The spectacular and dramatic effects of changing seasons have been a source of inspiration for artists through the ages. Pennsylvania Seasons is a delightful collection of nature-themed poems paired with magisterial landscape photography that captures all the mercurial moods of summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Overflowing with visual and lyric imagery, this book celebrates natural wonders, some preserved in public parks and forests and others lurking in hidden places. Featuring the work of local poets who know the region best, (...) Pennsylvania Seasons matches each photograph with a verse that effectively evokes its power. The result is an inspired ode to nature which will be an essential gift for all Pennsylvanians. (shrink)

"Russell's Pennsylvania" focuses on Bertrand Russell's days residing in Pennsylvania during the Second World War. It draws from contemporary local newspaper accounts, published memoirs of authors who visited Russell and his family then, as well as reminiscences from people with first-hand accounts who were able to be contacted recently.

Firearm violence has soared in American cities, but most states statutorily preempt municipal firearm regulation. This article describes a unique collaboration in Philadelphia among elected officials, public health researchers, and attorneys that has led to litigation based on original quantitative analyses and grounded in innovative constitutional theories and statutory interpretation.

The Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania, was built in 1965 as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Interdisciplinary Laboratories program intended to foster interdisciplinary research and training in materials science. The process that led to the construction of the four-story structure served as the focus of intense debates over the meaning and process of interdisciplinary research in universities. The location of the building, its size, internal design, and functionalities were all subject to (...) heated negotiations among patrons, scientists, and university administrators, to find the proper place of interdisciplinary materials science on the University of Pennsylvania's campus. Building on the recent work on laboratory architecture, this paper argues that the negotiations and controversies over the LRSM building were concrete representations of the broader struggle over the appropriate place of interdisciplinary research and training within a university. (shrink)

Various branches of Complementary and Integrative Medicine (CIM) are growing fast in Western Pennsylvania, similar to other parts of the United States and the world. Little or no knowledge is available about what healthcare providers know and how they think and act regarding CIM. Such knowledge is important for planning for education about CIM and its ethical ramifications for future generations of healthcare providers. In this study, after a qualitative study and literature review, a questionnaire was developed to assess (...) the knowledge, attitude, and use of CIM among health-majoring undergraduate students of PennWest University. The content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of experts, and its reliability was assessed by the test-retest method. The weighted agreements for individual questions ranged from 87% to 95%, with kappa ranging from 0.57 to 0.81. The Cronbach’s Alpha for the scale was 0.90. the questionnaire was completed by health-major students of PennWest University. To analyze the collected data, we used the Student’s t test and the chi-square test with a significant level of 0.05. The participants showed high percentages of familiarity with and use of CIM. Also, they expressed a favorable attitude toward CIM. They also agreed with the necessity of more education about CIM to be included in the curricula. This study concludes that there is a need to incorporate more education on CIM into the curricula of health-related disciplines, with a special focus on the ethical aspects, including the mandate for avoiding untested remedies and following evidence-based clinical practice. (shrink)

Gifford Pinchot was a noted forestry expert, a conservationist, and governor of Pennsylvania. Rachel Carson, celebrated for her groundbreaking books that raised awareness of the negative human impact on the natural environment, was born, raised, and educated in Pennsylvania. Although these Pennsylvanians are both environmentalists, they approached the natural environment very differently and embody two main positions in contemporary environmental ethics. After situating their environmental legacies among contemporary environmental ethics, this paper then discusses implications of the irreconcilability of (...) their positions on environmental progress; the concept of environmental legacy; and the importance of reflecting on the lives of environmentalists like Pinchot and Carson. (shrink)

Scholars have focused on algorithms used during sentencing, bail, and parole, but little work explores what we term “carceral algorithms” that are used during incarceration. This paper is focused on the Pennsylvania Additive Classification Tool used to classify prisoners’ custody levels while they are incarcerated. Algorithms that are used during incarceration warrant deeper attention by scholars because they have the power to enact the lived reality of the prisoner. The algorithm in this case determines the likelihood a person would (...) endure additional disciplinary actions, can complete required programming, and gain experiences that, among other things, are distilled into variables feeding into the parole algorithm. Given such power, examining algorithms used on people currently incarcerated offers a unique analytic view to think about the dialectic relationship between data and algorithms. Our examination of the PACT is two-fold and complementary. First, our qualitative overview of the historical context surrounding PACT reveals that it is designed to prioritize incapacitation and control over rehabilitation. While it closely informs prisoner rehabilitation plans and parole considerations, it is rooted in population management for prison securitization. Second, on analyzing data for 146,793 incarcerated people in PA, along with associated metadata related to the PACT, we find it is replete with racial bias as well as errors, omissions, and inaccuracies. Our findings to date further caution against data-driven criminal justice reforms that rely on pre-existing data infrastructures and expansive, uncritical, data-collection routines. (shrink)

Growing awareness of the ethical implications of neuroscience in the early years of the 21st century led to the emergence of the new academic field of “neuroethics,” which studies the ethical implications of developments in the neurosciences. However, despite the acceleration and evolution of neuroscience research on nonhuman animals, the unique ethical issues connected with neuroscience research involving nonhuman animals remain underdiscussed. This is a significant oversight given the central place of animal models in neuroscience. To respond to these concerns, (...) the Center for Neuroscience and Society and the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a workshop on the “Neuroethics of Animal Research” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the workshop, expert speakers and attendees discussed ethical issues arising from neuroscience research involving nonhuman animals, including the use of animal models in the study of pain and psychiatric conditions, animal brain-machine interfaces, animal–animal chimeras, cerebral organoids, and the relevance of neuroscience to debates about personhood. This paper highlights important emerging ethical issues based on the discussions at the workshop. This paper includes recommendations for research in the United States from the authors based on the discussions at the workshop, loosely following the format of the 2 Gray Matters reports on neuroethics published by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. (shrink)

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1795 proposal for a Constitutional Jury is usually portrayed as the first proposal for an institution to control the constitutionality of laws, and thus the ancestor of the modern constitutional court. Challenging this view, this article resituates the Constitutional Jury in a broader transatlantic tradition concerned with creating a conservative power, a non-judicial and explicitly political constitutional guardian, and demonstrates the influence of the 1776 Pennsylvania Council of Censors on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury. Drawing upon the insights provided (...) by this tradition, it then reevaluates the history of constitutionalism and the contemporary crisis of constitutional guardianship. (shrink)

A Black Intellectual's Odyssey describes aspects of Martin Kilson's intellectual journey in the social and institutional contexts that shaped his progression from a small African American community in a Pennsylvania milltown to his collegiate experiences at the oldest Negro college in the nation, and then to Harvard University, where he was both a student and a professor for some fifty years. Kilson's own writing is framed by pieces by three of his former Harvard undergraduate students: an introduction by Cornel (...) West; an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. (shrink)

This article explores the founding of Pennsylvania as a window into the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. I argue that this founding illustrates both the importance and the limits of political theory to the study of political life. On the one hand, theorizing new societies is vitally important, because founding documents give shape to the aspirations of both founders and citizens. In this case, the founder's plans for his colony were the product of a great deal (...) of political theorizing, grounded in Penn's Quakerism and his active role in English religious and political life. But theory's importance to the study of actual foundings (and, I argue, politics more generally) is inherently limited, as well, since the colony's theoretical foundations were themselves evolving and unstable, and the translation of ideas into practice is only ever partial. After a careful consideration of the many founding documents produced by Penn between spring 1681 and summer 1682, and a close examination of developments in Pennsylvania from late 1682 through Penn's departure in summer 1684, I close by reflecting on what the case of Pennsylvania might tell us about the broader study of political theory and political practice. I suggest that we need a more flexible understanding of what political theory 'is' if we want to make sense of thinkers like Penn who theorized out of their deep involvement in the thick of actual governing. (shrink)

Civic agriculture is characterized in the literature as complementary and embedded social and economic strategies that provide economic benefits to farmers at the same time that they ostensibly provide socio-environmental benefits to the community. This paper presents some ways in which women farmers practice civic agriculture. The data come from in-depth interviews with women practicing agriculture in Pennsylvania. Some of the strategies women farmers use to make a living from the farm have little to do with food or agricultural (...) products, but all are a product of the process of providing a living for farmers while meeting a social need in the community. Most of the women in our study also connect their business practices to their gender identity in rural and agricultural communities, and redefine successful farming in opposition to traditional views of economic rationality. (shrink)

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Schrecker and John W. Nason some half century ago, the University of Pennsylvania is home to microfilm reproductions of over one hundred thousand hand-written pages drawn from the collection of Leibniz’s papers presently housed in the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover. The microfilms are to be found on the mezzanine floor of the reference section in the Van Pelt Library and are readily accessible to visitors. Xerox copies may be made, although the Van Pelt Library (...) stresses that the microfilms remain the property of the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, and that permission to copy must be obtained from Hannover beforehand. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary hospital ethics committees have been the most common response to the mandates for ethical review procedures set forth by the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, the American Hospital Association, and within institutions themselves. A 1989 national survey reported that 60% of hospitals had ethics committees. However, little is still known about the current state of these committees in hospitals, their composition, what functions are performed, or what issues are discussed.

Local food systems are growing, and little is known about how the constellation of farms and markets change over time. We trace the evolution of two local food systems over six years, including a dataset of over 2690 market connections between 1520 locations. Longitudinal social network analysis reveals how the architecture, actor network centrality, magnitude, and spatiality of these supply chains shifted during the 2012–2018 time period. Our findings demonstrate that, despite growth in the number of farmers’ markets, grocery stores, (...) farms and restaurants in both counties, each local food system also experienced high turnover rates. Over 80% of the market connections changed during the study period. Farms, farmers’ markets, and grocery stores showed a 40–50% ‘survival’ rate, indicating their role in sustaining local food systems over longer time periods. Other actors, such as restaurants, had a much higher turnover rate within the network. Both food systems became more close-knit and consolidated as the center of gravity for both local food systems pulled away from urban areas toward rural farmland. Evidence of both growth and decay within local food systems provides a new understanding of the social networks behind local food markets. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 672-674.