Guest Editorial—“Building Research Communities During a Pandemic”

What does it mean to do research during a global pandemic? Many of us have grappled with challenges and tragedies over the past year, but we also acquired new skills as our educational lives shifted largely or entirely online. Students and professors have learned to use online technologies to create new scholarly communities, to share resources, and to work around limitations to accessing faraway materials. Together, we have explored new kinds of engagements with our scholarly topics through avenues that we might not have discovered if our research had not been interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

How Egocentric Biases Maintain Social Anxiety: A Literature Review

Biases and heuristics are mental shortcuts that help guide our daily decision making and cognitive processing but can often lead us astray when they account for inaccurate or misinterpreted information. In this review I aim to understand how the spotlight effect (Gilovich et al., 2000), the overestimation of how attentive others are to our actions, and the illusion of transparency (Gilovich et al., 1998), the overestimation of how easily others can discern our internal state, maintain social anxiety by disrupting the anchoring component these shortcuts rely on. Through a detailed analysis of major research conducted by Brown and Stopa (2007) and Haikal and Hong (2010), I was able to synthesize the empirical findings, discuss clinical implications, and propose future directions for research.

The Anthropocene Commons – A New Paradigm of Scale Variance: Commons Frameworks and Climate Change Theory

The term Anthropocene, denoting the era where human activity is the greatest influence on the environment and climate, marks a new era of climate change theory and understanding. This paper, though, looks at existing promising works surrounding the Anthropocene and argues that the dialogue lacks holistic conceptions of agency and spatial and temporal scale variance in order to fully grasp its complexity. Agency refers to the flawed understanding of the Anthropocene as simply human without consideration for other assemblages, which denotes the other stakeholders apart from humans. Temporal scale refers to the need for a varied consideration of time and the creation of assemblages. Spatial scale refers to the different levels of interaction (national, international, socioeconomic. This understanding of scales, or scale variance, relies on Derek Woods’ theory that multiple scalar levels are necessary to encapsulate the Anthropocene. This paper will approach scale variance by constructing the Anthropocene Commons model. The model, based its theoretical framework on Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons on resource, will utilize the three levels of scale absent in other scholarship. The paper will examine other models used to address climate change and discuss their lack of the necessary scope and holistic framework and how their prescriptions for addressing climate catastrophe fall short. Using scale variance in the Anthropocene commons, then, will seek to correct it and offer a standardized but flexible framework to better address the ongoing and impending crisis.

“Don’t Kill My Buzz, Man!” – Explaining the Criminalization of Psychedelic Drugs

In the 1950s, psychedelic drugs were the subject of extensive psychiatric research in the United States. By 1960, they had been found to be non-addictive, to have remarkable safety profiles, and to potentially be able to treat a range of psychological conditions. However, in 1968, the possession of psychedelics was criminalized by the US federal government. Consequently, medical research has been stifled, and today the possession and distribution of psychedelics are punished more severely than for more dangerous recreational drugs such as methamphetamine. Most scholars argue that psychedelics were criminalized due to a “moral panic” in the late 1960s. However, this theory overlooks several important aspects of the political process that led to psychedelic criminalization. This essay takes an alternative stance. First, early 20th century temperance advocates instilled an anti-drug moral framework into the American cultural consciousness. Then, in the early 1960s, safety concerns and professional biases led most mainstream psychiatrists to reject the therapeutic use of psychedelics. These factors interacted to cause both a moral panic and severe criminalization, but the moral panic did not itself cause criminalization.

Burning Woman: Sexualized Robots and the Vilification of Women in Metropolis and its Precursors

The vilification and subsequent destruction of feminine robots is a surprisingly common trope in film and literature. This essay draws connections between three very different works—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Villier’s Tomorrow’s Eve, and E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman—and posits a shared narrative reason for the deaths of the three artificial women: male projection. Comparing and contrasting the three death scenes with each other as well as other texts on feminine literature and projection demonstrates how little substance there is to these “out of control” women/technologies beyond the faults of the men who create them. Furthermore, this essay brings up a prudent question: could these artificial women have become something more if it were not for the displaced guilt and projected egos of the men around them?

Massacre or Genocide? Redefining the Sook Ching

Sook Ching is a Chinese term meaning “purge through cleansing.” Operation Sook Ching took place in Singapore from February 21 to March 4, 1942. It was a military operation carried out by the Japanese with the intent of executing anti-Japanese Chinese men between the ages of 18 and 50. Ultimately, it is impossible to know exactly how many people were killed; the official Japanese figure is 5,000, while unofficial estimates reach as high as 50,000. Men were called into screening centers where disorganized screening procedures determined if they were anti-Japanese. The Sook Ching’s legacy lives on as one of the greatest tragedies in Singapore’s history. The intent of this paper is to argue for a redefinition of the Sook Ching as a genocide rather than a massacre. The cornerstones of this research are the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and contemporary sources discussing the crime. This research is important because it sets a precedent of accountability, as well as acknowledging the crimes the Japanese committed during the Second World War. This thesis will discuss the Sook Ching, its legacy, and the steps required to address the incident and right the wrongs that occurred. It will also examine the racial and political environment that set the stage for the tragedy, as well as the scars it left behind.

Miłosz the Visionary: His American experience in Visions from San Francisco Bay

Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz is one of the most influential poets, prosiest, philosophers, and diplomats, his works spanning two centuries and multiple continents. Born in 1911, in what is now modern-day Lithuania, Miłosz spent most of his professional life in Europe including Poland and France. In 1960, fleeing the power of the communist regime, he found political asylum in California, teaching in the Slavic languages department at the University of California Berkley. The following paper examines Czesław Miłosz’s perspective on the radical West culture of the 1960s and ‘70s in his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. This work brings attention to previously unnoticed English mistranslations. I propose a new translation to reflect Miłosz’s original meaning, which changes the way English readers interpret his American experience as well as his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. Specifically, I consider two sets of Miłosz’s pros and cons which he crafted to describe the essence of his American experience, and one set of pros and cons I crafted from his writing to frame his experience. These juxtaposing pros and cons ultimately led him to the conclusion of the importance of richly interpreting one’s reality, especially in a time of change and uncertainty. By way of comparative literary analysis of Miłosz’s Visions and selected poems, we change the way we traditionally think of the ‘60s and ‘70s, realizing that instead of being a time of explosive interpretive energy, this was a time when Americans fell away from rich interpretation of their metaphysical realities.

Constructions of Identity and War: A Reciprocal Relationship in Former Yugoslavia

This article investigates the reciprocal relationship between identity and conflict, focusing the inquiry on the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and the resulting Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. A brief history of nationalist sentiment under communist rule in Yugoslavia is first displayed to contextualize the scope of research. The focus then shifts to how constructions of ethnonationalist identity became the basis of brutal ethnic conflict. Identity as the root of conflict is first discussed theoretically from an international relations perspective, citing the breakdown of a multinational state and the subsequent security dilemma. It is then grounded empirically in real-world evidence, illustrating how power imbalances between the republics and powerful ethnonationalist rhetoric led the region to war. The research then transitions to the secondary and complementary component of the thesis: how conflict shapes identity. The discussion cites incongruent narratives of war among the former republics as well as the tarnished international image of former Yugoslavia. Through a display of relevant evidence and literature, this argument strives to illustrate the power of identity in conflict, unity, and the nation. Further research could address how the weaponization of ethnicity could be avoided and reversed in favor of a stronger sense of collective identity around shared sociopolitical values and ideals.

Guest Editorial—“Green Open Access is ‘Just’ Publishing”

A shared experience among many graduate students is the dawning realization that the vaunted privilege of having one's scholarly work accepted for publication is also a fleecing. The exact terms of this fleecing depend on a number of different factors – so many, in fact, that it can get a bit confusing – but it's quite common for researchers to pay several thousand dollars to make their work available for others to read. And these are not the expenses incurred to complete their scholarly work. It's merely the cost of having one's work posted on the website of an academic publisher!

Mating Affects Lifespan Differently in Two Strains of Pseudo-female Caenorhabditis elegans

Mating is vital for sexually reproducing species, yet the ideal mating strategy for males and females can differ. The ensuing conflict between the sexes – namely, sexual conflict – results in a decrease in population level fitness. The degree of sexual conflict can be affected by the behavior, physiology, and life history of a population. Previous studies in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans have shown that mating causes lifespan to decrease in pseudo-females and hermaphrodites, which was interpreted as evidence of sexual conflict. However, it is still an open question whether variations in mating condition and strain type can affect the degree of sexual conflict and lifespan decrease. Here, I investigate whether lifespan is affected by mating in conditions other than sex- skewed individual mating scenarios used in previous work. I conducted population-based mating assays in two different strains of C. elegans using both natural and male-skewed sex ratios. Counter to expectations, I found no effect of mating on lifespan in a wild isolate of C. elegans, while virgins from a canonical laboratory strain had a decreased lifespan relative to their counterparts mated in groups. My data offers a counterpoint to the literature, which agrees that mating universally decreases the lifespan of C. elegans pseudo-females and hermaphrodites. These results highlight the flexibility of reproductive costs and the importance of life histories in experimental populations.