Rebecca Schneider

Increasing Evapotranspiration from the Conterminous United States

Abstract Recent research suggests that evapotranspiration (ET) rates have changed over the past 50 years; however, some studies conclude ET has increased, and others conclude that it has decreased. These studies were indirect, using long-term observations of air temperature, cloud cover, and pan evaporation as indices of potential and actual ET. This study considers the hydrological cycle more directly and uses published precipitation and stream discharge data for several large basins across the conterminous United States to show that ET rates have increased over the past 50 years. These results suggest that alternative explanations should be considered for environmental changes that previously have been interpreted in terms of decreasing large-scale ET rates.

Nomadmedia: On Critical Art Ensemble

The Critical Acts Ensemble, CAE for short, is a tightly knit group of artists exploring intersection between art, technology, critical theory, and political activism. We have given CAE a big chunk of space to present and explain their work. Added to that is a critical essay by TDR Contributing Editor Rebecca Schneider.

Nutrient Cycling in Grassed Roadside Ditches and Lawns in a Suburban Watershed.

Roadside ditches are ubiquitous in developed landscapes. They are designed to route water from roads for safety, with little consideration of water quality or biogeochemical implications in ditch design and minimal data on environmental impacts. We hypothesize that periodic saturation and nutrient influxes may make roadside ditches hotspots for nitrogen (N) removal via denitrification as well as biological production of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) nitrous oxide (NO), methane (CH), and carbon dioxide (CO). Research sites included 12 grassed ditches and adjacent lawns with varying fertilization in a suburban watershed in central New York, where lawns represented a reference with similar soils as ditches but differing hydrology. We measured potential denitrification using the denitrification enzyme assay in fall 2014 and GHG fluxes using in situ static chambers between summer 2014 and 2015, including sample events after storms. Potential denitrification in ditches was significantly higher than in lawns, and rates were comparable to those in stream riparian areas, features traditionally viewed as denitrification hotspots. Ditches had higher rates of CH emissions, particularly sites that were wettest. Lawns were hotspots for NO and CO respiratory emissions, which were driven by nutrient availability and fertilizer application. Extrapolating up to the watershed, ditches have the potential to remove substantial N loads via denitrification if managed optimally. Ditch GHG emissions extrapolated across the watershed were minimal given their much smaller area compared with lawns, which were the greater contributor of GHGs. These findings suggest that roadside ditches may offer new management opportunities for mitigating nonpoint source N pollution in residential watersheds.

Critical Art Ensemble, Tactical Media Practitioners

The Critical Acts Ensemble, CAE for short, is a tightly knit group of artists exploring intersection between art, technology, critical theory, and political activism. We have given CAE a big chunk of space to present and explain their work. Added to that is a critical essay by TDR Contributing Editor Rebecca Schneider.

In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht

The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider’s work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomises the operations of the “both/and”—a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye’s reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. Schneider’s ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response.

Keep Your EYES on the FRONT and WATCH YOUR BACK

These are times marked and marred by Homeland Security measures, terrorist attacks, preemptive “just” wars, and non-denial denials regarding the legality of torture and unrecorded detentions. The most pressing question is perhaps not “Are you paranoid?” but rather, “Are you paranoid enough?” Concerned TDR readers may be interested in the case of Critical Art Ensemble cofounder Steve Kurtz, who gained national—and federal—attention earlier this past summer [2004]. To get our own bearings on the situation, we visited Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) to view Free Range Grain, an aborted exhibition by CAE and Beatriz da Costa. The performative exhibit was to have been part of Mass MOCA’s show, The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, which also included such artists as William Pope.L, subRosa, and The Yes Men. The show asked, in part: “How can artists and the public become engaged in complex sciences like biotechnology, sociology, and anthropology? Why would they want to? We think of science as a world unto itself, the realm of super-specialists, but is it a public sphere, too?” Mass MOCA’s questions seemed entirely appropriate, and yet...one of the exhibitions was aborted. Why? The reason appears to have everything to do with policing the boundaries of the public sphere. An aborted exhibition is an exhibition of what might have been, had there been an exhibition—that is, in this case, had CAE not been under criminal investigation. In the center of the abandoned exhibit was a sign:

Inside/Beside Dance Studies: A Conversation Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities

In 2012, Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross collaborated across their home institutions of Northwestern University, Brown University, and Stanford University, respectively, to found a research initiative interrogating the field of dance studies. This manifold project, Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, receives funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through 2015 and includes a series of public roundtable discussions. This conversation—abridged from the original event—took place during two such roundtables at Brown University in June 2013, and it features substantial contributions from scholars Michelle Clayton, Mark Franko, Nadine George-Graves, Andre Lepecki, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Speakers address what dance studies may need, want, or do in this current historical moment. Manning articulates her experience being “inside” and “beside” dance studies through teaching in an integrationist/assimilationist model that promotes dance as a subfield in humanities (and occasionally social science) departments. Franko asserts that dance studies formed as a result of an epistemological break in the 1980s and adds that interdisciplinary frameworks can also support this relatively new field. Through embracing the partiality that comes with interdisciplinarity, Clayton encourages participants to investigate generative misunderstandings. Ross provides a comprehensive account of the crisis in the humanities, and Lepecki connects this crisis to the permanent state of war in the U.S. and emphasizes the importance of theory in dance studies. Falling short of Afro-pessimism, George-Graves calls for dance studies to infiltrate the upper echelons of higher education administration, and Schneider articulates post-structuralisms link to the Global South while calling for more scholarly representation from this area of the world. Through exploring possibilities for embodied knowledge, reenacting post-structuralism, and embracing partiality, these scholars address the expanding aperture of dance studies in a global economy. Topics identified for future discussion include decentering the whiteness of dance studies transnationally, exploring how dance studies methodologies are currently utilized in academia, and expanding dance studies beyond the American academy.

Explaining and modeling the concentration and loading of Escherichia coli in a stream—A case study

Escherichia coli (E. coli) level in streams is a public health indicator. Therefore, being able to explain why E. coli levels are sometimes high and sometimes low is important. Using citizen science data from Fall Creek in central NY we found that complementarily using principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) regression provided insights into the drivers of E. coli and a mechanism for predicting E. coli levels, respectively. We found that stormwater, temperature/season and shallow subsurface flow are the three dominant processes driving the fate and transport of E. coli. PLS regression modeling provided very good predictions under stormwater conditions (R2 = 0.85 for log (E. coli concentration) and R2 = 0.90 for log (E. coli loading)); predictions under baseflow conditions were less robust. But, in our case, both E. coli concentration and E. coli loading were significantly higher under stormwater condition, so it is probably more important to predict high-flow E. coli hazards than low-flow conditions. Besides previously reported good indicators of in-stream E. coli level, nitrate-/nitrite-nitrogen and soluble reactive phosphorus were also found to be good indicators of in-stream E. coli levels. These findings suggest management practices to reduce E. coli concentrations and loads in-streams and, eventually, reduce the risk of waterborne disease outbreak.

Self-assembled, ellipsoidal polymeric nanoparticles for intracellular delivery of therapeutics: SELF-ASSEMBLED, ELLIPSOIDAL POLYMERIC NANOPARTICLES

Nanoparticle shape has emerged as a key regulator of nanoparticle transport across physiological barriers, intracellular uptake, and biodistribution. We report a facile approach to synthesize ellipsoidal nanoparticles through self-assembly of poly(glycerol sebacate)-co-poly(ethylene glycol) (PGS-co-PEG). The PGS-PEG nanoparticle system is highly tunable, and the semiaxis length of the nanoparticles can be modulated by changing PGS-PEG molar ratio and incorporating therapeutics. As both PGS and PEG are highly biocompatible, the PGS-co-PEG nanoparticles show high hemo-, immuno-, and cytocompatibility. Our data suggest that PGS-co-PEG nanoparticles have the potential for use in a wide range of biomedical applications including regenerative medicine, stem cell engineering, immune modulation, and cancer therapeutics.

Reactuals: From Personal to Critical and Back

The tracks of this chapter have been interestingly forth and back and forth again. When invited to contribute to this collection, I readily agreed – then balked. Richard Schechner has been, in some profound ways, my friend and mentor at the same time that “Richard Schechner” is the set of signatory letters attached to the books that line the shelves of those who profess some “relation” to performance studies. My process of thinking through Richard Schechner’s legacy, and therefore this writing, could not be straightforward. My engagement with Schechner’s thought, his teaching, his ideas, and his example has, for me, been deeply cross-routed, or chiasmatic: the so-called “life of the mind” has been profoundly interlaced with what we often still call “personal life” (as if these things were ever really fully distinguishable). Given that we read in the midst of living in relation, and given that reading and thinking bear relationality and structure modes of belonging beyond the pages (and wages) we “make” as scholars – given these things – thinking back over Schechner’s life work made it impossible for me to fully separate the rubrics: “life” and “work.” Indeed, Schechner’s work invited me, as so much of his writing against the grain of rigid epistemological ruts has done, to critically and creatively jump into the cracks in distinctions – or to weave between them – as “between” theatre and anthropology, or “from ritual to theatre and back” again.