Explaining Obama: The Continuation of Free Market Politics in Education and the Economy

The contributors to this special issue of The Journal of Inquiry and Action provide insight into why the Obama administration’s educational policies manifest the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life. The articles presented herein build on the work originally presented in The Phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for Education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? (Carr & Porfilio, 2011)

Ethnicity and “Women Religious”: How Irish-American and Other Ethnic Nuns Were Presented in American Newspapers from 1865 to 1915

While Catholicism in America has had a turbulent history of mixed rejection and acceptance, the American Catholic Church prior to World War One was not considered a monolithic institution by the American clergy or in certain contexts by the American press. Women religious, such as nuns, were considered unnatural and malevolent at the worst, although this characterization in popular opinion declined after the Civil War, to unusual but benevolent at the best. Moreover, ethnicity was a determining factor among male authors for where on the sliding-scale of social alienation a nun or her convent might fall, although the degree of differentiation relaxed over the fifty years this study investigates. The nuns themselves and women authors did not place much emphasis on ethnicity, choosing to make distinctions between religious orders based on the services they provided to their communities. To examine reactions to nuns’ and convents’ ethnicity, newspapers from around the United States were consulted. Some news articles come from Catholic newspapers, women-focused periodicals, and newspapers both large and small from around the country, including women’s pages devoted to female readers and writers, and female-oriented topics. One problem posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on this study was the unavailability of primary source material written by female women religious themselves, which would have been an invaluable addition to this project. Beginning in 1865 with the close of the Civil War, nuns received their highest praises in newspapers for their contribution as nurses, with relatively little emphasis on ethnicity, although distinctions were made. These distinctions were usually in recognition of the ‘Irish’ religious orders – a loose classification based on either a religious order’s origin in Ireland or the predominance of its Irish members. Decreasing in frequency over time, the Irish were still those most likely to be signaled as outsiders in the press with comments on women’s names prior to taking their vows or references to their birth in Ireland. This period saw rising numbers of immigrants from many countries in addition to Ireland, although Irish immigrants were viewed as more socially permissible than other groups because of the duration of immigration from Ireland and the visible service done by Irish nuns in the war. Over the course of fifty years, the Irish immigrants, and by extension Irish nuns, came to be viewed with special honor as “our” immigrants; if there was a group considered simultaneously ethnically separate and yet distinctly American, it was the Irish/Irish-Americans. Part of this privileged position also came about because of the Irish’s prior knowledge of English. Women with ethnicities such as German, French, Polish, and Italian were also the subject of news articles, although to a lesser extent than the Irish. These articles were not as focused on the origins of specific women, and instead generalized about the order’s chosen work and skills because of the foundresses’ nationality or the religious order’s country of origin. French nuns were viewed as teaching in exclusive schools, while the German nuns taught in less prestigious institutions. Nuns of both ethnicities were expected, if not required, to learn the mother-tongue of the order and were considered elitists by newspapers, with few exceptions. Italian and Polish nuns received less press than the other orders, and it tended to be even more narrowly focused on a single stereotype than the others. All ethnicities tended to have at least one religious order which worked with nursing and child-care such as orphan asylums or day cares. These institutions received an inordinate share of press coverage compared to other good works nuns engaged in

Using Micro Satellites to Assess the Impact of Algae Growth on Global Warming

Data gathered from microsatellites can inform policymakers and environmental agencies about the impact of algae on global warming. It can guide the development of strategies to mitigate or harness the potential benefits of algae growth

A Tribute to Judge James R. Browning

A Tribute to Judge James R. Brownin

THE SENSITIVITY OF SOIL RESPIRATION TO SOIL TEMPERATURE, MOISTURE, AND CARBON SUPPLY AT THE GLOBAL SCALE

Soil respiration is one of the most important terms in the global carbon budget, yet we know very little about how important environmental factors control this process at the global scale. Soils contain more carbon than terrestrial biomass and the atmosphere combined and contribute ten times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year than the burning of fossil fuels. This study provides new insight on the factors driving soil respiration at the global scale by assimilating satellite observations of soil moisture, temperature, and net primary productivity with the Global Soil Respiration Database (SRDB).While temperature, moisture, carbon supply and other site characteristics are known to regulate soil respiration rates at the plot scale within certain biomes, there is no quantitative framework for evaluating the relative importance of these factors across different biomes and at the global scale. We link a subset of observations in the SRDB to soil moisture, soil temperature, net primary productivity (NPP), and soil carbon from global datasets in order to explore the relative strengths of these environmental regulators on soil respiration. We find that calibrating models with parabolic soil moisture functions can improve predictive power over similar models with asymptotic functions of mean annual precipitation. At the global scale, soil temperature is the dominant factor regulating soil respiration; however, soil moisture emerges as the dominant factor regulating soil respiration in temperate and boreal forested ecosystems, and NPP emerges as the dominant factor regulating soil respiration in croplands and grasslands dominated ecosystems. We compare the ways in which these statistical relationships predict global soil respiration values in generalized additive models and several calibrated models with mechanistic structures, which estimate total respiration fluxes ranging from 83 to 108 Pg/yr

Erased, spoiled, obliterated, and defiled : young artists’ transition to maturity through marking and un-marking

textAt certain moments in the creative development of an artist, experimentation leads to creative acts that on their face can appear negative because they are the actions of a young artist responding to the establishment. This thesis is an investigation of such works: a spoiled print, an erased drawing, a set of artist proofs stained by paint, and a painting wiped away with turpentine. Despite these negations, each of these works was pivotal to the career of its respective artist, and they were immediately cited by their makers as works of consequence. The four selected art works did not influence one another and the circumstances surrounding their creation are also distinct. Each work and artist developed independently from one another, in distinct spaces and times. However, there are notable parallels among the works. Each was created as the artist transitioned into the mature phase of his career. Additionally, each of the works is a layering of distinct images. The sub-images relate to an external artist, style, or dogma, and the superimposed image relates to the artist’s own work and his mature style. Further, each of the works is an indexical record of the artist’s activity. Each emphasizes the artist’s hand in the making of the super-image’s mark and even goes so far as to highlight the performative nature of the mark making. The marks of the super-image are so pronounced as the subject of each work and the performative element so emphasized that the artist himself is drawn into the work’s subject matter. In short, I investigate whether these images function as a commentary, a critique, a declaration, or simply as part of a process and a dialogue between the artist and his artistic environment.Art Histor

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