Challenging Perceptions: Exploring the Relationship between ELL students and writing centers

In an attempt to create more meaningful and effective assessment, the Howe Writing Center at Miami University implemented a new post-consultation/exit survey. During the course of the Fall 2012 semester, over 800 students responded to the post-consultation survey. Writing center theory has documented the limitations of the post-consultation survey; however, this type of feedback still represents the best and most accessible way to assess and expand the knowledge of writing centers. This assessment project provided important feedback concerning the writing center at Miami University about student demographics that use the writing center, including academic year and classes students wanted to work on. The assessment project also contributes to writing center theory and discourse by providing a different narrative for non-native English speaking students and native English speaking students that use the writing center. The assessment challenges the view that writing from non-native English speaking students is only concerned with so-called "lower order" writing issues and writing from native English speaking students is primarily concerned with so-called "higher order" writing issues. Instead, it was found that non-native English speaking students are interested in working on many "higher order" concerns and were very similar, after sentence-level concerns, in their writing needs to native English speaking students.University Writing Cente

Collaborative Publishing and Multivalent Research: Writing Center Journal Scholarship from 2001 to 2020

This work examines articles published in the Writing Center Journal between 2001 and 2020 in order to understand more about the publishing, scholarship, and research practices of the field of writing center studies. Through analyzing articles published in the Writing Center Journal between 2001 and 2020, this work makes three contributions to the field. The first contribution of this work is an overview of the shift from scholarship to research in the field of writing center studies. The second contribution of this work is to highlight the growth of collaborative scholarship and research during this time. As is demonstrated in the article, co-authoring is increasingly the norm in the field; there are also many benefits of collaboration and co-authoring in scholarship and research. The third contribution is to show the benefits of multivalent research—research that includes participants at multiple institutions—as well as the growth of multivalent research between 2001 and 2020. Multivalent research can make arguments about the field that research conducted at individual institutions cannot. This work challenges the way research is thought of in the field and provides avenues for strengthening research in the field of writing center studies in the future

Modular Evolution of DNA-Binding Preference of a Tbrain Transcription Factor Provides a Mechanism for Modifying Gene Regulatory Networks

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) describe the progression of transcriptional states that take a single-celled zygote to a multicellular organism. It is well documented that GRNs can evolve extensively through mutations to cis-regulatory modules (CRMs). Transcription factor proteins that bind these CRMs may also evolve to produce novelty. Coding changes are considered to be rarer, however, because transcription factors are multifunctional and hence are more constrained to evolve in ways that will not produce widespread detrimental effects. Recent technological advances have unearthed a surprising variation in DNA-binding abilities, such that individual transcription factors may recognize both a preferred primary motif and an additional secondary motif. This provides a source of modularity in function. Here, we demonstrate that orthologous transcription factors can also evolve a changed preference for a secondary binding motif, thereby offering an unexplored mechanism for GRN evolution. Using protein-binding microarray, surface plasmon resonance, and in vivo reporter assays, we demonstrate an important difference in DNA-binding preference between Tbrain protein orthologs in two species of echinoderms, the sea star, Patiria miniata, and the sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. Although both orthologs recognize the same primary motif, only the sea star Tbr also has a secondary binding motif. Our in vivo assays demonstrate that this difference may allow for greater evolutionary change in timing of regulatory control. This uncovers a layer of transcription factor binding divergence that could exist for many pairs of orthologs. We hypothesize that this divergence provides modularity that allows orthologous transcription factors to evolve novel roles in GRNs through modification of binding to secondary sites

The gravid ground: stories of bed and street

Entangled with the complexity of Jennifer Bloomer's creative/theoretical ideas on chickens, beds, eggs, birth, and time, this essay is a ‘poetic/politic'Footnote1 dialogue between interior and exterior, private and public, health and illness. As gendered, cultural and personal, the place of illness is politically controversial to Western culture — taboo even — with ill bodies absented from public life. The essay illuminates this absenting. If health crises, rather than passively intersecting racial or gender inequalities, develop in a cycle of ‘co-constitution', their unravelling necessitates identifying threads through both personal and political storytelling.Footnote2 This essay asserts that who or what stories make present, then, has valence. I present three poetic/politic threads. The first, ‘insides', from experiences of being confined during the Covid-19 pandemic, tells the backstory of the bed, entering a playful journal dialogue with Bloomer, chickens and ill health. The second story, ‘outsides', moves out into the street where ground is bed and, overhearing the stories of others, considers the story as a potential delicate, minor resistance and restoration in public space or the urban landscape. The third story, ‘inside out’, rather than a conclusion, offers a composting of material for new beginnings

Healthcare in the Welfare State: Assessing Emerging Welfare State Typologies in Eastern Europe Using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis

This paper analyzes welfare state groupings with several cluster analyses on the EU27 and the 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) states admitted into the EU in 2004 and 2007 using 20 social policy and public healthcare indicators as variables. The focus is on delineating (a) the robustness of the CEE block in the EU27 and (b) the existence of distinct welfare and healthcare groups within Eastern Europe. I found significant quantitative evidence in the cluster analyses of both the eastern welfare state type in the EU27 and the existence of corporatist and developing welfare state types within the eastern welfare state type. Following the cluster analysis, I found significant evidence in my quantitative assessment and the literature on welfare states in Eastern Europe of informal payments, out-of-pocket payments, and public healthcare inefficiency at the state-level as the leading factors in the distinction of states within the CEE10.Master of Art

Writing-drawing an entangled archival practice

This article is based on a 2016 talk I gave to a drawing research group led by Lesley McFadyen, Huda Tayob and Sophie Read. In it I look back at my PhD research completed in 2013, with a view to trying to disentangle my complicated relationship with drawing as a practice of architectural research Working through what drawing might and might not be, I propose that, hand in hand with writing, writing-drawing forms an entangled mode of doing architectural history and theory that draws out something more, or other, than each can do alone The mode of writing-drawing is particularly developed in the context of historical research on a building where archival material on the architect’s intent, or evidence of the uses of the building once it was built, are missing I argue two things: firstly, that the building itself can be read as an original archive, as a series of Lacanian part-objects; and that secondly, the writing-drawing research practice creates a further archive, a »living archive« that can be contributed to over time The article reflects on the roles of writing and drawing in the PhD whilst incorporating thinking developed in my recent research, chiefly drawn from ethnography, sociology, literary studies, and situated feminist and autotheory writin

Part-architecture: the Maison de Verre through the Large Glass

My thesis is an examination of a building, the Maison de Verre (Pierre Chareau, Paris, 1928–32), through an artwork, the Large Glass (Marcel Duchamp, Paris, New York, 1915–23).1 Starting from the fact that both are predominantly constructed from glass, I further align the two works materially, historically and conceptually. Ultimately, I challenge the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, providing original spatial and social accounts of its use and inhabitation in the 1930s. The Maison de Verre was designed as a gynaecology clinic and family home for Annie and Dr Jean Dalsace. Utilising a 'free-plan', it spatialised a programme for progressive female sexual health within a domestic setting. In the context of legislation criminalising contraception and abortion, the building was, perhaps by necessity, not visible from the street. The Large Glass, in contrast, is an overt narrative on unconsummated desire, and, I argue, despite being constructed in New York, is Duchamp’s response to 1910–20s Parisian sexual mores. I interrogate these ideas through a method for which I have coined the term ‘part-architecture’, developed from theories of the psychoanalytic ‘L Schema’ and ‘part-object’, after Rosalind Krauss and Jacques Lacan. Partarchitecture is an original architectural production which combines written critical theory and design operations – including fiction writing, drawing, book-arts and audio – to recover the (now invisible) historical, social and sexual interactions occurring in and between the Maison de Verre and the Large Glass. Three central chapters, structured around the materials glass, dust and air – where glass signifies looking, dust the discarded past, and air the activation of invisible registers – recover the works as new accounts. Importantly, part-architecture offers descriptions that suggest the works remain partial, open ended and contingent

Operating at a Distance-How a Teleoperated Surgical Robot Reconfigures Teamwork in the Operating Room

This paper investigates how a teleoperated surgical robot reconfigures teamwork in the operating room by spatially redistributing team members. We report on findings from two years of fieldwork at two hospitals, including interviews and video data. We find that while in non-robotic cases team members huddle together, physically touching, introduction of a surgical robot increases physical and sensory distance between team members. This spatial rearrangement has implications for both cognitive and affective dimensions of collaborative surgical work. Cognitive distance is increased, necessitating new efforts to maintain situation awareness and common ground. Moreover, affective distance is introduced, decreasing sensitivity to shared and non-shared affective states and leading to new practices aimed at restoring affective connection within the team. We describe new forms of physical, cognitive, and affective distance associated with teleoperated robotic surgery, and the effects these have on power distribution, practice, and collaborative experience within the surgical team

From Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘House’ to bell hooks’ ‘Homeplace’: autofiction and autotheory in architectural writing

From 1936 to 1948 Simone de Beauvoir lived alone in different hotels in Marseille, Rouen and Paris, from where she conceived her fictional and philosophical writing. In 1937, after convalescing in the south of France from a collapsed lung, she took a room in the hotel Mistral in Montparnasse to write the autofictional novel She Came to Stay (1943). The English writer Jean Rhys also lived an itinerant existence in successive, shabby Parisian hotels. Her novels written between 1928 and 1939 — Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning Midnight — are autofictional renditions of the desperate existence of a stateless, impoverished, unmarried woman. Making close readings of de Beauvoir and Rhys texts, the article theorises that the in-between, material space of the early 20th-century hotel was integral to shaping an alternative domestic life for women which resisted patriarchal imperatives. Whilst promoting feminist autofiction as a source of evidence of the material conditions of women’s lives, I draw on Audre Lorde (1984) and others to critique the limitations of de Beauvoir and Rhys’ renditions with respect to class and race. Analysing the autotheoretical approach of bell hooks’ 1990 essay ‘Homeplace’, I suggest that autotheory is an alternative mode that can decolonise writing on domesticity and, further, politically extend architectural history writing

Keeping the World’s Environment under Review

How do we take stock of the state and direction of the world’s environment, and what can we learn from the experience? Among the myriad detailed narratives about the condition of the planet, the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) reports—issued by the United Nations Environment Programme—stand out as the most ambitious. For nearly three decades the GEO project has not only delivered iconic global assessment reports, but through its multitude of contributors has inspired hundreds of similar processes worldwide from the regional to the local level. This book provides an inside account of the evolution of the GEO project from its earliest days. Building on meticulous research, including interviews with former heads of the United Nations Environment Programme, diplomats, leading contributing scientists, and senior leaders of collaborating organizations, the story is told from the perspective of five GEO veterans who all played a pivotal role in shaping the periodic assessments. The GEO’s history provides striking insights and will save valuable time to those who commission, design and conduct, as well as critique and improve, assessments of environmental development in the next decade