The nuts and bolts of the publishing-industrial complex
Abstract:
Scholarly publications are the bread and butter of academic work. As graduate students, some of us are just starting to dip our toes into the world of academic publishing, while some of us are seasoned and prolific publishers. What do we all need to know about publishing during our graduate studies? What’s normal? What are tradeoffs in trying to publish a lot vs a little? And how important is it anyway? In this conversation, we’ll talk to people at different stages of their academic life about the both the practical mechanics and underlying questions behind this ubiquitous, but seldom-discussed topic.
Dr. Leila Harris
Associate Professor, IRES
Associate Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Bio:
Leila Harris is an Associate Professor at IRES and in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives. Dr. Harris’s current research focuses on the intersection of environmental issues and inequality / social difference, water governance shifts (e.g. marketization, participatory governance), in addition to a range of water governance challenges important for Canada.
Dr. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent
UBC Faculty of Forestry Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Bio:
Dr. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent is a recent graduate from IRES and currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the UBC Faculty of Forestry. His research falls at the intersection between natural and social sciences. He has broad research interests that bring together natural resource management, territorial governance, environmental policies, deliberative-analytical engagement processes, climate change mitigation and adaptation and the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the extractive industries.
Dr. Matthew Mitchell
UBC IRES Postdoctoral Fellow
Bio:
Dr. Matthew Mitchell is a post-doctoral fellow at IRES. He completed his PhD at McGill, and previously spent two years as a post-doc at the University of Queensland in Australia. His current research focuses on how the arrangement of different land uses and habitats across landscapes affect biodiversity and ecosystem services, mainly in human-dominated agricultural and urban landscapes. His work aims to improve our knowledge about how human activities influence landscape and ecosystem dynamics.
In this June 2017 photo, a coal barge is positioned as a backdrop behind U.S. President Donald Trump as he speaks during a rally in Cincinnati. A coal company executive said Trump personally promised to activate emergency legal authorities to keep dirty or economically uncompetitive coal plants from shutting down. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
At a town hall meeting in Ohio in March 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said:
“…I’m the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”
Coal workers and communities in the United States overwhelmingly supported the rise of Donald Trump because he promised to bring back coal jobs, while Clinton had pledged new jobs and new economic investments in coal communities using clean energy.
Four key coal-producing states — Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania — collectively produce more than two-thirds of U.S. coal. In 2016, Trump received more than 30 per cent more votes than Clinton in three of those states. He also won the fourth, Pennsylvania, just not by as much.
Once he became president, Trump pledged to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and his government launched a slew of anti-climate and pro-fossil-fuel policies.
Despite politically powerful coal communities helping elect a president who vowed to guarantee their continued prosperity, their future remains more uncertain than ever. To understand this, it’s necessary to understand the power of coal communities and the future of coal.
The political power of coal communities
The configuration and structure of the coal industry reveals why coal communities remain strong politically. Our calculations show that approximately 100,000 people work directly in the coal industry in the U.S. — with an almost equal split between coal miners and power plant workers.
This number may seem small in a country like the United States, but these 100,000 jobs and revenue from coal operations support an even larger number of people.
There are a large number of “indirect jobs” for people who work on a contractual basis within the broader coal industry. This includes, for example, workers in manufacturing industries that supply equipment and provide transportation services to coal
operators.
A supporter holds a sign as President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in West Virginia on Nov. 2, 2018. (AP Photo/Tyler Evert)
Studies have shown that every 10 coal jobs support at least an equal number of indirect jobs. But that is just the coal industry. Hundreds of thousands of people work in local retail industries in coal towns such as in coffee shops, grocery stores and bars. These are “induced jobs” and, in the absence of alternative industries, the survival of these jobs depends on the survival of coal.
For example, the United Mine Workers of America, the leading trade union in the U.S., runs a pension fund with only 10,000 workers supporting over 120,000 retired coal workers. There are several other pension funds in the U.S. that support retired coal workers.
When we add up all these direct, indirect and induced jobs, and pensioners (and all their families), suddenly the coal community looks big. And they all are tied together by a single thread — the survival of coal.
‘Sense of belonging’
Studies have also shown that coal industry workers, particularly coal miners, have a strong sense of belonging to the place where they live and work, and have very strong social bonding. For several generations, the coal industry is what they know, and whatever they have is because of this industry.
In coal towns, coal is considered an iconic industry that built the United States as we know it today. It’s for these reasons that despite the decline of direct employment, overall coal communities still remain a formidable political force.
Despite their political power, the U.S. coal industry is struggling. It has seen an unprecedented decline in both coal production and coal-based power generation in the last few years. A core issue is that coal is unable to compete with cheap natural gas and the rise of renewables is not helping either.
In 2018, even with Trump almost half way through his presidency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that in 2018, the share of electricity production using natural gas will increase to 35 per cent from 32 per cent last year and coal-based power will decline from 30 per cent to 28 per cent.
Coal and natural gas compete tooth and nail in the electricity sector.
In this November 2016 photo, a haul truck carries coal from the Spring Creek strip mine near Decker, Mont. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has also predicted:
“This year [2018] will most likely see a record set for coal-fired power capacity retirements in the U.S.”
If this wasn’t already bad news for the coal industry, a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report claimed that to meet the 1.5°C climate target, coal’s share in the energy mix would need to decrease by 59 to 78 per cent by 2030 and 73 to 97 per cent by 2050.
This will likely squeeze U.S. coal exports further, even if it doesn’t change domestic consumption. Europe imports a large portion of American coal and will now face increased pressure from environmental groups and political parties to stop burning coal.
Domestic and foreign action on climate change will mean further declines in both coal mining and coal power plant jobs and the associated jobs and pensions.
So, what’s next for these communities? The coal communities are caught between maintaining the status quo or making a hard shift to a different future. That kind of shift has not always been good for workers.
One only has to look at the decline of the coal industry in the United Kingdom or of steel in the U.S. Midwest to see what can happen. If the coal industry is close to a point of no return globally and in the United States, it’s important that coal workers and their communities leverage their political power to elect politicians who will provide the right leadership for them looking forward.
In the last presidential election and the recent midterm elections, coal country tilted heavily towards a promise of the status quo. In future elections, a promise of a just transition for workers and their communities may hold more sway. That will probably only happen if politicians and those seeking to hasten that transition actively engage with coal communities.
Global Indigenous Rights and Politics: A Subtle Revolution
Abstract:
While indigenous peoples are often dismissed as marginal non-state actors, and Indigenous rights are cast off as merely aspirational and non-binding human rights, Sheryl Lightfoot argues quite the contrary in her 2016 book, Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution. She views the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a potential moment of revolutionary transformation in global politics, often overlooked and under-appreciated both in theory and in practice. The real potential for that revolutionary transformation lies in implementation of Indigenous rights, which necessarily involves considerable systemic change on both the domestic and international levels. While implementation of Indigenous rights faces significant challenges both within and outside Canada, there are also important opportunities actively presenting themselves, alongside these challenges.
Sheryl Lightfoot
Senior Advisor to the President on Indigenous Affairs
Associate Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies
Bio:
Sheryl Lightfoot is Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights and Politics at UBC, where she holds academic appointments in both Political Science and First Nations and Indigenous Studies. She is also currently serving as Senior Advisor to the UBC President on Indigenous Affairs. Her research focuses on Indigenous politics, especially Indigenous rights and their implementation in global, national and regional contexts. Dr. Lightfoot is Anishinaabe from the Lake Superior Band of Ojibwe.
Policy Evaluation Problems: Evaluating the effectiveness of a global mercury treaty
Abstract: The Minamata Convention on Mercury, a global environmental agreement that aims to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic mercury pollution, entered into force in August 2017. As the Convention shifts into its implementation phase, critical questions for mercury science and governance are: Will the Convention be effective at protecting human health and the environment? And how will we know? This talk will present preliminary research on strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of global-scale mercury policy given a changing, uncertain, and multi-stakeholder world. It considers both technical (e.g., what to monitor and where) and social (e.g., actors, institutions, norms) dimensions of the effectiveness evaluation challenge. Finally, it will explore how insights from the Minamata Convention may inform evaluation processes for other global environmental agreements, such as the global stocktake under the Paris Agreement.
This seminar will not be filmed.
Dr. Amanda Giang
Assistant Professor, IRES and Department of Mechanical Engineering
Bio: Amanda Giang is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBC. Her research address challenges at the interface of environmental modelling and policy through an interdisciplinary lens, with a focus on air pollution and toxic chemicals. Combining integrated modelling and qualitative approaches, she is interested in understanding how environmental assessment processes can better empower communities and inform policy decision-making. She received a PhD in Engineering Systems from MIT, a MS in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.
Academics in general and scientists in particular are increasingly getting involved in creative media to communicate and engage others in their consequential work. In this seminar, we will hear from researchers and media people who have successfully built bridges between research and creative media through businesses, projects, and social media. They will share their meaningful and meaningless experiences in the science media space.
Dr. David Shiffman
Bio:
Dr. David Shiffman is a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Conservation Biology at SFU, where he studies shark conservation policy. He is also an award-winning science communicator, and the most-followed scientist on social media in British Columbia. Follow him on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @WhySharksMatter, where he’s always happy to answer any questions that anyone has about sharks.
Dr. Justin Ritchie
Bio:
Dr. Justin Ritchie is an energy systems researcher at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. His PhD work on energy and climate economics has been published in an array of peer-reviewed journals that include Environmental Research Letters, Energy, Energy Economics, and Ecological Economics.
Concerns about eutrophication and future fertilizer availability have emphasized the need for better nutrient management along the entire food chain from agriculture and food processing to consumers and waste management. This includes comprehensive recycling of nutrients contained in human excreta to agriculture. With the shift from perceiving human excreta and sewage as waste to recognizing their value as resource, a wealth of treatment options has unfolded over the last decades. Although treatment renders a range of fertilizer products for use in agricultural production, technology development has rarely been informed by the needs of specific forms of agricultural production. I will explore what it means for the design and evaluation of future human excreta management to integrate considerations from food and farming systems, by outlining five aspects that are at risk of being overlooked and would deserve more attention.
Robin Harder
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Bio:
Robin Harder is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of British Columbia and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His current research interest is how future human excreta management might best support farming systems that seek to maintain long-term soil health, and which quantitative assessment tools are adequate to guide nutrient recycling towards best supporting soil and food security. Robin has a background in urban water management and environmental systems analysis. He received his doctoral degree from Chalmers University of Technology, with a MSc in Sanitary Engineering from TU Delft and a BSc in Civil Engineering from ETH Zurich.
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