Evaluating Public Hearing Testimony in the Context of a High-Risk Environmental Rulemaking: Does public hearing testimony provide the EPA with the information the agency requests in its proposed rulemaking?

Does public hearing testimony provide the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the information the agency requests in its proposed rulemaking? In one EPA proposed rulemaking, the agency requests public comment on approximately 140 topics specific to the proposed rulemaking. This analysis examines the testimony from two public hearings to see if the speakers provided any of the information the agency requested. Public hearings are used frequently in our democratic system and can vary substantially. The public hearings associated with a high-risk environmental proposed rulemaking are compared to characteristics that are common to public hearings in general. The public participation characteristics examined are aspects of representation and substantive involvement. The EPA’s describes representation in the agency’s public participation policies as the “various publics” that they seek to involve in public participation. Academic literature criticizes public hearings as non-substantive with content of minimal value. The EPA public hearing testimony was analyzed for each of these—Various Publics and Substantive content—to see how well the testimony compares to the expectation of the agency’s own policies and to general academic benchmarks. Understanding what information these high-risk environmental public hearings provide, how the representation compares to the agency’s own public participation policies, and how the public hearings compare to the general understanding of public hearings provides meaningful information about the value of these public hearings. This case study of the public hearing testimony expected the public not to provide the information the agency requested, based on a common impression of public hearings being legitimizing events without substantive participation. The expectation for representativeness was that any meaningful or substantive content would be provided by a dominant regulated community, based on another study of public participation proceedings involving a federal agency. The proposed rule has multiple regulatory options that the agency has requested comment on. The speakers testified a preference for which regulatory option they support. In this case, the proposed rulemaking was the EPA’s Hazardous and Solid Waste Management System: Identification and Listing of Special Wastes; Disposal of Coal Combustion Residuals from Electric Utilities, 2009. The proposed rulemaking had three regulatory options. Each testimony includes the speakers “vote” toward their preferred final rule outcome. The speaker’s vote for a regulatory option was compared to the outcome of the final ruling on December 19, 2015

Translating the Year 1299: On Reading Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic in English

Following general reflections on the relations between global media, local and oral history, this paper addresses the paradoxical constraints imposed by language specialization, which focuses Western historians on particular regions and languages at the expense of demotic and oral cultures. Taking up the idea that translation is never an ideologically innocent act, Stein addresses the ambiguous status of English in the Indian context, both as the language of British imperial power, but also as a vehicle for challenging and “writing back” against colonial discourse. To illustrate the linguistic pitfalls that accompany research on South Asian art, the paper investigates the relations between temple art, iconoclasm, and the zinc smelting industry in Jawar, Rajasthan

The visual rhetoric of Charles Callahan Perkins: the early Italian Renaissance and a New Fine Arts paradigm for Boston

The art historian Charles Callahan Perkins (1823–1886) taught Boston elites to embrace early Italian Renaissance art, and, in so doing, transformed the cultural landscape of his city. Mostly Unitarian in their religious beliefs, the local elites had previously spurned Italian paintings and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for their Roman Catholicism. However, when the new Museum of Fine Arts opened on July 4, 1876, the institution displayed close to one hundred art objects of the period, mostly copies. Perkins, who had returned recently from twenty-five years in Europe as an acclaimed scholar and illustrator of early Italian Renaissance sculpture and an expert in fine arts museums, was responsible for this result. Perkins focused on art whose “visual rhetoric” reflected the early Italian Renaissance humanist belief in clarity of line and subject as the most pleasing and edifying in art. These Renaissance principles emerged in his view from classical rhetoric, that is strategies for persuasive spoken and written communication, which had long been the core curriculum of Harvard University where Boston elites studied. Perkins also capitalized on the city’s taste for classical sculpture by privileging quattrocento sculpture, which, while more devotional in subject than had traditionally been displayed, did feature a naturalism that evoked ancient art. Chapter one presents four biographical case studies of individuals who were important players in shaping the fertile cultural ground upon which Perkins built a generation later. Chapter two forges the link between classical rhetoric and the fine arts in ante-bellum Boston. Chapter three examines the broad-based revival of early Italian Renaissance art that Perkins encountered in mid-century Europe. Chapter four assesses his own professional oeuvre within that context. The concluding chapter demonstrates how Perkins revamped ideas of what constituted fine art and how it could be viewed by positioning early Renaissance art at the new Museum as a powerful visually rhetorical tool, thus achieving a far more wide-reaching cultural change than previous scholarship has suggested

The Hegemony of Heritage

The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra

The Hegemony of Heritage

The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra

Charles Callahan Perkins: early Italian Renaissance art and British museum practice in Boston

Art historians have highlighted Charles Callahan Perkins’ pivotal role in promoting London’s South Kensington Museum (‘South Kensington’) as the model for the new Boston Museum of Fine Arts (‘Boston Museum’) incorporated in 1870. In particular, scholars have pointed to the MFA’s embrace of the South Kensington’s central and distinguishing tenet, a belief in art history’s ability to elevate the educational level of the public and the industrial design of everyday objects. However, there has been no systematic identification of the specific South Kensington museum practices adopted by Perkins, nor of the form that they took under his all-encompassing direction. This article addresses these lacunae. It also asserts that the centrality of early Italian Renaissance art to not only the South Kensington’s educational mission, but also that of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, was at the heart of Perkins’ accomplishments in Boston — ones that have largely been understated since his death in a carriage accident in 1886