Digital Commons Network^™

"Where Are The Bathrooms?": Academic Library Restrooms And Student Needs, Stephanie Margolin, Jennifer Poggiali

Publications and Research

This article investigates bathrooms, paying specific attention to those in academic libraries. The authors describe how bathrooms have been considered in the library literature for the past century and challenges to changing the status quo. Finally, this work sets the stage for future inquiry. Research materials come from a range of sources: historical library literature, building codes, social science theory and research that address the issues around bathroom taboos, and checklists for assessing bathrooms. The authors propose librarians and library administrators reconsider all aspects of their own bathrooms: location, features, equity/inclusiveness, and maintenance in service to their patrons.

Oldest Skeleton Of A Plesiadapiform Provides Additional Evidence For An Exclusively Arboreal Radiation Of Stem Primates In The Palaeocene, Stephen B. Chester, Thomas E. Williamson, Jonathan I. Bloch, Mary T. Silcox, Eric J. Sargis

Publications and Research

Palaechthonid plesiadapiforms from the Palaeocene of western North America have long been recognized as among the oldest and most primitive euarchontan mammals, a group that includes extant primates, colugos and treeshrews. Despite their relatively sparse fossil record, palaechthonids have played an important role in discussions surrounding adaptive scenarios for primate origins for nearly a half-century. Likewise, palaechthonids have been considered important for understanding relationships among plesiadapiforms, with members of the group proposed as plausible ancestors of Paromomyidae and Microsyopidae. Here, we describe a dentally associated partial skeleton of Torrejonia wilsoni from the early Palaeocene (approx. 62Ma) of New Mexico, which …

Cooperative Membership And Community Engagement: Findings From A Latin American Survey, Sangdong Tak

Publications and Research

Cooperatives as organization have mainly been explored in the field of business and management due to their operation in the business sector, and studies of nonprofit organizations have given little attention to them. Consequently, cooperatives studies have tended to examine economic outcomes, such as productivity and job security, comparing them to conventional business firms. Nevertheless, cooperatives are membership associations and have organizational characteristics in common with other types of voluntary associations. Furthermore, one explicit organizational principle of cooperatives is concern for community, and their contributions to the community have been covered frequently by media. Therefore, it is imperative to examine …

Understanding The Whole Student: Cuny Undergraduates’ Lived Experiences, Mariana Regalado, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

This presentation is a broad overview of research into how CUNY undergraduates fit their academic work into their lives, focusing on study locations, the technology they use, and how they engage in the research process.

Free To Serve? Emergency Food And Volunteer Labor In The Urban U.S., Maggie Dickinson

Publications and Research

Since the 1980s, cutbacks to welfare programs, widespread economic insecurity, and increased federal funding for nonprofit agencies have led to a massive expansion of emergency food providers (EFPs) such as soup kitchens and food pantries across the United States. These anti-hunger organizations are often staffed exclusively or predominantly by volunteers who are empowered to care for their communities. But, like all caring labor, volunteer work is shaped by race, class, and gender inequalities. Hunger and poverty motivate poor women to become volunteers, and contradictions around how this labor should be remunerated, recognized, and regulated create conflicts within EFPs. By mobilizing …

Tracing A Gypsy Mixed Language Through Medieval And Early Modern Arabic And Persian Literature, Kristina Richardson

Publications and Research

In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period. It is a mixed language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads, or Gypsy 1 groups. In 10th-century Arabic sources produced in Būyid Iraq and Iran, non-speakers named this language lughat al-mukaddīn (the language of the beggars), another demonstration of an outsider’s perspective. However, speakers of this language called it lughat …

From Plato To Nato. 2,500 Years Of Democracy And The End Of History, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Zooarchaeology Of The Scandinavian Settlements In Iceland And Greenland: Diverging Pathways, Thomas Mcgovern, Konrad Smairowski, George Hambrecht, Seth Brewington, Ramona Harrison, Megan Hicks, Frank J. Feeley, Brenda Prehal, James Woollett

Publications and Research

The Scandinavian Viking Age and Medieval settlements of Iceland and Greenland have been subject to zooarchaeological research for over a century, and have come to represent two classic cases of survival and collapse in the literature of long-term human ecodynamics. The work of the past two decades by multiple projects coordinated through the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) cooperative and by collaborating scholars has dramatically increased the available zooarchaeological evidence for economic organization of these two communities, their initial adaptation to different natural and social contexts, and their reaction to Late Medieval economic and climate change. This summary paper provides …

Medieval Iceland, Greenland, And The New Human Condition: A Case Study In Integrated Environmental Humanities, Steven Hartman, A.E.J. Ogilvie, Jón Haukur Ingimundarson, A.J. Dugmore, George Hambrecht, Thomas Mcgovern

Publications and Research

This paper contributes to recent studies exploring the longue durée of human impacts on island landscapes, the impacts of climate and other environmental changes on human communities, and the interaction of human societies and their environments at different spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the paper addresses Iceland during the medieval period (with a secondary, comparative focus on Norse Greenland) and discusses episodes where environmental and climatic changes have appeared to cross key thresholds for agricultural productivity. The paper draws upon international, interdisciplinary research in the North Atlantic region led by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Nordic …

As’Lem: An Ethical Diagnosis Of The Contemporary, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

In recent scholarly literature, refugees have proliferated: they are the “political figures par excellence” and “border concepts”; they are understood through their infrastructures, both camps and laws; and they are approached as suffering subjects. But Fassin, Wilhelm-Solomon, and Segatti have a different approach: they understand asylum—or as’lem, the term used by asylum seekers in South Africa—as a form of life.

Guest Studies The Diversity Of New York’S Chinatown., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Chinatowns are common sights in almost every major city in the U.S. To westerners, they appear to be homogeneous places where one goes to find good Chinese food and a little more. However, researchers have found that there is much more to them than that. It turns out that these Chinese communities can tell us a lot about not only the Chinese immigrants but also the cities where they are located.

One of those researchers is Dr. Ken Guest. He comes from a very religious family from New Jersey. “My mother is the fourth generation of United Methodist ministers in …

T-Complex Measures In Bilingual Spanish- English And Turkish-German Children And Monolingual Peers, Tanja Rinker, Valerie L. Shafer, Markus Kiefer, Nancy Vidal, Yan H. Yu

Publications and Research

Background Lateral temporal neural measures (Na and T-complex Ta and Tb) of the auditory evoked potential (AEP) index maturation of auditory/speech processing. These measures are also sensitive to language experience in adults. This paper examined neural responses to a vowel sound at temporal electrodes in four- to five-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals and in five- to six-year-old Turkish-German bilinguals and German monolinguals. The goal was to determine whether obligatory AEPs at temporal electrode sites were modulated by language experience. Language experience was defined in terms of monolingual versus bilingual status as well as the amount and quality of the …

Gait Changes In A Line Of Mice Artificially Selected For Longer Limbs, Leah M. Sparrow, Emily Pellattt, Sabrina S. Yu, David A. Raichlen, Herman Pontzer, Campbell Rolian

Publications and Research

In legged terrestrial locomotion, the duration of stance phase, i.e., when limbs are in contact with the substrate, is positively correlated with limb length, and negatively correlated with the metabolic cost of transport. These relationships are well documented at the interspecific level, across a broad range of body sizes and travel speeds. However, such relationships are harder to evaluate within species (i.e., where natural selection operates), largely for practical reasons, including low population variance in limb length, and the presence of confounding factors such as body mass, or training. Here, we compared spatiotemporal kinematics of gait in Longshanks, a long-legged …

Body Size And Lower Limb Posture During Walking In Humans, Martin Hora, Libor Soumar, Herman Pontzer, Vladimír Sládek

Publications and Research

We test whether locomotor posture is associated with body mass and lower limb length in humans and explore how body size and posture affect net joint moments during walking. We acquired gait data for 24 females and 25 males using a three-dimensional motion capture system and pressure-measuring insoles. We employed the general linear model and commonality analysis to assess the independent effect of body mass and lower limb length on flexion angles at the hip, knee, and ankle while controlling for sex and velocity. In addition, we used inverse dynamics to model the effect of size and posture on net …

Plekon Looks At The Evolution Of Religious Beliefs., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Abraham Lincoln once said, “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” He sounds like a precursor of today’s millennials, who, although they do not feel attracted to any organized religion, still have a space for spirituality and righteousness in their hearts.

Someone who looks at religion from many different viewpoints is Dr. Michael Plekon, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

The Paucity Of Frugivores In Madagascar May Not Be Due To Unpredictable Temperatures Or Fruit Resources, Sarah Federman, Miranda Sinnott-Armstrong, Andrea L. Baden, Colin A. Chapman, Douglas C. Daly, Alison R. Richard, Kim Valenta, Michael J. Donoghue

Publications and Research

The evolution of ecological idiosyncrasies in Madagascar has often been attributed to selective pressures stemming from extreme unpredictability in climate and resource availability compared to other tropical areas. With the exception of rainfall, few studies have investigated these assumptions. To assess the hypothesis that Madagascar's paucity of frugivores is due to unreliability in fruiting resources, we use statistical modeling to analyze phenology datasets and their environmental correlates from two tropical wet forests, the Réserve Naturelle Intégrale Betampona in Madagascar, and Kibale National Park in Uganda. At each site we found that temperature is a good environmental predictor of fruit availability. …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

Space, Land, Territory, And The Study Of The Bible, Stephen C. Russell

Publications and Research

In this brief volume, written for professional biblical scholars and graduate students being trained in biblical studies, Stephen C. Russell introduces the reader to the interdisciplinary study of space and its related concepts, including land, territory, border, frontier, nature, scale, spatial flows, and rhythm. He offers a synopsis of eight approaches to the study of space that have been influential in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades—sacred, legal, political, economic, ecological, visual, social, and urban approaches. He pays special attention to Henri Lefebvre’s treatment of social space as a social product. The volume also briefly notes some of …

Mediating The Tourist Experience: From Brochures To Virtual Encounters, Gordon Alley-Young

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Polyvalent Mediterranean, Or The Trope Of Nomadism In The Literary Oeuvre Of Igiaba Scego And Abdourahman A. Waberi, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Publications and Research

I argue that novelists Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman A. Waberi, building on the work of Nuruddin Farah among others, engage the trope of nomadism so as to propose a pre-colonial imaginary of a Somali polyvalent cosmopolitanism as a possible tool for thinking through our contemporary geographies of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Always A Novice: Feminist Learning And Leadership Practice, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

Learning about the theory and practice of intersectional feminism played an important role in my development as a librarian and a library director, and the ongoing study of feminism continues to be integral to my leadership work. Th e definition of feminism that I prefer is the concise and powerful statement by bell hooks: “feminism seeks to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” While I did not attend a library and information science graduate program with the express intention of becoming a library director, that is where I find myself. And while I have always considered myself a feminist, I …

Toward The Anthropology Of White Nationalist Postracialism: Comments Inspired By Hall, Goldstein, And Ingram’S “The Hands Of Donald Trump”, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article explains Donald Trump’s brutal political effectiveness in terms of his white nationalist appeal. It locates the intellectual, popular, and policy imperatives of Trumpism in a new form of racial politics that I am calling white nationalist postracialism. This is a paradoxical politics of twenty-first-century white racial resentment whose proponents seek to do two contradictory things: to reclaim the nation for white Americans while also denying an ideological investment in white supremacy. The article shows how Trump’s excoriation of political correctness, his nostalgia for the post–WWII industrial economy, his use of hand gestures, and his public speaking about race …

We Like Fried Things: Negotiating Health, Taste And Tradition Among Spanish Caribbean Communities In New York City, Melissa Fuster

Publications and Research

The study was conducted to understand fried-food (FF) consumption among Hispanic Caribbean (HC) communities in New York City. Data were collected through qualitative interviews with 23 adults self-identified as Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican. Most informants considered FFs an important part of their traditional diet. Potential explanations included taste, cost, convenience, and the emotive values attached to FF. FF consumption was contextualized in local foodscapes. Results include strategies to diminish FF consumption and differences across HC groups and migratory generations. The relevance for future nutrition interventions addressing health disparities in this community is discussed

Affect Bleeds In Feminist Networks: An "Essay" In Six Parts, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

'Confounding Powers: Anarchy And International Society From The Assassins To Al Qaeda' By William J. Brennar (Review), Zachary C. Shirkey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Charting Syriza's Swift Rise And Fall, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography And The Student Experience, Andrew Asher, Jean Amaral, Juliann Couture, Barbara Fister, Donna Lanclos, M. Sara Lowe, Mariana Regalado, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives in developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) Project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse higher education institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this …

Washing Machine Races, Gulag Pizza, And Mc Lenin: Kitsch-Ification In Post Socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer

Publications and Research

During the cold war, material culture could symbolically mark conflicts between the East and West. Lenin, Marx, the sickle and hammer symbolized communist strength. Household items and electronics were marveled at as new and advanced in contrast to the Western capitalist exotic “Other.” In Hungary today these symbols become Communist kitsch that can undermine former tensions and illustrate a collective ambivalence towards the post-socialist condition by (1) reinterpreting time and space, (2) symbolizing the cold war ‘other,’ (3) creating fantasized spaces, (4) and by representing a generational divide. Making former symbols of Communist strength ‘kitschy’ illustrates a mockery of the …

Many Hats, One Head: Considering Professional Identity In Academic Library Directorship, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. As an alternative, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored "digital surrealism" that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-five feature-length films …