Photo by John-Morgan

Since I’ve been home after my first semester as a Comparative Literature graduate student at Berkeley, I’ve spent a lot of time fielding questions from friends and relatives about what, exactly, I’ve been doing. My usual response – “Oh, you know; comparing the literatures, to see which one is the best” – tends to elicit nervous, confused laughter, and only thinly veils what I’ve actually spent all semester doing: wondering what, exactly, I’m doing.

As an undergraduate, I regarded graduate students with a certain baffled admiration. Their language was both idiosyncratic and predictable, as if codified in some dictionary whose existence it was their duty to deny. They all talked with the same calculated haltingness, in the contained cadence of seminar-speak. Where did they all learn to discreetly smirk at Lacan, question whether violence was being effaced on the level of the text, and wonder about the role of “affect”? Where did they learn to speak as if everything was in quotation marks (and/or parentheses)? And where could I learn to do that too? (This is a good place to start.)

As much as I rolled my eyes at this kind of academic posturing, I had an overwhelming desire to crack the code and join the ranks of this secret society. I also really liked reading things and writing about them. So I applied to graduate school, struggling to frame my questions of purpose as statements, awkwardly incorporating snippets of that foreign grad student language and hoping that by the time I got there, I would be problematizing, historicizing, and reifying with the fluency of a native.

Berkeley’s Comp Lit students, however, turned out not to be the jargon-spouting aliens I had feared. Worse: they were human, and spoke English, and were perfectly nice and friendly, and I still didn’t understand what was going on half the time. I felt like there were certain unsaid assumptions shared by everyone else about how to approach texts, assumptions too obvious to put into words and thus impossible to ask about. I became quite sure I didn’t know how to read, and wondered what it was I had been doing to books all these years, since it certainly couldn’t be called reading. The areas I thought I was interested in now seemed like they weren’t “areas” at all. I realized I didn’t know what “area,” or any other remotely abstract word, even meant. After stumbling through my first few seminars, never sure if I was saying what the professor wanted to hear or exactly the opposite, I took some solace in the fact that the rest of my cohort seemed as lost as I was. Second-years, third-years, and even seasoned dissertators assured me that they still didn’t know what they were doing, but I didn’t believe them; their claims of confusion were suspiciously coherent. They dutifully asked me if I had any questions about the program, and if they could offer any guidance, but I was too confused to even know what questions to ask.

Sitting around wallowing in a vortex of self-doubt, and dragging my peers in with me, turned out not to be much help in figuring out what I was doing in graduate school. What did help was actually doing stuff: immersing myself in texts, trying to work through them, tentatively venturing ideas about them. A professor’s advice to consider seminar papers as works in progress, potential springboards for further exploration on a topic, helped quell my anxieties about my general lack of direction. It also reminded me why I wanted to go to graduate school in the first place: I think literary analysis is really fun.

Starting graduate school at Berkeley just as the university was hit with budget cuts and their fallout both amplified and helped refine my existential woes. I started to wonder more and more about the economic value of intellectual labor, especially in the ostensibly insolvent humanities. How do we assign a monetary value to the pricelessness of literature, and why should I be getting paid to study it? (That last one I didn’t want to question too rigorously.) These questions ended up informing my academic interests, and both of my seminar papers touched on the relationship between literature and money. Graduate school, for better or for worse, turned out not to be as isolated from the “real world” as I had imagined.

Though I’ve tried not to think too much about school since I turned in those seminar papers, I do feel like I have a little bit of a better idea of what I’m doing than when I started. I’m starting to understand how my more-experienced peers could express their confusion with such calm countenances, and that a lot of graduate school is realizing that we don’t know what, exactly, we’re doing, but that trying to figure it out – by reading, by writing, by exploring, by interacting – is a worthy and rewarding goal in itself. And if all else fails, I can always say that I’m engendering the linguistic construction of the specular economy with an eye to the historicization of desire.

This problem is most severe in Bangladesh, where more than 40 million people drink arsenic-laden water. In some places, arsenic levels are more than 100 times the World Health Organization’s recommended upper limit of 10 parts per billion. Already arsenic poisoning is evident among 40,000 Bangladeshis. And without some kind of intervention, it is expected that arsenic poisoning will eventually cause 10% of deaths in this country of 140 million.

100L Electrode Assembly, the assembly of iron sheets that generate rust. This assembly will be used in a prototype that the team will be field testing this summer in West Bengal, India.

Conventional arsenic treatment methods are too expensive for nearly half of the people drinking arsenic-contaminated water. To address this need, the Berkeley Arsenic Alleviation Group (BAAG), of which Case is a part, aims to provide affordable, sustainable technologies that remove arsenic from groundwater. Their goal is to develop a technology that removes arsenic efficiently and cheaply and that can be easily operated and maintained by local communities. One of the two techniques for arsenic removal developed by Professor Ashok Gadgil at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is ElectroChemical Arsenic Remediation or ECAR. In this process, iron is placed in water with high levels of arsenic, then electricity is used to dissolve the iron which produces rust. Arsenic is known to bind very strongly to the surface of rust particles. Consequently, rust — along with the arsenic bound to its surface — can be removed from the water through filtration or settling. ECAR requires only small quantities of iron—iron nails for example are sufficient—and such low amounts of electricity that it can be powered with a car battery or solar cells.

Standard ECAR Batch Test. This is how most of Case's ECAR tests are done, on a much smaller scale and with much smaller electrodes.

The goal of Case’s research is to understand ECAR’s reaction products; in other words, the formation of rust and its interaction with arsenic. The information he generates will reveal the mechanism for arsenic removal on rust and enable members of BAAG to determine the long-term stability of the waste generated through ECAR. To assess the arsenic-laden particles made in ECAR, Case uses Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy, which provide information on particle morphology, structure, and composition. Case’s research is driven by concern for the millions of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation as well as a fascination with the chemistry of metals in aqueous systems. Fortunately, he’s found a project that satisfies both these interests.

This project has proved fortuitous in other ways too. An accidental discovery in the lab has added a promising new dimension to Case’s research. Although we’re most familiar with common orange rust, there are actually several different kinds of rust.  When he began the project, Case’s focus was on orange rust. But one day in the lab, he noticed that instead of the typical orange rust his experiment was producing a rust so dark green it appeared almost black. His fear that he’d damaged the power supply wiring soon turned to curiosity when he saw that this new particle settled much faster than orange rust. Further testing revealed that Green Rust, which has a much larger particle size, settles in under an hour, a huge improvement over orange rust which takes several days to settle out.  If this discovery pans out, it could eliminate the need for a filter or coagulant in future ECAR prototype designs, further reducing costs for this potentially life-saving technology.

Related:

• Berkeley Arsenic Alleviation Group
• Water research pt. 1: The Water Resources Center Archives
• Research highlights: water

Photo by Jeremy Farmer

Suspense is key to a well-told story. So it should have come as no surprise that Ira Glass, host and executive producer of This American Life, began his performance at Zellerbach Hall in a way at once surprising and amusing. Reproducing the invisibility of the radio, he started speaking in the dark.

Eventually the lights went up and Glass wove together stories from his life with clips from the show to present a funny and moving picture of some of what goes on behind the scenes at This American Life. While the audience learned about fact checking and creating the show’s themes, stories were Glass’s real subject. He has spent his professional life honing the craft of telling a good story.  Though the stories on This American Life often address serious issues, the show’s staff seek out stories that at their core contain humor, surprise, a sense of discovery, and hopefully joy. Ultimately, Glass hopes stories will build empathy and awaken the listener’s sense of curiosity about the world in which we live. Not only did Glass’s performance leave me thinking about how to tell better stories, but in a time of often gloomy economic news, I also found it inspiring to hear someone speak so passionately about his career.

***

Cal Performances offers many other entertaining shows, although not all are as uplifting as an evening with Ira Glass. Earlier this fall, I had the opportunity to see Druid Ireland’s production of The Walworth Farce. Not being a theater buff, I picked this play because the name suggested a comedy. Dark comedy, with an emphasis on the dark, was closer to the truth. As the performance progressed, I realized that the farce was the play (within a play) that the three main characters enacted daily. While the folly of the story they rehearsed became apparent early on, it wasn’t until the final moments that the full extent of its tragic power was revealed. Although nothing like what I expected – owing to my failure  to do my homework – The Walworth Farce demanded my full attention and was an engaging and challenging experience as a result.  I also enjoyed the novelty of watching a performance in the Zellerbach Playhouse, a campus space that was previously unknown to me.

***

Early this summer, I sent out an email soliciting advice for incoming graduate students to be published in the Orientation Issue of The Berkeley Graduate.  The first response I received was from a graduate student (Hi, Sarah!) who wrote that she wished she would have known years ago that UCB students and graduate students get 50% off tickets to Cal Performances events. As the campus center for the performing arts, Cal Performances features dance, music, theater, and the occasional speaker, a wide enough variety to offer something for most tastes. If you haven’t been yet, there’s still time to sneak in a performance before the semester ends.  The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’s reinterpretation of the Nutcracker, is playing this weekend.

The Whitney Siphon, Saugus Division, 1909, from the WRCA's Lippincott Collection

WRCA pulls together a wide array of water-related materials that are difficult to find elsewhere, let alone all in one place. Their ongoing efforts to collect and preserve water-related information have recently focused on capturing electronic data, as more reports, meeting minutes, and information appear only online.  Using web archiving tools, librarians are able to save and make searchable otherwise ephemeral data from websites, for example those run by water and irrigation districts, or federal, state, and local water agencies.

For those interested in exploring further, WRCA’s collection can be accessed through both Melvyl and Oskicat. One element of this collection that Head Librarian Linda Vida suspects is underutilized by graduate students are WRCA’s archival materials, which must be searched with finding aids.  Fortunately, these finding aids are now available online. WRCA also participates in the eScholarship Publishing program, which makes the full-text of scholarly publications available online for free. The recordings of the California Colloquium on Water lectures are another online resource that students may find useful. WRCA also sends one student each semester on a Water Education Foundation tour. During these 2-3 day tours, you will learn more about state water issues and meet other water professionals. Join WRCA’s mailing list to find out how to be considered for this opportunity by sending an email to waterarc@library.berkeley.edu. To keep up-to-date on the latest WRCA news you can also follow them on Facebook.

Men working with water jets, 1912 from the Lippincott Collection

Sadly, the future of the WRCA on Berkeley’s campus is in jeopardy. Although WRCA is located at Berkeley, it is funded by the Office of the President for the benefit of the UC system as a whole. In October, Dan Dooley, the Vice President of the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR) announced that to save money ANR would seek a UC campus to adopt the library and its $230,000 annual cost.  Berkeley risks losing this unique resource. This would be a serious loss to the campus community and water professionals who regularly consult WRCA in their work. WRCA is truly a public resource; a UC library card is not needed to check out or use their materials, and the library would like to maintain its liberal lending policy. For now, the library will remain open in its current location (410 O’Brien Hall) until June 30, 2010. If you’re interested in supporting WRCA’s bid to stay at Berkeley, you can send an email to Linda Vida (lvida@library.berkeley.edu) expressing your interest in helping their cause. WRCA librarians are compiling a list of people who are willing to take part in a letter writing campaign and will send out an email to the group once they’ve decided on a course of action. However things end up – and WRCA is definitely a campus resource worth fighting for – I highly recommend that you stop by WRCA, either to become acquainted with their collection or to enjoy a peaceful place to study.

Related:

Research highlights: Water

Today: The Graduate Student Support Services Project and the Graduate Minority Student Project are co-hosting a year end study hall. For free food and a nice place to study stop by Anthony Hall between 5:30 and 8:00 pm.

Tomorrow: The Graduate Women’s Project is hosting a day of rest and relaxation. Between 12 and 3 pm the Tan Oak Room on the 4th floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union will be a place to unwind. Escape from the madness of finals with tea, art, and a free 15-minute massage. (Sign up for the massages begins at 11:45 am.)

Thursday: The Graduate Social Club is hosting it’s final event of the year: a graduate student winter cocktail party. The party will be from 6 to 8 pm in the lovely Lipman Room on the top floor of Barrows Halls. Admission is free, but be sure to bring your Berkeley ID and your driver’s license.

Enjoy!

Photo by Lee Otis

This week we launch our second installment in “research highlights.” In October, we featured fire. Now, in December, as we wait for the next winter storm to sweep across the Bay Area, we turn our attention to water.

Water makes a compelling research topic because it is fundamental to life and so central to the way we live. Many believe that the management and distribution of the world’s water supply will be the critical environmental challenge of the twenty-first century. Already more than a billion people lack clean water to drink and for basic sanitation. And because many of climate change’s impacts will be related to water—e.g., melting glaciers and more severe droughts—additional changes to the availability and quality of the earth’s water resources are expected. While some of these concerns may seem abstract from the relative security of Berkeley’s campus, floods, droughts, tsunamis, and hurricanes, repeatedly remind of us water’s tremendous power to reshape human lives and challenge human institutions. Not surprisingly, water has gripped the imaginations of authors, artists, chemists, designers, historians, lawyers, and policy makers to name just a few.

With just two weeks left in the semester, it has been hard to find people with the free time to talk about their research. Nevertheless, until the end of the semester, we’ll be featuring Berkeley graduate students’ water-related research projects along with relevant campus resources. Up first, the Water Resources Center Archives.

Related:

Water research pt. 1: The Water Resources Center Archives

Photo by Lee Otis

Photo by robbyb on Flickr

Most academic conferences we attend are actually the annual meetings of particular academic associations – the American Political Science Association, American Chemical Society (ACS), etc.—and most of these have been meeting for decades (the ACS was founded in 1876).  So it is a rare opportunity to be able to attend the founding meeting of an academic association, which I was able to do back in October.  The University of Wisconsin, Madison hosted the first annual conference of the Association of Environmental Studies and Science (AESS), which was started in 2008 to “serve the faculty, students and staff of the 1000+ interdisciplinary ‘environmental’ programs in North America and around the world.”  One of the goals of the new association is to build bridges between the different social science, natural science, and humanities disciplines that study the environment, and the conference was their first major attempt to do so.

As I learned during the main conference dinner, Wisconsin has a fascinating environmental history and rich legacy in environmental research (Aldo Leopold’s shack, for example, is near Madison), and so it was a fitting place for the first AESS meeting.  But the campus is not the easiest to get to – I ended up flying through Milwaukee and taking a two hour bus ride because there was no reasonably priced direct flight available.  But once I arrived, I found the town of Madison to be very nice – quiet and quaint, although also quite cold.  On the third day of the conference, we woke up to find it snowing, and this was the beginning of October!  It will be hard indeed to take a job back East…

The conference’s morning keynote speaker was none other than Jane Goodall, the legendary chimpanzee researcher, speaking to the group via a web-based videophone from a research camp in Costa Rica.  After a few technical glitches, she spoke eloquently about environmental issues and the need for continued strong environmental research.   It was a nice beginning of the conference, and reminded us of the urgency of ecological conservation.

The conference itself was organized into 9-10 concurrent panel sessions, which included topics such as environmental education, measuring environmental quality, religion and the environment, marketing and the environment, and environmental risk (click here to see the full schedule).  A good percentage of the panels dealt with the nature and development of interdisciplinary environmental studies and science programs, and the best ways to prepare students for a “green economy.”  But others were more focused on specific environmental topics, and there was a good mix of disciplines represented, from ecologists to economists to sociologists to business scholars to critical theorists.   This range demonstrated the diversity of ways of studying environmental issues, and the challenge of effectively bringing them together.

I presented a paper as part of a panel on “environmental law and policy,” which was a sort of microcosm of this dual challenge and opportunity.  The other panelists included a professor of law who spoke on the history of environmental law, a professor of international relations who talked about the intercontinental transport of air pollutants, and a graduate student in public policy who presented on the diffusion of automobile emissions standards internationally.  My own presentations was on eco-labels and environmental ratings of products and companies.  On the surface, it is difficult to see a common theme in these talks, but as the panel progressed, we identified several interesting connections that provided valuable perspectives on each of our areas of interest.  I had long and helpful conversations with two of the other panelists afterwards, and I look forward to staying in touch with them in the future.

In terms of my own presentation, the biggest challenge was cutting it down to a reasonable length for 15 minutes.  I had a lot of preliminary data and ideas I wanted to discuss, and it was like pulling teeth to take things out.  But ultimately I was able to find a couple key points to focus on, and I think that very much helped the presentation.  My advice to anyone having similar difficulty – try to identify the most interesting complexity to present, but don’t present all of the complexity.  And getting feedback from colleagues on campus before you go can also be a huge help.

In addition to meeting my fellow panelists, I also connected with several other interesting people at the conference.  They included professors from other UC schools and from around the country, including both large universities and small colleges that I had never heard of, but that have some very innovative environmental programs.  They also included other graduate students, including four from the University of Wisconsin, UC Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton who were working on topics closely related to my own interests.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet people in this diverse field, and hopefully make connections that will last far into the future.  I certainly felt like the conference was a success, and hope that the Association is able to build on the momentum.  The next meeting is in Portland; for anyone who is interested, you can check out the association’s website at http://aess.info.