The social science magazine of Duke University SPRING 2012, VOLUME 6, ISSUE 1
gist f ro m t h e M i l l
stress:
How Staci Bilbo’s research could illuminate human brain development REGSS examines race and gender in politics bullying and its long-term effects a fresh look at 1970s feminism
greetings
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elcome to another issue of GIST from the Mill. GIST ’s content reflects the diversity of social and behavioral science research conducted at Duke University. In this issue you will read about Staci Bilbo’s (Psychology and Neuroscience and Arts and Sciences) research into how a mother’s touch protects against later drug use. Her ongoing research goal is to understand the role of the immune system in brain activity and behavior. She is especially interested in the role of innate CNS immune cells, in particular microglia and astrocytes, and their inflammatory products such as cytokines and chemokines, on cognitive processes in rats. Recently, Bilbo received the Frank Beach award in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. Read about how Paula McClain (African and African American Studies and Political Science), Kerry Haynie (African and African American Studies and Political Science) and visiting faculty Ralph Lawrence (REGSS) have contributed to the interdisciplinary nature of the study of race, ethnicity and politics. McClain’s book, American Government in Black and White, was selected by the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association as the best textbook on topics of race, ethnicity and politics in 2010. Terrie Moffitt (Duke Psychology & Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) continues her research on the interplay between nature and nurture in the origins of problem behaviors. In her latest research publication, “A prospective longitudinal study of children’s theory of mind and adolescent involvement in bullying,” Moffitt finds that children who are bullied become more anxious and depressed. In turn, these changes prime
children for negative outcomes. A strength of the study was a focus on twins where one was bullied and one was not. This quasiexperiment and the longitudinal examination of these children selected to be broadly representative of different socioeconomic groups makes Moffitt’s work the strongest and most credible on this important topic. This issue also reports on Women Studies’ exciting research initiative “The Future of the Feminist 70s” that will be displayed throughout the year with a variety of events, projects and courses. The initiative seeks to understand how some of the major interventions of the 1970s, for example, feminist art and film practices, Marxist and radical feminism, eco-feminism, lesbian separatism, human and civil rights discourse, cold war divisions and nonaligned movements, and postcolonial internationalism, continue to have an impact on feminist thought, offer important interventions into contemporary questions or map the futures of feminism. We are thrilled at the positive response we have received about GIST and will continue reporting on the exciting social science research at Duke. SSRI continues to be a catalyst for multidisciplinary research and at the forefront of training the next generation of social and behavioral scientists. We are fortunate to be the umbrella organization for a diverse group of centers working on a broad range of important issues including health and wealth disparities, the proliferation of local and global networks, how and why people make decisions, and how to maintain and improve the quality of and access to important social science data. The number of SSRI affiliated centers and programs continue to grow; this year we welcomed Dan Ariely and his Center for
Advanced Hindsight, and Sunshine Hillygus and her initiative on Survey Research Methods. Shortly, we will welcome the new Behavioral Science and Policy Center lead by Sim Sitkin (Fuqua School of Business) that will publish an online journal aimed at translating new research findings for a public policy audience. Please let us know about a project, team, student or faculty member working on an exciting project that would be a good feature in our magazine. SSRI is also now publishing a monthly e-newsletter to keep you up-todate between issues of GIST. To follow SSRI and its affiliates, be sure to get connected via social media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and more! Sincerely,
S. Philip Morgan Director
Duke University Photography
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s p r i n g 2 0 1 2 , vo lu m e 6 , i s s u e 1
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ss r i . d u k e . e d u / g i s t
features 6 STRESS: How Staci Bilbo’s research could illuminate human brain development
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10 REGSS Examines Race and Gender in Politics 12 Bullying and Its Long-Term Effects 14 A Fresh Look at 1970s Feminism
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in every issue 2 In Brief 16 Profile: Faculty 17 Profile: Student 18 Ask the Social Scientist 19 Questions
Editor: Courtney P. Orning Designer: Regina Barnhill-Bordo www.bdesign-studio.com
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GIST Advisory Board: Karl Bates Paul Dudenhefer Steven Foy Richard Lucic Ara Wilson Giovanni Zanalda
20 Research Back Cover Final Note
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news
in brief
Digging Into
Big-Time
College Sports by Angela Spivey
Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public
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would have to get creative to measure the intangible costs and benefits of college athletics. For example, to gauge how sports mania affects work at universities, he measured use of JSTOR, a popular database of scholarly articles, during the NCAA basketball tournament. By examining daily usage statistics from Duke and 78 other universities for three consecutive years, Clotfelter found that each year, JSTOR use increased throughout the spring semester, but dropped the week after the teams were selected for the NCAA tournament. Usage also changed depending on how particular teams were doing. “If your team is still in the tournament, there’s six percent less work being done compared to other times, as long as the team stays in the tournament,” he said. If the university’s team had an unexpected win, article downloads dropped 19 percent. “This was irrespective of whether it was spring break, or what day of the week it was,” he said. Not that Clotfelter has anything against college sports. He has season tickets to Duke football games and attends his share of Duke basketball games. But he thinks universities ought to be more honest about just how influential sports are. His book concludes that big-time sports are very firmly planted at the universities that have them. That, he said, creates a mixed bag. “On the minus side, it diverts our attention from things that you might think are more important, and it causes us to do things that are not consistent with our values sometimes. It causes us to make compromises. On the plus side, college sports bring people happiness. That’s not a trivial thing.”
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Policy and Professor of Economics and Law, remembers, back in the 1980s, coming to work in Duke’ s administrative building on the Friday before the ACC tournament and finding the halls strangely empty. The offices that were occupied had TVs tuned to the game. This phenomenon is not unique to Duke; last year UNC-Chapel Hill cleared all campus parking lots at 3 p.m. on a Thursday because of a basketball game to be broadcast on ESPN. In 2009, the University of Alabama canceled the first three days of classes for its spring semester because its football team was playing in a championship game in California. Yet when Clotfelter, who has previously studied issues in higher education, examined the mission statements of 58 universities with high-level sports programs, including Duke’s, 53 of them didn’t mention athletics at all. “It struck me that nobody in the scholarly community takes commercial sports seriously as a university function,” he said. “They treat it as if it was about as significant as the dining hall or the math club.” But it’s obvious to anyone who steps foot on the Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and many other campuses that sports is a big deal. “You begin to get the impression that universities are not being particularly candid when they write their mission statements,” he said. The result of Clotfelter’s digging into this paradox is Big-Time Sports in American Universities, published by Cambridge University Press. He called writing it a labor of love. While researching the book, Clotfelter quickly found out that he
news
in brief
Second edition of
“We had people tell us which articles they liked in the first edition and where there were gaps in coverage,” text examines field’s Neal said. “On that basis, we decided to include more stuff on gender, sexuality and technology.” Since the book’s first release, major events have impacted hip-hop, providing a backdrop to much of the by C a mille Jack son current research. President Obama, whom the editors say has “generally been accepted When Mark Anthony Neal met Murray Foreman in 1999, hipas a member of the hip-hop hop scholarship was new to the academy, as Neal put it, “jostling to “There are younger community,” was elected. And find its place for intellectual space.” While collaborating on a book Hurricane Katrina devastated in 2004, they introduced the term “hip-hop studies” to describe the scholars doing it and New Orleans, spurring hip-hop vibrant new field of research and help legitimize its study. artist Kanye West to blurt the “Since then there has been an explosion of hip-hop studies,” said more people are polemical line “George Bush Neal, a professor of black popular culture in Duke’s Department of does not care about black African and African American Studies. “If you think of hip-hop in a interested so we people” on live television. traditional way, it’s now pushing elsewhere in academia.” West’s questioning He and Foreman, an associate professor of communications don’t have to defend of “white-dominated at Northeastern University, have mined the new research for the institutional power structures second edition of their book, That’s the Joint, The Hip-Hop Studies the scholarship like … remains of central relevance Reader (Routledge Press), a volume of nearly 50 essays by hip-hop to contemporary hip-hop scholars and researchers. Michael Eric Dyson, Bakari Kitwana, Marc we used to.” studies,” wrote Foreman. Also, Lamont Hill, Nelson George and Greg Tate are among the writers some scholars turned their —mark anthony neal included in the volume. attention to hip-hop’s power “There are younger scholars doing it and more people are brokers engaging in a critical interested so we don’t have to defend the scholarship like we used examination of the rise of moguls Sean “Diddy” Combs, Shawn “Jay to,” Neal said. Z” Carter and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. The updated version reflects the broadening analysis of hip-hop The first edition of the book has been adopted well in academia, from an examination of patriarchy and hyper-masculinity to its selling nearly 10,000 copies to classroom teachers. In response, intersections with queer theory, social activism, global development, Neal and Foreman included study questions at the end of each economics, business and technology. Asian, Arabic, Native-American chapter of the new edition. and Chicano perspectives on the culture are also included. “This is the primary textbook in many hip-hop studies courses, “I blame the amount of new research on broadband and the ability and we wanted to make it easier to teach,” Neal said. for people to have access and exchange ideas,” said Neal, who blogs at newblackman.com and also hosts the weekly webcast “Left of Black” on Duke’s Ustream channel. Since the first edition, the field has not only grown, it has aged. Hip-hop’s veterans are retirement age and the culture’s artifacts are now carefully archived and on display at museums, such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Neal and Foreman have noted the changing socio-political landscape, and set aside articles and essays in the five years between editions.
hip-hop studies
rapid growth
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news
in brief
Duke Researchers Scale Up Program
to Address Mental Health Gap Among African Orphans by Alyssa Zamora One third of the 50 million orphaned and abandoned children living in sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents to HIV/ AIDS. Research by the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research (CHPIR) shows these vulnerable children have significant unmet psychosocial needs due to parental death and trauma, and faculty members are working to fill that mental health gap, using intervention studies designed to inform program development. With a new, five-year, $2.2-million award from the National Institute of Mental Health, CHPIR will expand a childhood traumatic stress and grief intervention, which has shown promise in helping orphans and their guardians cope with unresolved grief. Karen O’Donnell is leading the intervention at Duke, along with CHPIR Director Kathryn Whetten. “We have seen the intervention help with grief issues and also facilitate a deeper connection between the child and his or her guardian,” O’Donnell said. Children were found to have fewer trauma-related symptoms and overall improved behavioral health after the treatment, and these improvements hold up three and 12 months later. Guardians most commonly reported their children are calmer, more comfortable and no longer experiencing nightmares. They also said they learned skills to help their children, but also other children in the community. “What is exciting about this work is that lay counselors with no prior mental health training, under close supervision, delivered the intervention with very high fidelity,” said Shannon Dorsey, a faculty member at the University of Washington and former Duke faculty member who is involved in the study. “They learned the intervention quickly, and the intervention was welcomed by guardians who felt they learned skills to offer support to children.” Researchers are hopeful the intervention will inform other efforts to scale up mental health programs for orphaned and abandoned children in low- and middle-income settings around the world.
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news
in brief
The Politics of Food by Michele Lynn
The seeds of Charlie Thompson’s passion for agricultural issues were sown in his childhood. Thompson, the director of the undergraduate program at the Center for Documentary Studies, watched his grandfather struggle to make a living on his Virginia farm. “My grandfather had to deliver newspapers at night, after working really hard during the day on his 150-acre farm,” he said. “I became really sensitive to the fact that there are many people who are hard workers but who have been victimized by an agricultural system that demands so much of them and gives so little in return.” This realization inspired Thompson—who for many years tended his own farm in Chatham County—to become active in agricultural justice issues. He shares his passion with students in a number of classes including this semester’s “Documentary Studies 167S: The Politics of Food.” “This class looks at many different facets of the food industry, including how food is raised and distributed, and nutrition,” said Thompson. “My deepest personal interest in the politics of food is in how labor in agriculture is treated. My goal in this class—and in the food studies dialogue nationally—is to make sure that issues of labor stay at the forefront.” Thompson says that often lost in the discussion about “foodie” issues is the fact that huge segments of society don’t have access to locally grown food and that those who harvest food are often forgotten. “People think that if they buy organic at Whole Foods that they are buying from a farmer who is treating everyone kindly,” he said. “But even the terms ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ don’t always mean that there are humanitarian practices followed on those farms. Just because something says it’s organic doesn’t mean that it was grown by mom and pop down the road.” In fact, much of the food consumed in this country is grown on large farms owned by big companies. And the crops are primarily harvested by Latino farmworkers, about 85 percent of whom are from Mexico. “People from this country have moved out of farm work and into other jobs because farm work doesn’t pay well and is exploitative,” Thompson said. “Farmworkers are not given
appropriate housing, bathrooms or drinking water—things that people in other industries take for granted. So, it is often entry work for many immigrants. No one wants to work under those conditions but some people are forced to.” Thompson said that the issue of immigration is another reason that farmworkers are primarily Latino. “One way that people are kept in the field is by fear of being deported,” he said. “People are too afraid to speak up if they are mistreated.” Since 1992, Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), which was founded at Duke, has addressed these issues, working to create a more just agricultural system. To help celebrate SAF’s 20th anniversary, Thompson’s class features a service component during which students will create an exhibit about SAF for Perkins Library. “I want students to understand the inner workings of SAF,” Thompson said. “I also want them to understand why students are important to this discussion and how they have changed the discussion in the last two decades.” Students are planning and designing the exhibit, which will promote the work of SAF to a wider audience—as many as 5,000 people a day during the exhibit’s run, which begins in August and lasts through the end of the fall semester. “Students who take this class will leave it very aware that food doesn’t just come from a grocery store,” Thompson said. “There is a story with each morsel of food that we put in our bodies. I want students to be aware that they are part of a chain in the food system that consumers have a lot of control over. Eating is a political act; I want students to develop a sense about food-related justice issues.”
“ Just because something says it’s organic doesn’t mean that it was grown by mom and pop down the road.”
—charlie thompson
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stress: How Staci Bilbo’s research could illuminate human brain development by Nanc y E. Oates
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esearchers sometimes go to great lengths to construct animal models that could shed light on human problems. Staci Bilbo, in studying the immune system and brain development, has been known to replicate life in a low-income housing project for her rodents and enroll the pups in a rodent after-school program. All this to determine what happens to human babies born to stressed mothers exposed to air pollution and what can be done about it. “We’re trying to figure out a behavioral intervention, like an enriched environment for the offspring,” Bilbo said. “We take the pups to a playroom for a few hours each day and ask whether that reverses any of the negative effects we’ve seen.”
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Bilbo, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, is one of only a few researchers studying microglia, immune cells that reside in the brain. She looks at what happens in neural-immune interactions in the brain under various conditions and how that affects brain development. Her work has won widespread acclaim. Many of her research papers have been published in highly respected journals, and she recently received the Frank Beach Young Investigator Award from the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. She has been a very successful grant writer and was elected to her department’s advisory committee while an assistant professor. Her fall class evaluations were among the top five percent from across the university.
All this in the first eight years of her career after graduate school. “One of the most exciting things we’re doing is trying to model socio-economic status in animals,” Bilbo said. Poor neighborhoods not only have poor housing conditions but more maternal stress, fewer resources and greater exposure to toxins because they’re usually located closer to highways—all cumulative factors people in poor neighborhoods face that people in wealthy neighborhoods don’t. Researchers rarely model cumulative risk factors, she said, because “throwing a bunch of factors in together gets very messy. “But people are messy.” Through work done in collaboration with a research grant from the Environmental Protection
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Staci Bilbo is one of few researchers in her field who meld neuroscience and immunology techniques.
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the body. Her research is built on emerging research that showed that stressors and nutritional deficiencies during development could permanently change metabolism, stress reactivity, anxiety and propensity for depression later in life. She figured it might affect the immune system, too. First, Bilbo examined the interaction of the immune system and endocrine system. When she reduced the length of time Siberian hamsters were exposed to daylight, their bodies responded as if it were winter—their fur grew thicker and whiter, their reproductive systems turned off and their immune systems kicked into high gear. Randy Nelson, her doctoral mentor at Johns Hopkins University (he has since been successfully recruited to Ohio State), said Bilbo stands out in her ability to take information from many disparate fields and put it together in new, fresh ways that cause other researchers to say, “Of course!” “But it took Staci to figure it out and do the critical studies,” Nelson said. “She’s
brilliant in looking for unexpected outcomes and following those up in her work.” Bilbo’s interest in the brain’s role developed as she studied sickness behavior. She discovered that the organized responses to illness an animal exhibits—lethargy, fever, reduced interest in eating and drinking—were adaptive, not pathological, behaviors. “They’re recuperative behaviors that help you overcome the infection more quickly,” she said. “They’re very cool because they’re a motivational shift. You’re not motivated to do the same things you usually do, and you have a very strong motivation to sleep. That implicated the brain.” Brain development is a very underexplored area, she said, yet it presented an interesting plasticity experiment: short-term plasticity resulted in long-term changes. “The brain’s development must be the time that all of these different things were set up,” she said. “I looked at neuralimmune interactions in the brain and got immediately fascinated because I found all
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Agency and funded by a Research Incubator Award from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS), Bilbo has found that giving air pollutant particles to rodent pups themselves doesn’t change their brain or immune system much. But stressing the pregnant mothers while exposing them to pollution has a hugely synergistic effect on their offspring, she said. “They’re much worse off,” she said of those pups. Once the baby mice grow up, they have cognitive deficits and anxiety and changes in metabolism that make them heavier. Bilbo’s research is designed to tease apart any behavioral change in the mother that is mediating something in a pup from a physiological effect, such as transferring stress hormones while nursing the pup. Non-traditional in her methods, she is one of a few researchers in her field to meld neuroscience and immunology techniques, employing flow cytometry, a method of sorting cell types to find out what brain cells are producing. “We’re very interested in what about mom is producing the effect and how that’s transferred to her pups,” Bilbo said. “Is she changing her behavior? Or are her stress hormones getting to the fetus and interacting with the toxin exposure in an inflammatory cascade?” In graduate school, Bilbo began with the notion of plasticity in the immune system: External events could impact the immune system, which would respond in an adaptive way to organize other systems in
Maternal bonding, among other behavioral interventions, can set the trajectory for the way the brain works for the rest of the lifespan. Bilbo’s research underscores the importance of prenatal care and resources for moms, something the U.S. doesn’t do a very good job of, according to Bilbo.
this early evidence that the immune system was critical for brain development.” Harris Cooper, chair of Duke’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, said that Bilbo’s research on immune system compromise influencing risk or resilience for later brain functioning and behavior speaks to a broad spectrum of issues that interest scholars across psychology and other social sciences. “Her work helps us understand serious concerns about the implications of childhood poverty,” Cooper said. Bilbo is one of the pioneers in the field of understanding how the inflammatory response of the immune system affects other areas of functioning later in life. Quentin Pittman, a neuroscience researcher at the University of Calgary, is familiar with Bilbo’s work and, like many others in the field, holds her research in high regard. Her studies of microglia, the white cells in the brain that act as scavengers against infection, and how they are modulated by early infection, has implications for vulnerability in adults. “Many central nervous system diseases have a very strong inflammatory component to them—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, dementia—and the states of obesity and autism,” Pittman said. “In the area of neuroinflammation, she’s the most promising young investigator I know of.” Bilbo has recently uncovered a new class of molecules that could be useful in treating addiction. Yet she doesn’t ignore the
importance of behavioral interventions, like maternal bonding, exercise and the rodent playroom fun. “You can’t re-create a behavioral experience with a pill,” she said. Bilbo grew up mainly in Texas and received an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, obtaining her Ph.D. in psychological and brain sciences in 2003. She conducted postgraduate work at the University of Colorado’s Center for Neuroscience, where she continued to be extraordinarily productive in writing and publishing research papers. She joined Duke’s faculty in 2007. She has been invited to speak at dozens of colloquia in the past few years and has published more than 40 articles and several chapters and abstracts, and serves as a reviewer for many well-respected journals. In an era of tight funding, she secured major grant funding for three path-breaking studies that she is now conducting simultaneously. She recently completed two others. Bilbo is uncommonly efficient, said Nelson, her mentor at Johns Hopkins. When she had an idea for a project, he remembered, she would write up a protocol and explain what she planned to do in the study. She included the previous research on the topic, her hypothesis and what she intended to do with the results, and laid out the methodology. Once he approved her project, she was off and running. As soon as she got the results,
she’d plug those in and take a few days to write the discussion section. “Within a week of the study being completed, she had a paper to submit, and a very nice one at that,” Nelson said. “She was the easiest grad student I had—very independent, smart and highly motivated. She was the entire package.” Her longtime friend Jacqueline Wood attested to Bilbo’s efficiency. Wood remembers sitting next to her in class, as an undergraduate, watching her take copious yet concise notes in a compact notebook. “She’s very observational,” Wood said. “She’s very patient and a good listener.” Wood also saw Bilbo’s maternal side, not just with her whippet and cats at home, but the creatures in her lab. “She took very good care of her laboratory lizards, and the crickets she fed to them,” Wood said. Maternal bonding, among other behavioral interventions, can set the trajectory for the way the brain works for the rest of the lifespan. Bilbo’s research underscores the importance of prenatal care and resources for moms, something the U.S. doesn’t do a very good job of, according to Bilbo. “The pregnant mother is a vastly underexplored slice of the population,” Bilbo said, “and arguably one of the most important.”
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REGSS Examines Race and Gender in
Politics
From South Africa to the 2012 Presidential Campaign by Donna Ree ve
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The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences (REGSS) was established on July 1, 2004, as an interdisciplinary center within the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) of Duke University. Its raison d’etre is to bring faculty together from such diverse fields as economics, history, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology. Before their research can be understood, the differences between race, ethnicity and gender factors must be clearly defined. While gender is self-explanatory—male and female—the lines between race and ethnicity are often blurred. The co-directors of REGSS, Paula D. McClain and Kerry Haynie, use the revised 2010 census form to explain race as an issue of color, specifically black, white, and Asian. As for ethnicity, Haynie explained it as “cultural groups [that] have some race aspects as well.” McClain added that “When we [at REGSS] talk about
‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’, the ‘ethnic’ [part] is to pull in the Latino portion that the Census Bureau only views as an ethnicity, not as a racial dimension.” The center goes even further to look at the ethnic group subsets within other races, explaining, “These are not all the same people,” she said. Haynie’s and McClain’s groundbreaking research into minorities and those ethnic subsets generates news and much acclaim for the center. Both professors share their expertise and commentary on race, ethnicity and gender in national and local news reports, scholarly papers, books and textbooks. When asked why research centers like REGSS were important for racial study, Haynie answered, “If you looked today in 2012 at some of the disparities that exist between racial and ethnic groups—if you look at education, income, wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and…unemployment—[and] if you look at the black-white differences and the Latino differences, the gaps are as large today, if not larger, than they were 50 or 60 years ago.” Haynie and Ralph Lawrence, a visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, are currently working to compare the racial dynamics between the post-Jim Crow American South and the post-apartheid South Africa. Even though these areas have ousted “a repressive white regime” and added “more democracy” and “fairer government,” why does racial inequality persist? Haynie said he blames “government that happens beneath the radar screen.” He described the seemingly insignificant happenings at the smallest levels of government—school, zoning, annexation and municipal boards—as the birthplace of policy changes. Sure, law requires open access for the public, but rarely do any attend. As a result, “decisions tend to be biased in one direction,” often to the detriment of the unrepresented, he said. These “unseen” policy changes have a ripple effect. By the time they reach the upper levels of government and start
generating attention, it’s often too late to stop them. Haynie’s and Lawrence’s research also points to the trend for all elections “to be determined by black and brown input” Haynie said. Does this mean we might see President Obama reelected? Maybe. Maybe not. Those hardest hit in the recession—the minority groups—may feel so hopeless with their current personal situations that they might not turn out to vote in great numbers. The real danger, Haynie said he believes, is for people to believe that the system is so stacked against them that even if they have a black president, their situation will stay the same. Paula McClain refuted Haynie’s pessimism. Research data shows that “once black Americans get over the hurdle of getting registered to vote, they will, in fact, turn out to vote,” she said. The 2008 Obama campaign focused on registering blacks and Latinos to help secure the historic win. Without the allure of helping make history, McClain said, “Survey data is showing blacks overwhelmingly still support President Obama. What‘s going to be important is the ability of the [2012] campaign to mobilize.” McClain’s current research centers on the effect of the Latino immigration into Southern cities. She started her research in Durham because the black and white populations are fairly equal. For the second phase, she and her research team picked towns at either end of the spectrum—Little Rock (predominantly white) and Memphis (predominantly black)—to compare and contrast with what they learned in Durham. “You can‘t generalize…without taking into account the makeup, history, civil rights, [and] background of that particular community,” McClain explained. As for gender issues, McClain said she believes that first ladies can have an influence on who gets elected, especially in the case of First Lady Michelle Obama. Not only does she “humanize the president as a husband, as a father, [and] as a leader… she’s taken up the issues of veterans and the military along with the obesity issue,
Congratulations! McClain’s 2010 textbook, American Government in Black and White, written with her former doctoral student from the University of Virginia, Steven C. Tauber, is considered by many to be the most comprehensive textbook on American Government. At the 2011 annual American Political Science Association meeting, McClain and Tauber received the award for the Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, Politics, Incorporation and Identity.
all things that people can really relate to,” McClain said. Mrs. Obama seems more like every woman’s Jacqueline Kennedy. As McClain said, “When Mrs. Obama shows up in Target in a baseball cap, who can’t identify with that?” The researchers at REGSS know that studying race, gender and ethnicity academically is important because changing demographics affects us all. “If people become so disillusioned that they check out of the system,” Haynie warned, “I think that’s quite dangerous.” The result would be government by a people that looks nothing like the demographics of the population they serve. If the United States is continuing to be a government “for the people” and “by the people,” we must acknowledge our changing colors and let policy and laws reflect and support our diversity.
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Bullying and Its Long-Term Effects by Whitne y L .J. Howell
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or one 12-year-old girl, the taunting and teasing were almost unbearable. The false rumors that she was already sexually active with several male classmates were humiliating. She was overwhelmed by the daily harassment, and finally, her teachers intervened. Their investigation pinpointed a female schoolmate as the source. The reason: both girls were interested in the same boy. According to 2010 U.S. Department of Justice data, bullying is not uncommon: as much as 20 percent of children ages 2 to 17
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were victims of bullying at least once within the previous 12 months. Nearly 10 percent of children were assaulted chronically. A Duke study seeks to answer why certain children are targeted and to identify the long-term effects of victimization. “A lot of people say when a child is bullied, they become aggressive, hyperactive, or exhibit acting out behavior in some fashion, but we’ve found that those things aren’t something that can be chalked up to bullying,” said Terrie Moffitt, a Duke psychology and neuroscience professor. “What really happens with children who
are victims of bullies is that they become anxious and depressed.” In a seven-year longitudinal study, Moffitt and her colleagues followed 2,200 identical and fraternal twins in the United Kingdom (U.K.) from ages 5 to 12. The research revealed that physical characteristics— weight, hair color, etc.—don’t necessarily play into how a bully targets victims. Instead, bullies often choose children who seemingly have few close, warm relationships with adults and are less likely to report the abuse. Through home visits and questionnaires,
the team also determined while emotional and mental health difficulties can factor into a child being targeted by a bully, being bullied itself can spark a new set of problems. A recent study conducted by Arizona State University published in February’s Child Development, however, contradicts this assessment. The paper reported depressed children attracted bullies, but further victimization didn’t worsen their depression. Moffitt’s data demonstrated the opposite. Among twins where one was bullied and the other not, the bullied sibling was more vulnerable to depression and anxiety. Following twins gave her
and we over-sampled twins born to unwed teenage mothers living in public housing. We wanted to make sure we monitored plenty of kids growing up in poverty and with adverse circumstances,” Moffitt said. “We exceeded beyond our wildest dreams. Many of the kids are in dire conditions. Some moms are opium addicts, and many kids have already been removed from their moms and are in foster care. A number of mothers have already committed suicide, and in many situations the fathers are either absent or in and out of jail.” To assess how children in the study responded to bullying over time, nurses conducted two-hour, in-home visits when
“ What really happens with children who are victims of bullies is that they become anxious and depressed.”
—Te rrie Moffitt
team the advantage, Moffitt said, because they could control for genetic—as well as environmental—factors, and the Arizona team couldn’t. The Duke team is also interested in how repeated victimization affects individuals into adulthood. Beginning in May, they have a £3 million grant to follow this same cohort through to age 18, looking not only at their mental health, but also their psychosocial adjustment skills and any stress-related biomarkers. To date, existing research examining the incidence of bullying among twins has included mainly middle-class families recruited through newspaper advertising. Instead, Moffitt’s team used the U.K.’s twin registry to identify a sample group that more accurately reflects the characteristics of children who are most frequently victimized. “We under-sampled twins born to older mothers who were well educated, wellto-do, and who used fertility treatments,
the children were ages 5, 7, 10, and 12. They also collected birth weight, breastfeeding history, and vaccine records through a questionnaire at age 2. The nurses observed mother-and-child interactions during each visit and used two puppy puppets—Iggy and Ziggy—to ask the child questions designed to discover whether the child has been victimized. For example, one puppet asked, “Sometimes bigger boys make me cry. Do bigger boys sometimes make you cry?” Children either answered verbally or touched the puppet with which they identified. Other games pinpointed whether the child could view situations from another’s point of view. In addition, 100 families participated in a laboratory study that measured the twins’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol during an oral math quiz and discussion of their most recent traumatic event. Results revealed that children who hadn’t been bullied experienced an initial cortisol spike,
but levels normalized within 45 minutes. However, bullied children didn’t have as high a cortisol rise, but the stress hormone lingered in their bloodstream beyond 45 minutes. “This result shows bullied children are primed for bad things to happen to them. They just don’t bounce back,” Moffitt said. “That’s the kind of biological change to the stress hormone system than could have a long-lasting effect.” The child’s emotional state wasn’t the nurse’s only focus, though. They also monitored and took notes on how the mother talked about her child. They focused on the mother’s tone of voice rather than what she said—for example, did she call the child “a pain” in a warm voice or with disdain? This collected data was coded and helped the team identify children who were less likely to have supportive, close relationships with their mother, putting them at greater risk for victimization. In the long run, Moffitt said she hopes this research will be used to increase awareness among adults about bullying, as well as increase the availability of emotional and social support services for bullied children and their families. “We certainly don’t want to overblow this since bullying is a normal part of life. We do want our kids to be resilient and learn to deal with conflict,” said Moffitt, pointing out that being an occasional bullying victim is great practice for coping with adulthood. “But when bullying is chronic and secret from adults and the child feels hopeless and alone, that’s the part that parents and schools need to try and catch.”
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A Fresh Look at
1970s Feminism By Paul Dudenhefer
“A Women’s Town Meeting will be held Saturday, Nov. 3 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Durham YWCA,” the Durham Carolina Times reported in its Nov. 3, 1973, edition. “Workshops will include Legal and Economic Problems of Women, The Black Woman, Child Care in Durham, Women and Their Bodies, Restructuring Personal Relationships, and Women’s Studies. Fifteen local women’s organizations will be present to tell women about their groups. The Feminist Drama Troupe from Chapel Hill will present an original play, ‘A Feminist Fairy Tale,’ during lunch.” The meeting, the paper reported, will be “the first of its kind in Durham.” Occurring as it did in a working-class southern town (at the time, Durham was dominated by the tobacco and textile industries) and addressing AfricanAmerican women in particular, the Women’s Town Meeting that took place on that November day challenges our popular image of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Also out to challenge the popular image of the movement is the Future of the Feminist 70s, a yearlong initiative of the Women’s Studies Department at Duke University. Through courses, reading groups, lectures, and films, the initiative seeks to understand how some of the major interventions of the 1970s—among them, Marxist and radical
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feminism, eco-feminism, and human and civil rights discourse—continue to have an impact on feminist thought, shed light on contemporary questions, and influence the direction of feminism today. Victoria Hesford is a postdoctoral fellow who is teaching Gender and Popular Culture this spring as part of the initiative. As she explained, we each have an idea of what the feminist movement in the 1970s looked like: centered on the East Coast, mainly involving white, educated, middle- and upper class women. What the Future of the Feminist 70s asks us to do is to leave our presuppositions, received wisdom, and conventional narratives behind. “With this initiative we want to look at the subject anew,” said Hesford, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Stony Brook
University. “Because we were there or because we’ve heard the stories or because we’ve studied the movement in books, we think we know what happened. We want to set all that aside and see the feminist movement with fresh eyes, to let new connections and narratives emerge.” Another postdoctoral fellow who is participating in the initiative is Stephanie Gilmore, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Dickinson College; in the fall she taught a course that examined feminism in a historical context. Enough time has passed, she said, to allow us to take a longer view of 1970s feminism and see it from a broader perspective. “The Future of the Feminist 70s is about recognizing that we need a history to understand and give context to our current activism; we need
a usable past to create a future feminist movement, a movement that can sustain the things left over from the ‘70s,” Gilmore said. Now that a historical approach is possible, questions are opened up that may have been unthinkable a generation ago. Take, for example, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The question, said Gilmore, is not only how do we still pursue an ERA, but whether we even still want to pursue an ERA. “We need a history to answer those questions.” The timing of the initiative, Gilmore said, could not be better, coming as it does “at the front end of historical and critical scholarship on the movement.” Many of the programs associated with the Future of the Feminist 70s have been offered in conjunction with the Sallie
Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. Among them is a film series. The first film that was screened was I Am Somebody (1970), which tells the story of a 1969 strike by black women hospital workers in Charleston, S.C. The curator of the series is Shilyh Warren, an adjunct professor of film studies at N.C. State University. Warren, who recently graduated from the Ph.D. program in literature at Duke, said she wanted to open with a film that overturned our popular conception of the feminist movement as white, college-educated, and northern—and that demonstrated the movement’s multifaceted character. “Here was an episode that involved black women workers in the South,” she said. “Yet here was also an episode that showed that feminism was
not only about women but was connected to the civil rights movement and the labor movement.” So much of the initiative, Warren said, questions not only our understanding of the feminist movement of the 1970s but the 1970s themselves. As Victoria Hesford noted, the ‘70s marked the beginning of a transition in the global economic order. “With the rise of Pinochet, Thatcherism, and neoliberal economic policies, the way capitalism happens on a global scale began to change,” said Hesford, who has just completed a book titled Feeling Women’s Liberation, on our collective cultural memory of 1970s feminism. Indeed, a seminar at Duke University taught this past fall by Jolie Olcott (History) and Ara Wilson (Women’s Studies) approached the feminist 1970s from a transnational perspective. “There is a feminist movement today, and it has a history,” emphasized Stephanie Gilmore, who is writing a book on grassroots feminist activism in the postwar period. “We don’t have Sex and the City without Erica Jong and Fear of Flying. Without the feminist movement, we don’t have LGBT characters and interracial romance on TV. We don’t have in Ellen DeGeneres—an out lesbian—our go-to person for entertainment. We don’t have Oprah, who many say got our last president elected. A lot of positive role-modeling we owe to the movement.” A list of spring events associated with the Future of the Feminist 70s can be found on the News and Events page of the Sallie Bingham Center website: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/ bingham/news/index.html
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facult y
profile
Losing my Religion? Mark Chaves witnesses the trends of American religion by Rebecc a Mohr
Mark Chaves, professor in sociology,
In his book, Chaves uses both the NCS and the General Social Survey, an ongoing religion and divinity at Duke, has survey of Americans’ changing attitudes and recently discovered that religion behaviors that began in 1972. in America is slightly declining. In Chaves’ interest in the sociology of his new book, American Religion: religion means Duke is a great place for Contemporary Trends, Chaves looks at him to work, due to its encouragement of trends in diversity, belief, involvement, multidisciplinary research. With interests congregational life, leadership, liberal in sociology, divinity and religion, Chaves is Protestant decline and polarization. able to teach and work in all three areas, and “It’s much easier to document the merge everything together. trend then explain why it’s happening,” His interest in religion came at an early age Chaves said. “One possibility is that and has continued to grow into more of a American religion is tied to families, sociological angle. and one of the big social changes over “My father is a Presbyterian minister, I recent decades is the changes in family grew up in a largely Catholic neighborhood structure. People are marrying later, in New York City and then I went to more people are not marrying at all, and “The biggest change is church school at a at a Missouri Synod Lutheran people are not having kids at all. The attendance, but the number of school,” Chaves said. “From an early age I main demographic base of American people who say they believe in experienced religious diversity, and I was religion is traditional families and that’s interested both the role of churches and a smaller percentage of the population God is still over 90 percent. The society but also in where religious variation than it used to be. So I think the changes percent of people who say they comes from and what differences religious in family demography is definitely an have no religion has gone up.” variations make.” important part of the story.” Chaves’ brings that long-time curiosity Another theme in Chaves’ book is the —Mark Chaves of religious variations into his classrooms. concept that people often believe that One of his favorite assignments involves his after a sudden dramatic event, more students interacting with different religions in the real world. people will turn to religion to cope. He explains that even after “One of my main assignments is to get the students to events such as “9/11 or the economic crisis, religiosity is affected appreciate religious diversity and the social sources of it by in the short term, but the events do not have long term effects.” having them go out and find two congregations—it doesn’t have Even though Chaves’ research has found that some religion practices to be Christian churches—with some kind of social variation. are declining, he emphasizes that nothing is declining rapidly. They have to go actually visit the worship services and observe “The biggest change is church attendance, but the number of the differences in the way they do religion,” Chaves said. “The people who say they believe in God is still over 90 percent. The students have to then come back and analyze the differences percent of people who say they have no religion has gone up,” in a social context, meaning: does it seem that these religious Chaves said. “It is still under 20 percent, but in the 1950s it was differences are related to social aspects? The assignment gets 3 percent.” students to experience firsthand a little bit of religious variation.” Without the National Congregation Study (NCS), which Chaves Chaves feels that others, besides his students, should be aware directs, no one would be able to witness the trends of American of the religious trends in America. religion. The NCS is a wide-ranging survey, conducted in 1998, “Religion continues to be an important part of American society 2006-07 and starting again in 2012, of a nationally representative and important to a lot of people,” Chaves said. “People should be sample of religious congregations. Chaves explains that the NCS aware of all kinds of things about the world we live in and what’s results have helped researchers better understand many aspects changing and what’s not in all kinds of social trends.” of congregational life in the United States. BWPW Photography
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student
p rofile
The effects of war Victor Ray takes a closer look at the reintegration of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan By Rebecc a Mohr
Victor Ray, a Duke University Ph.D.
and interacting with your family.” Through personal interviews, Ray student in African and African American found that even though each vet Studies and Sociology, became involved had a different experience there are in the experience of young veterans commonalities in each story. From a returning home after a chance social vet working in a mental institution, yet meeting of a veteran who had been going to a different facility and doctor for medically discharged. treatment, to economic reasons being “He told me his story,” Ray said. “He the top reason people enlist, Ray was was really gung ho about going to war. So continually surprised while conducting he signed up. He thought it would be great his research. for him, said he needed the discipline. He “Most people, when they hear things was about 19 years old and did not feel in the media or public rhetoric about like he was moving forward in his life. service, they hear lofty ideas that are He joined up and came back—medically attached to people’s service, patriotism, discharged. Once back, he was diagnosed democracy, liberty,” Ray said. “So far with depression and PTSD. He told me I’ve had over 25 interviews, and only that he didn’t like the person he had to be one respondent has said they joined for when he was in the combat zone and that those reasons. The vast majority of my he totally changed outlook of the world. respondents said they joined mainly for He went from being a Bush voter to being economic reasons.” a member of the Iraq and Afghanistan Ray recalls one story that particularly Veterans Against the War.” had an impact. An African-American, Ray started to dive deep into the topic “Most people, when they hear single mother with two kids was working and soon was asking the question, “who at McDonald’s and decided she could no in sociology is writing about this?” He said things in the media or public longer support her kids on her paycheck. he found a lot of quantitative research but rhetoric about service, they She enlisted and let her friends watch not much that talked about daily lives. hear lofty ideas that are attached her kids while she was deployed. That was when he decided to refocus his Ray also interviewed vets who said that dissertation. to people’s service, patriotism, they knew they had a traumatic brain After coming to Duke to study with democracy, liberty.” injury or another disorder or depression Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Linda Burton, or had been sexually assaulted, but Ray had intended to go into race theory —victor ray rather than going to their superiors, but soon changed direction because “I they went off base to see a psychiatrist thought it was an important topic and or other mental health care, because they assumed they would be sociology had something to add to the conversation,” he said. punished, hazed, or receive a bad assignment. Ray’s dissertation takes a look at the reintegration of veterans of Besides influencing both current and future policy, Ray hopes Iraq and Afghanistan. He still keeps his original race theory interest that his research and dissertation is true to the people who told by focusing on racial and gender differences and what happens when him their stories. these heroes return. “I hope I represent them in a way that’s respectful and hopeful to “Traditionally scholarship on race in the military has seen military other vets,” Ray said. “Many of the people I interviewed said they as sort of the great racial equalizer for people of color,” Ray said. “But really didn’t want to talk about it, but did on the hope that somebody what my dissertation looks at is at what cost. We know, for instance, else won’t go through what [they] went through. They hope that things that in these conflicts we have some of the highest rates of PTSD and will be different in the future.” traumatic brain injury of any conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in. I wonder what that means as far as coming back, looking for work BWPW Photography
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a sk th e social sci e ntist
“They said what?” Can gossip be a good thing? Gossip, generally defined as a conversation between two or more people about someone else who is not present, certainly has many potential negative consequences such as damaging reputations or hurting feelings, but gossip can also have some benefits. The research literature has identified three main potential benefits of gossip. First, gossip can build social connections between the individuals who are gossiping together. The content of gossip can be either positive or negative. Interpersonal intimacy is especially fostered by sharing mild negative attitudes about another person. Of course, building in-group connections also has the downside of forming an out-group with the potential for exclusion and mistreatment. Second, gossip can promote desirable social norms. For example, by sharing stories about individuals’ behavior and its consequences, group members can learn what the expectations are in their social group and how deviations from expected behavior are likely to be treated. This can be especially adaptive if the gossip concerns an individual who is cheating, lying, or engaging in illegal behavior because it could prevent others in the group from being exploited or harmed in the future and convey the message that such behavior is not accepted by the social group. Likewise, positive gossip can spread knowledge about who is reliable, hardworking, and so forth. The promotion of social norms applies, though, even when the gossip is about celebrities with whom the gossipers have no real relationship. By listening to gossip, individuals learn what behavior is accepted or scorned by their social group and are more likely to adhere to social norms in order to be accepted by the group. Third, gossip can reduce individuals’ stress and make them feel better. If someone has been treated poorly or witnessed disturbing behavior, gossip can be one way to vent frustration. Gossip can also boost self-esteem if one compares oneself favorably against the target of the gossip. And, gossiping can raise an individual’s status in the social group, which can lead to good feelings. However, deriving esteem and good feelings by maligning others obviously has its own costs. As long as gossip doesn’t involve malicious intent, spreading false rumors, or manipulation, it can sometimes be a good thing. Given its potential for harm, though, the negative aspects of gossip might outweigh its potential benefits of building social connections, promoting social norms, and reducing stress.
Gossip is an informal exchange of information, often without fact-checking, concerning mutually relevant social actors. It forms a key component of the process by which we monitor the social environment. Gossip has at least two uses for members cast adrift on the sea of society. First, it improves our awareness of key actors in our social arena. As our lives are often in the hands of our fellows, it is immensely useful to have some sense of how those fellows might behave— their reputations and current circumstances. Second, gossip is a tool of social diplomacy with fellow gossipers. In an environment where the attainment of goals often requires the aid of others, gossip is a method of coalition building. It permits potential allies to negotiate common perceptions of the social environment, and thereby come to agree on common goals and strategies. Both uses of gossip—reputation and consensus building— make gossip a useful tool for getting by in human society. But is it a good tool? Gossip can have very real, negative consequences for the subjects of gossip. A 21st century mechanic with poor online reviews may suddenly lack for customers. A 17th century Salemite might suddenly find themselves on a burning stake. More than a few marriages, business partnerships, and friendships have foundered on the rocks of gossip. Then again, gossip can prevent swindles, vouch for character, avoid awkward situations, and create solidarity. Who hasn’t been inspired to do a covert good deed, after hearing that so-and-so has been going through a tough time because of such-and-such? Take a moment to consider someone you’ve known for a while. I imagine you could tell a million stories about them—some true, others exaggerated, and a few that are unconfirmed rumor. What story would you tell to make that person look good? What story would you tell to embarrass them? What stories would inspire compassion, distaste, fear, admiration, or anger? We have all of these kinds of stories available for most of the people we know, and those stories each reflect on them. However, the choice of which story we tell? That reflects on us.
Jennifer E. Lansford Research Professor, SSRI
S. Joshua Mendelsohn Department of Sociology
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que stions
Margaret Humphreys Studying the History of Medicine in the United States by Courtney Orni ng
Why is the history of disease in the South so different than other parts of the country? Humphreys: The overriding answer lies in the poverty of the region, stemming from the tragic history of African-American slavery and the destructive war fought to defend it and states’ rights. The trade in African people brought the microbes of falciparum malaria, hookworm, and yellow fever to a region sub-tropical enough to keep these diseases alive well into the twentieth century. The region’s pervasive poverty also bred malnutrition, leading to diseases such as pellagra that sapped mental and physical strength. Your current research explores the history of medicine during the American Civil War, yet you’ve also done research on colonial medicine. What have you found to be one of the biggest differences in the time periods? Humphreys: From the historian’s perspective one of the biggest differences is the availability of resources from the time, both manuscript and printed. The American Civil War generated mountains of documents, including the millions of shelf feet of army materials in the National Archives created to house its paperwork. From a cognitive point of view, the writings of colonial New England carry an overarching assumption of the action of providence that still receives lip service in the Civil War but is far less pervasive. Physicians during the Civil War were beginning to question whether microbes cause infectious disease, an idea entirely alien to colonial New England.
Can you explain your involvement at the National Humanities Center? Humphreys: In 200405 I was the lucky recipient of a Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, which paid my way for an academic year at the NHC in RTP, which hosts about 35 scholars a year, offering them offices, library support, and the wonderful interdisciplinary fellowship of shared lunch. Fellows come from a broad range of fields in the humanities—literature, history, cultural anthropology, art, classical studies, and so on. This meant a whole year to read, think and write, a glorious luxury for an academic. My book on black soldiers was conceived and partially written during that year. On a second sabbatical there in 2009-10 I made major progress on my next Civil War book, which looks at medicine during the war more broadly.
Duke University Photography
Race is one topic of the vast range of topics that you study and teach. In your book, Intensely Human: The Health of Black Soldiers in the American Civil War, you bring together issues of race and the history of medicine. How do those topics relate to one another? Humphreys: Health disparities by race and class persist in the modern U.S. and were even more pronounced in the 19th century. Most black people in the antebellum era lived in the South, and the physicians who wrote about their peculiar health issues were southerners simultaneously writing to defend slavery. During the American Civil War 186,000+ black men served in the Union army, and Union physicians found the encounter with black patients, often a novelty and thus fascinating. Some of those physicians were particularly sensitive to the needs of black troops, and others shared the southern dismissal of Africans as particularly diseased and lacking in the willpower that was at the heart of health and strength.
In addition to your work at Duke, you are the Editor in Chief of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. How do you balance it all? Humphreys: It helps that the JHMAS is run on a computer platform that automates much of my work, and that I have a managing editor to help me with day-to-day tasks.
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research
PoorQuality: Inequality Dan Ariely and the Center for Advanced Hindsight (C4AH) invite artists from around the world to create a piece representing social and economic inequality From the group that hosted the “Creative Dishonesty” project comes another artist outreach event combining the world of social science and art. In late February, artists from around the world were invited to attend a discussion on social and economic inequality. C4AH released a statement inviting all artists to “join Dan Ariely and the Center for a stimulating discussion on social and economic inequality, wealth distribution and what is so taxing about taxation. We ask: Pourquoi? And what can we do about poorquality?” After the forum, artists interested in creating artwork in response to the research completed an online application, including a one page explanation of the artist’s creative process and two-three digital images of past work. There is no limitation to the style or media of pieces created for “PoorQuality.” Artwork created for “PoorQuality” will be on display at the Center for Advanced Hindsight from June 1 to August 31 with a reception on June 22. An exhibit catalogue, including responses and reflections by the artists and the researchers, will be published.
Cheat Codes held Dec. 3, 2011—Jan. 31, 2012. (top) Artist Charlie Cook created the multiple canvas piece titled Unintentional Deceit (Puzzled Jackie); (bottom left) Keep the Home Fires Burning piece with moral/immoral envelopes was created by Kerry Cox; (bottom right) C4AH research assistant, Jamie Foehl.
BWPW Photography
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final note
Duke Data Used to Create iPhone App A new iPhone app that helps users visualize their carbon footprint uses data from a Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions study to run portions of the program. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creators of the application, used average values of the data for coastal ecosystems contained in “State of the Science on Coastal Blue Carbon: A Summary for Policy Makers” to create the UNEP Carbon Calculator, according to Gabriel Grimsditch. “The Duke University data was crucial for the development of the app because the Duke University synthesis of the global blue carbon data provided the basis for the calculations made in the app,” said Grimsditch of UNEP’s Freshwater and Marine Ecosystems Branch. “Without this global synthesis of blue carbon data, some of the calculations in the app would not have been possible.” The Nicholas Institute report is part of an emerging body of work on the topic of blue carbon—a concept that aims to protect coastal habitats and reduce climate change by assigning credits to the large amount of carbon stored in their soil. The free app, which was recently released
through iTunes, allows users to input details surrounding air, train or road travel to calculate their carbon footprint and find out how their footprint compares to what can be stored in these different ecosystems. Grimsditch said the data from the Nicholas Institute report allows app users to actually see their carbon footprint equivalent in coastal ecosystems such as mangrove forests, saltwater marshlands and seagrass meadows. “We are pleased that UNEP is using the data we compiled for their blue carbon app,” said Brian Murray, one of the three authors of the blue carbon study and director for economic analysis at the Institute. “This aligns well with the Institute’s mission to bring forth the best scientific and economic data to help inform decisions on the world’s most pressing environmental problems.” Beyond the calculations, the app provides suggestions on how to limit potential impact on these ecosystems. It was designed, according to a press release by UNEP, to draw attention to the critical role these tropical and coastal ecosystems can play in tackling climate change.