Removal of pathogenic and indicator bacteria from dairy wastewater using an ecological treatment system.

In the quest to improve the sustainability of water treatment options, plant-based systems, such as wetlands and ecological treatment systems, have become a promising alternative. To date, most of the research on ecological treatment systems has focused on the ability of these systems to remove excessive nutrients, turbidity and BOD from wastewater. However, wastewater is the primary source of fecal contamination in aquatic ecosystems; therefore another factor key to making these systems successful is ensuring their ability to remove pathogens. This study assessed the ability of an ecological treatment system to remove total coliforms and E. coli from dairy wastewater. Total coliform and E. coli data was collected from the ecological treatment system located on Waterman Farm (WETS) at The Ohio State University. A three phase dosing experiment was conducted during the summer and early fall of 2005 to assess the capacity of the WETS to remove pathogens from wastewater. Wastewater was diluted with wellwater at a ratio of 1:3 during the month of July, in August the ratio of wastewater increased to 1:1, and in September increased to 2:1. Regardless of wastewater concentration, total coliform and E. coli concentrations were consistently reduced by at least 95% from influent to effluent of the WETS, with over 60% of the reduction occurring in the first two reactors. Pathogen concentrations were negatively correlated with DO and NO3 concentrations and positively correlated with TSS concentrations. These results indicate that ecological treatment systems have the potential to successfully remove pathogens from wastewater.OARDCUSD

Examining the ‘flexible museum’: exhibition process, a project approach, and the creative element

Flexibility - considered broadly as adaptability and responsiveness to external forces - is a highly valued trait in late-modern life. As it reaches into new settings, there is scope to examine the diverse meanings, forms, and effects that it takes on. Using Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (Glasgow) as a case-study, this paper explores how a ‘flexible museum’ is produced and sustained. By recounting ethnographic observation of the making of a small display on Charles Darwin, it identifies how flexibility is variously made manifest not only as frequent material change, but also through new work-procedures and improvisatory practice. More broadly, and as situated within the landscape of museological reform, insight into the experiences and perceived effects of change on the everyday practice and sense of professional self of museum staff is provided

The multi-sensory museum

Traditionally, museums have been visual - 'Do Not Touch' - spaces. However, interactive and multisensory media are increasingly being used to help pursue wider democratic goals of appealing to new and more diverse audiences. This essay examines how one museum, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow (Scotland), has sought to reconfigure its sensory regimes of display. It discusses the incorporation of multiple sensory logics and queries whether one potential result of such mixings is a kind of sensory disorientation

Examining the ‘flexible museum’: exhibition process, a project approach, and the creative element

Flexibility - considered broadly as adaptability and responsiveness to external forces - is a highly valued trait in late-modern life. As it reaches into new settings, there is scope to examine the diverse meanings, forms, and effects that it takes on. Using Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (Glasgow) as a case-study, this paper explores how a ‘flexible museum’ is produced and sustained. By recounting ethnographic observation of the making of a small display on Charles Darwin, it identifies how flexibility is variously made manifest not only as frequent material change, but also through new work-procedures and improvisatory practice. More broadly, and as situated within the landscape of museological reform, insight into the experiences and perceived effects of change on the everyday practice and sense of professional self of museum staff is provided

Assembling the New: Studying Change Through the 'Mundane' in the Museum as Organization

Change is highly valued within the museum sector and related literatures. Despite this emphasis, it is claimed that the field struggles to adequately understand and explain change processes, and that new critical and methodological tools are needed to move discussion forward (Peacock 2013). This paper offers one possible route by developing an anthropologically informed, ethnographic approach to studying the museum as organization. Illustrated through selected empirical materials from the case of the refurbishment of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the paper focuses on a period immediately following this major capital project. It argues that change is implemented and sustained by the many different players and practices constituting the inner life-worlds of museums as organizations. By analyzing the mediatory capacities of, what in some frameworks might be considered, 'mundane' everyday activities (such as maintenance work and tour-guiding) the paper seeks to expand understandings of what shapes the dynamics of change in museums

Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, health care, and logistics sectors—a research field dominated by behavioral theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through others’ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisatory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible

De-growing museum collections for new heritage futures

This article focuses on curators’ frustrations with (what we call) ‘the profusion struggle’. Curators express the difficulty of collecting the material culture of everyday life when faced with vast existing collections. They explain that these were assembled, partly, from anxiety to gather up what was anticipated at risk of being lost. Unlimited accumulation, and keeping everything forever, are being called into question, especially through the disposal debate which has gained in intensity over the past three decades. While often with some reluctance, setting limits by slowing collecting or even reducing collections through targeted letting go, or what is variously called ‘deaccessioning’, ‘disposing’, and ‘refining’ collections, are undertaken to facilitate ongoing collecting, amongst other goals. To respond to curatorial interest in strategies for addressing profusion, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork looking predominantly at social history museums in the United Kingdom, to consider whether ideas borrowed from beyond museums might be of use. We explore the possible implications of economic concepts of ‘de-growth’ – partly by seeing the ways that these ideas are already practiced, but also by examining curators’ own enthusiasms and reservations. To develop more sustainable collecting practices, we argue that ideas of collections ‘growth’ might be usefully reframed

Other people’s homes as sites of uncertainty: ways of knowing and being safe

The home visit—when professionals work in service users' homes—is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home—both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines

Book review: Exploring Emotion, Care, and Enthusiasm in Unloved Museum Collections, edited by Anna Woodham, Rhianedd Smith and Alison Hess, Leeds, ARC Humanities Press, 2020

First paragraph: The majority of the chapters in this edited book have their origins in the ‘Who Cares? Interventions in “Unloved” Museum Collections’ conference held in 2015 at the Dana Research Centre, Science Museum (London). The conference marked the culmination of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project of the same name. Like the project and conference, this new book shines a light on ‘unloved’ museum collections. A term, the editors explain, which refers to stored collections, and more broadly objects with limited public appeal and for which ‘significance may be harder to recognize’ (p 1). Yet to speak of ‘unloved’ collections is not to suggest that they are disregarded. On the contrary, this book takes the reader beyond public displays into the hidden space of museum storerooms to look at who cares for such collections, and in doing so reveals a range of individuals, groups and institutions who care intensely. Driven by the applied aim of considering what happens ‘when people who care about stored collections are brought into the research, engagement, and curatorial process’ (p 7), the book addresses a broader challenge for the museum sector: how to find new ways to understand, interpret and use ‘unloved’ collections in ways that will enable the public ‘to value them as much as, if not more than, objects which are “easy to love”’ (p 201)