Experts from National Geographic, NPR, and other national leaders in the arts, humanities, and sciences connected by webcam last week to discuss a series of ten powerful images for “How Science is Pictured in the Media and Public Culture.” UMBC and Reading the Pictures jointly produced the panel as part of the year-long Seeing Science project, which explores the role photography plays in shaping, representing, and furthering the sciences.
To prepare, explains Marvin Heiferman, Seeing Sciencecurator at UMBC, “Meg Handler, editor-at-large at Reading the Pictures, and I spent a couple of months looking at the year’s worth of photographs that appeared in magazine articles and online pieces about the sciences to…see the various ways, from stock photography to photojournalism, that the sciences were represented.”
The discussion on December 1 took place on Google HangOut, accommodating live audio and video with viewer participation via live chat. Drawn from the ranks of curators, photo editors, visual scholars, and scientists, the panel included Rebecca Adelman, associate professor of media and communication studies, UMBC; Michael Shaw, publisher, Reading the Pictures; Max Mutchler, manager, Space Telescope Science Institute Hubble Heritage Project; Marvin Heiferman; Kurt Mutchler, senior editor for science photography, National Geographic; Corey Keller, curator, SFMOMA; and Ben de la Cruz, multimedia editor, NPR Science Desk, with moderator Nathan Stormer, professor of rhetoric, University of Maine.
The series of ten images they discussed represented a broad range of science disciplines, were visually distinct from one another, and varied in their goals and purposes. Together, Stormer argued, they demonstrated how “science becomes visible to us when science is helping us see things —that is when it becomes apparent to us that we depend on it, live within it as much as we do.”
The conversation began with a colorful and formally engaging photograph of a massive general-purpose detector within the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Subsequent photographs included a new view of the Pillars of Creation from the Hubble Space Telescope; a human embryo being modified; four women from NASA’s most recent astronaut class; the early 20th century Chart of Physical Traits alongside photographs of faces overlayed with facial recognition software mapping grid points; an overhead view of a toxic algae bloom in Florida; a 4-month-old baby with microcephaly, published during the Zika outbreak; President Obama with a boy and his marshmallow cannon at the White House Science Fair; and two visitors wearing virtual reality gear at The Void in Times Square.
The depth and spectrum of the panelists’ expertise created a fascinating discussion that began with initial emotional and intellectual responses to the images and quickly delved into, as Adelman described, “how the photograph acts as a visual metaphor for how science gets communicated to audiences of non-scientists.”
“What was interesting and revealing to me was to listen to the various ways people with different relationships to science and imaging looked at and responded to the images discussed,” says Heiferman. “Since Seeing Science is an interdisciplinary look at how images function, that variety of responses is what gives a discussion like the one we had its depth and richness.”
Melissa Cormier ’17 M.F.A., intermedia and digital arts, tuned in to the event from the on-campus viewing party hosted by UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC.) “My current thesis work deals with co-opting traditionally scientific aesthetics and methods of display and observation, so it was an opportunity to witness how those types of images are spoken about and discussed by the various panel members,” says Cormier.
Reflecting on the live chat function of the Google HangOut, Cormier shares, “It was a great experience to be able to interact with such a distinguished panel and feel included in the conversation. It also gave me some new research avenues to pursue in my work, as well as affect the language I will use to discuss my work.”
Reading the Pictures’ salon archive now features in slideshow format the ten photographs that formed that backbone of the event. A video of the discussion is available on YouTube.
Through #SeeingScience, readers can also explore fifty additional media images that Reading the Pictures featured on Twitter and Instagram in the weeks leading up to the event.
In the wake of recent events such as the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s electoral victory, John Rennie Short explores why there has been widespread resistance to economic, political, and cultural globalization in a new article in The Conversation.
Short, a professor of public policy, traces the origins of globalization back to the end of World War II when the Allied countries set up a new order focused on free markets and trade, coupled with the establishment of international organizations with the idea that it would curb economic nationalism.
He then explains how this later led to money moving more freely around the world, with eventual global shifts in manufacturing and a loosening of trade restrictions.
“As a result, there was a global redistribution of wealth. In the West as factories shuttered, mechanized or moved overseas, the living standards of the working class declined. Meanwhile, in China prosperity grew, with the poverty rate falling from 84 percent in 1981 to only 12 percent by 2010,” Short writes, adding, “the backlash against economic globalization is most marked in those countries such as the U.S. where economic dislocation unfolds with weak safety nets and limited government investment in job retraining or continuing and lifetime education.”
Professor Short analyzes how expanding free markets, with the creation of institutions such as the European Union, along with cultural backlash to globalization seen across the world, have all contributed in recent decades to the widespread resistance to globalization.
“The globalization project contains much that was desirable: improvements in living conditions through global trade, reducing conflict and threat of war through political globalization and encouraging cultural diversity in a widening cultural globalization,” explains Short. “The question now, in my view, is not whether we should accept or reject globalization but how we shape and guide it to these more progressive goals.”
Read the full article in The Conversation. It has also been re-published with the below news outlets.
Why there’s a globalization backlash (U.S. News and World Report)
Globalization and its discontents (The Millennium Post)
Globalization and its discontents: Why there’s a backlash and how it needs to change (SF Gate)
Image: John Rennie Short in his office. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
A thought-provoking memoir about love, loss, and survival published earlier this year by Nancy Rankie Shelton has received a 2016 Best Book Award. Shelton, a professor of education, is the author of 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival (Garn Press, 2016), a book that has made significant contributions to the growing body of literature on living and dying well.
The i310 Media Group announced the 2016 Best Book Awardsearlier this month, which included more than 2,000 entries from mainstream and independent publishers. Shelton’s book received the Best Book Award in the Health: Death and Dying category.
The book encourages readers to overcome fears of cancer, remain loving and strong, survive the death of a loved one, and continue living. The story traces Shelton’s husband Jack’s fight with lung cancer and the stress and confusion of managing his treatment. The book reflects on the 35 years the couple was together and the family’s relationships with others over the years.
In a review posted earlier this year on the Garn Press website, the reviewer notes, “Nancy Rankie Shelton’s 5-13, A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival is a breathtaking read. It is work of great courage but also a literary triumph. Like an uncut diamond it is rough reading in places and then the light fractures and you feel the surge of an enduring human spirit who is not frightened to love, face death, and then reimagine her life.”
In a press release announcing the 2016 Best Book Award winners, Jeffrey Keen, President and CEO of i310 Media Group, stated that “the 2016 results represent a phenomenal mix of books from a wide array of publishers throughout the United States,” adding, “our success begins with the enthusiastic participation of authors and publishers and continues with our distinguished panel of industry judges who bring to the table their extensive editorial, PR, marketing, and design expertise.”
Professor Shelton is the author of 23 publications appearing in prominent academic journals and leading publishing companies specializing in literacy research and/or education policy. Her teaching areas focus on reading and language arts, literacy/culture and composition theory/practice. Her research interests include children’s writing development, effects of mandated instruction on elementary literacy development, literacy/art connections, and children’s literature. Read more about her work on the education department website.
Image: Nancy Rankie Shelton. Garn Press photo. \
This story, by Max Cole, originally appeared here.
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