Making It Count: Mentoring as Cultural Currency

Mentoring relationships, those meaningful and often affective connections that characterize our work with students and colleagues, by their very nature, defy quantification. Even as we use the banking metaphor to describe our “investment” in others, the “return” for our time, and the “credit” we deserve, many of us who value mentoring for its qualitative and interpersonal nature resist putting our work into numeric terms. Yet, in an academic culture that asks us to measure our contributions and quantify our merit, we must prove cultural capital: that we have the currency to back our reputation and contributions. Like business models that illustrate income and expenses, the curriculum vita communicates to others how we spend our professional time and energy. We must demonstrate our worth within the academic world if we are to secure tenure and promotion (like funding for a business). While we certainly believe that academic review should move away from such business and banking models, we recognize that to make such change, we must establish ourselves within this system by conveying our worth to others. To do so, we propose ways of changing the curriculum vita and review portfolio to make mentoring count and to establish the value of mentoring as a scholarly activity that must be valued because it is valuable to the academy

Toward a Rhetoric of Scholar-Fandom

Individuals who consider themselves both scholars and fans represent not only a subculture of fandom but also a subculture of academia. These liminal figures seem suspicious to many of their colleagues, yet they are particularly positioned not only to be conduits to engaged learning for students but also to transform the academy by chipping away at the stereotypes that support the symbolic walls of the Ivory Tower. Because they are growing in number and gaining influence in academia, the scholar-fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffy) and other texts by creator Joss Whedon are one focus of this dissertation. Though Buffy academics or Whedon scholars are not the only ones of their kind (e.g., academic- fan communities have cropped up around The Simpsons, The Matrix Trilogy, and the Harry Potter franchise), they have produced more literature and are more organized than any other academic-fan community. I approach all of my subjects—fandom, academia, fan-scholars, and scholar-fans—from a multidisciplinary perspective, employing various methodologies, including autoethnography and narrative inquiry. Taking several viewpoints and using mixed methods best allows me to begin identifying and articulating a rhetoric of scholar-fandom. Ultimately, I claim that Whedon academic-fans employ a discourse marked by intimacy, community, reciprocity, and transformation. In other words, the rhetoric of Whedon scholar-fandom promotes an epistemology—a way of knowing—that in Parker J. Palmer’s paradigm is personal, communal, reciprocal, and transformational

“Hanging Out”: Cultivating Writing Groups Online

In this narrative, we describe the process and value of meeting in online writing groups via google hangouts. These groups offer a range of benefits, including just-in-time support, mentoring, and processing of the clamorous, eventful life of the writer. These groups also serve as a life-giving writing environment where we can think out loud and share spoken and written ideas with engaged, supportive, and sympathetic readers

Connecting

Helen Walker - More Apt, Connected Title Sheryl Lain - Hey, Teach! Do You Love Me? Matthew B. Ittig - Ask Me Tomorrow Laurence Musgrove - Writing Program Julie O’Connell - The Power of a Slave Narrative Leslie A. Werden - Embracing Chaos Donna Souder-Hodge - Teaching Dachau Tanya R. Cochran, Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, & Beth Godbee - Hanging Out: Cultivating Life-Giving Writing Groups Onlin

Is alcohol consumption a risk factor for prostate cancer? A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Research on a possible causal association between alcohol consumption and risk of prostate cancer is inconclusive. Recent studies on associations between alcohol consumption and other health outcomes suggest these are influenced by drinker misclassification errors and other study quality characteristics. The influence of these factors on estimates of the relationship between alcohol consumption and prostate cancer has not been previously investigated. Methods: PubMed and Web of Science searches were made for case–control and cohort studies of alcohol consumption and prostate cancer morbidity and mortality (ICD–10: C61) up to December 2014. Studies were coded for drinker misclassification errors, quality of alcohol measures, extent of control for confounding and other study characteristics. Mixed models were used to estimate relative risk (RR) of morbidity or mortality from prostate cancer due to alcohol consumption with study level controls for selection bias and confounding. Results: A total of 340 studies were identified of which 27 satisfied inclusion criteria providing 126 estimates for different alcohol exposures. Adjusted RR estimates indicated a significantly increased risk of prostate cancer among low (RR = 1.08, P 1.3, <24 g per day). This relationship is stronger in the relatively few studies free of former drinker misclassification error. Given the high prevalence of prostate cancer in the developed world, the public health implications of these findings are significant. Prostate cancer may need to be incorporated into future estimates of the burden of disease alongside other cancers (e.g. breast, oesophagus, colon, liver) and be integrated into public health strategies for reducing alcohol related disease

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

"Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses

For decades, the phrase fan activism has referred almost exclusively to television fans' efforts to save their favorite series. These campaigns—dating at least as far back as the original Star Trek (1966–69) to the more recent Farscape (1999–2003), Firefly (2002–3), Jericho (2006–8), and Veronica Mars (2004–7), among others—appear effective at catalyzing fan involvement, yet are largely ineffective at saving series. In other words, while it may achieve some secondary, albeit significant, victories such as tighter-knit relationships among fans, fan crusading rarely seems to end with the supposed primary goal of activist labors: more installments of the texts devotees admire and love. Recently, however, the phenomenon of fan activism has taken on a new dimension, and scholars are beginning to take note by asking several important questions. As Henry Jenkins asks, how does a fan move from "participatory culture to public participation"? And what does this move mean? As one might expect, there are many reasons for and implications that emerge from this reallocation of such devoted attention. To explore some of those reasons and implications, the author considers some of the devotees of television auteur Joss Whedon, their activist efforts, and the distinct ways Whedon inspires a politically participatory fan following. Ultimately, the author contends that through their activism, many enthusiasts of the Whedonverses extend the worlds of Whedon's stories by consciously constructing a sociopolitical, feminist identity

Commitment-Driven Co-Authoring

In our experience collaborating—with each other and with others—we have come to see again and again that shared commitment is what really drives collaboration, what makes it possible. Lack of shared commitment (or voicing of, explicit agreement on, or even evident effort toward enacting shared commitment) seems to underlie co-authoring experiences that go awry. In this way, co-authoring is not about a procedural division of labor; rather, it is about expressing and trusting our shared commitment and learning the strengths of each collaborator so that we can draw on—lean into—each others’ strengths to move ourselves and the current project forward. Coming to a clear understanding of each aspect of the project is, of course, essential to our process. It is not that everyone necessarily does equal work, but instead equitable (fair, agreed-upon, and recognized as important) work, which means that everyone is fully acting from their strengths and embodying stated, shared, and agreed on commitments. In other words, no one displays an attitude of deferral or waiting for others to assign tasks; everyone has full agency and ownership over the project