Oxford University Press's Blog, page 540

The ethics of war

People often do not associate war and ethics with one another, given the death, conflict, and senselessness that typically arises. However, in this sampling from Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, author George Lucas argues that ethics are not only paramount in military service, but typically more complex than “good versus evil.”

How can we talk about ethics in war, when people are deliberately killing each other?

This question expresses a common misconception that has a grain of truth. Of course killing people and destroying property are morally wrong in virtually all societies, under normal conditions.

The only way we would not categorically condemn these actions is if they were an unavoidable part of our attempts to stop something that was even worse. Simply put, the use of lethal force is morally justifiable only if war is the only remaining way we have available to us to prevent or avoid something even more terrible.

The premise of ethics pertaining to warfare is that war is waged only as the last remaining alternative to an even worse atrocity. If our justification for going to war is to avoid an even greater atrocity or evil, then we ourselves cannot inflict more harm than we are trying to rectify or prevent.

And here we encounter an important moral principle, known as the “principle of lesser evil” or, more commonly, the “principle of proportionality.” That is to say, very quickly in considering whether to wage war, we are forced to invoke moral considerations. We need a really compelling reason (like avoiding genocide or enslavement); we need to have first tried other, less “evil” alternatives than war (and presumably failed); and even then, we need to be reasonably sure our decision won’t bring about even more harm than we are trying to avoid or prevent.

That is how ethics comes to play a role in something even as terrible as violence and warfare. The ethics comes in through the questions we are forced to pose and answer that explain why it is both necessary and reasonable to sometimes fight, rather than surrender and put up with whatever terrible circumstances we are facing.

Isn’t this talk of justified war merely a form of public relations, designed to win public support for morally questionable decisions made by political leaders?

Quite often, one gets the impression that talk of justice in war, or the justification for going to war, is a kind of “sales pitch” designed to persuade a reluctant and skeptical public that they should support a proposal to go to war or to continue to endure the hardships of a war already in progress.

Suppose we accept this very cynical portrayal of political leaders as clever, Machiavellian manipulators who mean to employ subtle rhetorical tricks to dupe us into supporting a war that has no justifiable cause, or serves no useful or significant purpose (other than, perhaps, resulting in some kind of personal gain for themselves and their immediate friends). Why should this ploy work? What makes us all, apparently, “suckers” for the attractiveness of moral arguments?

If our leaders wish to persuade us to fight in, pay for, and suffer the risks and deprivations of war for their own personal gain—that is, if their real intention in declaring and waging war is narrow self-interest, as realists often claim—then their telling us the truth about that motivation is not itself very motivational. This is true even if we, with equal cynicism, believe that everyone in the world ultimately acts only in behalf of narrowly conceived individual interests. If we personally stand to gain nothing from the proposed war, we are unlikely to support it or to fight it.

So, according to this cynical view, political leaders must instead learn how to appeal to our shared sense of justice and fairness, as well as to moral principles like the defense of human rights, in order to foster support for their war. These appeals to the morality and justice of our shared cause seem to have enormous positive appeal. Cynics might continue to argue that this appalling strategy finally works, because the average person is ignorant, gullible, and naïve, and consequently open to manipulations through such “soft” appeals to our emotions and sentiments.

A less cynical observer, however, might think that such appeals address what President Abraham Lincoln eloquently termed “the Better Angels of Our Nature” in his 1864 First Inaugural Address. That is, we are open to such appeals precisely because most ordinary people believe concepts like “morality” and “justice” are important, and that they have some authoritative claim on our choices and actions. In other words, we are subject to persuasion on moral grounds because most of us, most of the time, are not skeptical or cynical regarding moral values and moral principles. It is only because most of us believe that ideals like justice and human rights are valid, important, and universally applicable that the manipulative ploy of the cynical statesman (if that is all it is) is finally able to succeed.

Appeals to morality may sometimes disguise more cynical and unworthy motives. But when this is discovered, it does not constitute an argument against the importance of morality in making decisions about war. Rather it betrays the weak or duplicitous character of political leaders, who would dare to frivolously risk the lives of soldiers and citizens for decidedly unworthy or immoral purposes, and then try to trick them into believing otherwise. This sinister possibility should, in turn, foster the resolve of all of us, military and civilians, to become better informed, more responsible citizens, rather than giving up our most profound moral convictions.

Image Credit: Photo by skeeze. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Why are evangelical voters so ambivalent about Ted Cruz?

When Ted Cruz announced last March that he was running for the Republican nomination for president, he did so at Liberty University. The nation’s largest evangelical university, Liberty was an unsurprising spot for Cruz to begin his campaign. More than any other Republican in the race, Cruz has based his entire campaign on winning evangelical voters as the pathway to his party’s nomination.

Yet the real surprise of 2016 is how poorly Cruz has performed among evangelicals. On Super Tuesday, Cruz lost in key Southern states like Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia, in large part because he could not capture the evangelical vote. (Conversely, Cruz’s victories in Iowa, Texas, and Oklahoma have depended on winning evangelicals.)

The son of a preacher, Cruz often talks in the cadence of a revivalist. His outspoken positions against abortion rights and same-sex marriage have been the stock and trade of Religious Right politics for more than 30 years. Cruz’s promise to defend religious liberty, repeal Obamacare, and abolish the IRS have huge favor among conservative evangelicals.

Despite all this, evangelicals remain largely ambivalent about Cruz. Here are five reasons why:

1) Evangelicals are not a monolithic bloc. Counting more than 62 million Americans, evangelicals are a diverse group religiously, culturally, and economically. Due to their strong support for the Republican Party, evangelicals have often been seen as a homogenous constituency. Yet they are politically diverse as well. From election to election, between 25 to 35 percent of white evangelicals vote for the Democratic Party, but even among Republicans evangelicals range widely across the spectrum. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both darlings of the Religious Right, courted this swath of voters with a broad conservative vision, but Cruz has wrongly gone after evangelical voters with a narrow and angry set of political issues that have limited appeal even among evangelicals. This is a misreading of both evangelical voters and the current political moment which leads to the next point…

“Senator of Texas Ted Cruz at New England College” by Michael Vadon, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

2) This is not a “values” election. Following an Obama presidency and significant social transformations, especially the legalization of same-sex marriage, Cruz understandably has chosen a “culture war” strategy. Yet voters have indicated this election is about the economy and national security. While evangelicals care greatly about social matters like abortion and same-sex marriage, more than 30 years of election data show that these issues do not define their political decisions. As Cruz doubles down on such hot button issues, he misreads where this electorate, including evangelicals, are moving and miscalculates his approach for reaching them.

3) Evangelical voters don’t like Cruz. Cruz has staked his candidacy on his identity as a “Washington outsider,” but he has been unable to escape his reputation as unlikeable and a shady politico. While he talks in a familiar Biblical language, Cruz also comes across to many evangelicals as a shifty televangelist type, a loathed figure for many conservative evangelicals. Evangelicals have accused Cruz of being an opportunist who says one thing to voters in Iowa and another to donors in New York. For a candidate peddling authenticity as one of his chief virtues, Cruz’s inconsistencies come across as typical political chicanery. The Cruz campaign’s dirty tactics, including wrongly telling Iowa caucus-goers that Ben Carson had just dropped out of the race and releasing a video that misquoted Marco Rubio as saying the Bible held few answers to the world’s problems, have generated questions about Cruz’s character, a problem that has plagued his political career from the start and has alienated many evangelicals.

“Ted Cruz” by Gage Skidmore via, CC BY-SA 2.0 Flickr

4) Evangelicals are rejecting the political establishment of the GOP. No sooner had Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 than evangelicals began to worry that the Republican Party had taken their votes for granted. “Were Christians Courted for Their Votes or Beliefs?” a Christianity Today headline asked after another Republican victory in 1988. That question has grown all the more pronounced through the presidency of George W. Bush and the seeming indifference by Congressional Republicans to the agenda of religious conservatives. In Cruz, many evangelicals see not so much a likeminded warrior, but yet another Washington politician who will pay lip service to their cherished issues on the campaign trail but who will ignore them and their causes once in office. In failing to rally behind Cruz, evangelical voters are rejecting the business-as-usual politics they feel has taken advantage of them. Which leads to the final reason why evangelical voters are turning away from Ted Cruz…

5) Two words: Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been the confounding mystery of 2016, but nothing remains more curious than how well he has done among evangelicals. Trump’s victory among evangelicals in South Carolina’s primary paved the way for his wins with the same voters in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, besting Cruz in some of those states by more than 15 percent among evangelicals. Evangelical leaders have mounted a vigorous campaign against Trump’s candidacy, but that has had little sway on the grassroots. While these religious leaders may question the “true” evangelical identity of Trump’s supporters, there’s no question such voters would have received little scrutiny had they lined up behind Cruz. But these voters have cast their lot with Trump. And in doing so, they have denied the presidential aspiration of one of their own.

Featured Image: “Senator Ted Cruz of Texas speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)” by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

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Shakespeare across the globe [map]

On 23 April 2014, the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, a production of Hamlet set off from the Globe Theatre in London. In a span of two years, the 16-person acting group is touring every country in the world, visiting seven continents in 732 days. People around the world will be able to enjoy these celebratory performances, as they have for hundreds of years.

Even mere decades after Shakespeare’s works were published in London, they had circulated from the west coast of Africa to New York City. Only a century or two after that, his plays had reached places like Japan, China, Italy, and Argentina. Now, there are many replicas of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre all over the world, hundreds of Shakespeare Festivals to celebrate his life and work, and endless adaptations of his plays.

Before the travelling group finishes their tour on 23 April 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, take a look at some of the locations where he and his work have had a profound effect.

Do you have any global Shakespeare facts to add? Let us know in the comments below.

Featured Image: “Conjectural reconstruction of the Globe theatre” by C. Walter Hodges. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Art in the streets

Street art has exploded – it pervades our back alleys, surrounds our bus-stops, covers up billboards, competes with advertising, and generally serves as wallpaper for most cities.

We are used to visual noise surrounding us when we are out and about – a glut of graffiti, big billboards, local flyers envelop our entire visual field. We have learned to see through the eye pollution. But, recently, eye candy is slowly replacing the visual garbage: clever, witty, ironic, sarcastic, humorous, and interesting new art is popping up in unexpected nooks and crannies of cities all around the world. Beautiful, clever and inspiring, this new trend has more popularity and appeal with the ordinary public than most contemporary art.

But, what is street art? A far cry from mere graffiti – turf wars on walls, expressions of angry, gang-members attempting a visual territory take-over. No, street art is more socially acceptable than graffiti, but neither officially sanctioned like public art nor institutionally condoned like its more traditional artistic cousins in carefully housed in museums. Somewhere in between these two extremes, street art has emerged, occupying some metaphysically suspect grey area between illegal activity and bona fide art.

‘Dull’ by Geoff Stahl, via Flickr. Used with permission.

But, this grey area of street art includes a wildly diverse set of artistically practices, including all manner of maverick works — space invader mosaics, yarn-bombed army tanks, delicate doilies for chain-link fences, and massive sculptures literally carved onto the sides of highrises, to name just a few. What could possibly unite this motley crew? Simply appealing to the traditional resources of art theory and history, viz., visual features or artistic medium will not do. Philosophers of art, fortunately, have a broader set of conceptual tools at their disposal.

Street artists engage in activism in a unique way: by moving their art out of the museum and into ordinary life, street artists do not merely comment about the state of the world; they intervene and change our world with their works. Inserting art directly into the real world (not the artworld) allows street artists to actively construct a different world to inhabit. Street art is designed to cross the boundary between art and an actual act of protest – that is its point!

‘Suggested Posing Spot’ by Geoff Stahl, via Flickr. Used with permission.

This activism is made possible because of its aconsensual methods of production. No matter what style, medium, or political agenda, all street art is made without consent of the property owner. This aconsensuality transforms the art-making process into an act of political and social protest. It is the umbrella concept under which the diverse facets of street art come together into a single, unified group that does justice to the social, political, intersectional, environmental and legal aspects of street art.

Street art is a sign of the times – where consumerism has become a forced way of life, where the artworld’s institutional pressures suffocate emerging artists, and where marginalised artists struggle to make their voice heard, street art represents an unexpected opportunity to opt out of the artworld system altogether. But these artists are not going underground; they are taking to the streets! There, they have the freedom to create their own art, in their own style, on their own terms. Street art presents a new alternative path for artists – one that allows them a chance for authentic expression, an opportunity to develop a set of alternative customs, traditions and norms that operate alongside, but definitely far away from, the “official” code articulated in art schools. The street is a logical escape from it all.

Street artists are placing their bets on a new artistic practice, a new medium for art-making – one that ignores the institutional structures of the artworld, and rejects their role as arbiters of artistic excellence. Taking art to the streets allows artists to redefine the criteria by which to be assessed: where an artist’s pedigree does not factor into an artwork’s evaluation, where the audience, not art critics, are the final arbiters of taste, and where other artists provide immediate and direct feedback in the form of responses to the work. The streets offer an even playing field, full of neutral, ordinary viewers and the opportunity for direct feedback from one’s peers. The streets provide an opportunity to make artistic statements, to invent artistic practices and to explore new media that are radically free from the restrictions, rules, and pressures facing artists working within the traditional artworld institutions. Street artists bring the power of art to the streets.

Featured image credit: ‘Shh!’ by Geoff Stahl, via Flickr, used with permission.

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Challenges in exhibiting oral history

This paper, originally presented at the 2015 National Conference on Public History, is republished here with an interactive poll and an invitation to share your thoughts on exhibiting oral history.

I am a curator at a mid-sized museum in Texas. My job includes overseeing the oral history program, which was founded in 1970, two years after the museum opened. Today, the collection is home to over 1,000 oral histories on topics ranging from the ethnic groups of Texas, Texas military history, local history, traditional folk arts, immigration, and farming and ranching. These are rich and moving stories, many of which you won’t find anywhere else, making the collection a real gem at the museum. Yet, for most of the program’s existence, our oral histories have been part of “behind the scenes” research, and not a visible or audible part of our exhibits.

In an attempt to better integrate the oral history program into our exhibits, we have tried to create more opportunities for oral histories to be an integral, visible part of our exhibits. Despite our efforts, I would say we’ve had mixed success. Not because the stories aren’t compelling. Not because visitors can’t relate. Rather, I suspect were are dealing with a combination of issues, including design, delivery method, and visitor needs and expectations. As you will read, our attempts to effectively incorporate oral histories into exhibits have taken numerous forms. Here, I present six recent exhibits that incorporated oral histories, with my observations on visitor engagement.

Leaving Home, Finding Home (2010-2011)
Photo courtesy of Sarah Zenaida Gould. Used with permission.

Organized by my predecessor, this exhibit was designed around oral histories conducted with descendants of families who fled to Texas to escape the Mexican Revolution. One of several exhibits around town commemorating the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, this exhibit focused on the Revolution’s enduring impact on Texas and Texans rather than details of the Revolution itself. Unlike many exhibits where artifacts are the stars of the show, here, the stories were the stars while photographs and a handful of artifacts were visual interludes. The stories are, at times, intense and heart wrenching, and coupled with a somber minimalist design, it was an emotional exhibit. To deliver the stories, video stations located around the gallery featured looping, thematically arranged clips from the oral histories. As managing sound can be a challenge in exhibits—particularly competing, overlapping sound—the design team chose to mount a “sound wand” to each station requiring visitors to pick up the wand to listen.

Unfortunately, many visitors walked right past the stations, or only briefly paused before moving on to the photos and artifacts. Were the videos too long? Was the “talking head” style of the videos visually boring? Was the sound wand too much trouble? I don’t know the answers, but based on observation, I estimate less than half of the exhibit’s visitors really listened to the oral histories. Though I admit I am biased, I thought the exhibit was truly powerful, so I was discouraged by the indifferent response from so many visitors. However, visitor feedback indicated that those who did stop to engage with the oral histories overwhelmingly enjoyed the exhibit. Stories visitors posted to a response kiosk demonstrated that (some) visitors were able to make connections to their own family’s experiences—perhaps not surprising in a city that is majority Mexican American.

Texas Football: In Their Words (2011)

When we hosted a traveling exhibit on the math and science of football, we created a small complimentary exhibit featuring Texas football stories. Unlike Leaving Home, Finding Home, we did not use video monitors; instead we made life-sized cutouts of our storytellers and mounted an audio handset next to each. Like Leaving Home, Finding Home, this meant that visitors had to pick up the handset to hear the person’s story. Perhaps because the adjacent traveling exhibit was extremely interactive (how fast can you throw a football?), the exhibit didn’t seem to attract much visitor attention. Again, I wonder if handsets are too much trouble?

Timeless Texas Toys (2011-2012)

This toy exhibit incorporated oral histories with two Texas toy makers in an otherwise artifact-heavy exhibit. Here, the oral histories were presented in video kiosks with built-in speakers. We were able to use speakers because the two oral histories were located on opposite ends of the gallery, making sound overlap negligible. To keep the visuals interesting and make it easier for visitors to jump into the looping videos, an on-screen question preceded each interview clip and the clips were overlaid with photos and other graphics relating to their story. This exhibit was popular enough that it was extended twice, though I hardly think it was the oral histories that made it popular. Still, a majority of observed visitors did stop to watch the videos. Did the lack of a handset and inclusion of only two video kiosks make it easier for visitors to take the time to stop and listen? Did the addition of graphics to the videos make the “talking heads” more appealing?

Traveling on Fredricksburg Road (2013)
Photo courtesy of Sarah Zenaida Gould. Used with permission.

This student-generated exhibit about the history and architecture of a local street occupied one long wall, with the majority of the wall covered in a giant street map. A video monitor was added at one end and a time-lapse video of driving down the street played on a loop. By pressing a button beneath the monitor, visitors could watch a video of multiple edited oral histories with locals talking about life along Fredericksburg Road. The interviews were intercut with historic photographs of referenced locations. Audio was delivered by an overhead sound cone to minimize sound spillover in adjacent exhibits, but no audio wand or handset was required to listen. The exhibit received a positive response from locals who had their own “Fred Road” stories, and based on comment cards created for this exhibit, visitors watched and enjoyed the oral history video. Was the familiarity a factor? Did they like pushing the button to start the video?

Why We Came: The Immigration Experience (2013-2014)
Photo courtesy of Sarah Zenaida Gould. Used with permission.

Our third attempt at an exhibit entirely conceived around oral histories was one based on the immigration experiences of 16 first generation Texans. The exhibit was designed like a giant game board, offering visitors an immersive experience of what it’s like to leave one’s homeland and settle in another. Upon entering the gallery, visitors were directed to spin a wheel that would assign each visitor to follow one of the featured immigration stories. Due to space and design constraints, we used no video monitors or audio devices to share the oral histories. Instead, snippets of the oral histories were transcribed and printed on panels corresponding to different aspects of the immigration process.

The stories are deeply inspiring, and highlight the complicated decisions and steps that must be made to immigrate. Even though visitors couldn’t hear the voices of the people whose stories they followed, many visitors did seem to get invested in their journeys. Given the centrality of oral history to this exhibit, we included a StoryKiosk where visitors could record their family’s story of immigration. The StoryKiosk attracted a combination of genuine stories and people goofing off in front of a camera, but overall, this exhibit—which included less technology than the others—received a good amount of positive visitor feedback as well as positive press. Could it be that video is easier to ignore than the written word?

Los Tejanos (2015)

Most recently, we added an iPad with clips from four oral histories with Texas ranchers in a long-term exhibit, Los Tejanos. A home screen invites visitors to select a story. Sound spillover was a concern in this exhibit because it features an additional five iPads with non-oral history videos.  Over-ear headphones were chosen to deliver audio at all of the iPad stations. This particular exhibit has multiple components, including many hands-on areas, and based on my observations the oral history iPad is easily overlooked. This, in addition to the iPads’ neediness—they seem to require much more maintenance than traditional monitors—gives me the impression that this too is not the ideal model.

There are many challenges in exhibiting oral histories, and as you can see, I have more questions than answers. Based on my observations, I think the biggest challenges are visitor engagement, delivery, and authenticity. How do we inspire in our visitors the patience to listen? How do we deliver sound in a way that works for most visitors and doesn’t distract others who are trying to focus elsewhere? Does too much audio or video overwhelm visitors? Are speakers and audio cones more likely to make a visitor stop and listen than a handheld audio wand or headphones? Is the “talking head” visually boring? Does it help to add photos or other graphics? If we add photos or other graphics to an oral history video are we distracting from the person’s words? Similarly, are we overmanipulating an oral history when we select clips and edit them into a slick two-minute video with animated graphics? I want visitors to know we have these oral histories and many others in our collection, but I don’t want to give the false impression that oral histories are polished or perfect histories. To be fair, we haven’t done a visitor survey on this topic, so my questions primarily stem from my observations of visitors, which may be entirely flawed.

So I turn to you dear reader. What models have you tried? What has worked for you and what has not? I invite you to respond to this poll below and share your ideas and experiences in the comments.

View Survey

Image Credit: Photo courtesy of Sarah Zenaida Gould. Used with permission.

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Saladin’s Islamic State

Aleppo, Mosul, Tikrit, Acre… Until just a few years ago, these names meant little to the average American. Now they are all too familiar, as are the atrocities being committed there in the name of religion. Eight hundred years ago the situation in that region was much the same, except then, Christians were committing acts of cruelty no less numerous or shocking than Muslims. Both did so during the course of Holy Wars that came to be known as “the Crusades.”

Of all the warriors who fought in those wars, none cast a larger shadow than the Sultan, Saladin, who died on this day in 1193 CE. His exploits eclipsed even those of his most famous adversary, Richard I (“the Lionheart”). It was Saladin who annihilated King Guy’s army at the Horns of Hattin in 1187 CE and reclaimed Jerusalem for Islam after it had been ruled by Christian Franks for nearly a century. And when Richard and Philip II of France came to Palestine at the head of a third Crusade, it was Saladin who met them, denied them Jerusalem, and forced them to abandon their quest to free the Holy Land from Muslim dominion. And yet, Saladin became a source of myth and legend more for his image as the “noble enemy” than for his victories on the battlefield. For he, more than the Christian knights who opposed him, exemplified chivalrous ideals in his conduct both as a military leader and civil servant.

After taking Jerusalem for Christendom in 1098 CE, Godfrey of Bouillon had its Muslim defenders massacred by the thousands. When Saladin reclaimed the Holy City for Islam in 1187 CE, he responded not in kind, but spared the lives of its Christian defenders in return for a modest ransom and bondage for those who were unable to pay. Later, he permitted Christians to visit Jerusalem without paying tribute and also granted them free access to the other holy places under his control.

Equestrian statue of Saladin in the Citadel, Damascus, Syria by Graham van der Wielen. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

On Wednesday, 4 March 1193 CE Saladin died. The cause of his fatal illness though uncertain had features consistent with tuberculous meningitis. At the time of his death, only one Tyrian gold piece and forty-seven pieces of silver remained of the vast wealth he had amassed during his conquests, so irresistible had been his impulse for giving while he lived. Unfortunately, none of his 17 sons inherited either his generosity or his statesmanship. No sooner was their father gone then they began fighting amongst themselves, and in just a few years had reduced the empire he had created into a fragmented patchwork of powerless states.

In 2005, Ridley Scott released an epic film, The Kingdom of Heaven, loosely based on the life and legacy of Saladin. Near the end of the film there is a poignant scene in which Saladin, having just entered Jerusalem at the head of his victorious army, picks up a cross that had been knocked to the floor during the siege of the Holy City and respectfully places it back on its table. According to journalist Robert Fisk, when he saw the film in a Beirut cinema, that particular scene brought the Muslim audience in attendance to its feet applauding. Their reaction gives hope that after nearly a thousand years of unrelenting religious strife in the Holy Land, a formula for peace may yet be found in the principles of the “noble enemy” that motivated Saladin throughout his life.

Feature Image: Saladin and Guy of Lusignan after the Battle of Hattin in 1186 by Said Tahsine (1904-1985, Syria). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Africa’s intellectual influence

A few years ago when the Greek economic and financial crisis was rocketing markets around the globe and seemed to justify the bashing of that “poor country of tax cheaters” to the point of threatening the majestic European Union project and dishonouring an entire continent, French philologist Jacqueline de Romilly reminded the world of some of the things owed to Greece: the invention of democracy, philosophy, and tragedy. The same applies to Africa: here is a continent whose image has been so poor for so long that even when it accidentally becomes the subject of “good” news, the information is often given superficially, if not in caricatures. Despite recent improvement in its coverage, the continent is rarely presented as a true contributor to human thought. A good illustration of the hysteresis of its poor image can be seen in comparative advertisements: in some global publicity campaigns, New York is typically shown to be home to the grandiose Empire State building or the Statue of Liberty; Paris is naturally depicted as the place when the human mind created the Eiffel Tower; London is represented with majestic Big Ben; African cities or countries are celebrated for their terrifying roaring lions, belligerent leopards, and inelegant chimpanzees…

In an era where legitimation and respect are correlated with economic performance measured by income, Africa is often dismissed as the region of the world whose contributions to the global intellectual production is not obvious. Perceptions of the continent generally fall into two broad categories: the “angry” and often conservative view of those who lament the disappointments of economic failure, and who point to the “astonishing outpouring of generosity” (mainly from foreign aid), which has not propelled Africa into greatness; and the miserabilist and often “progressive” view of those who tend to see the continent as a “victim of history.”

Such generalizations about a continent of 54 very diverse countries are bound to be distortions. Nothing bad occurring in Africa today has not been experienced—often in worse forms—in other regions of the world, and overcome. If there is an African exceptionalism, it is primarily in the resilience of a part of the world that has produced Nelson Mandela, 22 Nobel laureates and 7 women Presidents among many other achievements despite extreme duress.

Image credit: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, speaking at the GAVI vaccines pledging event, London, June 2011 by DFID – UK Department for International Development. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Traditional analyses also ignore the large intellectual debt that the world owes to Africa, and the continent’s enduring influence on some of the world’s leading economists. Joseph Stiglitz, who pioneered Information Economics and ignited fundamental change in the prevailing paradigm within economics, acknowledges the crucial importance of Africa in opening his mind to fruitful ways of looking at economic issues. In his 2001 Nobel lecture he explained how his long stay at the Nairobi Institute of Development Studies (Kenya) in 1969 “made an indelible impression” on him. Seeing the massive unemployment that characterized African cities, and unemployment that could not be explained either by unions or minimum wage laws, he was forced to challenge many of the key assumptions that went into the dominant economic model of competitive equilibrium, and to start his work on the economics of information asymmetry.

Although it may not be explicitly acknowledged, Africa’s influence pervades the work of other Nobel laureates, James Tobin and Peter A. Diamond, who also happened to be pensioners at the Nairobi Institute of Development Studies in the late 1960s. Africa’s intellectual influence is discernible in the works of other leading economists. Besides several future Nobel laureates, the Nairobi Institute of Development Studies also hosted in the 1960s John Harris and Michael Todaro (the celebrated authors of the Harris–Todaro Model), Gary Fields, and a few others who subsequently became household names in the field of development economics.

Of course, not everyone went to Nairobi. Still, African economies have inspired a large number of influential economists to produce some of their best work. Paul Collier, who has become himself a star in the discipline with his work on Africa, notes that “Professor A. Deaton (Princeton) based the prestigious Oxford Clarendon Lectures (1991) on two data sets which best tested his propositions on the central topic of consumption behavior; one was from the United States, the other from Côte d’Ivoire. This is indeed part of a wider phenomenon, the upgrading of the economics of development.”

In sum, mainstream macroeconomics has been enriched by cutting-edge work carried out on Africa on issues as diverse as the modeling of small open economies or the theory of repressed inflation. Likewise, mainstream microeconomics has benefited enormously from the study of factor markets, product markets, and household economics across the continent of Africa. Yet, despite its breadth and depth, Africa’s contribution to economics remains largely untraceable. A good indication of this trend is the fact that for about eight decades (from 1900 to 1981), the total number of Africa-related documents (journal articles, books, collective volume articles, dissertations, working papers, and book reviews from the Journal of Economic Literature published in the EconLit (which includes references to articles in economics journals from all over the world, most of which are in English or with English summaries) was insignificant, at less than 100 per year. It tripled to 310 in 1984 and reached 1050 in 1998 and 2441 in 2013. While this growth has been exponential in the past three decades, it remains negligible: Africa-related publications in 2013 still represented only 4 percent of the total of 58 649.

Gérard Depardieu, the famous French actor, once said that anyone who goes to Africa never really comes back. The powerful impact that the acquaintance and encounter with Africa can have on a researcher’s intellectual development is indeed often a lasting phenomenon.

Fortunately, the Depardieu Theorem now seems to be in full swing. In recent years, the list of well-known researchers who have turned their attention to Africa and contributed to the “upgrading” of development economics includes Roger Myerson (another Nobel laureate), Stanley Fischer, Daron Acemoglu, Jeffrey Sachs, Nicholas Stern, Justin Yifu Lin, and many others.

Headline image credit: go 3/3 by Dolapo Falola. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Will more (or less) high-stakes testing improve education?

Let’s take a pop quiz on the ongoing debate over high-stakes testing, an issue that is nothing less emotional than the way our schools teach our children. First questions, then answers:

Does high-stakes testing improve education? Does it lead to better teaching and learning? Do countries with high-performing schools rely on it? Does it help narrow the achievement gaps among different racial and socioeconomic groups of students?

Here’s the correct answer: No. None of the above. Absolutely not.

Synthesizing a body of research on this topic, the National Research Council concluded educational gains were marginal at best and high-stakes testing can be harmful for high-risk students. We can certainly learn lessons from high-performing countries that promote higher standards, quality teachers, stronger community and greater equity. But high-stakes testing does not belong on that list. Nations that once counted on high-stakes testing now lean away from standardized testing due to unintended negative consequences for engagement, creativity and innovation.

The Obama administration’s recent announcement of test reduction, along with a two percent cap on the percentage of mandated testing time during the school year, is overdue damage control. Further, the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), gives more flexibility about the schedule and practice of mandated state testing. These testing policy changes would give some relief to both educators and parents who have worried about the negative consequences of overtesting for children in public schools.

Now, it is time to ask different questions: Will test reduction improve education? Does less high-stakes testing mean less teaching to the test (drill and kill practice) and more authentic student learning?

Unfortunately, the answers are less certain and may depend on what local educators, parents and students do as much as what the federal and state governments do for the next steps.

It’s true that reducing time for testing and redesigning tests are necessary remedial steps. Schools need more balanced and comprehensive approach to accountability beyond test scores, including measures of students’ socio-emotional skills and creativity. School administrators and teachers should engage in collective and reflective inquiry on their performance against broad-based educational mission. Our schools need standards-based education with room for individualization and innovation, not standardized education. One size never fits all.

Learning results depend on “time on task”–that is, actual time that students spend on learning tasks, as opposed to official class time, which can be wasted and lost by the use of ineffective instructional methods and inadequate class activities such as test-taking practices. Learning opportunity will continue to get lost and achievement gap will widen among disadvantaged minority children if they were to miss schools or be tardy for classes. It is critical for educators and parents to help improve students’ learning environment and engagement at both their home and school. There is no royal road to learning.

Featured image credit: Classroom. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Women mycologists

This essay is written with some trepidation, by a fungal biologist with no formal credentials in the study of feminism. What I can offer to support this area of scholarship is a good deal of interest in the people who have made significant contributions to the study of fungi. Some individuals loom larger in mycological history than they deserve, but, to be fair, this mild indictment applies both to those with, and those without, a Y chromosome.

The science of mycology blossomed in Darwin’s time, when German botanist Anton de Bary (1831-1888) began to decode the life cycles of fungi and penned the first textbook on fungi. British clergyman and botanist Miles Berkeley founded the parallel field of plant pathology, which concerns plant diseases, at around the same time. Few women have left any trace of their contributions to the study of fungi before the 1900s, which explains, in part, why the mycological investigations of children’s author Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) have attracted so much attention. Beatrix developed a keen interest in natural history during childhood holidays in Scotland and the Lake District and became fascinated with lichens. The true nature of lichens as symbiotic sandwiches of fungi with green algal and blue-green bacterial fillings was recognized by a Swiss scientist in the 1860s, but there were holdouts who rejected the theory for decades.

An unfortunate misreading of Potter’s encrypted journal led biographers to conclude that the young woman had become a vocal supporter of the symbiotic theory in the 1890s and this has encouraged some ridiculous claims about her importance as a scientist. Comments in Potter’s journal about being rebuffed by botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with whom she discussed her investigations added to the myth. There is obvious drama in the story of a young woman working independently, making a significant breakthrough, and being quashed by the male establishment. Coupled with the fact that she became a best-selling author, one has the makings of a fairy tale. And a fairy tale this is. A careful reading of Potter’s journal shows that rather than supporting the cohabitive character of lichens, she thought that fungi could fashion their own green components. Potter got it wrong.

Her work on fungi was not without other merits. Potter’s keen observational skills and talent as an illustrator allowed her to compose glorious paintings of mushrooms and some of these were adopted for an authoritative guidebook on fungi. The problem with the myth about Potter’s groundbreaking experiments is that it detracts from the work of other women who made lasting contributions to our understanding of the fungi.

Elsie Wakefield. Source: C. G. Lloyd, Mycological Notes 72 (1924). Used with permission.

One of her contemporaries who deserves a higher profile is Elsie Maud Wakefield (1886-1972), an extraordinary scientist who served as Head of Mycology at Kew for 40 years. Wakefield studied the fundamentals of fungal sexuality by pairing colonies that developed from mushroom spores. Mushrooms have a particularly catholic approach to sex, with some species embracing tens of thousands of mating types, and fertilization occurring between almost every gender combination.

It is worth noting that Worthington G. Smith, a prominent Victorian mycologist, developed a view of fungal reproduction that was so utterly bereft of truth that it is difficult to overstate the failings of his seemingly hallucinogenic observations. He also poisoned his family by misidentifying a mushroom (nobody died) and, hubris intact, went on to publish a book on mushroom identification.

Johanna Westerdijk (1883-1961) was another scientist with a huge influence on the study of fungi. She was the head of a school of plant pathologists in the Netherlands, most of whom were women. Marie Schwarz was a 24-year-old student in the Westerdijk lab when she isolated a fungus from diseased elm trees after the First World War. The fact that this fungus was the cause of Dutch elm disease was established by Christine Buisman, another of Westerdijk’s protégés.

Opportunities for women in mycology are certainly more widespread today and many leaders in fungal biology are women. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible to suggest that we live in the best possible of all professional worlds and that women scientists face no career hurdles specific to their gender.

Featured image credit: Fly Agaric, by Bianca Mentil CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Climate change and COP21 – Episode 32 – The Oxford Comment

The Paris Agreement, held from 30 November to 12 December 2015, has been hailed as a “historic turning point” in the battle against global climate change. Consequently, dialogue surrounding greenhouse gas emissions, particularly around political and economic compliance, has picked up significantly in the wake of the consensus, proposed within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Even so, the problem it seeks to address is fundamentally multi-faceted, involving not only international relations and environmental law, but technical scientific analysis and philosophical considerations.

In this month’s episode of The Oxford Comment, Sara Levine, our Multimedia Producer, chats with Alan Alexandroff, a Senior Editor for Global Summitry, Dale Jamieson, author of Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means For Our Future, Liz Fisher, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Law, Maria Gavouneli, co-editor-in-chief of The Yearbook of International Environmental Law, Gib Metcalf, Professor of Economics at Tufts University, Richard Bardgett, author of Earth Matters: How Soil Underlies Civilization, and Amber Stubler, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Image Credit: “Séance pleinière de la COP21 pour l’adoption de l’accord de Paris (Salle Seine – Le Bourget)” by COP Paris. Public Domain via Flickr.

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