Life & Letters • Summer 2018 by Life & Letters Magazine

MAGAZINE FOR THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

FIGHT GIRL LIKE A

P.20

Summer 2018

Issue No. 31

Mabel was in the ring with more tigers than anyone could possibly fight off her.

Award-winning director and documentarian Leslie Zemeckis screened Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer, a documentary about the world’s first female tiger trainer, Mabel Stark, on the UT Austin campus on April 26. A Q&A followed, moderated by American studies professor Janet Davis, who served as a source in the film. In her 57-year career, Stark headlined shows with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, survived multiple maulings and marriages, and starred in Hollywood movies. Her life ended tragically after being let go from Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. The documentary reveals Stark’s story told in her own words, as well as those of her relatives, protégés and today’s female tiger trainers, who follow in her footsteps. Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer is written, produced and directed by Leslie Zemeckis (Behind The Burly Q, Bound By Flesh) and produced by Sheri Hellard, Jacqueline Levine and Robert Zemeckis.

Emily Nielsen

MABEL, MABEL, TIGER TRAINER

Director Leslie Zemeckis and American studies professor Janet Davis discuss Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer on April 26 in the Prothro Theater at the Harry Ransom Center. The event was sponsored by the Humanities Media Project.

CONTENTS SUMMER 2018 College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy L. Diehl Director of Public Affairs David A. Ochsner Editor Michelle Bryant Art Direction & Design Allen F. Quigley Copy Editor Adam Deutsch Contributing Writers Grace Dickens Rachel Griess Caroline Murray Emily Nielsen

Amrita Marino

Contributing Illustrators Michelle Kondrich Amrita Marino Zach Meyer Eric Moe

20 COVER FEATURE

DEPARTMENTS

Fight Like a Girl

02 Dean’s Message

How women’s activism shapes history

03 Knowledge Matters

12 BOOK FEATURE

16 Books

Living in a Material World

18 Events

Philosopher Galen Strawson tackles a few of life’s nagging questions

42 Commentary 44 A Place in the Sun

36 Q&A

Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program Founder Nancy Dedman makes life extraordinary, student Bahar Sahami interns supreme and alumnus Dr. Travis Cosban shares the power of authenticity

On the front and back cover: Illustrations by Amrita Marino

Contributing Photographers Sarah Lim Emily Nielsen Alan Pogue Visit us online at lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu Or email us at cola.alum@austin.utexas.edu Printed by Horizon Printing Postmaster Send changes of address to: Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts 116 Inner Campus Dr., Stop G6000 Austin, TX 78712-1257

LAITS Studio

DEAN’S MESSAGE

Rising to the Challenge “In recognition of the Pattons’ generosity, the College of Liberal Arts Building will now be called Patton Hall, with a formal unveiling in September.”

Five years ago we opened the doors to the new College of Liberal Arts Building in the heart of campus. It was a milestone event, marking the first time students in our college had a place to call home. Departments and other units once scattered across campus were brought together in new collaborative spaces, as were the branches of our top-ranked ROTC program. In addition, the building increased the university’s stock of much-needed classroom space. We marked another milestone in September 2016, when Bobby and Sherri Patton donated $20 million to our college and created the Bobby and Sherri Patton Challenge Fund, inspiring many alumni and friends to match that gift with an additional $19 million. It resulted in the creation of more than 50 endowments that will bolster our ability to hire and retain top faculty members and graduate students, provide experiential learning opportunities to undergraduates — including research, travel abroad, internships and community service — and excellence funds that allow the college to support and reward exceptional ambitions and achievements by its students and faculty members. In recognition of the Pattons’ generosity, the College of Liberal Arts Building will now be called Patton Hall, with a formal unveiling in September. This new naming not only recognizes a major gift, but also a transformational moment in our college as we continue to build on some of the nation’s best programs in the

humanities and social sciences, including No. 1 programs in Latin American History and Sociology of Population. We are also investing in areas of research that bring together some of UT Austin’s best minds to address some of the biggest challenges facing our communities. A good example is our Institute for Mental Health Research, where psychology professor Chris Beevers leads a campuswide team poised to make major breakthroughs in treating a variety of mental health disorders. Engaging in the highest levels of scholarship and research not only elevates the reputation of our college and the university, but also provides our undergraduates with countless opportunities for learning and discovery that are unique to a major research university. Students in the College of Liberal Arts work hard in the classroom, but they also apply what they learn by doing research in labs and in the field; by working for various companies, nonprofits or government agencies; and by helping others in communities around the world. These experiences prepare our undergraduates for careers beyond graduation while instilling in them the lifelong values and limitless rewards that come from serving others.

Randy L. Diehl, Dean David Bruton, Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

Michelle Kondrich

A Right to the City

AFRICAN & AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES, INSTITUTE FOR URBAN POLICY RESEARCH & ANALYSIS By Rachel Griess

ust south of Manor Road on Airport Boulevard, there’s a dimly lighted blues club where new and old East Austin meet. There, at the Skylark Lounge, local

African American piano icon Margaret Wright plays happy hour on Thursday and Friday nights, giving city newcomers a taste of the bygone culture that once engulfed Austin’s eastern neighborhoods. The club’s location was once the Airport Bar & Grill, an African American bar that catered to residents of a “Negro District” created in 1928 by Jim Crow-era city planners. But today, the area appears starkly different as gentrification bulldozes through the streets of East Austin, economically choking out long-term residents who are left with no choice but to uproot and relocate to more affordable suburbs and isolating those who chose to stay in the community they once knew. “African Americans who were previously so singularly confined to East Austin became singularly displaced by gentrification,” says Eric Tang, a UT Austin associate professor of African and African diaspora studies and a researcher in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Tang began studying the effects of Austin’s rapid development on minority populations after moving from Chicago in 2010, finding that Austin was 3

the only fast-growing major city in the United States to show a decline in African Americans between 2000 and 2010. He has since completed a three-part study on the impact of gentrification on current and former residents of Austin’s east side. “I couldn’t believe no one had studied this before,” Tang says. The first piece of his study’s series documented how between 2000 and 2010, East Austin’s white population increased by 442 percent, the black population decreased by 66 percent and the Latino population decreased by 33 percent. “Few people have been able to hang on, and they aren’t hanging on because the changes are beneficial. Rather, they’re hanging on because they feel a responsibility to black and brown East Austin — a right to the city,” Tang says. In the third and final installment to the three-part study, Tang and Bisola Falola, an East Avenue researcher and UT Austin geography and the environment alumna, interviewed long-term East Austin residents who chose to stay. And although most held negative views of their neighborhoods’ rapid development and rising property taxes, respondents felt change had delivered its deepest blow to their sense of community. Perhaps most telling of that was the decline in the number of children. “Children are the glue or 4

Courtesy of Eric Tang

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

“Few people have been able to hang on, and they aren’t hanging on because the changes are beneficial.” Eric Tang

the common thread that hold a community together, bringing vibrancy and visibility to the neighborhood,” Tang says, adding that children once accounted for 30 percent of the neighborhoods’ population, but now make up less than 12 percent. As gentrification began, families were the first to leave, seeking economic relief and better schools, Tang explains. In their place, passersby walk their dogs where children once played, engaging with their pets more than with their neighbors. “Most people are white. They spend the whole day walking the dogs. They don’t have kids — they have dogs,” says an 87-yearold African American female respondent. And although recent developments have led to new restaurants, businesses, supermarkets and parks in the area, more than 90 percent of long-term residents Tang interviewed said they didn’t patronize most new businesses because they are either uninterested or feel unwelcome. Some respondents even feel as if their new neighbors would rather they just disappear or accept one of the many insultingly low offers on their homes from aggressive investors. “East Austin has been resilient through segregation, civil rights, desegregation, urban renewal, the drug epidemics of the ’80s and ’90s, and the rezoning and

redevelopment of downtown,” Tang says. “The people who stayed reflect that very sense of resilience that once encompassed all of black East Austin. As a city, we should be doing more to address these issues of race and culture that profoundly and disproportionately impact our whole community.”

Trillions on the Table? ECONOMICS A decade after the onset of the Great Recession, the output gap between the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) estimate of the “potential level of GDP” has nearly closed, and the World Bank has estimated the same across most advanced economies. On the surface, it would appear that the economy has bounced back, returning to its potential level and making way for the Federal Reserve

to c

In Fear We Trust PSYCHOLOGY Research has long established that political attitudes are associated with the “Big Five” personality traits. For example, prior studies show low openness and high conscientiousness to be related to conservativism. But in 2016, two campaigns built on populist themes of fear, lost pride and loss aversion awoke previously uninfluential traits, particularly those of anxiety, anger and fear. In a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers found correlations between higher levels of anxiety and fear in a

“Widespread anxiety and fear in a region have the potential to profoundly impact the geopolitical landscape.”

Martin Obschonka

to begin reworking economic policy instruments — such as increasing interest rates — to satisfy these “normal levels.” But economists from UT Austin and the University of California at Berkeley say, “Not so fast.” In a paper published with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, UT Austin economist Olivier Coibion and his colleagues suggest such a policy shift “could be extremely costly to U.S. households,” identifying the CBO’s estimate of potential output as “too pessimistic,” leaving more than $1 trillion on the table each year. Researchers note that downward revisions in estimates of the potential level of GDP over the past 10 years have created lower expectations, resulting in 13 percent less income per year than projected in 2007 before the Great Recession. “Policymakers responded aggressively to the financial crash. But they now seem to be in a rush to return to a more traditional policy-making environment and give themselves ammunition in the form of higher interest rates for the next recession,” says Coibion. “But with an output gap probably in excess of 5 percent, perhaps the focus should continue to be on the battle that has not yet been won, rather than on the next battle which is likely to take an unexpected form.”

region in both the Brexit and Trump votes, and an even stronger influence of such traits when considering Republican gains since the 2012 presidential election. The 50 U.S. counties with the highest levels of fear and anxiety showed a 9 percent increase, on average, in Republican votes from 2012 to 2016, whereas the 50 counties lowest on fear and anxiety showed a shift of only 2 percent. Similarly, the 50 U.K. districts with the highest levels of fear and anxiety demonstrated an average of 60 percent support for Brexit (Britain’s exit from the European Union), with the 50 districts lowest on fear and anxiety supporting Brexit at the 46 percent level. “We propose a kind of ‘sleeper effect.’ Under normal conditions these traits have no influence, but in certain circumstances, widespread anxiety and fear in a region have the potential to profoundly impact the geopolitical landscape,” says Martin Obschonka, a psychologist at Queensland University of Technology. In England, rural areas and industrialized locations had both higher levels of anxiety or fear and Brexit votes. And in the U.S., these personality traits were also predictive of Trump support in battlefield states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, as well as the Midwestern “Rust 5

Belt.” Additionally, higher population density, earnings, educational attainment and openness traits were negatively related to Brexit and Trump votes, while conscientiousness showed little to no effect in either case. “Much as the consequences of a region’s fearful or anxious tendencies may remain hidden until certain conditions are met, there may be other regional characteristics that have the potential to influence geopolitical events, but the necessary conditions have not yet materialized,” says co-author Sam Gosling, a UT Austin psychology professor.

Gut Reaction ANTHROPOLOGY The term “gut microbiome” refers to the thousands of species of bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the digestive tract. Because of its significant impact on development, digestion and overall health, researchers have taken a strong focus on characterizing gut microbiome composition and how it is influenced by heritable, environmental and behavioral factors. In research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, UT Austin scientists examined the impact of social networks 6

Rebecca Lewis

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

“One of the benefits of living in a tightknit group may be the social cultivation of beneficial gut microbes.” Rebecca Lewis

Spirit, a juvenile male Verreaux’s sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) at the Ankoatsifaka Research Station in the Kirindy Mitea National Park.

on the gut microbiomes of wild Verreaux’s sifaka, a species of lemur, in Kirindy Mitea National Park in Madagascar. “Like humans, wild primates often live in social groups that eat, sleep, groom and travel together,” says epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers. “These daily contacts fuel the transmission of bacteria and other microbes, both helpful and harmful.” Even when controlling for spatial proximity, genetic relatedness, mother-to-offspring transmission, diet and pairwise social interactions, researchers found that permanent social groups were the most important factor in shaping gut microbiome composition. Furthermore, more tight-knit groups had more homogeneous gut microbiomes. “Thus, one of the benefits of living in a tight-knit group may be the social cultivation of beneficial gut microbes,” says anthropologist Rebecca Lewis. Researchers also found that

lemurs that received or initiated grooming or partook in scentmarking more frequently had greater gut microbial diversity. “Typically, more socially connected individuals are considered to be vulnerable to infection or the ‘superspreaders’ of pathogens,” says Amanda Perofsky, a doctoral candidate in integrative biology. “However, these animals may in fact be more resistant to infection because of their more diverse, stable microbiomes and contribute to the transmission of beneficial bacteria between otherwise disjointed parts of the population.”

Major Health HEALTH & SOCIETY In the four years since the Health and Society Program launched, the tiny program of only 14 students has blossomed to more than 500 students rising to the challenge of solving some of the world’s toughest and most urgent problems. Alex Weinreb, the director of the college’s Health and Society Program, says the major’s rapid growth is organic. Today’s students are attracted to what they see as not only an intriguing topic of study, but a booming industry with ample

oe M ic Er

Academy Honors Twinam HISTORY AND LLILAS BENSON History professor Ann Twinam will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest learned societies for independent policy research. Twinam, along with art history professor Richard Shiff, joined this year’s prestigious cohort of 213 individuals, including renowned policy leaders such as former President Barack Obama and Supreme Court

“[Twinam] understands Latin American history through the lens of those whose voices have been most overshadowed.” Gregory L. Fenves

Courtesy of Ann Twinam

opportunities. Health and society classes are rooted in an interdisciplinary outlook that merges ethics, psychology, business and the hard sciences to allow students to make inroads on innovative solutions to complex problems, preparing them for careers in medicine, health administration, pharmaceutical sales and more. “It’s a much more holistic way of looking at health,” says Weinreb, who is also an associate professor of sociology. “To understand health properly, you need to deal seriously both with the biomedical side and the sociological and cultural side.” Still in its early years, the major is constantly evolving and adding new courses. Stephanie Osbakken, a sociologist and the lead lecturer in health and society, recently created a class called Cancerland that brings in her experiences as a cancer survivor to explore the unique cultural and social factors that arise when living with the disease. With classes such as these, the Health and Society Program aims to foster a more nuanced understanding of health that will help its students drive future solutions. “The biggest problems facing us now in the 21st century are health-related,” Osbakken says. “If students really have a breadth of experience that they can draw on to propel them in the right direction, they feel empowered to take them on.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Professor Twinam is an exceptional scholar who understands Latin American history through the lens of those whose voices have been most overshadowed,” says UT Austin President Gregory L. Fenves. “Professor Shiff explores the range of artistic expression and draws meaning from complex works of art. Together, they exemplify the mission of The University of Texas, and we, as a university, are honored that they have joined the ranks of the Academy.” Twinam holds the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History in the College of Liberal Arts and teaches in the Latin American history program, ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the No. 1 Latin American history program in the country. Her interests focus on Latin American history from the colonial eras through the 18th century, with particular emphasis on social history, race, family history and women and gender. Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists and innovators and engages them in sharing knowledge and addressing challenges facing the world. The new members were elected in 25 categories and are affiliated with 125 institutions. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 7

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

CENTER FOR PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS Walking on natural terrain takes precise coordination between vision and body movements to efficiently and stably traverse any given path. But until now, vision and locomotion have been studied separately within controlled lab environments. To better understand how gaze and gait work together to help us navigate the natural world, UT Austin researchers combined new motion-capture and eye-tracking technologies by jerry-rigging a welding mask around an eye tracker — to shade the infrared eye cameras from sunlight — and calibrating the eye tracker with a motiontracking suit to record gaze and full-body kinematics as participants navigated through flat, medium and rough terrains. Researchers found that subjects walked quickly with longer strides on the flat terrain, looking down only about half of the time to briefly scan the upcoming path for obstacles. On the medium and rough terrains, steps became shorter, slower and more variable, with participants looking at the ground more than 90 percent of the time to precisely fixate upcoming footholds. For the medium terrain, focus was directed to where the foot would be in two steps; and 8

Michelle Chiou

Watch Your Step

Jonathan Matthis, a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Perceptual Systems, observes a research participant in “medium terrain” conditions using a motion capture suit, mobile eye tracker and transparent infrared-blocking face shield.

“Taking this type of research out of the lab and into the real world allows us to observe human behavior in its natural environment.” Jonathan Matthis

for the rough terrain, focus was directed two and three steps ahead. In all three terrains participants consistently looked 1.5 seconds ahead of their current location. This finding is similar to look-ahead timing seen in research on other motor actions — stair climbing, driving and reaching — suggesting that this timing plays an important role in human movement. “Taking this type of research

out of the lab and into the real world allows us to observe human behavior in its natural environment,” says Jonathan Matthis, a postdoctoral researcher in the UT Austin Center for Perceptual Systems. “This gives us more opportunity to discover things we didn’t expect, which will help us advance our scientific knowledge to the benefit of improving clinical treatment of gait-related disorders.”

Defending Humanities ENGLISH Legend has it that Alexander the Great fell asleep with an annotated copy of The Iliad tucked under his pillow, dreaming of Achilles. And when he led his armies into Persia, the Homeric epic and the notes of his tutor, Aristotle, were thrumming in his mind, shaping his vision of great leadership. A story, not just a spear, made him a soldier to remember. Col. David Harper is bringing the spirit of that ancient rumor to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, by leading the development of its new Humanities Center, which will be built atop Trophy Hill — a treasured campus location— and contain collaborative spaces such as art galleries, theater studios and more. Harper envisions not only a place for cadets to unleash their creativity, but a hub for interdisciplinary work that brings insights from the humanities into defense challenges. Harper found a passion for book history during his work at the Harry Ransom Center as a graduate student in English at UT Austin. As a professor at West Point, he encourages his cadets to explore literature, assigning novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Between the World and Me and Exit West, a book that imagines a world without borders.

They also delve into languages, jazz performance, psychology and sculpting. The cadets even perform their own Shakespearean monologue before they graduate. These creative explorations into the humanities teach cadets what math formulas can’t — nuance, diplomacy, the power of human will — all just as much a part of the military as firepower. “Our mission is to develop leaders of character for the nation, and we think the foundation of that is a broad liberal arts education,” Harper says. “That’s why I’m so excited about the Humanities Center, because it represents that side of the military and what we do here at West Point.” The humanities play a central role in the future security of our

“Our mission is to develop leaders of character for the nation, and we think the foundation of that is a broad liberal arts education.” Col. David Harper

nation. The true oe signatures of a cM Eri great leader — the power to stir people in the face of failure, to rally them around a cause, to decipher the secrets of an enemy — demand not just the shining artillery of the movies or data whirling in computers, but an understanding of the human mind and heart, given by the study of philosophy, literature, culture and history. “Seeing the world through a writer’s or a painter’s eye, seeing that connection with the natural world as well as engaging with literary themes, builds a sense of empathy and stewardship toward the people and the planet that we live upon,” Harper says. “When we become leaders making decisions that impact individuals as well as entire countries, we cannot be without that.” 9

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS Cover of Russell Lee in Color (CreateSpace, Nov. 2017).

Secret Scripture

Russell Lee in Color

RELIGIOUS STUDIES To date, only a small number of texts from the Nag Hammadi Library — a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books discovered in 1945 in Egypt — have been found in Greek, their original language of composition. But last year, UT Austin religious studies scholars Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau added to the list with their discovery of several fifth- or sixth-century Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, which was thought until now to have been preserved only in its Coptic translations. “To say that we were excited once we realized what we’d found is an understatement,” says Smith. “We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us.” The ancient narrative describes the secret teachings of Jesus to his brother James, in which Jesus reveals information about the heavenly realm and future events, including James’ inevitable death. Such apocryphal writings, Smith says, would have fallen outside the canonical boundaries set by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his “Easter letter

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS An unending siege of rain, fog and threatening weather didn’t stop the acclaimed photographer Russell Lee and his close friend Conrad Fath from completing their voyage on a friend’s yacht from New York to Texas in the summer of 1963. Using Kodachrome transparency slides, Lee chronicled his seafaring expedition in color, just as he had with 1,600 of his more than 6,000 film photos during the 1930s in Depression-era America. A collection of 162 neverbefore-published photographs shot by Lee on his summer trip, as well as 24 photos taken by or of him, were compiled in Russell Lee in Color (CreateSpace, Nov. 2017) by Fath’s wife, 102-yearold Shudde Bess Bryson Fath, and their daughter, Betsy Fath Hiller. Both Shudde Fath and Hiller are UT Austin alumni. Shudde Fath graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1937, and Hiller earned a Bachelor of Journalism in 1990. Conrad Fath received a Bachelor of Arts in 1940 and a Bachelor of Music in 1943. Lee created UT Austin’s first Fine Arts photography course in 1965, which he taught for eight years, and his personal negative and print collection was

“We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us.” Geoffrey Smith

Eric

Moe

of 367” that defined the 27-book New Testament: “No one may add to them, and nothing may be taken away from them.” Smith and Landau speculate that with its neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, the original manuscript was probably a teacher’s model used to help students learn to read and write. The teacher who produced this manuscript must have “had a particular affinity for the text,” Landau says. It does not appear to be a brief excerpt from the text, as was common in school exercises, but rather a complete copy of this forbidden ancient writing.

donated in 1986 to what is now the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Shudde Fath wanted to share photos from the albums of her late husband, Conrad, who was best friends and fishing buddies with Lee. To complete the book, Shudde Fath and Hiller intertwined the accounts of the travelers using geographic sequences from Lee’s 47 handwritten logs and 162 logs from Conrad Fath’s memory, alongside nautical charts.

“People living in healthy cities may lead more active lifestyles that require a future-oriented focus.” Kate Blackburn

PSYCHOLOGY The way people conceptualize and talk about food is related to where they live and the type of lifestyle afforded to them. UT Austin psychology researchers found that people in healthier cities talk differently about food online — that healthy cities (e.g. Austin, San Diego, Boston) referred to locations such as grocery stores or farmers’ markets and used more complex language to describe a variety of cuisines more so than people in unhealthy cities. When describing rich foods such as dessert and meat, healthy cities used more positive words

Eric Moe

Eat Your Words

while unhealthy cities used negative words, indicating that people in healthier cities may be more “aware of ” their dessert intake than those in unhealthy cities, researchers speculate. Overall, people in unhealthy cities referred to pizza and alcohol more frequently than people in healthy cities. Time also emerged as a revealing theme between healthy and unhealthy cities, with discussions in unhealthy cities being more oriented toward past food interactions, whereas healthy cities discussed more future food plans. Across all analyses, words such as “great” and “love” were used to describe food, indicating that people generally associate positive emotions with food. “These themes may emerge due to the differing lifestyles of unhealthy and healthy cities. For example, people living in healthy cities may lead more active lifestyles that require a future-oriented focus,” says Kate Blackburn, a psychology postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin. “By tracking the connection between language use in online discussion of food, researchers and practitioners can identify habits of vulnerable populations and generate targeted health campaigns for eating healthy and having an active lifestyle.” The study was published in the journal Appetite. 11

BOOK FEATURE

Living in a Material World Galen Strawson tackles a few of life’s nagging questions Interview by Michelle Bryant | Illustrations by Zach Meyer

Writer and actor Stephen Fry says Galen Strawson “opens windows and finds light-switches like no other philosopher writing today,” and novelist Ian McEwan simply dubs Strawson “one of the cleverest men alive.” High praise for this UT professor of philosophy, who discusses his latest book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc. with Life & Letters editor Michelle Bryant.

BOOK FEATURE

How did you come up with the title? I came up with it as soon as I was asked for a title, without reflection, and sent it to Edwin (Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books) half as a joke, although it was an accurate description of the contents of the book. What do you hope the readers will take away from your new book? If one is a philosopher, one can easily find oneself spending most of one’s time trying to correct false views. Some of them are wildly false. I think it’s worthwhile to let people know that some philosophers were mad enough to deny the existence of consciousness (This is the subject of Chapter 6, “The Silliest Claim”). Sometimes philosophy is a bit like public life, in which “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect” (as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710). I think it’s also particularly worthwhile to put the case against the “narrativist” orthodoxy, the view that we all live our lives in a narrative fashion and ought to do so (the subject of Chapters 2 and 8, “A Fallacy of Our Age” and “The Unstoried Life”). It’s just not true that everyone is like this. It’s not true that everyone ought to live like this, and I think it’s helpful to point out that there are other good ways to live. If you wrote the first essay in 1995 and the last in 2016, do you still agree with your past work? Are there beliefs that you have written about that have shifted or strengthened over time? Here you’re picking up on something I talk about in the book — the fact that when I 14

“I’m a full-on materialist or physicalist, someone who thinks that everything in the universe is wholly physical. But I also know that consciousness — color experience, emotional feeling, pain, and so on — is real, because nothing in life is more obvious or more certain.” Galen Strawson

think about myself as I am now, I don’t feel any strong connection to my own past, although I am of course perfectly well aware that Galen Strawson, “GS,” the biological human being that I am, has a past. On the whole, my views have changed very little if at all. The only change that I can think of is something that I touch on only very briefly in the book (pages 169– 173). It will seem crazy to some people, but I may as well report it here. I’m a full-on materialist or physicalist, someone who thinks that everything in the universe is wholly physical. But I also know that consciousness — color experience, emotional feeling, pain, and so on — is real, because nothing in life is more obvious or more certain. I conclude, as I must, that consciousness, consciousness in all its stereo technicolor magnificence, is a wholly physical phenomenon. And that greatly deepens my intuitive understanding of something I already know intellectually: the fact that physics, for all its glory, can’t tell us much about the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe. In fact, it leads me to suspect that consciousness is — must be

— among the fundamental properties of physical stuff. Now for the change of view. I used to think, with the rest of the world, that physical substance, physical stuff, mass– energy, had to have some sort of entirely nonconscious aspect or being, in order to count as physical at all, even if it also had some sort of fundamental and irreducible conscious aspect. I no longer think that this is obvious. And certainly physics doesn’t support the view that physical stuff must have some entirely nonconscious aspect. Some people will dismiss this as New Age piffle. Actually it’s genuinely hardnosed physicalism. It’s what hard-nosed physicalism looks like when it really faces up to the evidence, the basic data — which includes all the phenomena of consciousness. “Outright physicalism,” as I say in the book, “is compatible with ‘panpsychism.’” My favorite essay was “Luck Swallows Everything.” Even if we are not free agents, do you think it’s important for us to hold on to the belief that we are

Zach Meyer

responsible, and if so, why? Yes, I think it’s very important for us to hold on to the belief that we’re fully responsible for our actions, and I would worry if I thought that this is a belief we could easily lose. I don’t suppose Einstein lost his sense of being a responsible agent, even when he wrote, in a passage I quote in Things That Bother Me, that “if the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. … So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”

Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.

LAITS Studio

New York Review Books, March 2018 By Galen Strawson, professor, Department of Philosophy

If we don’t have free will, what is within our control? Well, we’re free agents inasmuch as we’re often in a position to do what we want to do or think it right or best to do, and there’s a leading sense of “control” according to which our control of our actions is undiminished in the absence of radical free will. I’m inclined to quote Einstein again: “Schopenhauer’s saying, that ‘a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,’ has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others’. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.” 15

BOOKS Feb. 2018 By Nathan M. Jensen, professor, Department of Government; and Edmund J. Malesky This book provides compelling evidence for the use of fiscal incentives for political gain The Invention of and shows how such Race in the European pandering appears to be Middle Ages Cambridge University Press, associated with growing economic inequality. Feb. 2018 Valuable tax revenues By Geraldine Heng, associate are surrendered, leaving professor, Department fiscal shortfalls that are of English Questioning the common filled through regresassumption that race and sive sales taxes, police fines and cuts to public racisms began in the modern era, Heng argues education. that religion — so much in play again today — enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off populations for racialized treatment.

Incentives to Pander: How Politicians Use Corporate Welfare for Political Gain Cambridge University Press, 16

The Sounds of Navajo Poetry: A Humanities of Speaking Peter Lang, March 2018 By Anthony K. Webster, professor, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics The Sounds of Navajo Poetry analyzes five poems by Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim in order to think through questions of linguistic relativity and translation. In

A sampling of new and forthcoming titles from our college community.

fundamentally rethinking linguistic relativity, this book argues for a humanities of speaking that attends to poetics as a key site for coming to terms with the ways languages facilitate imaginative acts.

Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz Duke University Press, March 2018 By Jason Borge, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit for debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature and film. Figures such as Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity in the region while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities.

Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film St. Martin’s Press, April 2018 By Don Graham, professor, Department of English Giant offers a largerthan-life narrative of the classic film based on Edna Ferber’s best-seller. Isolating his star cast in Marfa the summer of 1955, director George Stevens had his hands full with Rock Hudson’s insecurities, Elizabeth Taylor’s high diva-dom, and James Dean’s rebellious temperament. Yet he coaxed performances out of them that made cinematic history, winning Stevens the Academy Award for Best Director and garnering nine other nominations. The most famous Texas movie ever made, it offers a surprisingly progressive view of feminist and racial issues.

The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West Oxford University Press, April 2018 By Jennifer Graber, associate professor, Department of Religious Studies During the 19th century, Americans inflicted cultural and economic devastation on Native people. The fight over Indian Country sparked spiritual crises for both Natives and Americans. In the end, the experience of intercultural encounter and conflict over land produced religious transformations on both sides.

Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry

Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2018 By Chad Bennett, assistant professor, Department of English Can the art of gossip help us to better understand modern poetry? Gossip’s ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression, but Word of Mouth explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways modern lyric intertwined with histories of sexuality in the 20th century.

Thinking About Things Oxford University Press, May 2018 By Mark Sainsbury, professor, Department of Philosophy In a flash, I can redirect my thought from London to Austin, from apples to unicorns, from

former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, given that they are not there to be thought about?

The Emperor of Shoes HarperCollins, June 2018 By Spencer Wise, M.A. English ’09 The Emperor of Shoes is a novel set in contemporary South China about a young Jewish man from Boston preparing to take over the family footwear business from his father. The protagonist, however, falls in love with a factory

worker who’s using him as a pawn to start a revolution in the factory.

Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia University of Nebraska Press, June 2018 By Lina del Castillo, assistant professor, Department of History In the wake of independence, Spanish American leaders perceived the colonial past as looming over their present. This book examines how the vibrant postcolonial public sphere in Colombia invented narratives of the Spanish “colonial legacy.” At times collaboratively, and at times combatively, Colombian leaders tackled these “colonial” legacies to forge a republic in a hostile world of monarchies and empires. 17

EVENTS 1 Isle of Dogs Premiere DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY From left, South by Southwest Film Festival Director Janet Pierson, Wes Anderson, Jeremy Dawson, Kunichi Nomura, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban and Jeff Goldblum attend the North American premiere of philosophy alumnus Wes Anderson’s stopmotion story Isle of Dogs at the 2018 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Paramount Theatre on March 17.

2 Pro Bene Meritis Reception COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS On April 26, the College of Liberal Arts celebrated the recipients of its highest honor, the Pro Bene Meritis award. Since 1984, the annual award has been given to alumni, faculty members and friends of the college who are committed to the liberal arts, have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits or have participated in service related to the college. From left, the 2018 Pro Bene Meritis recipients: Jeremi Suri, Bianna Golodryga and Dr. Richard L. Harper.

3 Castro Conversation CENTER FOR MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES, DEPARTMENT OF MEXICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O STUDIES LBJ School and government professor Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, left, moderates a discussion about the importance of family support in Latino educational attainment with longtime Chicana activist Rosie Castro and her sons Julián Castro, former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development and a Dean’s Distinguished Fellow at the LBJ School; and Joaquin Castro (far right), a U.S. representative for the Texas 20th congressional district. The event was presented at the Harry Ransom Center’s Prothro Theater on Feb. 19.

4 The Social Life of DNA HUMANITIES INSTITUTE The Humanities 2018 Symposium on Health, Well-Being, Healing, which was held in February, marked the culmination of the 2016-18 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows Seminar. From left, keynote speaker Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology and the inaugural dean of social science at Columbia University; Phillip Barrish, professor of English and associate director of the Humanities Institute; and Caroline Faria, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

5 Undergraduate Research

Week

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS On April 19, David Aguirre, an anthropology and marketing junior from Flower Mound, Texas, presented his research at the Dean’s Research Reception, part of UT Austin’s 2018 Undergraduate Research Week. Aguirre researched the political economy surrounding the construction of the third gender (sao braphet song) in Thailand.

6 #MeToo Founder’s Keynote Address DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN & AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES, JOHN L. WARFIELD CENTER FOR AFRICAN & AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, delivered the keynote address of the Black Women’s Voices in the Age of #MeToo symposium on May 4 at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium. In addition to her work to assist other survivors and end sexual violence, Burke is director of programs at Girls for Gender Equity and author of the forthcoming book Where the Light Enters.

Credits: 1: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for SXSW, 2: Tomás Segura, 3: Ashley Nava, 4: Daniel Cavazos, 5: Emily Nielsen, 6: Brian Birzer.

Illustrations by Amrita Marino Portrait photography by Sarah Lim

ALICE EMBREE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT CAME OVER HER THE FIRST TIME SHE STOOD UP AGAINST INJUSTICE. SHE JUST KNEW IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. true at all, like ‘we’re all created equal,’” scoffs Embree, who came to UT to study anthropology, though she admits her major might as well have been “SDS” — Students for a Democratic Society, a 1960s student activist group of the New Left. By the mid-1960s, the pressures of the draft for the Vietnam War and disparities between race and gender populations were becoming intolerable. There was an outcry for peace, demands for true equality, and an uproar of women defying gender norms in the name of liberation. “That was the environment that changed me into an activist,” Embree says. The Cactus, 1967, Vol. 74, Texas Student Publications, Inc.

Along with her friends Karen and Glodine and the rest of the Austin High School drill squad, Embree had just sat down to order at a restaurant in Corpus Christi when a waitress approached Glodine, the sole African American on the squad, and said, “Honey, we just can’t serve you here.” “They won’t serve Glodine. We need to leave,” Embree recalls saying almost instinctively to her teammates, but they wouldn’t budge, muttering the excuse, “but we just ordered.” “It was as if the decorum of the place was more important than the principle to everybody else,” Embree says. She and her two friends were the only ones who left to eat lunch at Woolworth’s, which was integrated at the time, before meeting back up with the rest of the group. That moment, she says, foreshadowed becoming a freshman at The University of Texas at Austin in 1963 when its dormitories and sports teams were still segregated and in a city that was still enforcing poll taxes. “We’d been raised to believe certain things about the country and suddenly they appeared not to be

Candidate for Vice President of the Student Assembly Alice Embree, supporting the SDS stand, addressed the Texas Veteran’s rally during the campaign, 1967. Alice Embree, April 2018

RAISED VOICES, AND SUSPICIONS Embree became involved with SDS after she was handed a copy of the Port Huron Statement — the group’s manifesto — while walking through UT’s West Mall. From there she began working on an underground, counterculture newspaper called The Rag, which was founded in 1966, first as a typist and later 23

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Unlike many underground newspapers, The Rag at The University of Texas at Austin embraced women’s liberation. Here, women of The Rag and “Mother Smith” (right) work on layout, February 1974.

viewpoints you could access in the media.” Despite the university’s attempt to stifle their editorial voices and printers around town refusing to print material with such crude language and radical viewpoints, The Rag pressed on. Cries for liberation spread like wildfire at UT and across the U.S. as women came together in consciousness-raising groups to discuss their experiences. “I guess you have to understand that women didn’t do that before, that that was such a novel approach,” Embree says, adding that against the backdrop of the civil rights, free speech and anti-war movements, women began to understand their story as a social structure. “You’re in a framework that’s like a prison under

Alan Pogue

as a writer. It was a time when women in the office pushed to have their voices heard. “The Rag really embraced women’s liberation while a lot of other underground newspapers literally imploded,” says Embree. In each week’s issue, The Rag shared viewpoints on the black struggle, the farm workers’ movement, women’s liberation, free speech, anti-war protests and other social grievances that the local and national papers weren’t reporting. “We wanted to have an alternative view to the media,” says UT law professor Barbara Hines, who came to UT in 1965 to study Spanish and Latin American studies while also getting involved with The Rag and women’s movement. “Remember, this is a time way before the internet. There were limited

The Rag, October 30, 1967

patriarchy. Whether you like it or not, you have all these barriers and all these things and expectations that encircle you,” says Martha Cotera, who participated in the Chicano and women’s liberation movements. “The patriarchy has control over our reproductive lives, control over economic lives, control over our thinking and cultural lives, control over everything to keep the cage in place.” These women looked at a variety of issues, building off of questions asked in the civil rights struggle and the war struggle, and they began to consider and challenge the age-old expectations of wifehood and motherhood and push for autonomy as sexual beings, Embree says. They examined employment barriers and pay scales, realizing the concept of “the glass ceiling” before it even had a name. “It was eye-opening for all of us because I think it was the first time that women really talked about the socialization and the objectification of women and the discrimination against women,” Hines says. Off campus, there were no female firefighters, police officers or EMS workers. And if a woman tried to enter one of those professions, it was either through a lawsuit or a threat of a lawsuit, Embree explains. By 1968, women made up only 7 percent of doctors, 3 percent of lawyers and 1 percent of engineers and were making 40 percent less than men for the same jobs nationwide. And campus was a reflection of that. There were few female graduate students and even fewer female faculty members. “To go to law school or medical school was to make a political statement,” says Hines. She was classified as “Disloyal No. 3, known to sympathize with members of the Communist Party” in a 100-page FBI file detailing her involvement in the women’s liberation movement — though Hines says she was never

involved with the Communist Party. It seems there had been a mole attending The Rag and women’s liberation meetings. “Source stated that women’s liberation is basically opposed to male chauvinism to the point of eliminating the wearing of brassieres and clean attire in order not to be a sex symbol,” the FBI file continues. “The group also favors abortion.”

GETTING ORGANIZED It was a time of mass domestic surveillance in the U.S. under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who trained the agency’s eyes and ears on anyone suspected of posing a political threat. Some fears circulated around the possibility of a phone tap at the Y, where Hines and other women ran a birth control counseling center in a small room next to The Rag’s office. At the time, birth control was not available to anyone who wasn’t married or engaged — or had some form of acne that could only be cleared with the pill’s high dosage of progesterone, Hines adds, offering one way women were able to get around the restriction. Their operation seemed low risk enough to advertise in The Rag, but eventually women started asking questions about abortions. “We sent women who had money to other states where it was legal, but primarily we sent women to a doctor in Eagle Pass — well, he was actually in Piedras Negras, just south of the border,” says Hines, who is also affiliated with the UT Austin Immigration Studies Initiative. The group became concerned with their liability under conspiracy laws as aiders and abettors and reached out to one of the only lawyers they thought would be willing to help: Sarah Weddington, who recounts in her book, A Question of Choice, a conversation she had with the student group that sparked her decision to take on the case of Roe v. Wade. “If you think back to 1970, there was not a woman 25

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“SOURCE STATED THAT WOMEN’S LIBERATION IS BASICALLY OPPOSED TO MALE CHAUVINISM TO THE POINT OF ELIMINATING THE WEARING OF BRASSIERES AND CLEAN ATTIRE IN ORDER NOT TO BE A SEX SYMBOL.” From a 100-page FBI file detailing Barbara Hines’s involvement in the women’s liberation movement

Barbara Hines, April 2018 Passport photo of Barbara Hines, 1971

on organizing ethnic studies education and establishing the university’s Center for Mexican American Studies. “Things weren’t happening fast enough, so we took off with other educational activists to start our own independent college,” says Cotera, describing the idea that led to establishing Jacinto Trevino College in Mercedes, Texas, in 1969. “It was a way to do it quickly, to educate more teachers.” Though she laughs and admits the whole idea sounds crazy now, she knew the importance cultural institutions would have in providing a real, holistic education to students, so much so that she also helped establish Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center and ardently supported the Mexic-Arte Museum within the same decade. “When you’re at the bottom, every little gain that you make, you’re happy for,” Cotera says. “I thought our movement might last forever and go on and on and on.”

UNTOLD HISTORY Alan Pogue

gynecologist in Travis County. You couldn’t get birth control prescriptions unless you were married, except for one doctor. Women had no resources whatsoever to help them control reproduction. All of these things kind of kindled change,” Embree says. “We brought attention to that, and then we began to make changes.” Austin women activists began to call foul on issues related to domestic and sexual violence. In working with the Mexican American Business and Professional Women — “a safe name that hid radical work” — Cotera helped open the Austin Rape Crisis Center in 1974 and the Center for Battered Women in 1977. “We did a lot in bringing the churches around, and the police and the courts around to negotiate services for rape victims and victims of domestic abuse,” says Cotera, who learned about the terrors of domestic abuse when living in Crystal City, Texas, and working with teachers who were sheltering women and children who suffered domestic abuse. “I learned how risky it is to host abused families in a house with the potential of angry spouses locating them and endangering everyone in the house, including the host,” Cotera says. “That’s when we arrived at the idea that you needed to have a neutral territory that was well-secured to keep people safe.” On campus, Cotera focused her efforts

“It’s amazing to me how important this history is here that isn’t told,” says Laurie Green, a UT Austin history and women’s and gender studies professor, who argues that most of the narratives

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about the women’s liberation movement focus on the Northeast, the Midwest or the West Coast, not the South and certainly not Austin, Texas. This omission sparked the idea for her fall 2017 class assignment — a women’s activism memoir project in which Green’s students would interview women’s liberation activists who had either attended UT or lived in Austin in the ’60s and ’70s, including Cotera, Embree and Hines. “I wanted this history to be real for them and understand that this is their history — this is our history,” Green asserts. To ensure these women’s stories wouldn’t vanish from history as many often do, Green partnered with the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History to archive the transcripts and recorded interviews between the students and activists in a permanent collection that will soon be accessible for others to study for years to come. “Women’s history is a very rich and lively kind of study, especially when we really reach deep into the lives of these activists who define activism in a very broad way,” says Jacqueline Jones, professor of history at UT and chair of the department. “Yet a lot of that has been lost to us. That’s why this project is so important.” Oftentimes, women’s activity of the past is painted with a very broad brush, garnering titles such as “first wave” or “second wave”— both of which were described for the first time in a 1968 New York Times article, “The Second Feminist Wave,” which outlined the demands of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Classifying these eras as “waves” can be problematic because they compress all women activists and all their struggles from the mid-19th century to the late-20th century into just two compartments: the women’s suffrage movement, which ended in 1920 with the 19th Amendment, and women’s activism of the 1960s and 1970s. “Many UT activists in the project didn’t describe

Austin History Center, Austin Public Library

Women protest in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at the Texas Capitol, April 1975. [Center] Martha Cotera holds “Liberty, Justice, All” sign. 29

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“IT’S A DEEPER SHADE OF FEMINISM. MY CULTURE IS THE LENS THROUGH WHICH I SEE FEMINISM.” Lisa B. Thompson

UNIVERSAL WOMANHOOD

Latino students protesting outside of the Main Building on the University of Texas campus, January 1972.

In fact, NOW, which was first headed by Betty Friedan — who is often credited for sparking the so-called second wave with her groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique — has been criticized for operating under the ideas of “white feminism.” Rather than rallying behind the more radical views of women’s liberation, local and national groups of older, more privileged women seemed to prioritize political power. “In Texas, when Anglo women decided not to give minority women equal status within the National Women’s Political Caucus — when minority women were over a big majority of the feminist movement throughout the nation — then I knew it wasn’t going to last,” Cotera says disappointedly. “They marginalized radical women, they marginalized minority women and they focused on power over everything.

Marlon Taylor, Prints and Photographs Collection, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

themselves with the word ‘feminism,’ which they identified with older women in NOW. They used ‘women’s liberation,’” says Green. “The term ‘feminist’ can hinder our understanding of women’s activities in the past because women who were very outspoken, very active, who seemed to be breaking norms at the time, were not always acting on behalf of all women,” says Jones, whose recent book, Goddess of Anarchy, delves deep into the formidable life of Lucy Parsons, a quintessential agitator of the late 19th and early 20th century who spoke of growing inequality and the rights of workers who were being displaced by machines, but was most certainly not a “feminist.” “She was not sympathetic to women reformers. She really felt that they were just kind of tinkering with the capitalist system and that it needed to be destroyed,” Jones says. “It would have been unusual to find women, especially in the 19th and well into the 20th century, who had a view of universal womanhood; most women defined their place in the society within the context of their own kin, religious, class, ethnic, racial or regional group, and not exclusively according to their gender. Of course, to a certain extent that is the case today as well.”

Texas Student Publications Photographs, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

When you’re focused on that, you don’t last. You don’t build institutions.” Things began to fall apart on the national level as women of color challenged the idea that white, heterosexual women represented universal womanhood. “If Betty Friedan says, ‘Let’s all go leave our homes and work,’ that’s great, but who’s going to take care of Betty Friedan’s children?” That question is posed by Lisa B. Thompson, a UT Austin associate professor of African and African diaspora studies and women’s and gender studies. She points out the reality of white, middle-class, married women going out and bringing “another white income into the home while paying a woman of color to take care of their kids and clean their house,” adding that the lowest-paid women are those working in child care. “How does your feminism take into account those differences?” she asks. “That’s something we have to change — those who have the blow horn need to use it to amplify the issues of minority of underrepresented women and girls.” Even before the women’s liberation movement, the suffragists faced their own battles along sectarian lines. “When people see these images of white women in their white Victorian dresses with their lavender sashes in front of the White House, they get the idea that the suffrage movement was a white women’s movement,” Green says. “But black women were suffragists too.” Green offers an example of the first big suffrage march on Washington, D.C., in 1913 when organizers decided to appease southern white women by directing black women to march in the back. But Ida B. Wells, a crusader against lynching at the time, wouldn’t have it and ultimately stepped in line with the Illinois contingent during the march, Green says. Others joined in. “Every movement has its contradictions,” Green explains. “There’s not a movement where suddenly you’ve reached the pinnacle and everything is important. There’s always this working out of history and clashing ideas even within movements.” Hines recalls debates within their campus groups

A civil rights protester demonstrating in Austin with a sign using President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s initials, which reads, “Let’s Begin Justice in Austin!” 1964.

about race and class and whether a person of color should be aligned with the black liberation struggle or the women’s liberation struggle, admitting that much of the national movement centered on organized groups of white women. “We didn’t really have that term of “white privilege” or perspective of looking at what we take for granted, or what is so engrained in how things work, or the myriad of experiences, of steps ahead, or advantages you have as a white person in our society,” Hines says. White privilege wasn’t defined until the 1980s when people began to understand and define the inner workings of systemic oppression.

COMING TOGETHER In 1989, Kimbrelé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, introduced her theory of intersectionality. “If a black woman was being discriminated against, the law was asking her, ‘Were you being 31

“THEY MARGINALIZED RADICAL WOMEN, THEY MARGINALIZED MINORITY WOMEN AND THEY FOCUSED ON POWER OVER EVERYTHING.” Martha Cotera

Martha Cotera, April 2018 Martha and Juan Cotera packing up books for their move to Mercedes, Texas, in 1970, where they helped found Jacinto Trevino College.

She says today it is important to ask what’s new and what’s not new. “The violence isn’t new, but having a national movement and a reaction to a national movement — that is new.” In organizing the 2017 Women’s March on Washington after the election of President Donald Trump, people feared history might repeat itself and uppermiddle-class white women would again hold the reigns. “Same old, same old,” some criticized. “Ultimately, the people organizing it recognized it was so important for people to come together. And the march changed,” Green says. Protecting civil rights and taking a stand to end violence were two of the eight unity principles outlined by the women’s march committee, which was made up of African Americans, Latinas, Muslims and whites. The march became the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, with more than 4 million people participating in 653 marches across the country. It was followed later in the year by the unprecedented and viral #MeToo movement, a cry echoed by millions in 85 countries to end sexual harassment and violence.

AGENTS OF CHANGE Courtesy of Martha Cotera

discriminated against as a black person or as a woman?’ It’s both,” Thompson says. “Intersectionality is taking into account my race, my gender, my class, my sexuality.” The theory built on the idea of being a “womanist,” a term introduced by Alice Walker in her book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden. Walker writes: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” “It’s a deeper shade of feminism. My culture is the lens through which I see feminism,” Thompson says. “And another way black feminists are intervening is by pushing others to ask themselves, ‘What are your concerns as a mother?’” Black activist pioneers such as Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells — who were involved with anti-lynching campaigns — were fighting a women’s issue, she explains. “Some people will say lynching is a race issue, but if you’re a mother, and you’re giving birth to someone who is going to be lynched, it’s a woman’s issue.” That is why it is important for women activists today to rally behind the Black Lives Matter movement and work to end police brutality, adds Thompson. “Police brutality toward both men and women is an issue that runs through a lot of 20th century American history, particularly when there was so much movement from rural areas into the cities,” Green says. “It became an important part of history that angered black communities and affected mainstream politics.”

Although the numbers are impressive, it still doesn’t paint a true picture of womanhood in the U.S., Thompson says, pointing out that black women voted for Hillary Clinton at 92 percent, while more than half of white female voters voted 33

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“WE BECAME ADDICTED TO THE CONCEPT THAT WE COULD CHANGE THINGS, AND WHEN YOU INJECT THAT INTO PEOPLE, IT’S MAGICAL AND BUOYANT.” for Trump. “A friend of mine created T-shirts that say, ‘Vote like a black woman’ because she believes that black women are the only ones consistently voting in the best interests of the country,” Thompson says. “Who’s supporting progressive causes? Black women are. White women need to have a conversation across their own community — talk to their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces — that is what is going to make the biggest difference. That’s the real hard labor. It’s easy to march at the rally with a sign and wearing a pussy hat.” Movements are about values, most of which are instilled in people by their families, their homes and their schools. Activism is a natural progression that stems from that, Cotera says. “When I was in school, we actually had civics classes. I was taught that if you are in a political space, then you have to respect that space and be the best you could be — in other words, citizenship,” Cotera says. “They’re not teaching that anymore. I don’t know if it’s a plan to develop uninterested and uninvolved citizens or what, but I was raised to be extremely aware of your responsibilities as a citizen, and I just don’t see that anymore.” Like schools, youth organizations such as the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, 4H and the Y organizations also fostered good citizenship, but involvement in those organizations is on the decline, A little girl offering a peace sign to anti-Vietnam War demonstrators during a march in Austin, circa 1968-1972. 34

Tom Lankes/American-Statesman, Prints and Photographs Collection, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

Alice Embree

says UT Austin anthropologist and women’s and gender studies professor Pauline Strong. “One way of creating change is to develop young people to think of new possibilities and think of themselves as having the ability to create new possibilities,” says Strong, who is also the director of UT’s Humanities Institute. “So, in between these organizations and changes in the future are the young people who are being socialized as agents of change.” Since the 1960s, the Girl Scouts, in particular, put a strong emphasis on developing female leaders. “They really do train young people to gradually take leadership roles themselves. So, there’s a lot of planning things by the youth themselves, and I think that’s a really good model,” she says. But Strong worries that this model is hard to come across outside of these organizations, suggesting that there’s much more — and perhaps too much — play structured by adults and that many youth leadership roles have the character of “a sort of play-acting thing.” “It has to be real,” Strong says. “There have to be roles for young people to really make decisions. They have to have the opportunity to make a mistake.” Strong believes youth organizations are well equipped to address some of today’s most pressing issues: “Youth organizations do try to get kids into challenging environments outside. They try to introduce kids to those who are different than themselves and provide strong role models, who are both adults and older youth.” Most importantly, these organizations provide young people with a community within which they can learn, grow and create change together. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that young people can be the most important agents for change. Just as Cotera, Embree and Hines came into activism through the injustices they had witnessed in the world around them, so too will future generations. “We became addicted to the concept that we could change things, and when you inject that into people, it’s magical and buoyant,” Embree says. “Coming together with people can be transformational, and I think that what we’re seeing today will work its way through changing this country.”

RECOMMENDED READING: The Chicana Feminist Information Systems Development, June 1977 By Martha P. Cotera

Celebrating the Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper New Journalism Project, Oct. 2016 By Alice Embree, B.A. Anthropology ’82 and M.S. Community and Regional Planning ’87; Thorne Dreyer and Richard Croxdale

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class University of Illinois Press, Aug. 2009 By Lisa B. Thompson, associate professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies

Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical Basic Books, Dec. 2017 By Jacqueline Jones, chair and professor, Department of History

Q&A

Make Life Extraordinary Interviews by Emily Nielsen

In 1986, Robert and Nancy Dedman invested $10 million in the College of Liberal Arts to help recruit and educate the nation’s top students. Since its creation in 1989, the Dedman Distinguished Scholars (DDS) program has funded the education of nearly 200 students. Dedman scholarships cover tuition, housing, books and all other education-related expenses. In addition, the scholars are granted a stipend of up to $20,000 for experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad, research projects and unpaid internships. They also gain membership to the Dedman Academy, a rigorous training and mentorship program to help prepare them for success at UT Austin and beyond. The program boasts three British Marshall scholars, two Harry S. Truman scholars, one Hertz Foundation fellow, one National Science Foundation fellow and one Rhodes scholar. A founder of the program, an alumnus and a student share what it means to be part of this extraordinary community.

What motivated you and Robert to create the DDS program? First, a desire to “give while living” to an institution that has been meaningful to our family; and second, the recognition of the importance of liberal arts studies for individuals and our nation. Why do you think studying the liberal arts is so valuable? The liberal arts teach you skills to not just make a living, but make a life. They prepare you for your first job and for multiple careers, which is especially important given the projected longevity of today’s students. The liberal arts teach the skills that are paramount to a free society — freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, freedom of seeking new truths and freedom of becoming your best self through learning more about our legal, economic, moral, political and cultural origins and aspirations. Finally, they teach you about freedom of choice — to make informed decisions about how to be victors and not victims over whatever challenges or obstacles you encounter in life. Liberal arts develop our capacities, increase our flexibility and expand our horizons for a constantly changing world. How has the program been most memorable to you? The joy of seeing the scholars develop a passion for their various disciplines and

to see the camaraderie of the scholars and how they help one another academically, personally and professionally. What are your hopes for the students you support? That they achieve their greatest personal and professional potential in life. It is also my hope they will stay involved with the DDS as mentors to improve the quality of experience for future scholars. Lastly, that each scholar has a passion for helping others and building their communities.

Courtesy of MySweetCharity

What do you wish for the program as it approaches its 30th anniversary? First, that we will be able to support more scholars in the future. Second, that the alumni network will continue to grow and flourish. Third, that we will continue to enhance the program with experiences and relationships. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The only thing you have remaining at the end of your life are experiences and relationships. Make them extraordinary!” Recently visiting Marfa with the scholars and my family just reinforced how special the scholars are today and the potential they have for changing our world for the better in the future.

“The liberal arts teach you skills to not just make a living, but make a life.” Nancy Dedman

How do you enjoy spending your free time? Traveling with family and reading great books. I am 90 years young and I am still a voracious traveler and reader. What would people be surprised to learn about you? I have had the opportunity to travel and study with some of the great chefs of the world and that I compiled a cookbook of my favorite family and friends’ recipes. 37

Q&A

Intern Supreme Bahar Sahami is a Dedman Distinguished scholar from Plano, Texas. She is a senior double majoring in government and international relations and global studies, while minoring in Middle Eastern studies and completing a certificate in global management from the McCombs School of Business. She is a 2018 Bill Archer fellow, an Intellectual Entrepreneurship Citizen scholar, a 2017 UT Honors Day College scholar and the recipient of a 2017 Cactus Student StandoUT Award. Sahami has served as the editor-in-chief of the Texas Undergraduate Law Review and president of the Student Conduct and Advisory Committee. She worked as a research intern for the College of Liberal Arts’ Department of Government and interned during the 85th legislative session at the Texas Capitol. Most recently, she has interned with the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Following graduation, she plans to attend law school.

How has being a Dedman scholar influenced you? I have found so many ways to grow, to communicate and to challenge myself in the Dedman program. Along with the financial aid to pursue my academic interests, our faculty and fellow Dedman scholars are constantly in communication. For instance, I get to meet up every week with our group, along with Professor Julie Casey and Dean Marc Musick, to talk about anything ranging from my future aspirations, to the nuances of everyday life at UT. Whether we are on a trip to the Davis Mountains, or simply coming together for a family dinner, this program first and foremost sees us as dynamic individuals and encourages us to bond and learn from one another’s struggles and successes. This kind of enriching and energizing space amongst caring and driven people is essential to wellness and intellectual discovery in college. Can you describe your semester in Washington, D.C., as a Bill Archer fellow? The Archer Fellowship has been one of my most impactful experiences to date. The best part of this program is the vast number of unique individuals I get to interact with and learn from every day. I have had an amazing experience so far as an intern in the Office of the Counselor to the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court. My bosses at the Supreme Court embody unparalleled professionalism and genuineness, and the Archer faculty have been so supportive as we balance work and classes here in D.C. This fellowship has been a huge privilege, and I’m grateful to be here.

What did you learn from your experience as a legislative intern in Texas? While it often got very busy in our office, I was surrounded by people who had a large sense of purpose and pride in their work. Along with doing legislative research, I particularly enjoyed our office’s weekly intern discussion session during which our chief of staff would pick an economic or political science text to read and analyze together. My colleagues’ openly bipartisan communication and respect for differing perspectives was also refreshing, an attitude which I have learned to practice in any work environment.

Courtesy of Bahar Sahami

What have you found most rewarding in your role as editor-in-chief of the Texas Undergraduate Law Review (TULR)? I loved TULR not only because it helped me explore my editing and management skills, but also because it gave me the chance to be surrounded by brilliant people with similar goals and interests. While it is rewarding to write or publish something by yourself, it is a unique and especially rewarding feeling to share that achievement with a hardworking group of teammates.

“This program first and foremost sees us as dynamic individuals and encourages us to bond and learn from one another’s struggles and successes.” Bahar Sahami

What did studying abroad in Spain teach you? Studying abroad in Barcelona not only allowed me to sharpen my Spanish and learn about Spanish culture and history, but also to challenge myself amidst the energy of living within a different backdrop. While our surroundings can change unpredictably, our individual being is not swept around so aimlessly. There I learned that to get the most out of my present, I have to take ownership of my personal agency and open myself to genuine engagement in new experiences. 39

Q&A

Be Your Authentic Self Dr. Travis Cosban is a Dedman scholar alumnus from New Orleans by way of Katy, Texas. He graduated from UT Austin with a Plan II Honors degree in 2009 before becoming a part of the inaugural class at the Texas Tech University Health Science Center’s Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. Cosban is an emergency medicine physician at Las Palmas Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. He also works as a locum tenens doctor, traveling to underserved areas around West Texas, and as a clinical faculty member at his alma mater, the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. He is an executive member of the LGBTQ Pride Board in El Paso, where he focuses on aiding in HIV prevention and connecting the community to LGBT-friendly physicians and pharmacies. At UT, he remains actively involved in the DDS program as a mentor and serves as the chair of the alumni selection committee. How has the DDS program influenced your life? I remember when I went to college, I was in an unusual place in life. I knew I was gay and wanted to come out in college, but was unsure when would be the appropriate time to do so. At that time, Larry Carver was head of the program along with his aid Stacey Amorous. They became somewhat of a second set of parents to me. They somehow understood deeply who I was, and support never seemed like it was conditional. With the knowledge that I had mentors in place as well as financial security, I made the leap and came out over Christmas 40

my freshman year. I was fortunate that my parents responded well and my life forged onward. The Dedman Distinguished Scholars program gave me the ability to not only grow in my academic success but also my personal well-being. The program did all this through the sense of family that it fosters. When you attend a university as large as UT, a small and close-knit family is the best gift any student can ever receive. Can you describe your experience as a Dedman mentor? I value my role as a mentor to both prospective and current students. I am not the world’s most traditional of doctors as an openly gay man with a heavy liberal arts and music background. I can be eccentric, as evident from my closet full of sequin jumpsuits and faux fur coats for my annual medical volunteer trip at Burning Man. But within all of this, I value education and humanitarianism. In living openly I believe that by allowing students to see our quirks, we also allow them to see themselves in us. You do not have to be rigid to be successful. You can be your authentic self and in doing so find the things that make you fulfilled. In doing this, I have found not only success, but more importantly happiness with my direction in life. I hope that those are the two things we can give to each of our program’s graduates by the time they finish at UT Austin. How has your liberal arts education aided you? While not uncommon, most liberal arts students do not choose to go to medical school and spend their time at work

Courtesy of Dr. Travis Cosban

trying to shield themselves from blood. Still, I could not have asked for a better undergraduate education. When it came time to read massive amounts of material in medical school and process the information efficiently, I was thankful for all the reading I had done in college. When it came time to process and reflect on my first time seeing death firsthand as a medical student, I was thankful for my philosophy classes and times spent reflecting in a small group on Nietzsche and Sartre. Liberal arts seemed to teach me to do more than write papers — through dynamic classes based in discussion, it taught me the value of seeing another’s perspective. I am thankful for this today as I interact with all walks of life in a high-tension setting.

“Work as an ER doctor is a constant reminder that you do not know everything and you never will.” Dr. Travis Cosban

What do you find most challenging about your work? The most challenging aspect of work is never the knowledge attainment — it is the emotional challenge. After approximately eight years of graduate education and training, you know the information. But no one tells you how to tell a mother her son that she brought to America from Honduras for a better life just two weeks ago has been stabbed and left in a dumpster. No one tells you how to handle a patient threatening to embalm you for not giving them Vicodin. And no one tells you how to keep a poker face when you need to remove two dozen Skittles from an orifice they do not belong in. Still, you must manage and figure it out because there is no one else to turn to when you are the only doctor in the hospital. Work as an ER doctor is a constant reminder that you do not know everything and you never will. 41

Allen F. Quigley / Adobe Stock

COMMENTARY

Extreme Summer Speaking the Many Languages of Climate Change for Texas By Heather Houser

Summer is coming. In Texas, this warning — not unlike the familiar Game of Thrones motto — makes residents vigilant. And the admonition becomes dire as summers get hotter and drier, fueling wildfires, flash floods and worse. 2017 was Texas’ second-warmest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and those temperatures intensified extreme events such as Hurricane Harvey and its record-smashing 64 inches of rain. On March 20, 2018, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported more than 61 percent of Texas was experiencing moderate drought conditions, with nearly the entire Panhandle at extreme drought levels.

belonging such as ethnicity, race, gender and occupation. The clearest argument for bringing historical, cultural and social frameworks to bear on climate threats is that not doing so has failed us thus far. For this reason, Planet Texas 2050 incorporates creative and humanistic approaches that help us reconceive climate impacts, including environmental justice. For example, what does “justice” mean to varied groups: to Latina/os in the Rio Grande Valley, to black residents of East Austin, to ranchers in West Texas, to young Dallas urbanites? What if we thought of ecological resilience as promoting well-being for multiple species and not only humans? How have existing environmental infrastructures and policies in Texas exacerbated disparities between communities? How can we eliminate these disparities moving forward? These are questions that call on the interpretive skills of historians and anthropologists, of storytellers and ethnic studies scholars — as well as engineers and geoscientists. It’s at the rich edge where stories and statistics meet that we also meet Texans where they are. It’s where we can design strategies for resilience that our neighbors — the most important stakeholders in the Planet Texas 2050 program — believe in. Only through these forms of collaboration — between value and values, between scientists and humanists, between academics and community members — can we help ensure the coming summer is one we welcome rather than dread.

Courtesy of Bridging Barriers

Summer is here. How will Texas communities and ecosystems fare? Science fiction has an answer: not so well. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015) imagines a dystopian near-future in which Texan refugees spill out of a state that has collapsed from drought, and robber barons control scant water resources by murderous means. Bacigalupi’s real-life inspiration? A trip through Central Texas during the devastating drought of 2011. This isn’t the story our state wants to inspire. Expanding this more broadly — from the coming summers to the coming decades — the issue of how Texas will fare in the future has inspired Planet Texas 2050, the first grand challenge at UT Austin working to address social, environmental and humanitarian crises. Teams of researchers and artists from 14 colleges, schools and other units at UT are developing modeling tools and strategies of community engagement to help make Texas resilient in the face of climate change and rapid population growth. A key part of this endeavor is understanding the impacts of climate and population shifts on water and energy resources, urban infrastructure, social systems and human health in Texas, now and to the year 2050. The dominant languages of climate change have been scientific, technological and economic. But these languages alone cannot speak to the socially contingent beliefs and values that are at the root of human activities altering our planet. We need the knowledge the humanities and arts produce to prevent narratives such as Bacigalupi’s from becoming our reality. We must build common languages between architecture and archaeology, poetry and paleoclimatology, government and genetics. As a researcher in the field of the environmental humanities, I work at the overlap of such varied languages. Environmental humanists dwell at the intersection of drought tables and literary metaphors, where statistics on extinction meet artistic visualizations. I’ve come to think of this as a space where value and values meet. In order for the quantitative values of flooding or air pollution to attain experiential value, they must be translated into the meaning-making systems provided by the arts, religion and categories of

“The clearest argument for bringing historical, cultural and social frameworks to bear on climate threats is that not doing so has failed us thus far.” Heather Houser

Heather Houser is an associate professor of English and serves on the founding organizing committee for Planet Texas 2050. She is author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia UP, 2014).

Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Columbia University Press (Literature Now series), June 2014 By Heather Houser, assistant professor, Department of English

A Place in the Sun PLAN II HONORS

In the late summer of 2016, while most incoming freshmen at UT Austin were moving into the dorms and learning to navigate campus, Margaret Sui was starting an international arts magazine. By the following spring, Sui, along with fellow Plan II Honors student and managing editor Madeleine Richter-Atkinson and a team of designers and editors, published Volume One of Apricity Magazine. Apricity (the word is derived from the Latin ‘apricitas,’ the warmth of the sun in the midst of winter) distinguishes itself from other literary magazines in that it embraces all arts in a “budding platform of voices” — poetry, vignettes, photography, films and even original musical scores. After the second issue was published in April, Sui began contemplating ways to use art as a form of diplomacy. “This summer, I will be working at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice as an intern. The Human Rights and the Arts working group within the program insists that ‘literature, music, theatre, dance and the visual arts hold an integral role in expressing the need for social and political change, in fostering education on social injustice and in building more just and 44

Spread from Apricity Magazine, 2018 Volume II: “static” poem by Nooshin Ghanbari and “Cockatwo” photograph by James Green.

equitable societies,’” says Sui. “It is my hope that we can introduce this program in China, where any word against the government is instantly quashed and where vocalists who voice any amount of dissent can disappear.” Sui adds that Apricity Magazine “stands not only as a mere collection of words and images, but also stands as an effort to inspire conversation. Art inspires conversations and a diversity of opinions, nonviolently introducing and cultivating a freedom of speech.” To learn more or subscribe, visit www.apricitymagazine.com.

Cover of Apricity Magazine, 2018 Volume II. Apricity Magazine is a nonprofit, literary and art, multimedia, international magazine affiliated with the Plan II Honors Program.

Spread from Apricity Magazine, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Spiral of the Galaxyâ&#x20AC;? (2017), music composition and commentary by Austin Ali.

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