Steeltown Roots : Duality, Detachment, and the Search for Identity in Postwar Pittsburgh Literature

While the city is a common topic in American literature, if you were to Google “Pittsburgh literature,” chances are, rather than finding a list of stories about the Steel City, you would be linked to the Carnegie Library or the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by its lack of attention, I have directed my efforts toward making a case for Pittsburgh’s modest yet significant role in American literature, particularly during its “postwar” period. The “postwar” sequence of events that occur between the city’s industrial prime following World War II and its transformation into an academic and cultural center for medicine and technology upon the decline of its steel industry in the nineteen eighties, is in short, an American story of survival. Two American writers, both previous residents of Pittsburgh, significantly portray their narratives of duality, detachment, and identity in congruence with the city’s urban landscape. By identifying Pittsburgh\u27s presence in Annie Dillard’s post-World War II memoir, An American Childhood (1989) and in Michael Chabon’s modern fiction novel, Wonder Boys (1995), I intend to emphasize the parallels between the characters and their city. Specifically, I will discuss the way in which Pittsburgh’s postwar story is reflected in the lives of the characters through a consistent theme of duality, in which detachment is required in order to redefine identity. By illuminating the parallels between the characters’ duality and the city’s postwar urban transformation, I hope to secure the notion that few writers have conveyed in literature—the American search for identity is embodied in the story of Pittsburgh’s renaissance

‘Creator gave us two ears and one mouth’: Soundscapes as signifiers of environmental crisis at the intersections of Indigeneity and Acoustic Ecology

Acoustic ecology has served as a foundational theoretical field for many sound scholars to understand the soundscape as a signifier for environmental crisis. While sound theorists like R. Murray Schafer and those in the World Soundscape Project have developed ways in which to critically analyze environmental soundscapes, these methods have often excluded Indigenous narratives which offer complex understandings of sound through embodied experience. In this paper I employ a brief description of acoustic ecology, drawing attention to its benefits as a methodological approach to sonic ordering, while also demonstrating the possibilities for expansion of this field when examined in conversation with Canadian Indigenous perspectives and notable sonic activist movements. I address how Indigenous knowledge systems, futurisms, art, and activism can provide critical perspectives within the field of acoustic ecology, which lends well to understanding soundscapes of crisis. I identify a few case studies of sonic forward Indigenous environmental movements which include game design by Elizabeth LaPensée, Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound sculpture, and the Round Dance Revolution within the Idle No More movement. In sum, this paper works to bridge the work of acoustic ecology and Indigenous sonic movements to encourage a complex and nuanced relationship to sound, and to explore moments for understanding sonic intersections at the forefront of environmental crisis

The homogenisation of prospectuses over the period of massification in the UK

Through historically oriented critical discourse analysis this article considers how the messages regarding the purpose of higher education, as presented in prospectuses of four case study institutions, have been impacted by massification and marketisation in England between 1977 and 2018. The prospectuses of four higher education institutions of different status were analysed to trace how discourses relating to the value of an undergraduate degree could be identified in the prospectuses. The findings suggest that while the prospectuses presented multiple rationales as to why students should undertake degrees, there was a significant increase in focus on graduate transitions to employment and a parallel hollowing-out of information relating to course content. The study found that over the period the vocabularies drawn on to present the value of a degree have become homogenised, yet the rationales given for undertaking tertiary study became more numerous and complex, making diversity of institutional offers difficult for prospective students to differentiate

Estimating above and below ground vegetation biomass and carbon storage across an intra-urban land-use gradient in mid-Missouri

*Urbanization includes a gradient of disturbance along which impacts on vegetative communities can widely vary. Urban forests play a vital role as carbon sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide. In order to further understanding of the impacts of urbanization on vegetative communities and carbon storage six intra-urban 50m2 plots were surveyed for vegetation characteristics such as species richness, basal area, proportion invasive species, and species morphometrics. Morphometric data were used to quantify vegetative biomass and carbon storage. Trees within the bottomland hardwood forest were shown to be significantly larger in DBH and canopy height than all other sites. Total estimated carbon storage was also largest within a bottomland hardwood forest (38,990.2kg) and smallest within a bottomland floodplain grassland site (15.9kg). Carbon storage estimates generated with i-tree Eco were significantly smaller (p = .00013) than estimates made with allometric biomass equations. This study increases understanding of vegetative communities' composition, biomass and carbon storage across an intra-urban gradient and provides science-based information that will improve urban forestry practices

The impact of pre-entry work experience on university students’ perceived employability

Much research on the employability development of university students and the employability experience of graduates treats learners as experientially homogenous and ignores the potential impact of pre-entry work experience on either students’ confidence or their employability-related behaviours. This study explored the confidence of commencing students aged 17 to 21. The objective was to understand whether and how study and career confidence differs among commencing students according to whether they have never worked, are working whilst studying, or have worked previously and have stopped work. The impact of work experience including that gained prior to university entry is often overlooked when discussing students’ perceived employability. This largely quantitative study explores the perceived employability of commencing university students who began their studies soon after finishing high school and compares these self-perceptions relative to work experience. The study employed a self-measure of study and career confidence (Bennett, 2021) grounded in social cognitive career theory with 2,374 full-time students. Differences across the categories were explored using t-tests and multivariate analysis. The analysis concluded that 1,272 students (53.6%) were working at the time of the study, 1,025 students (46.4%) had previously worked but were not working at the time of the study and 77 students (3.2%) had never worked. The findings, illustrated by students’ text-based descriptions of their employability development activities, suggest a hierarchical relationship between pre-entry work-experience and more confident self-perceptions of employability. Implications for higher education employability development are discussed

Distinct Neural Response to Visual Perspective and Body Size in the Extrastriate Body Area

Neuroimaging research has independently implicated the extrastriate body area (EBA) in distinguishing between different visual perspectives and morphologies of bodies within visual processing. However, the combined processing of these physical attributes towards neural EBA response remains unclear, and may be crucial in influencing higher-order, aesthetic evaluation of bodies. Indeed, EBA alterations amongst eating disorder patients have been associated with disturbances in body image, and disruption to EBA activity amongst healthy individuals shown to influence aesthetic evaluations made towards bodies. Therefore, the present study used images of slim and large female bodies viewed from egocentric and allocentric perspectives, to investigate neural EBA response in healthy females (N=30). In addition, participants provided behavioural aesthetic and weight evaluations of all model stimuli. Results revealed an interaction, bilaterally, between visual perspective and body size in EBA activity, with multi-voxel pattern analysis revealing distinct neural patterns between the four conditions. However, EBA activity did not relate to non-clinical eating disorder psychopathology. No direct relationship was found between EBA activity and behavioural evaluations of model stimuli; however, a whole brain analysis revealed that higher-order, prefrontal regions were associated with cognitive evaluations of large bodies. Taken together, our results suggest that the EBA is an integral core region in discriminating between multiple physical attributes of the body, which is likely to provide important information to higher-order brain regions which make aesthetic evaluations towards bodies

Facilitating Collaborative Metadata Creation for Faculty-initiated Digital Projects

The usability and long-term preservation of digital humanities projects, such as a digital archive or other project built around digitized materials, depend on thoughtful and thorough metadata creation. The variety of expertise required to create high-quality metadata for digital humanities projects practically requires a collaborative approach. Putting the call for collaboration into practice requires tools that are accessible and functional for all collaborators. Research on tools for metadata creation has tended to focus either on tools for librarians to manage digital project metadata or on tools for independent author metadata creation (Greenberg, 2003; Crystal & Greenberg, 2005). The literature has also tended to focus solely on the use of spreadsheets for metadata creation. Lincoln (2018) has discussed best practices for Google Sheets in archival metadata entry, and Broman and Woo (2017) have discussed best practices for spreadsheet data entry in general. This article positions tool selection and configuration as site of collaboration for the creation of digital project metadata through its examination of a Google Forms-based workflow for the creation and organization of metadata