Spatial variation in biodiversity, soil degradation and productivity in agricultural landscapes in the highlands of Tigray, northern Ethiopia

There is a growing concern about food security and sustainability of agricultural production in developing countries. However, there are limited attempts to quantify agro-biodiversity losses and relate these losses to soil degradation and crop productivity, particularly in Tigray, Ethiopia. In this study, spatial variation in agro-biodiversity and soil degradation was assessed in 2000 and 2005 at 151 farms in relation to farm, productivity, wealth, social, developmental and topographic characteristics in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. A significant decrease in agro-biodiversity was documented between 2000 and 2005, mainly associated with inorganic fertilizer use, number of credit sources and proximity to towns and major roads. Agro-biodiversity was higher at farms with higher soil fertility (available P and total N) and higher productivity (total caloric crop yield). Low soil organic matter, few crop selection criteria and steep slopes contributed to soil erosion. Sparsely and intensively cultivated land use types, as determined from satellite images, were associated with high and low agro-biodiversity classes, respectively, as determined during on-farm surveys in 2005. This study gives insight into the recent changes in and current status of agro-biodiversity and soil degradation at different spatial scales, which can help to improve food security through the maintenance of agro-biodiversity resource

Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting Hegemonic Racism

This essay identifies emancipatory racial humor as a disarming critical public pedagogy that confronts racial hegemony. Acknowledging the interpretive quandaries of humor and the possibilities of racist humor, this essay tells an often overlooked story of the comic “heroes” who struggle against dominant racial meanings, power relationships, and identity constructions. The essay analyzes the pedagogical possibilities of critical humorists who creatively confront hegemonic racism and whose work participates in critical projects of social, political, and cultural transformation. Such emancipatory racial humor serves as a critical public pedagogy that exposes dominant public pedagogies, injects counternarratives into the struggle over hegemony, and subverts naturalized racial meanings and privileges

Critical Intersections and Comic Possibilities: Extending Racialized Critical Rhetorical Scholarship

Communication scholars conducting work on race must engage work from complementary critical communities to bolster their own critiques and further advance progressive racial coalitions. Critical, rhetorical scholarship and Critical Race Theory (CRT) share principle aims that provide significant ground for interdisciplinary racial projects. Together, these interrelated disciplines can find reinforcement in comedic discourse. This essay locates racial comedy as a space for transformational critiques. More specifically, the author argues that critical rhetorical scholarship and CRT taken jointly can illuminate parallel comic discourses and advance their important correctives pertaining to race and racism

Prudence and Racial Humor: Troubling Epithets

Prudence is an essential virtue in a contemporary racial culture marked by the contingencies and the paradoxical in/stability of race and racism. Recurring controversies surrounding racial epithets exemplify this clash between deeply entrenched racial meanings on one hand and shifting conventions on the other. I argue in this essay that racial humor presents a valuable site for understanding and practicing prudential reasoning and performance. Analyzing three episodes from popular texts—The Boondocks, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and South Park—I illustrate the way racial humor resists prescriptive reasoning and creates possibilities for audiences to practice prudence

Critical Race Humor in a Postracial Moment: Richard Pryor’s Contemporary Parrhesia

Racial truth-telling becomes a difficult project given the current sociopolitical context that privileges postracialism and neoliberal individualism. Critical race humor, however, remains a public and popular discourse where people not only speak but also engage powerful racial truths. This article presents critical race humor as a contemporary form of parrhesia, or frank and courageous criticism. As a critical practice, parrhesia resonates with tenets of critical race scholarship and critical communication scholarship. Using the truth-telling comedy of the late Richard Pryor as a case study, this article suggests that critical race humor could be understood as parrhesia for our time. Moreover, critical race humor as a form of public pedagogy might provide people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality

Dick Gregory and Activist Style: Identifying Attributes of Humor necessary for Activist Advocacy

Human rights advocacy is often austere, if not funereal. Nevertheless, humorists have long engaged human rights activism through their art. Against claims that humor weakens action or conservatively maintains the status quo, this essay argues for humor as necessary element in human rights activism. At its best, humor awakens communities by providing new perspectives on reality and sharpening understandings of injustice. It provokes dialogue and action and humanizes all parties in a struggle. This essay explores humor as a necessary, if not sufficient, component of an activist political style through a case study of comedian and activist Dick Gregory. Using evidence from Gregory's performances and speeches as well as public discourse about Gregory, this essay establishes humor as an integral characteristic of an activist political style