Night Moves

Cathy N. Davidson\u27s three previously published books include The Book of Love: Writers and Their Love Letters. Night Moves is from a new book, 36 Views of Mount Fuji, which will be released by Dutton in October. She is a professor of English at Duke University

Grass Roots Women\u27s Studies: Chicago

The women\u27s studies offerings on college campuses in the Chicago area seem, at first glance, disappointing. the University of Chicago has no courses in this field; neither Northwestern University nor the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle allows an undergraduate major. But despite such inauspicious indications of a general lack of commitment to women\u27s studies in the Second City, there are still a number of more or less established programs available. For example, both Chicago Circle and Northwestern, although they give no degree in women\u27s studies, do staff courses that would almost allow one. At Circle, approximately 80 women each quarter take an interdisciplinary core course such as American Women Today, Women in History, Literature, and Art; or Women in Other Cultures and the Future. These courses (one is given each quarter) are taught collectively and often utilize guest lecturers. Chicago Circle also offers, in various departments, a number of other courses which focus on women. Thus, through the Student Designed Curriculum option, an individual can put together a program which emphasizes women\u27s studies. Inquiries may be addressed to Sandra Bartky of the Philosophy Department

Gender bias in academe: an annotated bibliography of important recent studies

Academic research plays an important role in uncovering bias and helping to shape a more equal society. But academia also struggles to adequately confront persistent and entrenched gender bias in its own corridors. Here Danica Savonick and Cathy N. Davidson have aggregated and summarised over twenty research articles on gender bias in academe, a crucial resource for International Women’s Day

Newly updated for international women’s day – gender bias in Academe bibliography

On this International Women’s Day, and the first anniversary of the post originally appearing on the Impact Blog, Danica Savonick and Cathy N. Davidson have updated the Gender Bias in Academe bibliography with 17 new studies. Here, they offer a brief insight into some of these additions and also appeal to readers and collaborators to continue to share details of new studies so the bibliography can remain thorough and up-to-date

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

In this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for today's graduating high school and college classes. It is for this reason that Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions. This report is available in a free digital edition on the MIT Press website at http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513593. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learnin

The Future of Thinking

How traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of “institution” as a “mobilizing network”—emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change—and explore the implications for higher education. The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft of the book was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing. The authors use this experiment in participatory writing as a test case for virtual institutions, learning institutions, and a new form of collaborative authorship. The finished version is still posted and open for comment. This book is the full-length report of the project, which was summarized in an earlier MacArthur volume, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

A Literature of Survivors: On Teaching Canada\u27s Women Writers

Do all feminists kill themselves or go crazy - or does that only happen in the books feminists write? I am reminded of this question put to meby a student in the first Women and Literature course I taught, whenever I look over a syllabus which begins with, say, The Awakening or The House of Mirth and ends with such writers as Plath or Sexton. Of course, we teach more than plot summary and biography. Set in its context, Edna Pontellier\u27s awakening should be historically, sociologically, and psychologically illuminating for the contemporary student. But we must also accept the fact that our students do look to the books and the authors they read for models of behavior. And many of the female characters in the texts commonly used in women\u27s studies courses just do not provide positive models

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders