Efforts to Improve Roadway Safety: A Collaborative Approach between Amish Communities and a Professional Engineering Society

Lighting and marking recommendations for animal-drawn buggies and wagons were first established in 2001 through an American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Engineering Practice, EP576.1. Many Anabaptist communities who primarily rely on animal-drawn vehicles utilize this practice for marking their buggies and wagons; however they do not utilize the practice for their low-profile vehicles, such as pony carts. Visibility for pony carts on public roads is important to protect the operators, typically women and children. Following a series of tragic deaths in their community, the Holmes and Wayne Counties, Ohio, Amish safety committee raised the concern of having a consistent lighting and marking scheme for these low-profile vehicles. They also called for an additional aerial device to boost the cart\u27s visibility to the motoring public. This project took approximately two years to develop consensus among Anabaptist stakeholders and members of the professional engineering society. The result of this effort was a revised Engineering Practice, EP576.2, which enhanced the previous recommendations to include consistent lighting and marking of low-profile animal-drawn vehicles

Democracy begins at home : moderation and the promise of salvage ethnography

This article ethnographically maps the activism of moderates engaged with grassroots Republican Party politics in Kansas, a state that for the last two decades has been a primary battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’ in which the value of ‘moderation’ has been the subject of strident contestation. Drawing inspiration from the writings of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, it probes the testimony of activists in an effort to identify those political and social practices and principles that might be considered constitutive in the making of a moderate politics. The goal is to ‘salvage’ a rudimentary activist theory of moderation for those seeking to champion and defend contemporary American democracy at a time when publics and their institutions have been compromised by, or succumbed to, electoral polarization and political extremism. The article argues for the displacement of the usual representation of moderation as a default position defined by the absence of strong ideological or other convictions in favour of an understanding of moderation as a disciplined engagement with divided publics. Most importantly, moderates embrace democracy as a yet-to-be-fulfilled moral project, which serves to infuse the values that underpin moderate politics with normative power and purpose. How to render these values operational in a divided politics remains a central question for both activists and scholars committed to moderation and the practices and values it names