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1. Vegetal Agency in Street Tree Stewardship Practices: People-Plant Involutions Within Urban Green Infrastructure in New York City

   https://doi.org/10.1177/02780771231221644  

   Maurer, Megan ( December 2023 , Journal of Ethnobiology)

   In cities nature is taking on a new role as infrastructure, providing essential services in terms of temperature regulation and water management, as well as the provision of habitat for biodiversity conservation. With this turn to green infrastructure have come new challenges to maintenance. Plants are lively things and if they are to perform their infrastructural roles they must be routinely tended to in particular ways. In the context of neoliberal governance, much of this labor falls to volunteer humans. Framed as stewardship, this volunteerism for plant-city thriving is posited as a way to meet maintenance needs while promoting human health and well-being and creating support for nature-based solutions through a sense of ownership and responsibility. While it is thus possible to read stewardship as an enrollment of people and plants into the reproduction of neoliberal urban political ecologies, in this paper I argue that such an analysis overlooks the involution of plants and people that occurs during acts of stewardship. Drawing on ethnographic research with street tree stewards in New York City I explore how vegetal agency draws people into affective, embodied relations. During acts of stewardship, trees act on people and reconfigure their relations in ways that potentially exceed the strictures of stewardship. Rather than allowing stewardship discourses and critiques thereof to be our sole frame for understanding these people-plant relations, we should also consider them from the perspective of vegetal agency and what human-tree involutions do within, around, and to human practices of stewardship.

    

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2. Reef Conservation off the Hook: Can Market Interventions Make Coral Reef Fisheries More Sustainable?

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.675274  

   Cramer, Katie L. ; Kittinger, John N. ( August 2021 , Frontiers in Marine Science)

   The overexploitation of coral reef fisheries threatens the persistence of reef ecosystems and the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. Market-based initiatives to increase fisheries sustainability have been widely implemented in industrialized commodity fisheries, but the suitability of these initiatives for coral reef fisheries has not been systematically investigated. Here, we present a typology of market-based interventions and coral reef fisheries sectors and identity promising approaches for each fishery archetype. For high value, export-oriented reef fisheries that are highly unsustainable (live reef food fish and dried sea cucumbers), traditional regulatory efforts including trade restrictions will be most effective. For high-value, export-oriented fisheries for highly fecund invertebrates (lobsters and mollusks), certification and ratings efforts, fishery improvement projects, and sustainable purchasing commitments can improve fishing practices and increase fisher market access and revenue. For lower-value fisheries targeting species for domestic or regional consumption, sustainable purchasing commitments among local buyers, consumer awareness campaigns, and local certification and ratings schemes hold promise for shifting attitudes toward sustainability and increasing food security for local communities. Finally, fisher empowerment efforts including direct access to local markets and market information, training on improved post-harvest methods, and formation of fisher associations hold promise for increasing fisher incomes, reducing wasteful catch, increasing food security, and de-incentivizing unsustainable practices. Despite the potential of market-based interventions, specific approaches must be carefully tailored to the ecological and social reality of these systems, including the inherent unsustainability of commercial coral reef fisheries, the limited capacity for fisheries governance, the limited financial support of market-based initiatives, and the threatened status of coral reef ecosystems globally. 

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3. Designing and enacting lessons to promote students’ epistemic agency in middle school biology classrooms

   Akçil-Okan, Ö. ; Tekkumru-Kisa, M. ; Southerland, S. A. ( January 2023 , Annual Meeting of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching)

   Reform-based instruction that fosters all students’ intellectual engagement and sensemaking is possible. However, it is not yet prevalent across many science classrooms. To gain more insight into how to design and enact science instruction supporting students’ intellectual engagement, this investigation centered on understanding how to design and implement science lessons for promoting students’ intellectual engagement as epistemic agents who shape knowledge building happening in the classroom. We examined a middle school science teacher's design and implementation of four lessons that she did as part of a PD focused on fostering productive science talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed that her efforts in fostering opportunities for students’ epistemic agency were evident in both her lesson design and implementation. Her responsiveness to students’ thinking/intellectual engagement throughout the lesson implementations via principled improvisations supported opportunities for students’ epistemic agency. Her efforts allow us to understand how the design and implementation of science lessons with the focus of opening space and maintaining this space by being responsive to students’ thinking are critical for fostering students’ epistemic agency. These findings can provide implications for professional development efforts that seek to develop teachers’ capacity for reform-based instruction in science classrooms. 

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4. Dairy Livestock Interventions for Food Security in Uganda: What are the Implications for Women's Empowerment?*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12332  

   Bain, Carmen ; Ransom, Elizabeth ; Halimatusa’diyah, Iim ( May 2020 , Rural Sociology)

   Women are increasingly the target of agricultural development programs aimed at reducing poverty and food insecurity, especially in sub‐Saharan Africa. Some feminist scholars argue that such efforts are driven more by concerns about the efficient use of resources than the rights of women and do little to transform gendered power relations. We examine how development interventions that target women affect household well‐being, especially food insecurity, empower women, and transform gendered power relations. Our study uses the case of the Gates Foundation funded East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) program in Uganda. Our methods include the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index survey and in‐depth interviews of women farmers and key informants, within the EADD program. We argue that the livestock sector provides critical insights into women's empowerment because livestock are not “socially neutral” in their gendered effects. Our study found that: (1) ownership of dairy cows enhanced important dimensions of women's empowerment and gender equity that benefited women and households; (2) women's labor responsibilities for dairy cows disempowered some women by increasing their time poverty and; (3) ownership of dairy cows provided a means for women to disrupt entrenched social norms related to gender roles within the household and agriculture.

    

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5. Supporting the adaptive capacity of species through more effective knowledge exchange with conservation practitioners

   https://doi.org/10.1111/eva.13266  

   Cook, Carly N. ; Beever, Erik A. ; Thurman, Lindsey L. ; Thompson, Laura M. ; Gross, John E. ; Whiteley, Andrew R. ; Nicotra, Adrienne B. ; Szymanski, Jennifer A. ; Botero, Carlos A. ; Hall, Kimberly R. ; et al ( July 2021 , Evolutionary Applications)

   There is an imperative for conservation practitioners to help biodiversity adapt to accelerating environmental change. Evolutionary biologists are well‐positioned to inform the development of evidence‐based management strategies that support the adaptive capacity of species and ecosystems. Conservation practitioners increasingly accept that management practices must accommodate rapid environmental change, but harbour concerns about how to apply recommended changes to their management contexts. Given the interest from both conservation practitioners and evolutionary biologists in adjusting management practices, we believe there is an opportunity to accelerate the required changes by promoting closer collaboration between these two groups. We highlight how evolutionary biologists can harness lessons from other disciplines about how to foster effective knowledge exchange to make a substantive contribution to the development of effective conservation practices. These lessons include the following: (1) recognizing why practitioners do and do not use scientific evidence; (2) building an evidence base that will influence management decisions; (3) translating theory into a format that conservation practitioners can use to inform management practices; and (4) developing strategies for effective knowledge exchange. Although efforts will be required on both sides, we believe there are rewards for both practitioners and evolutionary biologists, not least of which is fostering practices to help support the long‐term persistence of species.

    

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