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Doctoral Training Is Ossified. Can We Reinvent It?

Lessons from the short-lived Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. program.

Todd Butler.
Butler

In 2016, Todd Butler, an English professor at Washington State University, joined a committee charged with exploring changes in graduate education. At first, the group’s planning sessions felt typical: the slow consensus-building, the circling conversations. But then something shifted. “Two months into our planning process, the dean of the grad school said to all of us who were assembled there, ‘Are we just going to talk about doing something, or are we going to do it?’” Butler perked up: “I was not interested in writing another internal white paper that would get read, be appreciated, and stall out somewhere.” He saw the work as vitally important — an opportunity not just to improve graduate education but to articulate the importance of the humanities to a rural, land-grant university like Washington State.

Butler and his colleagues had received a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities under a new grant program called the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. Begun in 2015, its mandate was broad, offering funds for graduate institutions to rethink doctoral education in the humanities. The goal was to focus on what the NEH delicately called “disparities between graduate-student expectations for a career in academe and eventual career outcomes,” and to further the role of the humanities in public life. Colleges could apply for either a planning grant, with the NEH matching an institutional commitment of up to $25,000, or an implementation grant of $350,000, to further efforts already under way. In 2016, the NEH awarded an initial round of grants: 25 planning grants and three implementation grants. Grantees planned to study a host of possible changes in doctoral education: practicum internships, curricular reform, professionalization, changes in academic advising and mentoring, and even new dissertation formats.

And then, in 2017, the program was quietly canceled. What went wrong?

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Chronicle of Higher Education

Three projects receive $150,000 in final round of Cougar Cage event

Three projects proposed by Washington State University researchers were awarded $50,000 each in this spring’s Cougar Cage event.

Over the course of a day in Seattle, six faculty research projects were evaluated by the Palouse Club — a group of WSU alumni dedicated to supporting the university — in the culmination of the third semi-annual Cougar Cage event. The six projects were hand-selected by WSU leadership from a pool of 26 submissions representing WSU students, faculty, and staff from across the system.

Courtney Meehan.
Meehan

The selected projects include “Study of cannabis, human milk composition, and infant development,” led by Courtney Meehan, CAS associate dean for research and graduate studies and professor of anthropology.

To address the historical lack of research on pregnant and breastfeeding women, Meehan seeks to populate the information desert surrounding these vulnerable individuals and their children. Her proposed study will assess whether milk composition differs among women who use and do not use cannabis, and how the presence of cannabinoids in milk affects infant development. Meehan hopes the results will enable healthcare providers to offer evidence-based advice and allow mothers to make more informed decisions.

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WSU Insider

A mysterious grizzly carcass was found on Whatcom beach. Here’s what to do if you see a bear

A mysterious grizzly bear carcass was found on a Whatcom County beach last week, shocking professionals who still aren’t sure how it ended up there.

The rare sighting is raising many questions of what happened to the bear, how it was injured and how it ended up on the shore of a beach north of the Cherry Point refinery.

The Herald has done some research for you about just how rare this sighting is, if grizzly bears may become more prominent in our county and what you need to know.

Grizzly bears used to have a population of 100,000 across Alaska to Mexico, but have now declined by about 99%, leaving an approximate 1,600 bears outside of Alaska, according to the Washington State University Bear Center, part of the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Bellingham Herald

Racism drives environmental inequality — but most Americans don’t realize

Survey finds that most people think poverty is why pollution disproportionately affects Black people, despite evidence that racism is the major cause.

Most Americans do not think that Black people are any more likely to be affected by pollution than white people, despite significant evidence that racism is a root cause of environmental injustice in the United States, a survey has found.

Dylan Bugden.
Bugden

Numerous research papers over the years have shown that people of colour and poor people are significantly more likely to live in areas of high pollution — a result of the deliberate construction of polluting industries in these communities, says Dylan Bugden, an environmental sociologist at Washington State University in Pullman.

But Bugden found that respondents to the survey were more than twice as likely to identify poverty as the main cause of environmental inequalities, instead of blaming structural racism. This is despite scientific evidence clearly demonstrating that “race, rather than poverty, is the primary factor behind environmental inequality”, notes Bugden in his study, published in Social Problems. Additionally, many people suggested that a lack of hard work and poor personal choices were responsible for increased exposure to pollution.

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Nature
Scientific American
WSU Insider

Transgender women found and created community in the 1980s internet

The internet has played an outsized and very visible role in the massive political and social gains of transgender people over the past two decades. But while it’s easy to point to modern-day social media and smartphones as instrumental tools for the trans community, trans people have actually been utilizing the internet to connect, learn, and organize since the 1980s.

Avery Dame-Griff.
Dame-Griff

Dr. Avery Dame-Griff, PhD, is a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and assistant professor of Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University. He’s also the founder and primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent project tracking queer* digital culture from the 1980s to the 2010s. His forthcoming book focuses on the relationship between the “two revolutions” of the transgender political revolution and the computer revolution.

Dr. Dame-Griff’s research and archival work digs extensively into the earliest communities of trans people online: BBS or the “Bulletin Board System.” The BBS was a precursor to the modern world wide web and social media. Launched in the late 1970s by computer hobbyists, BBSs allowed users to dial a number through their modem and access an online, text-only “bulletin board” where users could post messages. By the mid-to-late 1980s, as the technology needed to access BBSs became more affordable and accessible, BBS groups focusing on niche interests — including transgender communities — were popping up across the US and, soon, the world.

These early online trans communities were secretive and ephemeral by necessity, Dr. Dame-Griff tells Avast. Trans women in the 1980s were likely to be presenting publicly as men, oftentimes with wives and families, and exposure could result in them losing everything — their jobs, their families, and even their lives. Some lived as “crossdressers,” allowing themselves to dress in women’s clothing at home (maybe with their spouses) but rarely, if ever, in public.

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