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Characterizing Fish Communities using Traditional and Emerging Monitoring Approaches in San Diego County Estuaries
No full textFish communities are essential to estuarine health, playing key roles in food webs, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem functioning. However, the persistence of native fish populations is increasingly threatened by the cumulative impacts of coastal development, pollution, and climate change. Rapid, effective monitoring of species distributions is a priority, enabling timely conservation and management. However, the study of any ecosystem is limited by time, resources, and the consideration that research of a system can damage the ecosystem under study.
This research aimed to characterize fish species richness and evaluate the benefits and limitations of different estuary monitoring approaches. Specifically, this study compared traditional methods (block net seining, enclosure traps) with contemporary approaches (community science (iNaturalist) and eDNA metabarcoding) to assess species richness and composition in 2023 across five San Diego estuaries: Tijuana River Estuary, San Diego Bay (Sweetwater Marsh, South Bay Salt Ponds), Mission Bay (Kendall-Frost Marsh), Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, and San Dieguito Lagoon. Additionally, long-term traditional sampling data from 2013 to 2023 at Tijuana River Estuary and San Dieguito Lagoon were compared alongside abiotic variables, including salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen.
In 2023, iNaturalist reported the highest species richness at most sites, except Los Peñasquitos and San Dieguito Lagoon, where traditional sampling and eDNA, respectively, yielded more detections. Species richness was lowest at Tijuana River Estuary, consistent with evidence of degraded water quality. Despite strict adherence to sampling protocols, only 10 of 89 eDNA samples yielded sufficient sequence reads, likely due to filter clogging and PCR inhibition caused by high organic content. These findings underscore the value of integrating multiple monitoring approaches, highlight the potential of community science to enhance species inventories, and emphasize the need for improved eDNA protocols tailored to the unique challenges of Southern California estuaries
From Mill to Mussolini and On to Microsoft: Freedom of Speech in a Neo-Corporatist Era
No full textJohn Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—a fundamental text for political liberalism—not only defended the importance of freedom of expression and debate, but suggested that social pressure from private persons and institutions can be as much, or more, of a threat to freedom, including freedom of expression, as any legal sanction or act of government. Mill feared “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” which “leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul to itself”.
Recent decades in America have seen efforts to suppress free expression by colleges and universities—many of them private and not answerable to the First Amendment—and by corporate and other private institutions as well. These are private pressures of a kind that Mill might have anticipated and feared.
A development that Mill did not clearly foresee was widespread collaboration of government and private institutions to suppress opinions, ideas, or facts that challenge the would-be orthodoxy. Extensive collaboration of government and private bodies to achieve social unity and to suppress dissent was a feature—and an explicit principle, known as “corporatism”—of Mussolini’s fascist government in 20th century Italy.
To what extent have there been quasi-corporatist efforts to restrict freedom of expression, inquiry, and debate in the US in recent years? To what extent is there an imminent danger of such corporatism in the US, despite First Amendment constraints on government?
This article explores the degree to which corporatism actually or potentially threatens free expression and debate. Recent decisions by the Supreme Court have had mixed implications for efforts to challenge or rein in such government and corporate collaboration. What are the constitutional, statutory, and cultural resources that might tame corporatist threats to free speech and to freedom of debate in a broadly free society?
This article is part of a Symposium on “Free Speech Beyond The Constitution” published in 27 Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2025)
Examining the Creative Process of Visual Artists: A Phenomenological Study
No full textCreativity fuels problem solving and innovation, driving both economic growth and individual success. Yet, many schools and organizations fail to nurture it. Today, there is a decline in creativity scores among U.S. students. This is concerning since many of these students will be the future leaders of organizations and communities. For this reason, this dissertation explores the creative process of visual artists to better understand how creativity can be cultivated. Visual artists\u27 perspectives and sense-and-meaning-making processes offer a unique view of innovation and creativity. However, there is limited research on the creative processes of contemporary visual artists from culturally diverse backgrounds in a phenomenological study.
In addressing this gap, this study used an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) design and a theoretical framework combining Wallas\u27 four-stage model of the creative process with Csikszentmihalyi\u27s systems model of creativity to guide the data collection and analysis. This study interviewed fifteen visual artists from culturally diverse backgrounds. Inductive and deductive coding, and artwork analysis revealed four findings from the research: 1) Context influencing the creative process: family, mentors, and culture; 2) Self-awareness and identity formation in the creative process; 3) Creative disobedience: connected to empowerment and agency, and 4) Creativity as a form of problem solving and problem finding. These findings revealed the impact of external factors and how visual artists perceive their creative process to develop their self-awareness and identities. In navigating their creative process, visual artists discussed their creative disobedience in resisting norms, conventions, and expectations in the art field and society. Additionally, visual artists provided examples of problem-solving and problem-finding skills to frame and refine their work.
This study contributes to creativity literature, particularly in the visual arts, adding a critical approach. It sheds light on the complexities of creative agency, problem solving, and innovation and offers insights for cultivating creativity in the educational practices, leadership development, innovation policies, and art education.
Keywords: creativity, the creative process, visual artists, phenomenology, Interpretive Phenomenology Analysis (IPA), problem solving, problem finding, and leadership
Exploring Systems of Discrimination and Violence Against Wayuu Indigenous Women/E’rrajawaa Sucuaypaa Jutumaa tu’u muju’ulaca err’uin wayumuin Sumuin tu’u Wayuu Jiertkaa sumuin tu muilian Jain
Get PDFFrom the moment an Indigenous girl is born, her identity is shaped by two intersecting categories: gender and ethnic belonging. These identity categories influence various aspects of her environment, upbringing, education, work and life.
As a member of the Wayuu people, I understand the challenges of being an Indigenous woman. The Wayuu Indigenous people are the largest Indigenous group in both Colombia and Venezuela. They inhabit the desert and coastal territory of La Guajira, a region shared between the two countries. However, for the Wayuu, it is a single, unique territory, encompassing the physical, biocultural and spiritual dynamics rooted in our Indigenous identity.
Through my work as a researcher, I have found a way to reconnect with my roots. Growing up far from my ancestral territory and having the privilege of accessing higher education made me deeply aware of the barriers that Wayuu Indigenous women face. In these academic spaces, Indigenous identity was absent, and representation was almost nonexistent. I have also experienced self-rejection—feeling like an outsider in non-Indigenous spaces yet belonging to both worlds at the same time. The obstacles that Indigenous women face in reaching their full potential led me to undertake this research: to express our own vulnerability in this new era and what we can do for the preservation of our culture and territory, as women, as an Indigenous people.
This research continues the practices of other Indigenous research methods by placing the voices of Indigenous people at its center. The methodology is grounded in focus groups conducted with Wayuu women in Colombia and Venezuela, specifically in the communities of Pasipamana, Oorokot, and Paraguaipoa. It includes interviews with Wayuu leaders and references literature on the cosmology of Indigenous peoples, as well as studies of discrimination and human rights abuses. Through these conversations, I identified forms of discrimination that intertwine and produce systems of violence affecting Wayuu women. The goal of this article is to explore how Wayuu Indigenous women stand before the world and confront the causes of discrimination and the power inequalities that reinforce forms of violence and oppression.https://digital.sandiego.edu/ipj-research/1109/thumbnail.jp
Racial Identity and Belonging Among Asian American Undergraduate Students in the Midwest
Get PDFAsian American students are often deemed overrepresented in higher education, leading to inequities in admissions, scholarships, and student support. This perception feeds and is fed by the model minority stereotype, which characterizes Asian Americans as hard-working and high-achieving and creates intense pressure to succeed academically (Poon et al., 2016). In addition, Asian American college students often experience racism and xenophobia, which can undermine their sense of belonging on campus. However, in the Midwest, where their immigration is more recent and conversations about race are often framed in terms of Black and white, Asian Americans often feel invisible and othered (Lee, 2009; Trieu, 2018).
Framed with Asian Critical Theory, this critical ethnography explored how 16 Asian American undergraduate students at a private Midwestern university view the construction of their ethnic identity, how stereotypes shape this process, and how experiences of belonging or exclusion influence the way these students see themselves and others. The study’s participants saw “Asian American” as a shared identity that brings together different national origin ethnic groups, but complicated by intersectional aspects of their identities, including socioeconomic background, ethnicity, political beliefs, religion, queerness, or rural upbringing. The study documents the complexity of this identity formation and how hierarchical and competitive social, academic, and institutional factors created barriers to belonging in this research setting. Its findings point to the importance of considering geographical and institutional influences on Asian American identity formation and emphasize the necessity for higher education professionals to understand the complexities of these students’ experiences and needs
The Mathematical Structure of the Law
No full textScientific “law” and human-made law (“social law”) are both “laws” in a general sense—scientific laws “govern” the workings of the material world and social laws govern the behavior of people. Beyond this superficial resemblance, do social laws partake of the same sorts of mathematical structures as scientific laws? Many theorists have proposed formal, deontic-oriented logical models of legal rights and other entitlements. Here, leveraging the typology of Wesley Hohfeld, this Article proposes a novel, mathematical model of legal entitlements. This model incorporates physical and mathematical properties—such as entropy, indeterminacy, temperature, and modularity—to measure quantitative properties of legal systems. Moreover, this Article proposes a post-classical approach to model ontological legal indeterminacy by adapting the formalism of quantum mechanics. These understandings have important implications for the nature of legal rules, legal AI, game theory and the law, and the ontology of rule-based systems. Of particular note, the formalism suggests a novel approach to the quantum measurement problem, proposing that measurement is a “second-order” physical process, which is fundamentally different from the “first-order” physical processes currently described by quantum mechanics