No, no. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm.
Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. So welcome if you
don't know who I am. I'm Tyler Walters.
I'm dean of university libraries here at Virginia Tech and
you're here for the Virginia Tech authors reception recognition event
. So thank you very much for coming 2017.
We've been doing this for 12 years. I see
a few people give yourself a hand here. All
right, that's good. You can do that.
Thank you for coming. Um I as is customary
, I have some vital statistics to share about this
year's productivity. So bear with me and I'll walk
through through some of that for you this year.
So the year we're talking about is published in 2016
. We have 98 works, 85 authors total.
And the venerable College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
comes in at 44 publications and 34 authors. So
let's give them around. So the productivity remains.
And of course what we have we have to we
have to call out Professor robert Denton Bob. Where
are you? You found your 30 yard? You
had something in now. 12 of these in a
row. So congratulations. I, you keep telling
me every year. That's not gonna happen next year
. It's not gonna happen next year. Maybe next
year. Awesome. That's awesome. So, I
should point out while this is mostly books, we
do include things like musical productions. We have six
musical productions and they're represented on the shelves here.
So again, for those of you haven't been here
in past years. The publications are on the shelves
around us. And you're very welcome to look at
them when the programs over during the reception. Afterward
, The reception will continue. We're officially open till
eight or whenever we need to close. But you're
welcome to stick around after the, after our program
. Mm hmm. So, a couple of things
I'd like to mention. I would like to mention
that there is one publication here. I never do
this. I never point out one particular author,
but I just want to point out that one of
things the library does a lot of these days is
support and promote open access to scholarship, which really
means it's an approach that's that's free to readers.
That doesn't mean there's not a cost, right?
There's cost to production. It just means that it's
front loaded. It's usually paid through grant or foundation
or some other, some other charitable means. And
we actually have a textbook this year, fundamentals of
business by professor of practice standards, cryptic. Uh
it is an open educational resource textbook. It's on
the shelves and that's the first one that I'm aware
of. So we work closely with Professor script.
And so it's really published between Pamplin College and the
library. So, a rather unique entry for us
this year. Mhm. Related to that too,
as we like to mention, are open access a
pension fund to all of you authors here. Now
, this is a suspension fund that generally uh supports
journal articles, but if you're if there's a book
of interest that's ongoing that you want to make freed
readers or that you find a publisher that works with
open publishing and there's there's many of them to continue
to grow. We're happy to hear from, you
can see what we can do to support you.
In the last year, there were 60 scholarly articles
that were supported by our open access a pension fund
that included 169 authors total. So quite a few
people and I think we spent probably close to$100,000
on that 80 here, 80, Okay, lower
8080. It's going a lot of money that we're
very happy to support those efforts. Again, we
see a lot of rise in publisher, especially on
journals in terms of open excess business models. Yeah
. All right. So with that I'm going to
conclude my opening remarks and going to turn it over
to Theresa May, who is our vice president for
research and Innovation. Thank you Tyler. I will
be very brief. I just want to thank all
of you for being here to celebrate our Virginia tech
authors as we think about our mission as a university
, particularly as a land grant. University knowledge creation
and knowledge dissemination is central to what we do every
day. And the work that we do and publishing
in books, journal articles, other works is just
essential to our success as a university. And um
, the, uh, the statistics are impressive.
And I also really want to emphasize the importance of
the open access initiative here at Virginia Tech and across
the nation. Um, it's a really excellent opportunity
that allows us to disseminate freely without the cost associated
with purchasing books or subscribing to journals. And so
it's a great opportunity for our community to have access
to the work that all of you do on a
day to day basis. Um, and again,
I just thank you for attending today to celebrate these
accomplishments of our Virginia tech faculty and students. Thank
you very much. I'm going to turn the floor
over to tom ewing he will introduce our speaker.
Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much,
very pleased to be here on behalf of the five
beta kappa chapter at Virginia Tech. Um, and
take part in this annual recognition of faculty authorship as
the vice president of the five beta phi beta kappa
chapter. Um as an associate dean of the College
of Election human Sciences and a professor in the history
department, I'm keenly aware of the importance of books
for the university community. Books are the most important
scholarly outcome for many faculty in Virginia Tech, particularly
level arts, but in a lot of other fields
as well as you can tell by the books that
are represented here. Um, in an era when
so much information is simplified into charts and graphs,
Power Point Bullets or 140 character tweets, it is
very important for us to committed to take time to
appreciate the value of books. Books are and always
will be an important durable and flexible form of communicating
, storing and deepening knowledge. Writing a book is
a difficult process, takes a long time, considerable
effort. I think any of the authors here can
attest to that. But reading a book, especially
a scholarly book, also takes an intellectual commitment.
Scholars and students take very much appreciate university libraries,
particularly in Walters and his colleagues for hosting this event
today, but also for making the library the place
you go when you want to find a book and
read a book. Um and if you want a
suggestion of a really good book, I'm delighted to
recommend zero hunger political culture and anti poverty policy in
Northeast brazil, written by our featured speaker, Dr
Aaron Ansel, an assistant professor in the Department of
Religion and Culture. Um The review committee was most
impressed by the extensive field work that went into this
research projects that we did. The ways that the
book drew the rear end to the community is being
studied and the quality of the writing, which one
committee member said immediately absorbed the reader into the story
, into the complexities of the society. The committee
, the review committee for the Stern Prize described this
book as a model of how sophisticated research can address
broad themes in ways that enhance public understanding, thus
advancing the goals of liberal learning and liberal scholarship,
central to the mission of the university. Now,
any of your scholars out there that would like to
be featured as next year's keynote speaker. The deadline
to apply for the Stern Prize Storm prices one and
Research one and Creative Arts and Scholarship is march 8th
. There are nomination forms out there on the table
when you leave, you can also find them easily
on the website. So if you imagine yourself here
in DR answers place a year from now, you
still have that opportunity. Please join me in welcoming
DR thanks very much tom Um, can I close
this, Is that right? Yeah. Okay,
thank you. Okay. Um, it's a great
honor to be addressing my fellow VT authors and it
feels really great to be part of a community that
commemorates the enormous work that we put into our books
. In my case, I spent about 12 years
working on the project that would eventually become the book
Zero hunger political culture and anti poverty policy in Northeast
brazil come And part of me just wants to take
my 15 minutes and tell you all about this this
book. Um, but I thought it might also
be interesting to offer a reflection on how my book
and other books emerging from the liberal arts and human
sciences can inform something of a shared interest to all
of us here at Virginia Tech and I'm thinking about
the emerging university wide initiatives beyond boundaries and the destination
areas. So it seems to me that the humanities
and social sciences offer a range of insights into the
human condition that could potentially guide some of the collaborative
teaching research and innovation emerging around the destination areas in
particular as an anthropologist. 11 question that comes to
my mind is that of how an awareness of diverse
cultural worldviews might contribute to the uh areas of study
like the adaptive brain and human behavior or intelligent infrastructure
and human centered communities. So I'd like to use
this talk as an opportunity to reflect on the ethnographic
experiences on which I base this book uh and then
discuss these experiences in light of the challenge of integrating
the humanities and social sciences into these destination areas.
That's money, that's my plan. The book itself
is an ethnographic analysis of the encounter between impoverished rural
communities in the desert interior of Northeast Brazil and the
Progressive Federal Initiative designed to end hunger. When President
Lula of the Workers Party took office in 2003,
his team selected to municipalities in the country with the
lowest human development index to serve as pilot towns For
this zero hunger program. At the time, I
was a graduate student studying Portuguese in the city of
Radio Janeiro in Southeast. When I learned of zero
hunger, I wanted to know how the government would
design it, how the rural beneficiaries would engage it
and what unanticipated it affects. This program might have
on the beneficiaries lives. So I got a couple
of grants and went to live in one of these
two municipalities, Setting up residence in three villages where
I lived from 2003 to 2005. The villages were
populated by the descendants of Iberian conquerors, african slaves
and nearly massacred indigenous populations. Mhm. Most of
them lived as subsistence cultivators and livestock herders. Their
ancestors had labored on cattle ranches that provision the big
sugar plantations of brazil's atlantic coast with beef and leather
goods. These cattle ranchers had long since this cattle
ranches, excuse me, had long since broken up
into small peasant holdings and the wealthy ranchers moved to
the cities, leaving a cast of middle income landowner
is effectively in charge of municipal governments that the president
Called upon to assist in the implementation of zero.
To be clear, I was not there as an
aid work. I didn't bring resources to build houses
or vaccinate livestock or dig latrines, but I did
offer the sort of help that the villagers asked.
I worked with the village association president to secure land
documents for squatters to petition the local government for community
well and a local clinic and headquarters for their association
. This seemed only fair because the villagers fed me
show me where I could fetch potable water, taught
me how to ride a motorcycle and called upon their
politicians to rest to rush me to the hospital when
I was suffering a severe case of dehydration. During
this last event by hospital trip, I experienced very
acutely my privileged position within the local patriots hierarchy that
connected subsistence cultivators to local mayors and council men,
drawn from the ranks of the rural and town middle
class and rescuing these politicians aim to secure my allegiance
to their faction in the upcoming elections. As with
much of the latin american countryside allegiance and affiliation to
patron politicians who provide material resources to the poor governs
. The logic of elections hold over. Some argue
from the bygone days of a semi feudal colonial economy
. First without knowing it, and then later,
without liking. I took up a position within this
patron entire arc while trying to avoid factional allegiance and
nonetheless brokered resources for the villagers. I live with
all the while studying their interactions with federal government agents
who introduced cash grants, electricity and development projects to
their lives. Ironically, the patron relationships that became
key to my understanding of local culture were the very
same that zero hunger. The very same relationships that
zero hungers. Urbane officials wanted to dismantle. The
central claim I make in the book is that in
addition to attacking poverty, the Brazilian state implemented a
set of informal techniques designed to transform rural political culture
and the name of liberal democratic equality and meritocracy.
In the eyes of the state patronage was tantamount to
corruption, a kind of divide and conquer strategy that
furthered the economic dependence of the poor on the rich
and perverted the citizens autonomous use of her political rationality
as president lula himself said, the poor our lead
to vote with their stomach, not their heads,
meaning they're hungry, so they take goods, they
sell their votes to politicians for what's tended not to
food. Mhm. More pointedly, lula's administration feared
that local patron politicians would divert zero hunger resources away
from the neediest members of the population and towards their
own cronies. Indeed, the perils of patriots are
real, and my colleagues in political science and sociology
and history have gone a long way in analyzing.
Mhm. But as an anthropologist trained in relativistic modes
of inquiry, part of my job is to capture
the moral logic and even the allure of patronage and
corruption. Even if even if its allure might offend
our democratic sensibilities. Let me suggest then that rural
Brazilian patronage builds from a moral premise about the human
condition that contradicts the constitution, claim that our species
being, our humanity is grounded in the individual's capacity
for autonomous decision making. Mhm. In rural Northeast
brazil, which most true and most valuable about the
human condition is the radical dependence that we have on
one another. In the words of one patron politician
who I came to know very well. They he
means the government, the federal. They come in
here and want to tell me I can't be friends
, my friends, they told me that the people
should not depend on me, but my friend,
the reality of life is dependence. I am dependent
on them too. Yeah, I recall resisting his
assertion. Sure he needed the rural poor for their
votes, but they needed him for farm inputs and
mental care. So whatever their interdependence, they were
hardly equally positioned. But it's also true that this
man like other good patrons must be ready to help
people with any problem they have at whatever time,
using whatever means he has at his disposal, He's
never off the clock And he's expected to share at
least a portion of his salary with those who petitioned
him for 8th. This politician routinely gave out his
cell number two villagers and one night He got a
call at three. a.m. From a man whose
wife was going into labor. He gets into his
truck and he drives out into the hillside. It's
like Like two hours over really hostel rooms. Mhm
. And he brings this woman and her husband to
the public hospital in a nearby city. The doctor
on call had decided decided to stay at home,
wasn't it? Supposed? So the politician uh,
went to this person's home with a pregnant woman and
her husband. He bangs on the door and he
says to the doctor, and I'm paraphrasing from the
husband's reporter. This woman is one of five Children
, the one her mother cherished most for her kindness
and hard work, tending to father's flock. Now
she lies before us. Men of means, bleeding
and suffering. She wants to bring new life into
the world for her to love and care for and
raise under the mercy of our Lord. Are we
gonna sit home and watch tv. Mhm. Mhm
. Looking at the politician's rhetoric, alleged brother was
the story stigmatic his claim as to this woman's value
has nothing to do with her personal autonomy or her
rational self legislating individualism, but rather her interdependence with
others, her role as both the giver and receiver
of care and it's her dependence on her mother and
the dependence of her father's flocks on her and her
future Children's dependence on her. That makes her worth
saving. Indeed, the culminating line bringing new life
into the Lord's world suggests that interdependency is the moral
fabric of a job. I think this perspective has
something to offer us and that we can learn from
it without exculpate ng patronage politics and without relegating rural
Brazilians to the status of an absolute cultural other.
While the validation of mutual dependency is not the dominant
understanding of uh of human values that we hold in
the industrialized West, it's not entirely foreign to us
either. Many people come to know themselves as virtuous
through their care for independence and others based on her
studies of people with severe mental disabilities. The philosopher
Ive got a has led to challenge the continent perspective
on human worth. She writes, the virtue of
care, the asymmetrical, non reciprocal and partial devotion
to another as well being, which requires that one
make oneself transparent to another's needs is a distinctive moral
capacity and is peculiarly human moral capacity as the exercise
of rational moral autonomy. At the very least,
this critical perspective might serve as a useful provocation to
us. I'm thinking of the classroom. I teach
a first year experience class on the topic of love
. Uh, and I asked my my students,
um, if love is about maximising our individual pleasure
through exchanges with others, uh or if through love
, we seek to intertwine ourselves with another so we
can see the world from the standpoint of two rather
than one. Okay, I think we can put
a similar provocation to the destination areas, adaptive brain
and behavior and intelligent infrastructure and human centered communities.
How may we think about technologies that mobilize interdependence to
better adapt us to the changing conditions of the workplace
? What sorts of innovations promote human center? Communities
organized around mutual care rather than individual autonomy? Have
a toddler. So uh my wife and I meandered
the world in a sleep deprived haze because whenever our
son cries out at night, the baby monitor weeks
is booked up. Why can't such devices treat parents
as an interdependent team rather than as two separate individuals
? We could invent a baby monitor that helps parents
take turns by only waking the on duty parent say
, from like a vibrating wristbands. What feels more
appropriate? One of those electric shock colors? Um
, we might imagine infrastructure that promotes healthy interdependence among
Children. The phenomenon of bullying is partly about isolating
someone from their peer group and partly about intimidating victims
, sympathizing peers into passive bystanders. What if we
design digital reporting technologies by which such by standards could
wordlessly convey their disapproval of bullying to their peers in
real time for elderly people who opt for aging in
place, we can direct innovation to technologies that might
allow neighbors to be on standby, ready to visit
a lonely elder or a depressed team at the time
of a phone. Mhm. Immediately I've strayed quite
a ways from my own book from patronage politics and
from a specifically Brazilian moral intuition. And there are
surely those among you who have very different ideas about
the key insights from the humanities and social sciences that
should guide major university initiatives like uh, destination areas
, certainly many in this audience. Um, and
you take research and writing that there's far more directly
on the kinds of projects that can realize the university's
land grant commitment to public service. So I appreciate
your patience as you've allowed me to seek and a
far away place, something relevant to our shared endeavor
here. Thank you. And congratulations stuff with if
anybody has any questions. He said, sir.
Yeah. You think lula could apply the same concept
itself. I mean they're rich with your stomach too
, right? They do or they certainly engage in
vote trafficking through means that seldom get called uh low
level vote buying right often because they're legal, Right
? one thinks about campaign finance regulation in the United
States. The recent McCutchen decision as an example of
legalizing what's essentially a system of high end patronage,
Right? Uh it seems like it's only the poor
who vote by right, otherwise it's legitimate means of
self expression. Uh huh. Okay. Mhm.
Mhm. Yeah. Was that question just a said
the woman left. Yes, she became one of
the great relays of the story of her patrons heroic
rescue of herself and her baby. Yeah. Mhm
. So because I don't know much about their voting
mechanisms, how do they know where they actually vote
for the? Sure. Sure. Yeah. This
is political scientists have called this perverse accountability um when
uh as opposed to leaders being accountable to their electors
, electors are accountable to their leaders, which of
course entails information systems. So it can be done
through word of mouth through various other um technologies like
giving somebody a ticket with a certain color on it
and you watch them pull it out of their of
their shirt and you can tell who they're going to
vote for. It's also about how voting results are
reported by various different districts. So if you can
if you can um uh make the district small enough
uh you can make very good inferences about, say
how a village voted, even if you don't know
the individual vote. Sometimes the village is really all
you care about anyway. So there are all kinds
of mechanisms through which people gather this kind of information
, right for international, this critical question. Is
it that much different artistry? We're back today by
whiskeys persuading both of you or were patronage? Was
the neighborhood Lincoln office? Sure, sure. Certainly
there's there's a good social history literature on what some
people call the boss tweed uh, system in which
patron urban patronage, essentially through distribution of whisky food
, uh, decks of cards, other kinds of
uh, swag. Uh, I think at that
level it can, if you look at it through
the eyes of say vote buying is your category as
your analytic category that you're gonna transpose from context to
context, then certainly there is. Um, but
there is, I think there's a lot of cultural
and historic specificity in grounding this particular kind of transactional
system uh, in in this uh setting, not
the least of which is because um some forms of
transaction, electoral transaction are not considered vote buying by
local people, but they are considered vote buying by
, say, the government of brazil and Western political
science. And that has to do a lot about
the currency being used and the kind of moral entanglements
between the partners. So in a kind of classic
boss tweed system, no further relationship is necessarily entailed
between the transacting parties. They've engaged in essentially commodity
transaction as opposed to a relationship of a kind of
moral long allegiance that could last not only years,
decades. So that is an important local distinction,
I think to keep in mind. Yeah. Are
the folks still hungry or is there 0? Uhh
, zero. Hunger was remarkably effective and it wasn't
effective because of a lot of it's innovative uh strategies
. It was effective because it essentially took a very
complex problem, which is hunger and created a very
simple solution for it, which is um redistributing income
to the poorest members of the population. Uh And
so while there's a lot of abject poverty in brazil
hunger has been very substantially reduced. I can't say
it doesn't exist right. It's almost an impossibility.
But yeah, it was very effective, which is
one of the reasons why the Workers Party recently impeached
Workers' Party government. I'm sure you know about this
may very well come back into power with the next
round of elections. Yeah, that's my guess,
not using the traditions, but Yeah. Yeah.
Well, thank you everybody for your kind attention.
Thank you very much, Professor Ansel. So that
includes a brief concludes brief program. Please stick around
if you'd like to enjoy the food and drink and
company and we would like to have all the authors
who are present here today to come to the front
as we can get your photograph. Thank you for 471 00:30:55.140 --> A:middle L:90% coming.