photo by Michael Gooseff
SEEKING ANSWERS AS THE ARCTIC WARMS
Across the Arctic, permafrost seems to be getting a lot less permanent. As stretches of once-frozen tundra melt, the underlying soil can collapse, leaving behind a bumpy landscape of hollows, hummocks, and sinkholes that scientists call thermokarst.
“In hilly terrain you can get massive landslides—thermokarst failures,” says UVM watershed scientist Breck Bowden. Whole hillsides sometimes slough off, dumping tons of sediment into rivers and exposing mineral soils below.
To understand the ecological impacts of these thermokarst failures, Bowden has begun a four-year research study. He’s leading a group of thirteen investigators from ten universities to northern Alaska. Funded by $5.5 million from the National Science Foundation, $1 million of the grant will come to UVM.
“The Arctic has long been considered a canary in a coalmine; some of the biggest impacts of climate change are going to be felt there first,” Bowden says. As soils frozen for thousands of years collapse, engineers are already struggling with failing roads, buckling foundations, and falling pipelines.
“But very few people have thought about the huge ecological impacts,” Bowden says.
“When the hillside fails, we get this huge redistribution of nutrients across the landscape,” he says, “we open up new niches in the landscape for plant colonization, we create opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions, we create opportunities for injecting massive amounts of sediments, and perhaps nutrients, into freshwaters.”
Though thermokarst failures happen naturally throughout Arctic landscapes, Bowden and other scientists strongly suspect global warming has changed the equation. Considering estimates that about 70 percent of permafrost will be lost in the Canadian Arctic in the next half-century, “we expect to see many more of these thermokarst failures, which has got to have increasingly significant effects on the environment,” Bowden says.
Bowden’s field studies will begin next June and continue through 2011, based out of the Toolik Field Station in the foothills of the Brooks Range. His part of the project will look at the impacts of thermokarst failures on streams. Other scientists will explore the hydraulics of hill-slopes, microbial processes in the soil, indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the historical prevalence of thermokarsts, greenhouse emissions, and many other factors—all toward a goal of creating a clearer picture and better forecasting models of the Arctic’s warmer future.
“We’ll have a synthesis season in 2012,” Bowden says, “that will really begin to reveal how all these different studies fit together.”
Since the Arctic holds some 30 percent of all the carbon stored in the world, and a mighty store of the potent greenhouse gas methane, the results are likely to underscore scientists’ growing awareness that the dynamics of global warming will be hugely influenced by thawing northern soils.
HELPING KIDS KEEP IN SCHOOL
More than twenty-five years of academic research have earned Fayneese Miller, dean of the College of Education and Social Services, a reputation as an expert on the social, academic, and political development of adolescents. It’s her most recent project, however—a non-academic “bench book” to be sent to every family court judge in America as a guide for sentencing truant students who often dropout out of high school—that she considers her most significant.
“This book means more to me than any scholarly publication I’ve ever done because it will have a direct impact on young people going through our court system,” says Miller. “A lot of judges will be making decisions based on this book that could turn around the lives of thousands of young people.”
The Bench Book for Family Court Judges is a condensed version of a 200-page evaluation report Miller wrote as a faculty member at Brown University, research grounded in two years of observing Rhode Island’s Stop Truancy Outreach program. The new book provides practical information for judges designed to reduce truancy through behavioral contracts, creative sentencing, motivational suggestions, best practices, and examples of successful truancy reduction programs.
The guide, which also shows judges how their own biases might affect sentencing, was funded by a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice to the National Truancy Prevention Association.
“It focuses on how to help students, not punish them. Judges don’t have a lot of time to read, so it’s written very succinctly and is more of a guide book,” says Miller, who led Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and was its first coordinator and chair of ethnic studies before accepting the UVM deanship in 2005.
Miller’s work on truancy is an outgrowth of her earlier research focused on why some young people succeed and others don’t. She worked from the premise that all young people are alienated regardless of their social class or racial background and that depending on certain social factors, the alienation is either temporary or stable. Those with stable alienation feel as though no matter what happens or what they do they will never get ahead.
Not surprisingly, truant students with stable alienation often don’t think it matters whether they show up for school or not, which often results in their becoming part of America’s 30 percent dropout rate. Each student who drops out of high school costs the nation approximately $260,000 over his or her lifetime. At the current rate, more than twelve million students will drop out by 2018, costing the country $3 trillion, writes Miller.
As truancy rises, so rises daytime crime, juvenile crime, and delinquency rates. Miller says, “If truancy is not addressed during early childhood to elementary-aged years, during the early adolescent years it can have significant negative effects on the positive development of a young person and adversely impact schools, communities, and society in general.”
[OBJECT LESSON]
POWER & IDENTITY
A poster in the Fleming Museum’s Wilbur Room features French philosopher Michel Foucault’s assertion that “power is everywhere.” Spend some time with the “Objects of Power and Identity” exhibit and you’ll walk away convinced.
A suit of armor stands sentinel over the show and one of the cases contains similar stuff—clubs and daggers, swords and spears. But there are plenty of objects on display that evoke power more subtly than a blunt instrument—tin talismans stamped with images of the Holy Family, an ornate paper fan from mid-nineteenth century Italy, a black top hat, a white iPod, and a Vermont badge from William McKinley’s 1897 presidential inauguration, among others.
The exhibit, which was curated by students in UVM’s museum anthropology class during the fall semester, is on display through May 17.
courtesy Fleming Museum
PICTURES (AND WORDS) AT AN EXHIBITION
Through the Fleming Museum exhibit More than Bilingual is an artistic conversation between visual artist William Cordova and poet Major Jackson, the show came together with virtually no literal conversation—just a few e-mails—exchanged between the two men. Jackson says, “We both felt that in order for this kind of collaboration to work it would be best if it was an independent response to his work.”
The UVM associate professor of English first encountered the work of Cordova, a Peruvian-born visual artist who now lives in Miami, last summer through an exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “I was floored by it,” Jackson says. “I was impacted by the multiple levels, the multiple conversations he was having with other artists, both visual and literary, the political and social vision of his work.”
Cordova’s art resonated with Jackson’s own vision, shaped by his experience growing up in North Philadelphia and explored in work that includes his first two collections, Leaving Saturn and Hoops, and the forthcoming Holding Company. “Clearly, Cordova’s art was celebrating an aspect of urban life, which is what I feel like my project has been in my poems for a long time,” Jackson says.
For his part, the artist had connected with Jackson’s poetry, intrigued by its echoes of his own youth, years before the Fleming project. The shared endeavor would be a natural step. “My art practice has always involved collaborating in various capacities,” Cordova says. “Some of the first collaborations evolved through playing soccer as a child in the fact that strategy played a big role in my tiny mind and its development. The objective of my work has always been to raise the awareness of marginalized presence, be it people or history, to document the evidence.”
Cordova’s “Wholesellers, Retailers & Bullshitters,” a 10-by-5 foot piece that depicts a stripped, graffiti-covered panel truck against an expansive field of gold leaf, is among the most striking works on display. The work affected Jackson deeply when he saw it in Boston and it would be one of the works he would draw from directly in creating original poetry for the collaborative exhibit. “I’d been living with it visually in my head for a while — psychically,” Jackson says. “This one I wanted to attack head on.”
Such head-on artistic attacks, Jackson notes, are known as “ekphrasis,” a term that broadly applies to the interpretation of a work of art through another art form. For the past several semesters, Jackson has been discussing the practice with his students as it applies to a poet’s response to visual art. With the Bilingual show, and particularly in the pairing of Cordova’s “Wholesellers” and Jackson’s poem “Dreams of Permanence,” the Fleming shines in its teaching role—the lesson at hand, ekphrasis.
Random commonalities between Cordova and Jackson’s work also build the exhibit’s shared language. You can’t read the first line of Jackson’s “Block Party” on one wall—“Woofers stacked to pillars made a disco of a city block.”—without thinking of Cordova’s “Oradores, Oradores, Oradores,” a towering installation of discarded stereo speakers, looming behind you.
More than Bilingual is on display through May 10.
BETTER LIVES IN A NEW LAND
When refugees arrive on American soil—in steadily increasing numbers, now nearly 5,000 in Vermont—resettlement efforts are centered on basic necessities, finding a home and hopefully a job, functioning in an utterly foreign culture. Talk to them and they tell you they are grateful. They know that they are the lucky ones. And yet. A fresh start and a welcoming community cannot shut off an inner slideshow of suffering, violence, loss, and fear—the all-too-common history of people united by the fact they have fled something.
According to Karen Fondacaro, director of UVM’s Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center, 50 to 80 percent of refugees are estimated to have significant mental health issues, primarily post-traumatic stress disorder, and symptoms related to anxiety and depression. So in July 2007 she stepped into the void, with a team of passionate graduate students, launching Connecting Cultures, a groundbreaking clinical science program with three components: community outreach, direct mental health services, and research that will allow them to formally assess their approach and offer a map for other refugee resettlement communities. To Fondacaro, the psychological and physical, spiritual, and cultural are inseparable, fundamental aspects of survival.
“When you look at the poverty and hunger refugees are facing, if someone is also in the midst of full-blown PTSD,” she says, “it’s a big issue. I’ve treated trauma for over twenty years now but some of the stories we’re hearing now are so horrific it’s taught us more about how you treat this problem.”
Connecting Cultures, at its heart, is based on sensitivity—to the different cultures and beliefs among clients, to their perceptions of power, to their emotional and physical comfort. Fondacaro and her students began outreach efforts by merely hanging out for a couple of hours at a time at the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, becoming friendly, safe, familiar faces. Then they held two community breakfasts, one for men and one for women, with talks on parenting skills that were translated into three languages. The format works, and they plan to repeat it focusing on other issues such as alcohol and substance abuse.
Central to the therapeutic techniques used in the clinic, Fondacaro explains, is giving people control over their stories, letting them decide how and when to talk about the pieces. “They say,” for instance, “‘Well, I can talk about when I was being hung by my hands, but I can’t talk about seeing my parent get killed just yet.’ So they get to pick which pieces they want to talk about first. They are already having nightmares about it, they are already inundated, but they get some control.”
Patrick Giantonio, executive director of Vermont Refugee Assistance, calls Connecting Cultures an extraordinary resource, particularly for those applying for asylum. “You can’t evade those worst moments of torture; as you go deeper and deeper into the darkest moments of someone’s life,” he says, “oftentimes they come apart. But this is the moment when they most need to keep it together. It’s incredibly useful to have them receiving treatment while having to recount these difficult times.”
Fondacaro and her team of graduate students know their mission is not to erase the stories. For someone who has endured severe trauma, the goal can only be to turn the story around. “Hopefully,” Fondacaro says, “they can create a different meaning from it and who they are now. You incorporate it into your life, know that you’ve existed with it, but not live it every day.”
[CELEBRATION]
REMEMBERING MLK
In a week that saw the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president, UVM welcomed human rights advocate and community activist Martin Luther King III, the elder son of the civil rights icon. His keynote talk before more than two thousand people in Patrick Gym anchored a week of events at UVM commemorating Dr. King’s birthday. The younger King used the day, echoing his father and the new president, to urge young people to serve in the fight against poverty and oppression. “Get out there, get active,” he told students at a breakfast gathering. “You can’t fail from trying. You need to try.”
[VQ ONLINE VIDEO]
ANCIENT ACOUSTICS
John Franklin, assistant professor of classics, makes music in a decidedly contemporary way: using a computer and the latest software tools. But the music he creates is anything but modern, originating more than two thousand years ago in ancient Greece. Franklin calls himself a music archeologist. His computer-based innovations, it turns out, are the best way to recreate a music that sounds hauntingly strange to modern ears. Watch a video about Franklin’s scholarly musical pursuits.
[FACULTY FOCUS]
photo by Sally McCay
DISC MAN
Take a jelly donut. Wrap it with a strip of radial tire. Pour in a cup of lactic acid. Pound up and down, twist, squash, and hold. Repeat thousands of times across scores of years.
This isn’t too far off from the life history of your intervertebral disc, the strange fibrous squishy pad that sits between each bone in your spine.
Not too surprisingly, these discs degenerate with aging. Not only do they have the tough job of holding your spine together while still allowing it to flex, they’re also the largest avascular
organs in the body. This lack of blood vessels means that it’s hard to get oxygen in or metabolic waste out. Acid builds up, making it difficult for cells to grow or injuries to heal.
So it should also come as no surprise if your back hurts. About 80 percent of Americans suffer low back pain in their lifetime, we spend more than $50 billion each year seeking relief, and it’s a leading cause of missed work. Unfortunately, there are few easy or early treatments.
But James Iatridis is on a mission to find them.
For his work to understand the biomechanics of the intervertebral disc—and develop prevention and treatment strategies for low back pain—Iatridis recently received the highest award given by the U.S. government to young scientists.
President Bush recognized Iatridis and sixty-six other winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers last December at the White House. Iatridis, a professor with appointments in both engineering and orthopedics, is the first researcher at UVM to ever receive the PECASE award, which provides $1.5 million in research funds.
By studying shear strain of living discs from pigs and human tissue donors, “we’re getting a much clearer picture of the difference between damaging loads and healthy loads,” Iatridis says.
Too much loading, especially “excessive flexion and lateral bending,” he says, contributes to disc damage, but “immobilization is also a problem. It slows the metabolic rate,” he says. His research shows that “dynamic compression loading”—like taking a walk—helps the body repair and remodel discs before they are damaged. “We need to move,” he says.
In another promising line of investigation, Iatridis and his partners aim to find cell therapy techniques that will allow adult spine cells to act more like young cells do during growth, letting damaged discs heal.
“Back pain is not the evolutionary cost of standing erect, but the cost of sitting in a chair all day—the outcome of our current social patterns,” Iatridis says. His work may not change our current social patterns, but it promises to help millions of backs get back to work.
Joshua Brown
[BOOKS AND MEDIA]
ALTERNATE WORLDS
Gaming expert alum pens fantasy novel for young adults
Michael Waite ’82 is no stranger to the world of fantasy and magic. The Seattle-based video game creator—whose resume also includes gigs as a Muppet designer and storybook writer—is studio head at Amaze Entertainment, the production company responsible for the gaming companions to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and Shrek, among other titles.
Waite inhabits another identity, too: Riford McKenzie, author of The Witches of Dredmoore Hollow, his first novel and one of five finalists for the 2009 Edgar Allen Poe Awards for best juvenile mystery.
The novel follows eleven-year-old Elijah, a timid farm boy Waite lovingly labels “nerd-boy” for his dedication to science encyclopedias and cowardly reactions to his own overactive imagination. But when Elijah’s estranged aunts descend upon the family farm at Dredmoore Hollow and abduct him to their dilapidated house at Moaning Marsh, he’s on his own to figure out what they want from him.
Standing in his way are the curious potions (and not-so-pleasant side-effects) his mother’s sisters, Serena and Agnes, use on him to “cure” various maladies, the strange lack of contact from his own parents, the hulking hired man his aunts employ, and his ferocious pet wolf, and the strangle oaks lining the drive up to the foreboding estate—trees that defy everything Elijah has learned from his favorite book, Hodgeworth’s Encyclopedia of Natural Science.
Waite says he isn’t sure why science fiction and fantasy stories are entertainment chart-toppers today, but he has a theory. “You could look at it as a sort of accommodation or reaction to what’s going on on the Web,” he says. “Alternate worlds are really prevalent right now, speaking as a software developer. That’s what I do; I build alternate experiences for kids and adults.”
Unlike much of fantasy literature, Dredmoore Hollow takes place in the recent past, 1927. “I have a romance with turn-of-the-century, Depression-era, the Industrial Revolution,” Waite says. “I wanted there to just barely be cars...anything seemed possible,” he says of that era’s new technologies. “The telegraph and the telephone, electricity was pretty new. All of it was pretty outrageous.”
Magic and technology aside, the heart of the book lies in Elijah’s family secrets. “It’s really about family falling-outs,” Waite explains. “It’s kind of fun to think about all the various petty and even not-so-petty breaches in your own family history and how those would go if you had magical powers at your disposal,” he laughs, acknowledging the likely disastrous results of such a scenario.
Although Waite may write more books about the Dredmoore Hollow clan, he says he has no current plans—or even much interest—in melding the book project with his day job by turning Elijah’s adventure into a gaming experience.
“When you’re making a video game, you can’t be selfish,” Waite explains. “You need to try to do things as a team member and test your ideas against everybody else’s, absorb everybody else’s. Writing a book is kind of an answer to that. It’s very meditative for me. It gives me an opportunity to be selfish.”
Amanda Waite ’02 G’04 (no relation)
[BRIEFS]
American Pragmatism
and Democratic Faith
Robert Lacey ‘93
Northern Illinois University Press
Robert Lacey examines the work of fellow UVM alumnus and one of the founders of American pragmatism, John Dewey. Lacey charts the history of the movement for “participatory democracy” championed by Dewey and others, in which all citizens engage in public life and share the responsibility of political decision-making. He
argues that, ultimately, the political concept is more about faith than theory.
City of Trees: The Complete Field Guide
to the Trees of Washington, D.C.
Melanie Choukas-Bradley,
Illustrated by Polly Alexander ’76
Virginia Press
Sure, everyone knows about the cherry blossoms, but Washington, D.C., offers much more in the way of tree species. The third edition of City of Trees provides more than 400 pages of botanical background on the nation’s capital. Also new in the latest edition: pen-and-ink illustrations by alumna Polly Alexander.
Philosopher’s Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Demise of a Famous Friendship
John Scott and Robert Zaretsky G ’84
Yale University Press
Who knew celebrity feuds were fodder for public consumption way back in 1766, long before the advent of gossip blogs? Robert Zaretsky, a professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston, co-authors the nonfiction narrative chronicling the friendship and falling out between philos-ophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, a drama made public when their
acrimonious letters were published. The Philosopher’s Quarrel examines their brief yet tumultuous relationship, setting their public feud in the context of the differences in their philosophical thought.
