A Place At The Table: A Feminist Analysis Of A University’s Curriculum Development In Partnership With A “Local Food” Non-Profit Organization

In this feminist ethnography, I returned to a small rural public Hispanic-serving university in the southwestern U.S. in order to critique how practices of inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders during the curriculum development process reproduce inherited privilege. I examined texts such as reports, emails, meeting notes, and student surveys, and I interviewed university personnel and community members active with the Local Foods Coalition who had been invited to advise on the new Food Studies major. These data revealed paternalistic neoliberal efficiency mindsets which perpetuated exclusion of minoritized peoples’ perspectives. I used feminist theory to describe and critique the power structures and their functions. This theoretical grounding enabled me to dive more deeply into neoliberalism as a framework for analysis of curriculum development in higher education.I focused on three elements of feminist theory (challenging authority, analyzing power structures and their reproduction, and naming paternalism) in order to develop a critique of neoliberalism in higher education curriculum development. I named neoliberal phenomena present in this curriculum development process, including deregulation of environmental and labor protections which benefit corporations, externalization of costs, efficiency mindsets, designing for standardization, privatization of what used to be public services, framing people as consumers, and commodification

Flipbook-ENA: Towards a dynamic Ecological Network Analysis under changing environmental conditions

Changes in abiotic parameters can affect ecosystem structure and function. Network models with subsequent Ecological Network Analysis (ENA) are often used for the quantification of ecosystem-wide properties with descriptive system indices. However, dynamic abiotic alterations of an ecosystem cannot be resolved with the “state of the art” ENA as the methodology of analyses is static in both space and time. In this study, we present a new, almost dynamic ENA “Flipbook-ENA” which allows for the trend analysis of system indices over a defined range of abiotic factors. Flipbook-ENA enables an approximation of the dynamic system response by discretizing the continuous influence of abiotic factors and by calculating the corresponding changes in the model for each discretization step. ENA indices are therefore obtained as a discrete function of the abiotic conditions. We applied this new concept to two aquatic food web models as case studies, using temperature as the influencing abiotic factor. Flipbook-ENA can be considered an enhancement of ENA flexibility, also facilitating the provision of a quantitative assessment basis for socially, economically and ecologically-balanced management of ecosystems in unstable environmental conditions under the pressure of climate change

I-LEEP Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 1

https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/ileep_newsletter/1004/thumbnail.jp

Investigation of marine temperature changes across temporal and spatial Gradients: Providing a fundament for studies on the effects of warming on marine ecosystem function and biodiversity

A current critical issue in climate change studies is how temperature changes and shifts on different spatial and temporal scales can affect organisms in terms of trends, variability and frequency of extremes. In this paper, we analysed marine temperature data on different temporal and spatial scales. We related the sea surface temperature data from the Helgoland Roads Time Series, one of the most important and detailed long-term in situ marine ecological time series, to the Sylt Roads, North Sea, Germany, Europe, North Atlantic and Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures. All time series showed a distinct upwards shift in temperature in the late 1980s, early 1990s, with positive trends in overall for the period between 1962 and 2019 ranging from 1 to 2 °C over 57 years. We quantified changes in temperature variability by comparing the years before and after 1990, on both long-term and seasonal scales. At Helgoland and Sylt, an increase in the number of warmer days in summer and a decrease in extremely cold days in winter are the new characteristics of the temperature pattern after 1990; higher than expected temperatures now also occur earlier during the year. For these locations, we observed the highest trends overall, i.e. of around 0.3 °C/decade. The observed bimodal shape of the probability density functions, characterized by winter and summer modes, had become more heterogeneous, with the cold mode peak moving to higher values and the steepness to the peak increasing, which is a consequence of a decrease in extremely cold days. North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) large-scale phenomena had no significant correlations or, for the NAO, were limited to the winter season at the regional and local scales. The closest landmass (mainland Germany) temperature was highly correlated with the North Sea sites. Taken together, our results suggest that marine pelagic ecosystems and their species are subject to temperature shifts with similar patterns but with variations in magnitude at the different scales. Temperature is one of the main drivers of species diversity and distribution, and this manifests on different spatial and temporal scales depending on population growth, life stages, cycles and habitat. Accordingly, we here present the temperature changes on the appropriate spatio-temporal scales, and thus provide the suitable and useful fundament for studies on the effects of warming on marine ecosystem function and biodiversity