Wader woes

Waders can be a wonderful thing.  To some, they’re key to a good day of hunting and fishing.  For others, they complete an award-winning costume (meet your director, new Unis!).  And for those of us who insist on centering our Ph.D.s around marsh-breeding species, waders are one of the best inventions ever.  Field sites would be impenetrable without a pair of waterproof hip waders to get us through the day.  Only while wearing them can we brave the mud, the floating vegetation mats, and those horrible muskrat-made potholes to collect our precious data.

But sometimes, even the pluckiest of waders is defeated by the elements.  When the first sound you hear after exiting your car is not the sweet song of sparrows or the burry croak of blackbirds, but rather the steady WHOOSH of water exhaled by drainpipes, you know it will not be a good day for waders.  Your waders know this, too.  You buckle them on and imagine them peering up at you, asking uncertainly, “Do I matter anymore?”

Turns out, sometimes the answer is a big fat NOPE. Three days of rain and you might as well be wearing pajamas in the field.

Now you hear your waders yelling, “It’s a marsh!  It has no drainage!  It’s duckweed soup!”  But you have nests to check and birds to catch, and so you lumber in anyway, and despite your best efforts to hike up your outrageously high-waisted pants, you soon feel the shock of cold water running down your legs and pooling around your feet and the weight of it all pulling your waders lower and lower until equilibrium is reached and marsh muck gleefully sloshes around both sides of the fabric and your lower half becomes one with the marsh.  You’ve officially topped your waders.  It’s 7 in the morning.

Elephantiasis? Triple-jointedness? Simultaneous bow-legs and knock-knees?

Nah, just several pounds of water and all the interesting things floating inside it. Which we have been lugging around with us for the entire day.

One little-known benefit of wading in high water is that your clothes receive a dye job! Check out that hipster fringe on this mass-marketed shirt. It’s gone from plain white to dull gray AND taupe. Who says a three-dollar tee has to be boring?

To be fair, flooded waders are not so bad when the weather is nice. By afternoon, the water has usually warmed up enough that heading back to the road is no big deal. Your pants have been soaked for hours, right? (This is a poor way to get yourself out of a dry, toasty car at dawn.)

Note: You can see a few more photos here of what I’m actually doing in the marsh.  Hope everyone’s summers have been going well!

—Irene L.

Defining Service {lma}

Approximately 17 days ago, another DukeEngage student and I arrived at our volunteer site in a small village called California in Trinidad and Tobago. We learned that we would be working under the supervision of a retired female individual who, to my knowledge, is not affiliated with a government body, a nonprofit organization or any insitution connected to volunteer or service work. We have been completing the assignments she has assigned us in our homestay. In the span of approximately two weeks, we have finished approximately 8 interviews of community members she has arranged for us to speak with. To my knowledge, these interviews will be complied into a report that myself and another DukeEngage student will submit to her. It is unclear to me at this point who will read this report other than those affiliated with the DukeEngage program.

During our training for this project, in a three-day program known as DukeEngage academy, we were often asked to define “service.” Given the experiences of the past two weeks, if what we have been doing is to be called “service,” then I would define “service” as, “an arrangement by which one individual is utilized as a means to achieve the ends of another individual or individuals.”

To follow the experiences of the six students of this DukeEngage project, please visit http://devilsintrinidad.tumblr.com/. To follow my personal adventures and opinions, please visit http://lengagestrinidad.wordpress.com/.

The allosphere

I wish I had found this before the symposium:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

-Ian

Did I mention they’re short?

Two interesting articles on two types of science crossover:

Let’s Not Crowd Me, I’m Only a Scientist (Newsweek)

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy (NYT)

—Irene L.

Potential Keynote Speaker – Jeffrey Baker, MD, PhD

Here are some of the background information on Dr. Baker below. I had Dr. Baker for History of Medicine (FOCUS: Prospective Health Care) last semester and really enjoyed his class. His teaching style is very dynamic and we (students) almost always engage in very lively conversations and debates regarding the course material of the day.

~ Runbin

Dr. Baker is a pediatrician who is also a historian.  He describes his research interests on his webpage as follows:

“My formal training (PhD) is in the history of medicine. I am particularly interested in the history of Pediatrics in the following areas of study.
- Neonatal Medicine
- Preventive Pediatrics
- Childhood Immunizations
-Autism

My current work focuses on childhood vaccine safety controversies, and their relation to broader social and cultural forces in the United States and Britain.”

You can see more information on his profile pages for four different departments/centers with which he’s affiliated (each has a somewhat different profile!)

http://csmeh.mc.duke.edu/people_baker.html

http://spiritualityandhealth.duke.edu/faculty/baker.html

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/jeffrey.baker

http://www.dukehealth.org/physicians/2BA0F01DEC3A594A85256DFD006A9318

~Abhijit

Keynote speaker nominee: Margaret Humphreys

Another possible good keynote speaker for our “Two Cultures” symposium would be Margaret Humphreys, Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine & Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine.  Professor Humphreys was affiliated with the USP in its early days and is exemplary in her approach to interdisciplinarity.  She describes her research interests as:

My major research interest is the history of disease in America, especially in the South. Until the last half of the twentieth century diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, pellagra, and hookworm marked the south as tropical, impoverished, and strikingly different from the rest of the United States. My recent work concerns the history of medicine in the American Civil war. I teach and read broadly in the history of public health, medicine, race, biology, and infectious diseases.

Professor Humphreys has numerous publications, including books and articles.  Among her books are Yellow Fever and the South, (Rutgers University Press, 1992), Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and most recently a book called Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

She teaches at the undergraduate, graduate and professional school level with undergraduate courses in History, including through the Focus program; graduate courses through History and the graduate certificate program on History and Philosophy of Science Technology and Medicine; and in the School of Medicine.

For more on Professor Humphreys, see her bio on the history website at:

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/meh

Tori

Symposium Speakers – Divinity Magazine article on Ray Barfield, M.D., Ph.D.

winter 2009 15

Ray Barfield’ s Epiphany of Presence
LEADING LIVES OF CONSEQUENCE
by Jonathan Goldstein
Divinity Magazine
When Ray Barfield was a second-year resident at Eggleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta, he learned how parents and doctors alike can lose sight of what’s most important when a child is terminally ill.  Barfield was part of a team at the hospital—affiliated with Emory University School of Medicine—treating the 3-year-old son of an Emory pediatrician and faculty member. The child was in the intensive care unit, suffering from a relapse of neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer that is nearly always fatal when it recurs.

Barfield watched as other doctors, especially the boy’s mother, proposed increasingly invasive treatments—even some that are clearly ineffective against neuroblastoma. Meanwhile, the child was sullen, stuck in a sterile intensive care unit, connected by uncomfortable leads and tubes to monitors, intravenous fluid bags and other equipment. All the while he was running out of time.

“We were just desperate to treat this child,” Barfield says. “He was in pain because of what we were doing, and no one was dealing with the fact  that he was going to die. Almost no one survives a relapse of neuroblastoma.”  Finally, the boy’s mother—a mentor to Barfield—realized that medical intervention wasn’t working. She took her son home, where he could spend his final hours with loved ones in familiar surroundings, his pain controlled by morphine.

“At home, his grouchiness went away,” says Barfield, who is affiliated with the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke Divinity School. “He had two or three good days with his family, and then he died peacefully.”

It was a defining experience for Barfield, who last fall joined the faculty of the Divinity School and the Duke Medical Center and is developing a new model of pediatric care.  Cooperating with physicians, nurses, faculty and administrators from across the university, Barfield is working to help practitioners and families make better choices for children who are chronically or terminally ill.

Hi Everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed our meeting on Sunday as much as I did – it was so good to see so many of you there!

Below, I’ve provided a summary of what we decided at the meeting with regard to the Symposium. This is NOT a full summary of our discussion (which I encourage you all to continue on the blog!). Instead, I’ve recapped just the details related to Symposium structure.

Working Title: The Two Cultures: Fifty Years Later Date: Saturday, February 28

Seminar Groups: I. Name/topic: “What makes a culture/roots of the division/Language, specialization, and biological mechanism” Presenters: Chris, Anna, Drew, Carlos Group leader: Drew

II. Name/topic: “A case study: Body vs soul” Presenters: Chantelle, Ian, Charles, Ece(?) Group leader: Chantelle

III. Name/topic: “Two other cultures” Presenters: Melissa/Stephen/Runbin (Academia vs the public), Laura/Denver (Science vs religion), Beth/Kristina (Environmental science vs environmental activism) Group leader: Melissa

IV. Name/topic: “Where are we now?/Connections, communication, and community” Presenters: Anthony (+ general discussion) Group leader: Anthony…

Keynote Speaker Suggestions:

1. Public Relations/NY Times Science writer suggested by the Nic School (please post a name and possibly bio to the blog)

2. Professor Anthony Kelley (Dept. of Music, Duke)

3. Ray Barfield (Duke Div School/Med School prof)

4. Jeff Baker

5. Alex Roland

Other Responsibilities:

1. Poster/Chronicle ad design – Anna and Chris [suggested idea: tree]

2. Program – Runbin and Phyllis

3. Invitations – Louisa and Chinika

4. Nametags – Jodi-Renee and Ga-young

5. Food – Jodi-Renee and the Grad Mentors

If any of this information is incomplete or incorrect, please let me know (I was taking notes furiously and may have missed/miswritten something). Additionally, anyone who was not at the meeting or who has since decided that they would like to present is welcome to join any group. Please just let me know what you’d like to do and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

Note that EVERYONE is expected to participate (by presenting, organizing, or at the very least attending) the Symposium. Finally, please continue to suggest any additional Keynote speakers on the blog. That’s it for tonight – happy evenings! ~ Melissa G.

Symposium Group I ideas

Hey Unis,

Here is a brief summary of the Group I ideas.

Group I Description:

Our group aims to describe the factors influencing culture and specialization within cultures, including language, regional, and discipline-specific influences. If you’d like to join our group, think about ways you can describe the factors that affect culture formation and the reasons why we create cultural or specialization divisions.

Here is a summary of our notes from the first meeting (brainstormed):

1) Define culture
- tools you use to investigate/describe/solve problems
- elements of culture:
- identity
- language
Book: Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn- Carlos, could you follow up with this?
- paradigm defined by people in it, what they’re looking at
- isolation of a particular field
- Why do people draw dichotomies? – Drew, could you follow up with this?
- value of specialization and practical use of categorization
- Why do we study?
- academic vs. non-academic
- “less practical” vs. practical applications of knowledge
- natural philosophy —> science
- “Western” philosophy
- continual process – changing classifications of fact vs. speculation
- microcultures

2) Possible structure for Presentation
- history
- phylogeny
- microcultures

segue from the definition of culture and the elements therein to focus on specialization and microcosms of culture within the umbrella structure

I hope this will spark some thoughts! Feel free to post directly to the blog with comments/ideas/suggestions/presentation ideas, or feel free to email me at anna.brown@duke.edu as well. I also have an email list with all of the members of Group I, which I have posted below in case you’d like to contact the other members in our group.

Take care,

Anna

Here are the emails of everyone in Group I:

anna.brown@duke.edu,
Carlos <cm136 [ at ] duke.edu>,
cjw22 [ at ] duke.edu,
David Honig <david.honig [ at ] duke.edu>,
Drew Marticorena <drew.marticorena [ at ] duke.edu>,
pdm6 [ at ] duke.edu

Stanley Fish, “The Last Professor,” asks “Will the Humanities Save Us?”

Stanley Fish, a former professor of English and Law at Duke, now Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and frequent contributor to the editorial pages of the New York Times, has written several columns about the current state of the humanities in today’s American university system.  Three articles highlighted below segue well into this year’s symposium theme, “Two Cultures: 50 Years Later,” especially the challenges posed to the humanities in particular in today’s corporate-styled university.   The articles review recent publications addressing the crisis in the humanities, with Fish’s special spin on the topic.

In January 6, 2008 article, “Will the Humanities Save Us?”, Fish reviewed Anthony Kronman’s book, “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”  Fish rejects Kronman’s premise that the humanities ennoble the human spirit and that this is the ultimate purpose of the humanities.  Fish counters by saying that the humanities are their own good and that there is no reason to justify their existence because justification diminishes this purpose.

In a subsequent follow-up article, “The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two,” Fish expands on this argument, in response to readers’ comments on his previous blog post.  He explains his own reasons for pursuing humanistic study, namely his delight in solving the puzzles of language and his admiration of the linguistic prowess demonstrated in literary texts.   Significantly, he distinguishes the “humanities” from works of “literature, philosophy, and history,” something that C.P. Snow failed to do in his “Two Cultures” lecture.  Snow pitted scientific inquiry against literary production, not against the study of humanistic texts.  It is the merits of the latter that Fish undertakes to articulate, merits difficult to pinpoint unless, as commenters pointed out, one highlights the importance of the humanities in cultivating critical thinking skills, which make people “more interesting and informed.”   The French hostesses of the salons of the 17th and 18th centuries would be delighted to have such skilled and intriguing interlocutors amongst their attendees.  Are we today?

This past weekend, Fish posted a review of Frank Donoghue’s new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” In this article,  “The Last Professor” , Fish agrees with Donaghue, his former student, about the pessimistic chances for the humanities in the future.  Today’s corporate universities emphasize the importance of “usefulness,” of courses that deliver “the information and skills necessary to gain employment,” and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the liberal arts education.  The humanities, in this universe, are not pragmatic or purposeful, and are thus doomed.  So, I guess the answer to this post’s titular question is, sadly, “No.”  Say it ain’t so, Stan!

Tori L.