a general lack of understanding of why major outbreaks can occur and what activities and actions are driving these events.

Although it’s a technical term, wider understanding of zoonoses could bring health risks between humans and animals closer to home. Meaning, if we can accept our relationship with animals to be wider and more integrated than we currently do, we might be able to handle certain situations better. While we are busy delineating boundaries between ourselves, the natural world, and other living things, the reality is that there aren’t boundaries and it isn’t possible to create them if we wanted to. It might be that we naturally like to know the limits and what is the range of area that we should be concerned with so that we do not overwhelm our cognitive systems with too many inputs and concerns. That’s fair, but it doesn’t reflect reality. We need to be able to step out of that mental comfort zone occasionally to see what is out there and if any of the assumptions we’ve made need to be adjusted. Our lack of understanding or response to the implications of zoonotic diseases may be a sign that we are too much inside our bubbles and need to make it a priority to do a reality check.

The post Zoonosis: what it is and what it means first appeared on science before breakfast.

If we are all to continue reaping resources from the Earth and benefit from the land and living things, there has to be some consideration for what humans are doing collectively that detract from our ability to continue on doing this in the future. Game theory principles would suggest that the current state of the world economies incentivize competition and dishonesty rather than cooperation, especially when it comes to natural resources.

If the economy is a game with many players, each country is a player and the GDP is their annual score. Each country is competing to increase their score as quickly as possible, and at all costs never let it decrease. Instead, we could measure contribution to global prosperity and well being, rather than individual country-based measures. Much like how open source initiatives benefit from many contributors who share their code, having a global metric for progress could be contributed by all countries in different ways.

One way to create a global measure is by aggregating several measurements on how the earth is faring. For one, we could start by calculating area of forest conserved, or additional area added to legal protection schemes for that year. Each country could contribute by either conserving their own land, or adding to efforts to contribute in other countries. A proportion could be calculated from the total conserved that year. Other measures could include how many fisheries were managed sustainably. Or how much material was recycled or up-cycled. There are many possibilities, but would take some effort to compile and standardize.

Each country could focus on their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, if the area that needs most improvement is child hunger, then they could contribute quite a lot in relation to what other countries could achieve. In the end, each country would be competed to solve their own and the worlds problems in collaborative and constructive ways, rather than in destructive and monetized ways.

How would we get countries to buy into this metric? Tie it to something that already has value, or use that in addition to pride and prestige. Somehow the Olympics is a simple example of how countries will spend millions to get a piece of metal. We could call it the Olympics for the Earth, or something similar. The events would be recycling, education for girls, human rights, etc. Medals go to the top 3 every 4 years, and losers go home to train harder for the next Olympic year.

Maybe it is optimistic to think that governments will want to participate, but then how can we continue to do what we do and expect different results? That is the definition of insanity. Maybe the signal is a little muffled or lagged in time, but it is there. We can’t keep doing everything to the Earth and expect it to continue on providing as it always has. Ask anyone who studies desertification and they will tell you. Perhaps this type of “Games” would help rehab us back to sane harmony with the planet we live on.

The post Beyond GDP: change the game’s incentives by making it more like an open source community (Olympics for the Earth) first appeared on science before breakfast.

I especially enjoyed the process of designing my poster. It took a last minute push to get some things together, but I’m happy with it overall and I DID NOT use Powerpoint to make my poster. I hadn’t realized that many people use Powerpoint to design their posters until a few years ago when I was making a poster and my colleague asked me in an email to send him the ppt file. I used Omnigraffle, which was pretty easy to pick up since I had used Adobe Illustrator before. If you are not afraid of learning how to use a new piece of software and have a bit of time to get the hang of it, I highly recommend it or Adobe Illustrator. The posters come out looking a bit more pro!

This conference happens every year and is jointly put on by University of Malaya in Malaysia, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. The location of the conference alternates between the 3 universities. Each university sends around 50 students in a few different areas of biology ranging from cell and molecular to biophysics to biodiversity and ecology. I’m going as part of the biodiversity group from NUS.

I’ve never participated in a graduate student conference, so it’ll be interesting to interact with peers and see what other people are working on. I am required to be present at my poster for 2 sessions each day, for the 2 days. Each session is about 45 minutes long, and I hope lots of people come to see my poster!

The post Next conference: 18th Biological Sciences Graduate Congress at University of Malaya first appeared on science before breakfast.

Linking food security, biodiversity and sustainable consumption

Animal protein is an increasingly larger portion of the diets of people in the world who are increasingly able to afford more of it. It is also one of the major resources traded globally. With that in mind, also consider that many of the new infectious disease that are emerging nowadays are coming from animals. This is not to say that we should get rid of animals, especially not the wildlife that may naturally have many diseases circulating through their populations. Straight culling of animals that may or may not harbor harmful-to-humans infectious disease would not ensure that an outbreak or emergence event will not occur. For instance, some pathogens are transferred by the bodily fluids of animals and starting a massive culling project would expose many workers to the animals and the pathogens. Then there is the problem of disposing of the animals. And not to forget, the importance of these animals for the ecosystem and biodiversity warrants protection, not destruction.

Infectious diseases are a part of the natural ecosystem. It is when they cross boundaries (physical or biological) or combine into new strains that they may be most dangerous and scary. Many diseases that are highly infectious in humans barely affect the animals they regularly circulate in. To achieve sustainability, we should understand the dynamics of infectious disease transmission, how they emerge locally, and how they spread globally. On top of that, we need to embrace the role of humans in the process and how human systems, such as intensification of livestock production and global trade of wild and domestic animals, may potentially be contributing to the risk of disease emergence or reemergence. Other human activities like hunting and butchering of wildlife increase the frequency of contact between humans and animals, and also present an interface for disease transmission or exchange. While many of the most threatening infectious diseases may be passed from domestic animals to humans, pathogens can also be passed between domestic and wild animal populations. This allows for mixing, and may lead to a perfect storm for new pathogens to emerge.

To further contemplate the role of people in the emergence or spread of infectious diseases, it is important to note that human activities are driving forces for some of the factors leading to such emergence or spread, such as increased contact between humans and wildlife as a result of roads made by logging companies through forests. To protect biodiversity by conserving natural areas (as opposed to building roads and developing the land for agriculture or other purposes) is to also prevent new interfaces for contact between humans and wildlife, and domestic animals and wildlife. Similarly, the sustainable consumption goal may call for farming methods that make the most of already converted land, avoiding the clearing of forests for new agricultural operations. By minimizing contact, we may reduce the frequency of pathogen exchange and thereby lower the chance of a pathogen with pandemic potential making it into humans. Finally, food security itself encompasses the human interest in biodiversity and land as resources, and so can be considered an overarching goal to frame the others.

To be economically relevant

Globalization is often cited as one of the main forces for shaping modern interactions and global issues. It is not as simple as human greed versus the greater good. What has allowed the world’s societies to function the way that they have is the potential for converting natural resources to marketable goods. We could attempt to return to a hunter and gatherer society and live off the land like our ancestors did, but we cannot possibly ask the world’s population to do this and give up the lifestyle that many have lived and died for. We will also find it hard to continue to prosper while simultaneously minimizing the damages to the environment and living things. Unless…we somehow find a middle ground between completely giving up what we have worked hard to achieve and maintain, in terms of lifestyle and quality of life, and acknowledging that we cannot continue in the direction and at the pace that we have the past several decades.

Part of the issue with finding this middle ground is that of perspective. Although we may not be able to promise hamburgers and fries for dinner for the entire world’s population, we can attempt to manage expectations and risks. Remember that infectious disease is a natural part of the ecosystem, and may never be fully eradicated. In turn, diseases are a normal part of animal raising and trading. They are a real concern for large and small operations alike, though perhaps in different ways. Higher intensity livestock production, driven by demand for animal protein, puts all of the animals at risk for higher rates of disease. An outbreak within an animal population in an enclosed area can mean complete loss of economic value of those animals. Not only that, outbreaks on farms and in markets can have an overall effect on demand as well as perceptions of disease risk held by the general public which can have long lasting effects. Such outbreaks can lead to a dip in animal trade industry, and large losses in tourism especially if the disease crosses over into humans. Emerging infectious diseases, such as bird flu, have a critical economic impact and call for a better understanding of disease dynamics and prevention.

To be socially relevant

What of the social element? How do social systems link these issues together? Well, as social may be defined in different ways, the ultimate question in all of this is what do people care about, and subsequently how do people make the decision whether to care or not. The human brain may not be able to fully understand and sympathize with something as abstract and far away to themselves, for example the chronically disease ridden areas in Africa, but it may be able to comprehend the shared, immediate risk of a global pandemic. The local threat becomes a global one. What makes us all the same is that we are all vulnerable in the situation of a pandemic, and this makes it easier to care about what is happening with infectious diseases in other parts of the world.

What has not been helpful, however, is the occasional overblown press by the media which does not accurately portray the situation or convey understanding of actual risk. Scientific literacy is low in some countries, and sensational headlines are not making that any better. Add onto that the difference between understanding enough to recognize a threat to yourself versus understanding enough to recognize the bigger picture implications and threats, and now we have a complex situation with misalignment of interests. Advancement of agricultural and livestock practices has allowed distancing of the average First World citizen from food production and natural disease processes within it. This distance is only magnified by some cultural tendencies to hide the fact that what we are eating is an animal and that it most likely came from a farm where it lived in close proximity with many other animals. If we continue to refuse this inherent link between how we raise and trade animals and the risk of disease to humans, the next pandemic originating in animals could very well be the great unifying common “enemy” for all global citizens.

To be politically relevant

Political will…that is another key term that strikes at the heart of this matter. Whether or not the stars are aligned properly for political action to take place, these issues will remain what they are. A lack of political will may characterize any type of tragedy of the commons, when a common good or resource is continually exploited by individuals to the detriment of the whole group. But, there is hope for the rest of us who still believe in change. Biodiversity alone has not consistently proven to be reason enough for political action, specifically to conserve land and resources. For whatever reasons, it may never be enough on its own, but paired with the double issues of food security and sustainable consumption in the context of risk for emerging infectious disease, the persons in power may find it compelling enough to pay more attention.

In many cases, political leaders cannot afford to sit back if there is a natural disaster, such as a disease outbreak. They are often working for the vote of the people and/or for prestige and power on the world stage. Though this might be an oversimplification, it boils down to power: how to obtain it, retain it, and multiply it. To be perceived as incompetent in the face of such a challenge as an outbreak of an infectious disease could potentially be devastating to the reputation of a politician or even to a nation. This can be a powerful motivator, and hopefully will create some political will.

Closing thoughts

When it comes down to it, humans are part of the global ecosystem, and all of the human-created systems function within that global system. The issues of our time are not neatly distilled into containers where each can be dealt with alone, but our frame of thinking and approach to them often treat them as such. This is not a new notion by all means, but with the SDGs comes a new opportunity to realize a better version of integrated thinking and interdisciplinarity. It is not enough to settle into the false trichotomy that you must be either people-focused or profit-focused, or environment-focused. To defy this trichotomy could be slated as the main objective in the role of infectious diseases as a connecting element for the SDGs targeting food security, biodiversity, and sustainable consumption. It is something that requires a long term outlook paired with a sense of local threat, and forgoes the type of urgency that is far too fleeting to be sustainable.

A few questions have come to mind:

• Will economic advancement and trade necessarily be at odds with biodiversity?
• Will we be able to meet the animal protein demands of an exploding population sustainably and without increasing the rate of disease emergence?
• How do we compensate for misalignment of objectives, especially between and among government agencies and international organizations?
• Can we reconcile economic ambitions with the public good (in this case, being free from infectious disease)?

I do not have answers to these questions, but I do know that the hope for the future is on us to be able to take hold of what the implications of the SDGs are and how they may be a step forward in action as well as in thinking. What will set this generation of goals apart is the forethought to put these together in concerted effort. So, do I consider sustainable development to be an oxymoron? I think that we have the power to make that statement untrue, and it must start with our intentions and perspective.

It is inherently part of our nature to view the world and it’s problems from our own point of view, and it is all just a matter of scale. What might be a daily concern for someone living in one part of the world may not even be part of the mental scope of someone living in another. Sometimes we forget that those of us living in the developed world have the privilege of not having to worry if there will be food available for our next meal, or whether the water we drink is clean, or where our money is kept (safe). The threat of infectious disease that can become a global pandemic is a serious one. We are seeing new diseases every year, and the impact is not just on public health. Trade and tourism suffer greatly, as well as public perception and trust of health surveillance systems. An unlikely but true connection can be drawn to link to sustainability and development, and what that means in this globalized age is constantly changing. By integrating our approach to infectious diseases as they relate to these specific SDGs, we can change the shape of sustainable development and veer away from the territory of oxymoron.

[This essay was written as an entry for the International Dimensions Human Programme (IDHP) Writing Contest.]

The post The role of infectious zoonotic diseases as a connecting element for the Sustainable Development Goals first appeared on science before breakfast.

Introduction

The commodification of technology has made it even easier to reach individuals and groups that are physically distant, but virtually neighboring. In the Information Age, new connections between people and groups of people are being created in the virtual world as much as or more than they are in the physical one. Increasingly, the formation, expression, and spread of ideas and information occur in virtual space as opposed to physical space, where the only limitation is the technological connectedness of the actors. The power of ideas and information is what drives Internet relationships and connections. In particular, ideas can be surprisingly empowering, which may culminate as something intellectual such as scientific progress and technological innovation, or something as simple as free access to news and events from other parts of the world. This paper aims to explore ideas as part of networks in virtual space, how it impacts the connections formed, and the society that is thus assembled, drawing on examples as to how ideas may function through actors and connections on the Internet and World Wide Web (hereafter referred to as the Web).

Although ideas are abstract by nature, they have traditionally travelled through actor connections in the physical world. To define idea, one can consider the definition laid out by Merriam-Webster: “a transcendent entity that is a real pattern of which existing things are imperfect representations” (Merriam-Webster). An idea can be as simple as how to boil an egg, or it may be as complex as freedom. The physical home range and mobility of the individual actors, and also the connectedness of the physical mail system usually limit connections in the physical world. Nonetheless, one would have to have a way of obtaining the mailing address of another actor, after having already somehow established a connection. Such connections still proliferate today, but are not the dominating type of connection, especially among the technologically enabled persons of the developed world whose lives are partially being lived out now in the virtual world.

From the perspective of actor-network theory, it is these new connections and new types of connections that will change how society assembles. Ideas in virtual space have the newfound advantage of being an abstraction within an abstract environment. In addition, new types of conflicts and controversies arise out of the newest virtual realms on the Internet as new possibilities are constantly being created. This results in a diverse network of newly created connections that have assembled society in virtual space in a different way than what is possible to occur in physical space. In this paper, I will explore the role of ideas in reassembling society in virtual contexts.

Actor-network theory

In his discussion of actor-network theory (ANT), Bruno Latour (2005) attempts to return to the original definition of social, and to return to being able to trace associations, thereby reassembling society. He aims to clarify that, while social has become a term that has come to mean a type of material, it originally meant a “movement during a process of assembling” (Latour, 2005). The actors, nodes, other elements, and connections form a network, which can be analyzed to reassemble society. In this vein, new connections can be made when actors find a common link through ideas.

Latour engages in a discussion of two approaches to sociology: sociology of the social which focuses on non-social phenomena and aims to use ‘social factors’ to explain the ‘social aspects’ of such phenomena, and sociology of associations which is from the perspective that there is no ‘social dimension’ but that society is one of the connecting elements among many interconnected elements. In other words, there is not a ‘social angle’ to frame a question or problem. This would require approaching the phenomenon of ideas in virtual space not as a social side of the phenomenon of technology, but as connections or associations that are unique to the virtual parts of society that exist or that are being created as part of the process.

It is critical to understand social as a process in the context of the connections made with ideas because it is a dynamic process that includes active as well as passive participants. Social in this case cannot be used to blanket describe the interactions that facilitate the transfer of ideas, but it must be the central process that creates associations for ideas to move through and virtual spaces where they can live. This will then give us the ability to describe how the actors and ideas are connected and interact relative to the network at large. Latour’s work gives a framework for viewing the different elements of the network and deconstructing the social process by which actions are taken to reach configurations.

Virtual space

With relatively recent advances in technology, virtual space – specifically in the form of the Internet – has burgeoned into something much greater and larger than could have been imagined, and with greater complexity making it difficult to comprehend as participants of the space. Virtual space has created a new playground for society, but it has also released economic capacity that has led to the globalized trade networks that we see today. With more effort, we can begin to understand the long term role of virtual space as a new environment for new connections to be made and for society to assemble within.

Technology may be considered to “embod[y] the capacity of societies to transform themselves” (Castells, 2010). It is also the enabling element for virtual space to exist and expand and for the Web to become what it is today. Manuel Castells (2010) discusses how information technology as a mode of production was instrumental to restructuring processes of capitalist systems as modes of development (i.e. informationalism). The relationships of production, experience, and power are discussed to explore how human processes are structured and are put into contexts of class relationships, the state and institutions, and people. These relationships have also traversed into the Web. Nations that have come to be able to take full advantage of technology have propelled themselves forward in the global economy. Cross-cultural exchanges are made possible by the new connections and the nearly boundlessness of the Internet. On another level, multinational collaboration and commerce is much more common and easily managed. The power of technology then also becomes the power to transfer knowledge and information through connections, with the Internet as one main virtual space for connections to be made that form virtual networks of conversation and commerce.

Even though these global macro level relationships may take up new connections and meanings, the micro level human processes have also become transformed to adapt to virtual capacities. People who would never have met at during a different technological era are now able to see each other and instantly communicate via the Internet (although we unfortunately do not have holographic projections yet). Not only that, a person who chooses to leave their homeland can remain in touch and informed without the same time lag that such distance would have imposed in the past. This increased ease of contact and general immediacy has implications for the global exchange and transfer of ideas and information, such as that of the role of the Internet in the proliferation of ideas on democracy and human rights. The role of ideas in society within the virtual space will be a function of the actors connected to it, of the nodes and connections that link them up, and of the potential for cross-network travel.

The questions about geography in virtual space could be summed up by the concept of the re-territorializing of knowledge that takes place in virtual space. Squirre (1996) brings up several questions such as:

“What power relationships shape electronic communities? How are social inequalities played out in electronic contexts and geographies of fear represented, negotiated, and potentially re-defined? How may electronic communications connect individuals with other societies, transforming social consciousness? And how might Internet activities create new geographies of leisure, recreation and tourism?”

The new realm of virtual space should “challenge geographers particularly to forge new understandings of ways of seeing and of being in multiple, and multi-faceted worlds” (Squire, 1996). A major goal of the sociology of associations could be to understand what within these relationships and connections have affected how ideas are connected through networks in virtual spaces and whom they are connected to, which in turn have impact on the assembling of society.

Actors and actor networks in virtual space

Distance is relative in this context of networks as opposed to absolute, while the importance of space and time is how they are interwoven into network configurations. Two types of spaces that emerge from actor-network theory are ‘spaces of prescription’ and ‘spaces of negotiation.’ Spaces of prescription are where norms exist and circulate, resulting in a rigid and predictable set of behaviors, whereas spaces of negotiation are where there are variation and flux throughout the network, with flows and interactions that make it unstable (Murdoch, 1998). These spaces are implied by network configurations, and are “linked to the degrees of remote control and autonomy found in networks” (Murdoch, 1998). The two types of spaces is an interesting perspective in the virtual realms of the Web because of the seamless boundaries that may exist between the virtual spaces.

Both types of spaces exist in virtual space, and to varying degrees depending also on the countries that the virtual spaces are grounded in, linked to and regulated by. From this perspective, how ideas may exist and function in these spaces as well as what connections are formed will be affected by whether the space is characterized by prescription or negotiation, or sometimes a combination of both in different contexts. The actors in the networks may potentially connect across the different types of space, which then creates more complexity in the network configurations. In addition, actors may not be able to tell what type of space other actors are functioning within, resulting in imperfect knowledge or understanding across networks.

One major type of network actor through which ideas can exist through is the news outlet. The news brings current events and opinion pieces into the virtual community, which can be shared across the world with low costs and barriers. Interestingly, the Internet has brought about a new wave of journalism that has forced traditional news outlets to develop a web-based presence and readership. Several completely novel outlets that would not have been established otherwise have sprouted to fill in every niche imaginable on the Internet. These serve as vital sources of information and ideas for the general population of actors within the virtual networks, but they are also catalysts for thought and curiosity about things that may be unknown or unfamiliar to the actor.

Innovation in the newsroom, now integrated with the virtual newsroom, has been explored in the framework of ANT as well as communities of practice (Schmitz Weiss and Domingo, 2010). However, innovation in journalism does not only occur in the virtual newsrooms. In addition to this, citizen journalism has taken a special place and role in the networks of virtual space. Scenes that would have gone unseen by the general public are now going viral through media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, and other sites of congregation. These public displays of ideas, opinions, events, etc. are bringing together and connecting actors in the virtual networks through common interests in the topics breached by the actors. In many cases, actors that would not have been connected are now linked and engaged in conversation because of the connection to the common ideas that attracted them to the particular websites or nodes in the network.

Ideas as forms of power and counterpower in networks

Power is a useful perspective to view the conflicts and controversies in society. As Michel Foucault’s (1977) pivotal work demonstrates, it is what drives every action and actor and impacts the relationships that are formed. He states that “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault, 1977). Information is powerful, and the access to information and even the access to Internet is increasingly seen as a right. For example, the Freedom of Information Act in the United States of America allows individuals or organizations to request full or partial disclosure of data controlled by the US Government (FOIA). This gives some significant power to the individuals or organizations, especially when considering how much data the government actually possesses. Networking power, network power, networked power, and network making power, discussed by Castells (2011), are three types of power that characterize networks. These are summarized in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Types of power in networks (Castells, 2011)

In addition to these types of power, there is counterpower:

“Counterpower is exercised in the network society by fighting to change the programs of specific networks and by the effort to disrupt the switches that reflect dominant interests and replace them with alternative switches between networks.” (Castells, 2011)

In this sense, counterpower is the opposing force to power, and can be viewed as a destabilizing force in a network. We can consider ideas in networks as forms and manifestations of power as well as counterpower. The role of ideas in the network can be complex due to its position and function, and how this translates in power relationships. Ideas can exhibit power in a network in the form of network power or network-making power. The power of ideas is in how they affect the structure of the network and the creation of new connections between actors. They are abstract objects that can drive actions and connections to be made and network configurations to shift. This in turn will impact how actors interact in virtual space, and in some cases physical space as well. As I will discuss in a later section, the special case of China as a rising Internet power presents an interesting situation where power relationships are being played out.

From another perspective, nonaction, and broken connections as well as the cost of exclusion from the network may also have great impact on power relationships (Tongia and Wilson III, 2011). To return briefly to the discussion of journalism, Weiss and Domingo (2010) found in their observations that the power relationships between actors in the newsrooms and conflicts regarding technology and interpretations of innovations in technology were a hindrance to effective operations. The technological innovations implemented by the programming team were not effectively taken up by the journalists, and the journalists did not feel that their concerns were heard (Tongia and Wilson III, 2011). This is an interesting case where Internet-based technology integrates with the structure of the news team operations in both a physical and a virtual space and out of that arose a conflict among the actors. The authors found that by using ANT to map positions of actors, they could interpret the impact of technological innovations and perceived power of groups on work flows and routines of the various teams.

Another significant barrier that is being breached is that of language. Having the advantage of being the language in which the Internet was invented and first used, English using actors in the network have a head start on creating networks and also on monopolizing network power. Although English language sites may dominate the cyber sphere, there are efforts to translate the web into many other languages. It would take quite some time to reduce the dominance of English, but a multilingual and translatable Web may soon diminish the advantage of English using actors in the network. The power would then shift somewhat away from those actors dominating in English who hold the network-making power to the networked power of actors enabling the translation and cross-language communication.

Putting it all together

Ideas as actors

Within ANT, the possibilities for thinking about networks are endless. The limitations are not imposed by the theory, but by the thinker who is applying the theory. It would be a mistake to limit the network from the outset to a defined type of actor or defined type of connection. In this line of thought, ideas themselves can be actors in networks, and not only in ones that exist virtually. Although not in the sense that ideas as actors can actively create new connections, ideas in the passive sense are the driving forces for the creation of new connections between actors and nodes in a network. Ideas themselves can serve as inspiration for development of virtual network nodes where actors congregate, e.g. special interest forums. Ideas can also be the nodes within the network, and can lead to the formation of networks that are centered on ideas.

From this perspective, we may conceptualize the virtual space to be filled with networks made up of active users, connections, and nonhuman nodes. This network may be termed as a multidimensional network where technology can be brought “inside” of the network (Contractor et al., 2011). Technology can also be considered to already be inside of the network if a network is inherently a “substance that had deemed at first self-contained…and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (Latour, 2011). Considering this, if virtual networks are capable of being multidimensional, as in containing nonhuman technological elements such as databases, then ideas in general can also function as nonhuman nodes and actors in a network. This will change our understanding and perspective on dynamics of the network and give new insight into how the network may be configuring itself.

Ideas end up being passive actors in the network because of the way that they function as catalysts for the creation of new connections between actors. Ideas themselves can be considered as vital elements in the virtual networks by nature of the search term and content oriented structuring of data in conjunction with methods of path making on the Internet. However, from the perspective that “being an actor and being a network are the same thing” while having “complete reversibility” (Latour, 2011), ideas as actors in the network are the network, and the network is reversible to its attributes and actors. It is unnecessary to begin first with an individualistic view (a first level), and then move up to the collective phenomenon (a second level), if we take the perspective that “there is only one level, where the parts are actually bigger than the whole and where a phenomenon can be said to be collective without being superior to individuals” (Latour, 2011). When we are able to think about virtual networks in this sense, ideas are on the same level as users or human actors and the phenomenon of ideas in virtual space can simultaneously be among individuals or the collective.

Virtually tracing associations through ideas

Curiously, some researchers have found that the human mind works more like the Internet in a network model of organization than the “top down,” hierarchical model that has been promoted since the 19^th century (Thompson and Swanson, 2010). If we consider virtual networks to be like the human mind and that ideas in virtual networks are also actors, we can trace associations through the network by way of tracing associations through ideas. Connections to an idea may be intangible, but they are real in that they create associations between actors or other network elements. For tracing associations of ideas in the virtual space of the Internet, the difficulty will lie in how to interpret and manage the diverse links that proliferate amongst actors and between groups of actors.

In China, the Internet users making connections and disseminating ideas in virtual space are who makes up a crucial part of their society, especially as an outlet for expressing interests that would otherwise be stifled. The Chinese government infamously exerts impressive control over access to sites on the Internet and what content is allowed to flow through virtual space. What is not yet understood is what are the implications of China being a rising Internet power, with a reported 500 million users and 38% Internet penetration rate (CNNIC, 2012), while also being one of the least free countries if not the least in terms of freedom of expression and free access. One of the new and explosive modes of communication made possible by the Internet and that has had large impact in world and in China is microblogging, i.e. Twitter and Weibo. Microblogging and its vast seas of short length content have made surveillance and control a much more difficult objective than it was with other forms of content creation and sharing that came before it. The ideas and thoughts being broadcast through microblogs have become a type of counterpower to the controlling power of the agencies monitoring the virtual space. The preceding forms such as blogs may be characterized more as spaces of prescription whereas microblogs may be characterized as spaces of negotiation where norms have not yet been established and flux makes it unstable.

Although control and surveillance are just two objectives for paying attention to microblogs, other objectives may be more academic. One way to follow microblogs is to see what topics are “trending” amongst the general population of users, usually found by searching for a hash tagged phrase (e.g. 2012 trends on Twitter (Twitter, 2012)). Often, groups of users compete to make their chosen topic one of the top trending topics in a virtual battle against the rest. The collective phenomenon occurs as a result of the individual users contributing to the community at large. Microblogs also serve as breeding grounds for conversations which may start up between users who have never connected before simply because they both contributed content on a specific topic. These conversations can eventually become new connections in the network. Intriguingly, the conversations are usually public, so even observing conversations makes the spectator an actor in the network.

The cutting edge of programming science is now to harness the power of microblogs by using code to mine the content for useful information (e.g. a Twitter language map of New York (Barratt et al., 2013)). If the human mind does work very similarly to the Internet, then the process of assembling the components of the Internet society would be analogous to the process for assembling the human mind. It is essentially an attempt to analyze the thoughts, opinions, observations, relationships, etc. of actors in a network that are in the form of short text entries which collectively are arguably the closest thing to getting inside someone’s head. The microblog entries are given their own existence within the network of the larger microblog community. The individual microblogger is creating little bits of data (which may be explicitly connected to other users or sites outside of the blog) that can be viewed by others as part of the individual’s train of thoughts or as part of the collective community.

The microblogosphere could be perceived as completely not at all structured or highly structured depending on context and scale. The structure of the Web in general has transitioned from linked, mostly static, documents to hypertext linked information and is moving towards fully linked or associated data (Hall, 2011). This shift has affected how we interact with the Web and how it fits into our lives outside of the Web. For example, in the beginning, user profiles on Facebook (a social networking website) were simply various facts about the user listed out on a page (Aronica, 2012). With the addition of new features like “the wall” and status updates, the Facebook profile has become a dynamic page with links to other users and websites constantly coming in and going out. In the “Semantic Web” of the future, the Web is made of linked data that allows for automated querying and interpretation of data distributed from various sources and in heterogeneous formats (Hall, 2011). This type of Web would allow for more advanced interactions and associations between nonhuman actors of the network. What may follow is that the Web becomes a virtual space for conversations not just between human actors, but also between nonhuman actors. Once the ability for semantic interpretation is available and the links between data become two-way streets for communication, then ideas in one part of the network may begin to associate with ideas in other parts.

Implications of reassembling the virtual social

Bruno Latour (2005) set out to reassemble social, and to be able to trace associations through sociology of associations. In what hopefully has been an insightful exploration of assembling the social in virtual spaces, the situation is not necessarily clearer than when we started this journey. What makes ANT an exciting theory is that it allows us “to study the individuals and their aggregates…without any discontinuity where the individual action disappears mysteriously into a sui generis structure” (Latour, 2011). This structure can now span both the physical space, where human actors must reside, as well as virtual space, where some attributes of human actors reside in addition to nonhuman actors and elements.

If we are able to assemble the social in virtual space, we will be able to gain an understanding of how it is also part of society that is assembled at large, physical and virtual combined. As an effort in global social development, the virtual actor networks in the realm of the Internet pose new challenges to assembling the social. How things are structured on the Web will also have impacts on how they are linked in our minds. Additionally, having an understanding of the history of how it has progressed also gives a different perspective. Hall (2011) suggests that users that predominantly access the Internet through mobile devices may have a different mental map of the Web. This might be interesting to investigate in countries such as Japan, where the bulk of Internet activity occurs on mobile devices. Differences in mental maps of the network between different actors may then in turn impact the relationships and connections with other actors, and ultimately the individuals’ worldviews.

The author also brings up the psychological implications of being newly able to access the Internet after it has already progressed to its current state. To return to the example of Facebook, it would be similar to someone joining today as opposed to a user who has been active since the inception of the website in 2004 nine years ago. The significance is that the naïve users would be flooded with features whereas people who grew with the technology have seen the innovations be added along the way. You cannot choose to start off with the original format of Facebook page and then progressively add features as you are comfortable with accepting and using them.

The difference with actors being newly introduced to the Internet is that these actors would be leapfrogging from having no access to even primitive forms of the Web, to having all of the modern power of the Internet. Unlike with other technologies, there is no way to take babysteps or intermediate steps into the Internet. Being unfamiliar with the virtual territory, new actors in the network would remain at a disadvantage due to the learning curve, while veteran actors continue to dominate the actions and connections in the network. In this case, the new users or actors could also be at a disadvantage in terms of power within the network due to the cost of being excluded for the crucial early periods of time. Early adopters have the advantage of having already claimed a “territory” within the virtual space, from which they can operate and influence the network by using their position in relation to others and power acquired from established connections. Using ideas as signposts in the virtual space, new users may be able to navigate the virtual networks in a way that would be less overwhelming.

Conclusion

The connections made and maintained in virtual networks impact many economic and behavioral aspects of society and populations such as strength of relationships, perception of risk, innovativeness, etc. The configuration of network connections is unique to each virtual space and time, and thus they will change as the connections and interactions change in response to internal or external stimuli. What is important to note is that society does not exist solely in the physical with the advent of the Internet; it exists as it always has but now co-exists in a new dimension of possibility of the Internet and its manifestations.

Ideas in virtual space impact social connections, the relationship between virtual and physical space, and overall the functioning of actors. Ideas are also actors in virtual networks, and hold network power in ways that impact other network elements. In this research paper, the aim was to explore how actor-network theory can be applied to ideas and how they affect the assembling of society in virtual spaces. Ideas, since they are able to transcend the boundaries between physical and virtual space, are the linking elements for connections and associations in networks that are integrated across both spaces. A deeper understanding of ANT and these issues may lead to better framing of research questions in fields that could benefit from this perspective even if seemingly far removed, such as science and ecology, by putting things into the framework of networks and associations.

Literature Cited

ARONICA, J. 2012. Happy Facebook IPO Day! 10 Screenshots of the Old Facebook Designs [Online]. Shareaholic. Available: http://blog.shareaholic.com/2012/05/happy-facebook-ipo-day-10-screenshots-of-the-old-facebook-designs/ [Accessed 21 April 2013].

BARRATT, J., MANLEY, E., CHESHIRE, J. & O’BRIEN, O. 2013. Twitter NYC A Multilingual Social City [Online]. Available: http://ny.spatial.ly/ [Accessed 21 April 2013].

CASTELLS, M. 2010. The rise of the network society, Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell.

CASTELLS, M. 2011. A Network Theory of Power. International Journal of Communication, 5, 773-787.

CNNIC 2012. The 29th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

CONTRACTOR, N., MONGE, P. & LEONARDI, P. M. 2011. Multidimensional Networks and the Dynamics of Sociomateriality: Bringing Technology Inside the Network. International Journal of Communication, 5, 682-720.

FOIA. National Archives. Available: http://www.archives.gov/foia/foia-guide.html [Accessed 21 April 2013].

FOUCAULT, M. 1977. Discipline & punish, Random House Digital, Inc.

HALL, W. 2011. The Ever Evolving Web: The Power of Networks. International Journal of Communication, 5, 651-664.

LATOUR, B. 2005. Reassembling the social-an introduction to actor-network-theory. Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, by Bruno Latour, pp. 316. Foreword by Bruno Latour. Oxford University Press, Sep 2005. ISBN-10: 0199256047. ISBN-13: 9780199256044, 1.

LATOUR, B. 2011. Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist. International Journal of Communication, 5, 796-810.

MERRIAM-WEBSTER. Idea – Definition and More [Online]. Merriam-Webster. Available: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idea [Accessed 18 April 2013].

MURDOCH, J. 1998. The spaces of actor-network theory. Geoforum, 29, 357-374.

SCHMITZ WEISS, A. & DOMINGO, D. 2010. Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society, 12, 1156-1171.

SQUIRE, S. J. 1996. Re-Territorializing Knowledge(s): Electronic Spaces and ‘Virtual Geographies’. Area, 28, 101-103.

THOMPSON, R. H. & SWANSON, L. W. 2010. Hypothesis-driven structural connectivity analysis supports network over hierarchical model of brain architecture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 15235-15239.

TONGIA, R. & WILSON III, E. J. 2011. The Flip Side of Metcalfe’s Law: Multiple and Growing Costs of Network Exclusion. International Journal of Communication, 5, 665-681.

TWITTER. 2012. Trends [Online]. Twitter. Available: https://2012.twitter.com/en/trends.html [Accessed 22 April 2013].

The post Ideas in virtual space through actor-network theory first appeared on science before breakfast.

Sometimes I wonder if I am more suited to the social sciences, but then I remember that I cannot understand their dense writing for the life of me. I’m interested in learning about concepts and theories, but I can’t digest writing that is convoluted, especially the ones that even those who are part of that field have a hard time deciphering.

The readings for this course have really challenged me and made me stretch my thinking power. We covered topics and dense writing that I had never been exposed to before or knew existed. The major themes that we covered were space and place, agency and structure, theories of difference, theorizing the city, governmentality and biopower, and performativity and subjectivity.

These are some of the well known authors that we read:
Doreen Massey
David Harvey
Michel Foucault
Judith Butler

I handed in my research paper for this class a few days ago, and I’m feeling glad that I took the plunge to take a course that was so far out of my normal range. I’m not sure how much will stay with me as I go back to ecology and biology, but I think it was an interesting exercise in exploring other disciplines. In the past, I’ve taken courses like philosophy of science, urban anthropology, and philosophy and film. Sometimes it takes something so different to bring in new perspective. What I chose to write about was actor-network theory and virtual space (in the form of the Internet to be specific) and the role of ideas in those spaces and contexts. Maybe I’ll post some snippets of it here!

One of the topics that I wrote about for a reaction paper was academic dependency. I think this is a very interesting phenomenon, especially now that I’m interacting more with the academic realm. The last section on performativity and subjectivity made me really think about myself and my identity. You could certainly say that as a scientist, you are expected to “perform” your role as an expert. Performance not in the evaluative sense like what grades you get or where you publish, but performance as in you are the performer and you are performing for an audience. From the perspective of performativity, this would mean performance is what makes you you. This is not saying that everyone is fake. Not at all, your performance of yourself is what makes you real.

How does this apply to science?

I think to really think about this in terms of science, we have to consider who scientists are performing for. At risk of oversimplifying, they are performing for the granting agencies, the academic journals, the department committees, least of all the general public. We may say that we are doing it for the common good, but at the end of the day the common good isn’t what brings in the funding. The pressure to perform to expectations has put so much pressure on researchers, that some have resorted to faking data and misrepresenting results in publications. It is regrettable, but it happens.

I think this largely occurs because they have lost sight of who/what should be the goal audience for their work, the common good. If you are not framing your research in terms of how it can improve current knowledge or improve how things are in the status quo, then what is the point? Not just framing your research, but the greater good should be the driving force for why the research should and is being done. Lying about results does good for no one.

What do you think? Is this social theory a bit too distant conceptually to be applicable to science?

One of the authors that I wrote about before, Nicky Gregson, is now working on science in practice. Though she doesn’t go into much detail about this project, she conducted an ethnography of a university science lab. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it!

The post My short foray into human geography and sociology and what I’ll bring back to natural sciences first appeared on science before breakfast.

Although very different in nature, the two research experiences of Gregson and Rose are interestingly relatable and insightful. The audience and the performer have different positions in the two settings. In the first, the participants of community art programs were the performers but the process was considered by the participants themselves to be more important than the audience. The participants were discovering and performing new parts of themselves through the process, and they did not see the end product as the most important part of the program. In the second, both participants in the car-boot sales were performing and both were the audience as well. The setting calls for a certain type of performance by the salespeople and the customers, some being more elaborate and others being simpler.

Perhaps one of the most important points of the article is that Gregson and Rose are quite self aware of their performance as part of academia. In the “Reflections” section of the paper, they discuss the somewhat ironic feeling that resulted from coming full circle from the fieldwork through to the writing of this paper. The authors found themselves changed by the process of performing academically. They recognize that the writing and publishing of papers is another type of power play in itself, and that the performance of the research itself was not fully complete until they came together to write this article.

Having started in a new school and campus several times, I could say that I have experienced changes or differences in the performance of myself in different spaces based on what I wish to present to classmates and friends (the audience). This could be an example of “self-cultivation” and “self-deployment,” where one can engage in cultivating identity “through multiple modalities of self” (Blackstock, 1997). This performativity of identity leads to diverse spatial performance. Even in a stable life with no new environments or audiences, I am performing different parts of myself in different contexts and spaces.

Perhaps the stereotyped thinking that people can travel the world to “find” themselves is just the releasing the pressure of needing to perform to a regular audience. When traveling, the traveler is constantly meeting new people and experiencing new environments that their performance can change accordingly. There is no historical evidence of a certain performance that ties you down to the expectations of the audience. This in itself can be freeing, where you can choose to deploy and depict the self you wish to.

Literature cited

BLACKSTOCK, C. G. 1997. Anne Bradstreet and Performativity: Self-Cultivation, Self-Deployment. Early American Literature, 32, 222-248.
GREGSON, N. & ROSE, G. 2000. Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 433-452.

The post Some thoughts on performance, performativity and subjectivity first appeared on science before breakfast.

• You are less likely to fade into the crowd because the number of people starting at the same time as you will be much smaller. This might also mean that administrative staff will be less stretched thin than for the first semester of the academic year, but that might not be true.
• If you have a lot of coursework and/or teaching duties but have summers off in between semesters, starting during the second semester means that you have a bigger summer break in between your first 2 semesters to work on other important things like getting your preliminary research going and preparing for your qualifying examination. This could be a MAJOR advantage to consider since you would get this long break in the middle of your first year, as opposed to towards the end of it!
• Housing could go either way. There might be fewer options for on-campus housing but if you are looking for off-campus housing there might be less competition. This will greatly depend on where you are of course.

There are some disadvantages though, like having to keep telling people that you only just started if they assume that you have been around for a semester already. Another disadvantage might be that you don’t have as strong a bond with your cohort or as big a cohort that you start with and go through your program with, but assuming you have some social ability, I think you could overcome that within a few weeks of being in your lab group.

The post Advantages to starting a PhD program mid year (second semester/term) first appeared on science before breakfast.

Alatas (2003) describes the dimensions of academic dependency as the dependence on ideas, media of ideas, technology of education, aid and investment, and dependence in the West for skills. The author brings up Project CAMELOT as an example that overtly implies both political and academic imperialism. Although it was quickly recognized as a mistake, government research agendas could be more open with their intentions, whether imperialistic or not. At present, the US government continues to fund research internationally which in some cases might be construed as somewhat imperialist, but proposal wording is thoroughly vetted to maintain political correctness (e.g. agriculture and food security, economic growth and trade, etc. (USAID 2013)). In the case of openness, the countries on the receiving end would at least be aware of the intentions and the implications.

Whether government research agendas of Western countries are displaying dominance overtly or not, the establishment of Yale-NUS and Duke-NUS in Singapore is proof that the West still dominates in many aspects of academics. This obvious and deliberate partnership between NUS and universities from a Western power country can be attributed at least in part to academic dependency if not majorly. Another example is how New York University (NYU) has also independently set up fully functional satellite campuses in several countries around the world, but the reverse does not seem to be happening. In addition to sharing research agendas, sharing authorship between researchers from developed and developing countries is now common practice. Dunkin found that authorship dynamics varied by discipline and between solo and multiple authorship just within University of Sydney (Dunkin 1992). It would be interesting to survey how the addition of Yale-NUS and Duke-NUS will change authorship dynamics among researchers in Singapore.

Alatas asks us to consider academic dependency a crippling handicap for the scientists in developing countries. It seems that one way to overcome this would be for those countries to look inward instead of Westward. However, it may be quite difficult to deviate from the current trajectory pushed by the West (and often pulled by non-West) because academic dependence is already so integrated and accepted and has been for quite some time. Research by the academically dependent on this topic would be greatly insightful for furthering understanding and would increase the awareness and reflection on this issue by all groups.

Literature Cited

Alatas, S. F. (2003). “Academic Dependency and the Global Division of Labour in the Social Sciences.” Current Sociology 51(6): 599-613.
Dunkin, M. (1992). “Some Dynamics of Authorship.” Australian Universities’ Review 35(1): 43-48.
USAID. (2013). “What We Do.” Retrieved 19 Feb, 2013, from http://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do.

The post Academic dependency, and is Yale-NUS and Duke-NUS proof of it in Singapore? first appeared on science before breakfast.