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STS Work-in-Progress Series
Start Date: 4/3/2019Start Time: 12:30 PM
End Date: 4/3/2019End Time: 1:45 PM

Event Description

The Center for Science, Technology and Society is happy to invite you to join us for a session of the 2018-2019 Work-in-Progress series.

The program includes two presentations:

Love and Loneliness: Addressing Social Isolation in the Autistic Community
By Laura Graham Holmes, postdoctoral researcher, A. J. Drexel Autism Institute

This presentation is a National Institutes of Mental Health funding application on addressing social isolation for autistic adults. People with autism have core difficulties with social communication and interaction and a restricted repertoire of interests and activities. Social relationships serve critical social, psychological, and behavioral functions across the lifespan, yet we know almost nothing about how the lack of social relationships affect people with autism. People with autism have fewer social relationships and higher rates of loneliness compared to unaffected people. Loneliness has been associated with depression, impaired sleep, and dysfunction across endocrine, immune, and cardiovascular symptoms, particularly for vulnerable groups (e.g., people who are elderly, have less resources, or are from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds). As the autistic community points out, there are few social interventions for adults, and few social interventions for people with autism of any age that target mechanisms beyond social competence – histories of interpersonal victimization, perceived stigma and discrimination, and other factors that may decrease social motivation. I will discuss data from a lifespan quality of life study and other data on social outcomes for autism and consider how to come up with innovative new interventions to improve social outcomes and health, including for vulnerable groups (e.g., autistic women and sexual/gender minorities).

Empire from the Global Commons: Capture, Escape, and Colonial Governance in the Early Modern Atlantic
By Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, PhD, assistant professor, Department of History

My book project offers a new environmental history framework for understanding the rise of colonialism and slavery in the early modern Atlantic. The manuscript (in progress) traces the concurrent rise of the Portuguese, Spanish, and French empires between Atlantic Africa and the Greater Caribbean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a series of intertwined struggles over different facets of the “global commons,” a term used by social scientists and historians to denote transboundary domains such as the high seas and the wildlife coursing through them. Where most environmental history treatments of early modern imperialism emphasize elite-driven enterprises of mass extraction and biotic invasions, the book uses archival research to delve into lesser-known episodes of global commons struggles involving a diverse array of people including fisherfolk, cattle ranchers, enslaved artisans, market peddlers, maroon hunters, and tax collectors. Chronologically arranged chapters trace how multi-species dynamics of capture and escape, and the social relations and legal norms they engendered, structured global commons struggles and patterns of colonial governance into the middle decades of the sixteenth century. By then, a cadre of European officials made concerted efforts to exercise a political, legal, and economic framework of global commons management that they articulated along increasingly stark divisions of race, class, and religion, setting the tenor for the insertion of the Global South in the modern world order.

Lunch will be provided.

Contact Information:
Name: Vincent Duclos
Email: vd339@drexel.edu
Location:
3101 Market, Room 224, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Audience:
  • Everyone

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