Listening Project

In an effort to better serve Southeast and Coastal Georgia, The Coastal Rivers Water Planning & Policy Center tapped the thoughts of several key stakeholders on water issues in our region.The Center was created in 2001 with a continuing mission to "assist policymakers in the formulation of policy designs to best manage sustainable economic growth and natural resource conservation via water planning, research, education and technical assistance." In order to best accomplish this mission, it is necessary for us to engage stakeholders in our region to determine those issues of critical importance.The Listening Project is designed to identify the perspective of water users throughout the Coastal Rivers Region by listening to the actual concerns and ideas for improvement of those who have a stake in the water future of the region. Using this information, the Center can better meet the research needs of stakeholders in the region.The objective of the first round of listening sessions is to identify issues, and not to take a quantitative measure of any given constituency. Thus, the results of the process do not lend themselves to conclusions that any one constituency has a certain viewpoint, but rather gives an idea for the type of issues that arise when representatives of one particular constituency gather to discuss their hopes and fears around the future of water use in Coastal Georgia region.The balance of this paper is organized in the following way: In Section II we discuss the process used in this first round of five listening sessions. In Section III we report the verbatim ideas of the participants in each of the five sessions. Section IV reports the same verbatim ideas put forward by the participants, but the ideas are organized according to dominant themes emerging from the sessions, where various constituencies' ideas on each theme are easily readable in the same place. Finally, in Section V we offer concluding remarks and describe our plans for Phase II of the project. Working Paper Number 2005-00

Assessing the Market for Poultry Litter in Georgia: Are Subsidies Needed to Protect Water Quality?

Concerns about nutrient loads into our waters have focused attention on poultry litter applications. Like many states with a large poultry industry, Georgia recently designed a subsidy program to facilitate the transportation of poultry litter out of vulnerable watersheds. This paper uses a transportation model to examine the necessity of a poultry litter subsidy to achieve water protection goals in Georgia. We also demonstrate the relationship between diesel and synthetic fertilizer prices and the value of poultry litter. Results suggest that a well functioning market would be able to remove excess litter from vulnerable watersheds in the absence of a subsidy.fertilizer, phosphorous, poultry litter, subsidy, transportation model, water quality, Environmental Economics and Policy, Marketing, Q12, Q13, Q25, Q53,

Parents, children and the porous boundaries of the sexual family in law and popular culture

This article focuses on a perceived ideological overlap between popular cultural and judicial treatments of sex and conjugality that contributes to a discursive construction of parenthood and parenting. The author perceives that in both legal and popular cultural texts, there is a sense in which notions of ‘natural’ childhood are discursively constituted as being put at risk by those who reproduce outside of dominant sexual norms, and that signs of normative sexuality (typically in the form of heterosexual coupling) may be treated as a sign of safety. These ideas are rooted in ancient associations between fertility, sexuality and femininity that can also be traced in the historical development of the English language. With the help of commentators such as Martha Fineman, the article situates parents and children within a discourse of family which prioritises conjugality, with consequences for the ways in which the internal and external boundaries of families are delineated

HB 1134: Amendments to the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act

The Act amends the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act to provide the attorney general with concurrent authority to prosecute criminal gang activity alongside local prosecuting attorneys in Georgia. Modeled after a similar act that created concurrent authority for the attorney general to prosecute human trafficking crimes, the Act seeks to enhance the government’s investigation and prosecution of gang crimes in the state by making the effort more corroborative, coordinated, and multi-jurisdictional

High stakes and low bars: How international recognition shapes the conduct of civil wars

When rebel groups engage incumbent governments in war for control of the state, questions of international recognition arise. International recognition determines which combatants can draw on state assets, receive overt military aid, and borrow as sovereigns—all of which can have profound consequences for the military balance during civil war. How do third-party states and international organizations determine whom to treat as a state's official government during civil war? Data from the sixty-one center-seeking wars initiated from 1945 to 2014 indicate that military victory is not a prerequisite for recognition. Instead, states generally rely on a simple test: control of the capital city. Seizing the capital does not foreshadow military victory. Civil wars often continue for many years after rebels take control and receive recognition. While geopolitical and economic motives outweigh the capital control test in a small number of important cases, combatants appear to anticipate that holding the capital will be sufficient for recognition. This expectation generates perverse incentives. In effect, the international community rewards combatants for capturing or holding, by any means necessary, an area with high concentrations of critical infrastructure and civilians. In the majority of cases where rebels contest the capital, more than half of its infrastructure is damaged or the majority of civilians are displaced (or both), likely fueling long-term state weakness

DEI-Informed Pedagogy in Theatre Courses

As a queer white woman working at the intersection of theater practice and scholarship, I see itas an essential part of my job to amplify works by global majority, BIPOC, disabled, and queerartists and scholars on every syllabus I write and in every institution I work with. In the courses Iteach, I also equip students with the tools they need to critically examine canonical works byplacing them in their historical, cultural, and political contexts. Throughout my time at CU Boulder, I have been committed to cultivating inclusive and equitableclassrooms, creating opportunities for more students to participate in the department, andadvocating for diversity in our production season. I&rsquo;ve built connections with theater artists andlocal organizations to enrich my students&rsquo; learning experiences; in spring 2023 I wrote a grant tobring playwright Madhuri Shekar to Zoom with my Theatre and Society class before they sawour production of her play; in 2023-24, I brought artists from Local Theater Company to workwith student playwrights and actors in our New Play Lab, and in fall 2024, I invited Indigenoustheater artists and scholars affiliated with the Creative Nations First Storytellers Festival to speakwith my playwriting class. Through these visits, students have been able to hear diverseperspectives from working artists, and to ask questions that span beyond my own areas ofresearch.</p

The EBLM project : III. A Saturn-size low-mass star at the hydrogen-burning limit

This work was partially supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (PI Queloz, grant number 327127).We report the discovery of an eclipsing binary system with mass-ratio q ∼ 0.07. After identifying a periodic photometric signal received by WASP, we obtained CORALIE spectroscopic radial velocities and follow-up light curves with the Euler and TRAPPIST telescopes. From a joint fit of these data we determine that EBLM J0555-57 consists of a sun-like primary star that is eclipsed by a low-mass companion, on a weakly eccentric 7.8-day orbit. Using a mass estimate for the primary star derived from stellar models, we determine a companion mass of 85 ± 4 MJup (0.081 M⊙) and a radius of 0.84+ 0.14 -0.04RJup (0.084 R⊙) that is comparable to that of Saturn. EBLM J0555-57Ab has a surface gravity log g2 =5.50+ 0.03 -0.13 and is one of the densest non-stellar-remnant objects currently known. These measurements are consistent with models of low-mass stars.PostprintPeer reviewe

Critical international relations and the impact agenda

How should critical International Relations (IR) scholars approach the ‘impact agenda’? While most have been quite resistant to it, I argue in this essay that critical IR should instead embrace the challenge of impact – and that both IR as a field and the impact agenda more broadly would gain greatly from it doing so. I make this case through three steps. I show, firstly, that critical IR has till now been very much at the impact agenda’s margins, and that this situation contrasts strikingly with its well-established importance within IR teaching and research. I argue, secondly, that critical IR scholars both could and should do more impact work – that the current political conjuncture demands it, that many of the standard objections to doing so are misplaced, and indeed that ‘critical’ modes of research are in some regards better suited than ‘problem-solving’ ones to generating meaningful change – and offer a series of recommended principles for undertaking critically-oriented impact and engagement work. But I also argue, thirdly, that critical social science holds important lessons for the impact agenda, and that future impact assessments need to take these lessons on board – especially if critical IR scholarship is to embrace impact more fully. Critical IR, I submit, should embrace impact; but at the same time, research councils and assessments could do with modifying their approach to it, including by embracing a more critical and political understanding of what impact is and how it is achieved

The possibility of critical realist randomised controlled trials.

BACKGROUND: Some realists have criticised randomised controlled trials for their inability to explain the causal relations that they identify; to take into account the influence of the social context of the interventions they evaluate; and to account for individual difference. However, among realists, there is controversy over whether it is possible to improve trials by making them realist, or whether realism and the philosophical assumptions underlying trials are incompatible. This paper contributes to the debate in Trials on this issue. The debate thus far has concentrated on the possibility of combining trial methodology with that of realist evaluation. MAIN BODY: We concur with the contention that it is not feasible to combine randomised controlled trial design with the realist evaluation approach. However, we argue that a different variant of realism, critical realism, provides a more appropriate theoretical grounding for realist trials. In contrast to realist evaluation, which regards social mechanisms as an amalgam of social resources and people's reasoning, critical realism insists on their distinction. It does so on the basis of its assertion of the need to distinguish between social structures (in which resources lie) and human agency (which is at least partly guided by reasoning). From this perspective, conceiving of social mechanisms as external to participants can be seen as a valid methodological strategy for supplementing the exclusive concentration of trials on outcomes. While accepting realist evaluation's insistence that causality in open systems involves a configuration of multiple generative mechanisms, we adopt the critical realist interpretation of the experimental method, which sees it as creating artificial closure in order to identify the effects of specific causal mechanisms. If randomised controlled trials can be regarded as epidemiological proxies that substitute probabilistic controls over extraneous factors for closed experiments, their examination of the powers of discrete mechanisms through observation of the variation of outcomes is appropriate. CONCLUSION: While there are still issues to be resolved, critical realist randomised controlled trials are possible and have the potential to overcome some of the difficulties faced by traditional trial designs in accounting for the influence of social context and individual interpretation