Open Access Week Feature: Prof. Anupama Arora Published in OA South Asian Studies Journal

We close out International Open Access Week with a look at an article by Dr. Anupama Arora of the English Communications Department titled “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven.” This article is published in the freely accessible journal, Critical South Asian Studies, which is a bi-annual (published twice a year in February and August), peer-reviewed publication that centers on literary, media and cultural studies. Additionally, Anupama serves as Executive co-Editor of an OA journal called The Journal of Feminist Scholarship.

Please see below for the abstract of “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven:”

ABSTRACT: Written by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Alankrita Shrivastava, the first season of the nine-episode web series, Made in Heaven, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 8 March 2019 to great acclaim, garnering praise for being both “daring and revelatory” in its “provocative exploration of gender, marriage and love” and for offering “binge-worthy television” (Qureshi). In this essay, we examine how Made in Heaven investigates women’s lives as they navigate precarity, a distinct and historically contingent condition produced by neoliberalism in India. It does so by especially paying attention to the configurations of precarity produced through the intersectional workings of gender and class simultaneously. We argue that the show maps the ubiquity of precarity as it permeates and engulfs all life but ends with offering alternatives to perpetuating neoliberal logics of precarity and precarization by suggesting other possible worlds of solidarities, love, and care.

Research and Publishing Roundup

This week in UMD scholarly publishing, research, and news features:

Professor Viviane Saleh-Hanna (Crime & Justice Studies) co-edited Abolish Criminology, which presents critical scholarship on criminology and criminal justice ideologies and practices and emerging freedom-driven visions and practices for new world formations. The volume features chapters from Crime & Justice Studies faculty members Associate Professor Erin Katherine Krafft with “Marxist Criminology Abolishes Lombroso, Marxist Criminology Abolishes Itself,” Assistant Professor Vanessa Lynn Lovelace with “Abolish the Courthouse: Uncovering the Space of ‘Justice’ in a Black Feminist Criminal Trial,” Assistant Professor Toniqua Mikell with “Trans Black Women Deserve Better: Expanding Queer Criminology to Unpack Trans Misogynoir in the Field of Criminology”, and Saleh-Hanna’s chapters “A Call for Wild Seed Justice” and “The History of Criminology is a History of White Supremacy.” Also featured are chapters written by Charlemya Erasme (’18; MS,’20) with “Biology and Criminology Entangled: Education as a Meeting Point” and Tatiana Lopes DosSantos (’21) with “Civil Lies.”Professor Pia Moisander (Biology; Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) and Abhishek Naik (Doctoral student) co-authored “Disturbance frequency directs microbial community succession in marine biofilms exposed to shear” in mSphere. The article investigated microbial community dynamics in marine biofilms exposed to foul-release paint and/or shear and the impacts of antifouling-induced disturbance on stability in biomass.Assistant Professor Robert J. Gegear (Biology) co-published “Temporal variation of floral reward can improve the pollination success of a rare flowering plant” in Arthropod-Plant Interactions. The article examines a lab experiment with bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers of two colors to investigate whether bees’ foraging behaviors produce a rarity disadvantage.Associate Professor Michael Sheriff (Biology) and Olivia Aguiar (’22) co-published “Short Commentary on Playing it Safe; Risk-induced Trait Responses Increase Survival in the Face of Predation” in the Journal of Veterinary Sciences. The article found that those individuals with greater risk-induced trait responses (i.e., increased risk aversion behavior) had greater survival when exposed to a lethal predator. However, these responses came at the cost of growth.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

Open Access Week Feature: A Book Chapter About the History of Portuguese Colonies by Prof. Timothy Walker

As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, we turn to an openly licensed book called The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World which discusses botany, medicine, religion and mining in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. UMass Dartmouth Professor Timothy Walker of the History Dept. contributed a chapter to this freely available book called “Global Cross-Cultural Dissemination of Indigenous Medical Practices through the Portuguese Colonial System: Evidence from Sixteenth to Eighteenth-Century Ethno-Botanical Manuscripts.” The book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license which means that not only can other researchers and faculty share the material, but they can also remix, transform, and build upon it.

When asked about his thoughts on Open Access publishing, Prof. Walker said “To be most effective, and to achieve the widest possible dissemination, knowledge needs to travel freely, unimpeded by online pay walls or the practical limits of print-only distribution of publications.  Open Access publishing online democratizes information by making it available to anyone with internet access, and guarantees the broadest impact of our scholarly work.  Open Access publishing should be a central aspiration for researchers seeking to publish and disseminate their work.”

Open Access Week Feature: SMAST Professor Published in OA Marine Science Journal

International open Access Week is a time to recognize scholarly research and published works that are available free of charge and unfettered by access barriers. Today we highlight Associate Professor Gavin Fay’s recent publication to promote Open Access publishing activities. Prof. Gavin Fay (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Navigating concepts of social-ecological resilience in marine fisheries under climate change: shared challenges and recommendations from the northeast United States” in ICES Journal of Marine Science. Starting in January 2023, ICES Journal of Marine Science became freely available, including the archive which extends back 120 years! Fay’s article focuses on the challenges and ambiguity in social-ecological resilience concepts and explores implications for research and implementation. Kudos to Prof. Fay!

Prof. Fay also has an openly licensed lab manual that is now linked in the UMassD Open Educational Resources (OER) Hub available through OER Commons. This lab manual resource is intended to provide an overview for lab members and others about how the lab operates and centers around developing interdisciplinary modeling approaches to extend the scope of applications for fisheries and ecosystem-based management.

Open Access Week Feature: Two OA Journals Founded at UMassD

International Open Access Week (October 23-29, 2023) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an Open Access journal that was founded by UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley, in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island. A few other UMD faculty are currently listed as co-editors.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles. The journal published a feminist criticism of paywall publishing.

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka  currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS) which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing. OJS is open source and enables the publication of articles and issues online and indexed in global services like Google Scholar, Crossref, and many others.

Are you interested in locating more OA Journals? Take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Celebrate International Open Access Week

This year’s theme for International Open Access Week (Oct. 23 – Oct. 29) is Community over Commercialization. Open Access (OA) places the value of accessible information to the public above monetary interest in knowledge dissemination. OA removes restriction from research outputs such as journal articles, books, datasets, and more. Have you ever hit a paywall in your research? Perhaps you have located the abstract for an article that sounds ideal for your project, but then you click to find a request for your credit card. Interlibrary loan is a solution for the UMass Dartmouth community in those circumstances, but what about researchers who do not have library resources available?

The free and immediate availability of academic publications online means that the research will be read and built upon by a wider and more diverse audience. With this greater exposure comes more opportunity in the academic and scientific community. This publishing model is not available for all academic research at this time, but acknowledging Open Access Week is a great way to expand awareness of OA, and to learn more.

Here are some ways to deepen your understanding of OA this week:

  • Check out a print book about OA publishing from the display in library.
  • Access books online from MIT Press Direct to Open.
  • Subscribe to our Scholarly Communications blog for OA features this week and beyond.
  • Stop by the library/MASSPIRG OA Week table from 11am – 3pm on Tuesday Oct. 24th in the library lobby.
  • Attend one of these OA Week webinars:

Research and Publishing Roundup

This blog will periodically highlight some of our UMass Dartmouth Community’s recent achievements in scholarly publishing, research, and news features. Congrats to the following UMD faculty and staff on their newsworthy work:

Professor Pingguo He (Fisheries Oceanography) and Technical Associate Christopher Rillahan (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Waiting for the right time and tide: The fine-scale migratory behavior of river herring in two coastal New England streams” in Marine and Coastal Fisheries. The study used high-resolution acoustic imaging to study river herring’s fine-scale behavior during spring spawning migration in two coastal rivers in Massachusetts.Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) was featured in an article about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in America. The article uses Anguelov’s research of data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database.Associate Professor Gavin Fay (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Navigating concepts of social-ecological resilience in marine fisheries under climate change: shared challenges and recommendations from the northeast United States” in ICES Journal of Marine Science. The article discusses the challenges and ambiguity in social-ecological resilience concepts and explores implications for research and implementation.Associate Professor Mark Santow (History) published Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race. The book focuses on the community organizer’s attempts to grapple with the moral dilemma of race through his organizing efforts and writing.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

Making High Quality Videos

By Heather Tripp, Video Specialist

Whether it’s filmed with a smartphone or a professional camera, video is no longer an option in our world. Video started to take over print over a decade ago and has grown to be a requirement for businesses and organizations across the world. While we are bombarded with all kinds of images, having a video of high quality can still set yours apart.

Video has become an important medium for disseminating scholarly information. This may come in the form of video summaries of research findings or conference proceedings. Academics choose to promote their publications or scientific experiments through video to make the content more engaging and reach a wider audience. This blog will present some tips for creating quality videos:

Before you begin, a few key elements to think about are:

-What are your goals/who is your audience? This dictates the pace and feel of the video.

– Hook your viewer in the first few seconds of your video. The first six seconds are key!

– Tell a story. Stories tend to draw the viewer in and keep them watching.

One large element that can make your video easier to create and look better is to do pre-production. Things like, scouting out the area you plan on filming the day before. Look at the lighting at that time of day. How busy is it? How loud? Are there unsightly things like trash that can be removed? If you need to plug in a light source, is there an electric outlet?

This is also a good time to check out your camera and gear. Are the camera and microphone batteries charged? Do you have enough space on your card? Contact any talent and make sure they know the time and place to meet you.

High quality smartphones can take decent video and do much of the work for you, but it still needs a human touch to keep things creative and visually pleasing. One way of doing this is using the Rule of Thirds. Divide your screen into 9 cubes using 4 gridlines. By positioning key elements along the gridlines, you’ll end up with better compositions.

The rule of thirds identifies four points at the center of each grid line intersection that your subject should intersect. The subject should hit 2-3 of these points. The image above has the subject more to the side, leaving room for the addition of text.

Another trick is to use a shallow depth of field, which keeps your subject in focus, but the background is fuzzy. It’s almost always best to have a simple background, and using a shallow depth of field can make even the most distracting settings less so.

Once you have your video recorded and edited, you may want to consider adding music. Most popular social media sites have their own music library to browse through. I you want to add something of your own, keep in mind you need something either in the public domain or through a royalty free website. These can offer a single, one-time purchase, or a variety of subscriptions. Rules are different on each site, so make sure to read them.

Finally, where do you want your video to live? Popular places for horizontal videos continue to be YouTube and Vimeo. Social sites like TikTok and Instagram are best for vertical video.

Do you need support with making videos for your courses or scholarly endeavors? Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

 

Research and Publishing Roundup

This blog will periodically highlight some of our UMass Dartmouth Community’s recent achievements in scholarly publishing, research, and news features. Congrats to the following UMD faculty and staff on their newsworthy work:

Professor Avijit Gangopadhyay co-published “Observed surface and subsurface Marine Heat Waves in the Bay of Bengal from in situ and high resolution satellite data” in Climate Dynamics. The paper documents that surface marine heatwaves have increased in the Bay of Bengal in number, frequency, duration, and intensity over the last two decades.Assistant Professor Jonathan Kush (Management & Marketing) co-published “Communication networks and team performance: selecting members to network positions” in Frontiers in Psychology. The paper examines how individuals come to occupy communication network positions and the effect of selection processes on group performance.Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Economic Development and Strategic Initiatives Michael Goodman was featured in an article that examined how policies and politicians in Massachusetts define how the state is viewed through a national political lens.Resident Director Kevin McGinnis published “‘All One in Christ Jesus:’ Physical and Moral Equality in Galatians 3:28″ in the Journal of Religious Competition in Antiquity. The paper argues that Paul’s letter to the Galatians was an example of Hellenistic philosophy, which saw everyone as having equal potential for cognitive clarity and moral goodness without the expectation of political equality.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.