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Scarcity and risk: The indoor ecologies of 'Hoarders'
No full textThese are the slides from a presentation given at American Association of Geographers' Annual Meeting 2025 on 03/27/2025.Accumulation dynamics under racial colonial capitalism have produced a variety of structurally undervalued geographies of waste, pollution, and toxicity. While certain environments under capitalism are marked by scarcity and precarity, geographies of waste are, in contrast, rife with excess, abundance, and too much matter—of the wrong kind. Industrial manufacturing, the absorption of capitalist accumulation, and the unstable designation of waste come together in the home, a key site where agents negotiate the pressures of individualistic scarcity/precarity discourse and the risks posed by excessive matter in space.
In this paper, I interrogate the above tensions by analyzing a series of episodes from the A&E documentary television series Hoarders (2009-2013). Hoarders, along with a coterie of similar documentary series, occupies a complicated position in which a purportedly humanitarian impulse vies with the exploitative trappings of reality television. In each episode, cleaning and organization specialists work to purify and correct the behavior of one or two featured inhabitants of hoarded homes, primarily single-family houses in which residents store food items, consumer goods, and, sometimes, domesticated animals, the amount and condition of which is portrayed as excessive, hazardous, and wasteful. Particularly in the episodes which feature ‘hoarded animals,’ these indoor ecologies exemplify both a psychological alienation, the roots of which arguably lie in capitalist practice, and the reproduction of classed, raced notions of cleanliness, propriety, and purity. With a focus on the subjectivities of hoarded animals, I attempt here to advance understanding of scarcity/abundance discourse and practice under racial colonial capitalism
Implementation of Digitally Scanned Polarization-OFDR using a Coherent Transceiver
No full textThese are the slides from a presentation given at Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) on 03/31/2025.We present a novel measurement technique for P-OFDR with a digitally created linear chirp in the transmitter and vector complex optical field detection to measure the Stokes parameters along the fiber
Enabling Change: Individual Emission Reduction in Lawrence - Douglas County
No full textThis capstone was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for EVRN 615, taught by Dr. Kelly Kindscher and Dr. Ali BroxThis project investigates how Douglas County residents can effectively reduce their personal GHG emissions and how the Douglas County League of Women Voters can support those efforts through position and policy statements. Drawing on historical and current environmental policy trends, a comprehensive literature review, and survey responses from over 230 community members, this report identifies key barriers and opportunities for emission reduction. Findings reveal that while community members value sustainable practices, cost and accessibility can often limit their ability to implement meaningful change. The project offers targeted policy recommendations, including expanding access to solar subsidies, promoting home weatherization programs, and enhancing environmental education across Douglas County. By bridging policy advocacy with accessible individual actions, Douglas County has the potential to serve as a model for inclusive, community-driven climate progress
TBI and post-concussion symptoms as predictors of insomnia
No full textThis is the paper from a presentation given at International Neuropsychological Society on 02/15/2025
.Objective:
Sleep disturbances, including insomnia, are common following Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Gender, race, and age disparities have been observed to be related to TBI outcomes, although their relationships to sleep-related problems are not well understood. The objective of this study is to examine demographic and health correlates of sleep problems among TBI survivors and healthy controls.
Participants and Methods:
Data from the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) Informatics System was used. Participants were 1601 adults with a history of TBI as well as healthy controls recruited for the TRACK-TBI study. Demographic characteristics as well as sleep problems, measured by the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), and post-concussion symptoms, measured by the Rivermead Post Concussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPQ), were extracted from datasets. A multiple linear regression model was used to examine the relationship between demographic characteristics of the sample and sleep outcomes.
Results:
Participants included were primarily male (65.20%), White (79.88%), had completed at least High School (70.95%), had a mean age of 41.28 years (SD = 16.72), and self-reported sustaining a TBI (n = 1811, 73.77%) at the time of the study. The majority of this sample reported no symptoms of insomnia (84.25%), with 32.51% reporting subthreshold symptoms, 13.29% reporting moderate symptoms, and 5.50% reporting severe insomnia symptoms. Participants also reported limited post-concussion symptoms according to the RPQ (mean = 10.24, SD = 13.16), and 6.46% of participants reporting moderate-severe post-concussion symptoms (e.g., headaches, dizziness, difficulty concentrating). Overall, the model accounted for 40% of the variance in the data set (R2 = 0.40). Among the variables explored, both increased post-concussion symptom severity (t = 32.02, p < 0.001) and having suffered a TBI (t = 4.30, p < 0.001) were significantly correlated with increased insomnia symptom severity.
Conclusions:
Post-concussion symptoms appeared to be significantly associated with insomnia among our sample. Further, TBI patients were significantly more likely to report sleep problems compared to the healthy controls. Other demographic characteristics did not appear to significantly predict insomnia symptoms in our model; however, systemic disparities may limit access to research studies and our sample was likely not representative of the population of TBI patients in the US. Researchers should continue to recruit diverse samples and investigate potential explanations for these observed disparities in the field. Further, sleep problems have been observed to exacerbate cognitive deficits among healthy and TBI patients alike. It will be imperative for neuropsychologists to continue to monitor insomnia and other sleep disturbances following TBI in their assessments
EcoRadio Hour (Fire Ecology): The Role of Fire as a Natural and Anthropogenic Process in Ecosystems
No full textThis capstone was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for EVRN 615, taught by Dr. Kelly Kindscher and Dr. Ali Brox.With the support of the KU Environmental Studies Program and in collaboration with KKFI 90.1, a Kansas City public radio station, we created an educational public broadcast about fire ecology, including topics of wildfire, prescribed fire, and cultural fire to be aired on KKFI’s EcoRadio Hour. Our group aims to expand our audience’s understanding of the ecological role of fire along with its historical context and geopolitical significance to showcase Environmental Studies as a foundationally interdisciplinary and collaborative field.
Throughout the broadcast, we weave principles of ecology along with historical and geopolitical contexts to create an integrated fire ecology lesson, utilizing a systems-thinking approach to deepen our audience’s understanding. Ill-informed policies have resulted in ultimately inefficacious fire suppression measures that degenerate ecosystem health, promote wildfire conditions, and amplify environmental concerns. Moreover, fire suppression policies were initiated to eliminate the existence of Native populations and their stewardship practices after their land underwent settler colonization and became the United States. With each passing year, prominent changes in climate continually increase the intensity and frequency of wildfires. Together, these risk factors increase the prevalence of air pollution and water contamination, worsening the impact on public health. Our broadcast emphasizes the geopolitical context of fire on the land over time to develop a deepened understanding of the relationships between management practices and environmental outcomes
Leveraging Generative AI for the Creation of Valid MARC21 Bibliographic Records from Unstructured Data
No full textUsing ChatGPT 4o and O3, in this case, for cataloging materials in Slavic languages highlights its strengths and areas requiring careful handling. These languages, characterized by diverse diacritical marks, alphabetic, and script variants, present significant challenges in character encoding and romanization. Through targeted prompts referencing these guidelines, ChatGPT demonstrates enhanced precision and compliance, streamlining the cataloging of Slavic material, although the application is certainly valid for other broad categories of materials
The Allied Information Service and Psychological Operations during WWII
No full textThis paper was presented on March 29, 2025 at the 2025 Society for Military History Annual Conference, held in Mobile, Alabama.The Allies used battlefield psychological warfare with mixed results during World War Two. These leaflet and loudspeaker teams have been widely studied by military historians showing how psychological warfare targeted enemy soldiers. Overlooked is the Allied Information Service (AIS) under C. D. Jackson. Formed after the invasion of France, the AIS had a far different purpose than previous psychological warfare operations. Liberated French expectations clashed with the reality of the continuing hardships they continued to endure under Allied offensive operations. AIS’s goal was to directly influence the behavior of liberated French civilians; to gain and hold their support for the Allied invasion and prevent them from taking any actions that might hinder the continued push eastward. AIS used multiple forms of media to accomplish this: radio, newspapers, broadsides, and film. Using records from the National Archives, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Fort Leavenworth’s Combined Arms Research Library, and the US Army’s War College, this project examines the decisions behind the creation of AIS, its employment, the novelty of its civilian composition and methods of operations, as well as its success in achieving their influence over a civilian population. I argue that Jackson, on loan from Time-Life, shaped French behaviors through establishing a whole-of-media approach that he would later instill into the US Information Agency as a member of the Eisenhower administration. Awareness of AIS methods, motivations, and operations provides a better understanding of how psychological warfare targeted liberated civilians in the Second World War, foreshadowing similar use by the US Information Agenc
Polar question prosody in Dzə: A first look
No full textThese are the slides from a presentation given at the Linguistics Association of the Southwest (LASSO) 54TH Annual Meeting 2025 held at Wichita State University on 10/10/2025.This paper presents a first-ever investigation of polar question prosody in Dzə. We focus onphonetic parameters at the level of
production, situating our analysis in relation to question intonation typology among African languages (Rialland 2007, 2009, Cahill 2015, Genzel & Kügler 2020), particularly whether Dzə is a “lax prosody” language. Unlike what has been reported for the most closely related languages where lax prosody prevails, we find that Dzə bears characteristics of a hybrid prosody language. Lax prosody in Adamawa-Ubangi languages. Polar question prosody has been reported for Adamawa-Ubangi languages in relation to the discussion of “lax prosody” as an areal feature of African languages. The two Adamawa-Ubangi languages in Rialland (2007) both showed
properties associated with lax prosody, which was expanded to 7 of the 10 reported in Rialland (2009). Specifically, Adamawa-Ubangi languages were reported as having either: (a) vowel lengthening, (b) L tone/falling intonation (w/o mention of lengthening), (c) L tone/falling intonation with the clause-final suffix -(y)a, or (d) M tone with clause-final suffix -wa. Prosody in Dzə polar questions. Dzə (aka Dza, Jenjo, Jen) is an endangered Adamawa language spoken by E Idzə (Dzə people) across several regions of northeastern Nigeria. It is a tonal language with SVO order and a strong preference for open syllables. The language is severely underdocumented. Although there are many excellent recent and even current efforts to expand documentation of Dzə (e.g., Benson 2020, 2024, Othaniel 2017, 2020, 2022), polar interrogative clauses have not received substantive attention. To identify parameters associated with polar question prosody, we compared a series of string-identical (or in some cases, nearly so) declarative statements and polar questions, produced by a single speaker (1 speaker x 2 repetitions x 25 sentences x 2 conditions = 100 sentences). The stimuli were created to ensure that a variety of tones and vowels appeared in clause-final position. We then used Praat to measure f0, duration, and intensity, and generated prosograms (Mertens 2022) for each sentence to examine relationships between prosodic forms and segmental material (see Figures 1 & 2). We find that downstep occurs in both declarative statements and polar interrogatives. Compared to polar interrogatives, Dzə declaratives are marked by sharp clause-final lowering, which we attribute to the presence of a low boundary
tone. Compared to declarative statements, Dzə polar interrogatives are characterized by final vowel lengthening, breathy termination, and downstep reduction realized as a very gradual decrease in f0 across the lengthened vowel. In some cases, -a occurs. Implications: Establishing Dzə as a hybrid prosody language. Our controlled production experiment reveals that Dzə polar interrogatives are indeed characterized by lax prosody features, namely, considerable vowel lengthening, breathy termination, and clause-final -a. However, downstep reduction is a tense prosody feature. Thus, our results support claims that hybrid prosody languages may be more common than they are currently understood to be (Cahill 2015, Salffner 2017)
Aligning Incentives with Institutional Values: Reforming faculty evaluation to promote (and reward) scholarship for the public good
No full textThe streaming version of this video is available at https://mediahub.ku.edu/media/t/1_ao2ba5w0Michael Dougherty is Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research (haha!), when he has a chance to actually do it, focuses on the nexus of decision making, attention, and memory. His non-research time is spent managing the 3rd largest major on campus with a shoestring budget, making lemonade from lemons, convincing faculty that their committee time was well spent, and making ice cream. A good day is when his 'research' self meets his 'non-research' self to make data-informed decisions, develop sensible policies, and generally improve (hopefully) how things are run. His research and administrative efforts have been driven by a commitment to the view that basic research ought to be guided by real-world problems. He received the 2023 NINDS Rigor Champion Prize in recognition of his efforts to reform the academic incentive system to focus on behaviors that more directly promote rigor and transparency. He has also received numerous research awards, including the Hillel Einhorn Early Investigator Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the early investigator CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. He received his PhD in 1999 from the University of Oklahoma and his BS from Kansas State University in 1993.Why do faculty evaluation and incentive systems focus so heavily on the so-called three-legged stool of Research, Teaching, and Service? Are there alternative ways that we can think about faculty evaluation that might better align both with what faculty deem important and with the mission and values of the modern public university? In this workshop, we will rethink faculty evaluation through a values-based lens that empowers faculty to engage in meaningful and impactful work that truly fulfills the University’s core mission of advancing solutions that improve the lives of Kansans and the lives of the broader global community. Instead of thinking about ‘research’, ‘teaching’, and ‘service’, as “buckets” to be filled, we will instead explore ways in which values such as ‘accessibility’, ‘integrity’, ‘transparency’, ‘rigor,’ and ‘public impact’ are rewarded. This workshop will involve hands-on activities in which you work collaboratively with colleagues to identify key faculty behaviors that support these values and how these values can be used to rethink processes involved in hiring, promotion, tenure, and annual reviews in your own departments
United to Transform: A Comprehensive Statewide Needs Assessment of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Systems and Related Work in Kansas
No full textThe opioid epidemic is the latest of many substance use crises that have ravaged Kansas families and communities. Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, deaths related to prescription opioid pain medication grew steadily, followed by increases in heroin and methamphetamine overdose fatalities and the sudden rise in drug-related deaths from fentanyl beginning in 2014 and continuing today (State Health Access Data Assistance Center, n.d.). The Kansas Fights Addiction (KFA) Act Grant Review Board is poised to build a multi-sector approach to address this crisis and prevent the next by convening a broad array of partners. This needs assessment is designed to support such transformational change, drawing on foresight methods, community engagement, and a rich mix of data from multiple sources.Sunflower FoundationKansas Fights Addiction Grant Review Boar