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Sharing Air: A Review and Application of Effective Methods of Communicating Temperature Data
Get PDFOne’s residence should not determine an individual’s health or lifespan. Further, if the environment where someone lives is detrimental to one’s health, that information ought to be shared with him or her. Surface heat exposure poses dangers to human health, and surface temperature is influenced by surrounding environmental factors. Surface temperature and related environmental data should be shared with communities in formats that best meet local needs. It is a matter of environmental and health justice. On July 15, 2021, a team of citizen scientists united under the Virginia Heat Watch project to collect surface temperature data in ten localities across Virginia. The current study aims to meet the communication, engagement, and analysis goals of the Virginia Heat Watch project through a community-based approach. Using Richmond, Virginia as a case study, web maps and communication methods were piloted before being presented to other localities. Four public web maps were created across the studied localities of Abingdon, Arlington, Petersburg, and Richmond, Virginia. Through computations of Pearson’s r values, it was found that in Arlington and Richmond, tree canopy is negatively correlated with temperature and impervious surfaces are positively correlated with temperature. Regarding social variables in Arlington, temperature was positively correlated with the white percentage of the population and negatively related to median household income. In Richmond, however, temperature was negatively related to the white percentage of the population and positively related to median household income. These discrepancies between localities and their divergence from the expectations imposed by previous literature suggest that further research should be done. This study makes an important contribution to the work of the Virginia Heat Watch Project by displaying and analyzing their findings and communicating the findings of the current study based on locality needs. Future work should expand the mapping and communication of Heat Watch data to all ten Heat Watch localities.
Paper prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Todd Lookingbill
Paint It Black or Red: Serious Play in Brazil\u27s Northeast
No full textThis article analyzes a popular, folkloric dance drama in the small city, Laranjeiras, a thriving slave port for its first three centuries. Lambe-sujo e Caboclinho, dating to the 19th century, depicts the practice of missionized Indigenous people engaged to capture and return fugitive slaves. Participants paint themselves either black or red and parade through the streets, leading to a mock battle, ending in defeat of the fugitive slaves. This article employs ethnographic data and historical research to consider the use of performance, which enhances heightened consciousness of racial oppression, reinforced by Afro-Brazilian social movements, and makes the event serious fun. Residents of this overwhelmingly Black city are rethinking responses to racial oppression in today\u27s Brazil through a cultural performance with the flexibility to serve as a window onto the past that opens onto the future. The article contributes to the fields of cultural anthropology, folklore studies, and critical race studies
What Pandemics Teach Us About Servant Leadership
Get PDFThis article seeks to understand what pandemics teach us about servant leadership. It analyzes two texts, which reflect on people of color’s experiences becoming servant leaders during such public health crises: A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (1794) and The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (2021). These texts balance detailed depictions of what this leadership praxis looks like with trenchant critiques of how service, racism, and leadership tend to intersect in the United States. As texts that demonstrate the value of servant leadership under pandemic conditions while also exposing its imbrication in systems of racialized oppression, the Narrative and the Guide reveal servant leadership’s complicity with systemic white supremacy and corollary extractive logics in American contexts. This article builds on scholarly conversations about how race and gender impact recognition of servant leadership by drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman, particularly two concepts she develops through analysis of post-Emancipation labor: indebted servitude and property in the self. These concepts help illuminate how racialized attitudes toward compulsory servitude extend to the praxis of servant leadership for people of color
Book Review: Political Argument in a Polarized Age: Reason and Democratic Life by Scott Aiken and Robert Talisse
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Banning Noncompetes in Virginia
Get PDFThe past decade has seen a nationwide wave of reform in noncompete law, specifically the limitation of noncompete agreements. Since 2016, ten states—including Virginia in 2020— banned the use of noncompete agreements against certain “lowwage” employees. In order to stay ahead of this curve and ensure Virginia remains and grows as one of the top states to do business, this Article suggests that Virginia—like its neighbor, the District of Columbia, initially did in 2021—pass a complete ban of all noncompete agreements in the employment context. Such a ban would make Virginia a lucrative destination for entrepreneurs and startups by maximizing the job and employee market and keeping the best business opportunities for employers and employees alike in-state. The Article forecasts this effect by examining the rise of California’s Silicon Valley, where employee noncompete agreements are banned, and the converse decline of innovation in Michigan since 1985, when the state accidentally repealed its noncompete ban. Virginia would specifically benefit from a ban of employee noncompetes because its current noncompete law is inadequate. This Article argues that Virginia courts’ longstanding three-prong test weighing legitimate business interest, undue hardship, and public policy is dangerously unpredictable—so much so that the Supreme Court of Virginia once upheld and struck down the exact same noncompete agreement in two different cases—resulting in legal guesswork and unfair bargaining power between employer and employee. This Article also suggests that Virginia’s 2020 “low wage” ban insufficiently addresses the issues at hand and even further adds to the burden of deciphering the law. While some may claim employee noncompete agreements are necessary to protect legitimate business interests and advance the freedom of contract, this Article responds that such business interests are already adequately protected by other, less problematic provisions—namely, confidentiality and nonsolicitation agreements—and that the freedom of contract is not any less valuable than the freedom of trade, which employee noncompete agreements severely restrain. Finally, this Article proposes model legislation to aid the Virginia General Assembly, and other jurisdictions who may follow suit, in passing such a ban
Renewable Energy Federalism
Get PDFNo one seriously questions that an improved and decarbonized energy supply system is a key component of climate change mitigation, but the United States’ system of federalism complicates the siting of utility-scale renewable energy facilities. The new Biden Administration presents the United States with an opportunity to reimagine how this country regulates renewable energy siting, allowing for substantial national progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, primary siting authority for renewable energy projects rests with state and local governments, which generally exercise that authority through zoning and land use planning, while the federal government approves most interstate energy delivery systems. This fragmented system of governance can delay and even deter project development, simultaneously thwarting the optimal logic in developing a national renewable energy generation system. Proactive renewable energy project planning offers one potentially effective – and constitutional – solution to this renewable energy federalism dilemma, particularly in conjunction with negotiated siting guidelines and a centralized siting agency. Drawing upon the substantial body of scholarly work that advocates for federal or regional collaboration in renewable energy policymaking and for more balanced and dynamic federalism in the energy sector, this Article further advances those goals while also shifting the focal axis and underscoring renewable energy as the locus for expanding energy federalism and mitigating climate change
Introducing movement and embodied meditation into the classroom and applied studio
No full textWe know that our students are more stressed now than in the years when we were in college. Dr. B. Janet Hibbs and Dr. Anthony Rostain, authors of the 2019 book The Stressed Years of Their Lives, have shared that our students experience “more stress and anxiety now” because “they have grown up post 9.11, there is more anxiety in the family, the school shootings, the non-stop 24/7 news cycle, and the internet itself, which has created a different childhood than that which many of us experienced.”1 And of course, all of this was before we were engulfed in a global pandemic. So much for all of us to navigate. How can we, as caring, committed teachers, help our students leave their stress outside the door of the studio, the classroom, or the Zoom platform, and enter our learning spaces with confidence and openness to engage with the material that is being offered to them
Consensus, Convergence, and COVID-19: The Ethical Role of Religious Reasons in Leaders’ Response to COVID-19
Get PDFFocusing on current efforts to persuade the public to comply with COVID-19 best practices, this essay examines what role appeals to religious reasons should (or should not) play in leaders’ attempts to secure followers’ acceptance of group policies in contexts of religious and moral pluralism. While appeals to followers’ religious commitments can be helpful in promoting desirable public health outcomes, they also raise moral concerns when made in the contexts of secular institutions with religiously diverse participants. In these contexts, leaders who appeal to religious reasons as bases of justification for imposing COVID policies may seem to fail to show respect for the autonomy of those who lack the relevant religious commitments, and—especially when a leader herself rejects the religious commitments she makes reference to to persuade others—her appeals to religious reasons may seem to constitute ethically problematic exercises of manipulation. This essay draws on the resources of contemporary political philosophy to analyze and respond to these concerns and concludes that they are not sufficiently well-founded. To the contrary, it contends that there are good moral grounds for leaders to appeal to religious reasons as (partial) bases of justification for why followers should accept COVID policies. In the course of the argument, this essay also highlights how contemporary political theory can enrich discussions about the distinctions between coercion, manipulation, and leadership. It thereby give insight not only into the ethics of leadership but also—at least by the lights of central theories of leadership like that of James MacGregor Burns (1978)—into whether and how appeals to religious reasons can figure into genuine exercises of leadership, in contrast with mere instances of the wielding of social power