Research and Publishing Roundup

Here’s what’s new in research and publishing at UMassD:

Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Shannon Jenkins was featured in an article that details how voters gather credible information about candidates and issues in the age of digital disinformation.

Professor Brian Williams (History) published an article about the latest phase in the military campaign against Hamas, which involves navigating a complex network of tunnels below ground.

Professor Steve Lohrenz (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) co-published “Increased Terrestrial Carbon Export and CO2 Evasion From Global Inland Waters Since the Preindustrial Era” in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. The paper discusses research undertaken to address gaps in global carbon cycling identified in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.

Brooke Lowman (Ph.D., ’21), Cate O’Keefe (Ph.D., ’13), and Professor Steve Cadrin (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Evaluating bycatch avoidance in the U.S. Atlantic sea scallop Placopecten magellanicus fishery” in North American Journal of Fisheries Management. The paper analyzed the bycatch avoidance program’s effectiveness over four years based on fishing behavior relative to bycatch advisories. Using loglinear models to compare frequencies, the research team examined the relationship between bycatch reports from participating vessels and bycatch advisories.

Professor & Montgomery Charter Chair Changsheng Chen (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Effects of warming and fishing on Atlantic sea scallop (Placopecten magellanicus) size structure in the Mid-Atlantic rotationally closed areas” in ICES Journal of Marine Science. The paper examines the sea scallop size structures in three rotationally closed areas in the Mid-Atlantic Bight and decomposed their total variances using the variance partitioning method.

Professor Steve Lohrenz (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) co-published “Soil legacy nutrients contribute to the decreasing stoichiometric ratio of N and P loading from the Mississippi River Basin” in Global Change Biology. The article advocates urgency in integrating soil legacy into sustainable nutrient management strategies for aquatic ecosystem health and water security.Professor Doug Roscoe co-published “The Accreditors Made Us Do It?” in the higher education publication Assessment Update. The article examines how accreditation bodies foster improvement in student learning and recommends eliminating mandates for the program-level assessment reporting cycle.

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

Research Reflection: Autoethnography

by Megan Fletcher, PhD

Autoethnography is a narrative method in qualitative research that combines tenets of autobiographical writing with ethnographic sense-making. Ellis, Adams and Bocher (2011) point out that this combination makes autoethnography “both process and product” (p.1). Authors of autoethnography usually write in the first-person making themselves and their experiences the focus of the research, divorcing the traditional separation between researcher and subject. Autoethnographic research is often characterized by evocative and emotional experience while disclosing details of private life.

I remember the first time I learned about autoethnographic writing during a graduate seminar on qualitative research methods. I was struck by the honesty and vulnerability of the authors and their ability to harness subjective experience rather than attempt to establish and maintain objectivity in a research project. I found myself returning over and over to the topic of intimate partner violence in my developing work but made a point to keep myself (and my lived experience) out of the conversation. After that class, inspired by the bravery of the authors I had read, I decided to make a change. I wrote “We to Me: An Autoethnographic Discovery of Self – In and Out of Domestic Abuse” for my Master’s Thesis project, which later developed into my first publication (Fletcher, 2018). This manuscript went on to receive the Stephen E. Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.

There are great resources for exploring autoethnographic research or submitting your own work. These include the Journal of Autoethnography, the International  Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry, as well as our own Claire T. Carney Library which offers many autoethnographic articles and resources available to students and staff.

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social

Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 36(1), 273–290.

Fletcher, M. A. (2018). We to me: An autoethnographic discovery of self, in and out of domestic abuse. Women’s Studies in Communication, 41(1), 42-59.

Research and Publishing Roundup

Check out the latest publishing achievments in the UMassD Community:

Kevin Stokesbury, Dean of the School for Marine Science & Technology and former SMAST students Kyle Cassidy and Travis M. Lowery co-published “Constructing a baseline groundfish trawl survey for an offshore windfarm development area” in Marine and Coastal Fisheries. The article details an experimental bottom trawl survey in the Vineyard Wind lease and adjacent control areas to collect preliminary estimates of fish assemblage composition, density, and size distribution.Associate Professor Scott Field (Mathematics), Assistant Professor Vijay Varma (Mathematics), and doctoral students Tousif Islam and Feroz H. Shai co-published “Analysis of GWTC-3 with fully precessing numerical relativity surrogate models” in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology. The article discusses their findings , including identifying a binary black hole system most likely formed through dynamical capture and whose collision produced the second fastest-moving black hole observed.

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

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.”

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.

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.

Books Written by Faculty in the Library Collection

by Emma Wood

UMass Dartmouth faculty members actively publish and produce scholarly products within their areas of expertise, and these research outputs come in a variety of formats such as journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports, and of course, books. To celebrate and promote books written by our faculty, the library adds titles that come to our attention to the library collection. To note a few recent books by UMD faculty, Prof. Anguelov Nikolay of the Public Policy Department recently authored a book titled The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy, and Prof. Tryon Woods of Crime & Justice Studies published Pandemic Police Power, Public Health, and the Abolition Question. These titles, among others, are available in the Claire. T. Carney Library’s print collection and are searchable online.

Even without knowing the titles or faculty author names, you can still peruse the library collection for books authored by UMD faculty. An efficient method to look up those materials in the online catalog, Primo, is to enter the following keywords in the search box, displayed on the main page: “UMass Dartmouth Faculty Publication Collection.” This search will help to connect you with the books in this growing collection.