Life & Letters - Fall 2025

Dean’s Message

The stories in this special “international issue” of Life & Letters point to some of the reasons why Liberal Arts is at the center of so much of what happens at UT. Whether it’s Tom Garza reflecting on the extraordinary transformations that he’s observed traveling to Russia over the decades, geographer Brenda Boonabaana exploring the complexities of ecotourism in her native Uganda, or sociologist Daniel Fridman analyzing the intersection of psychotherapy and money in his native Argentina, our faculty travel so far and study so deeply. They’re out there exploring every crevice and alcove of the world.

And not just our faculty. Our students are out there exploring the world too, whether through immersing themselves in the literature, history, languages, and philosophical perspectives of cultures and nations from far away or long ago (or nearby and recently); through study abroad; or through military service. To engage in the study of the liberal arts is to orient oneself toward deep, sustained, and open-ended engagement with the world.

A liberal arts education is also practical preparation for the demands and opportunities of living and working in Texas, which is a thrumming dynamo of international culture, technology, and industry, with an economy that would rank eighth globally if it were its own nation. If we want to prepare our students to flourish, whether in Texas or elsewhere, we need to equip them with knowledge of what they’ll be encountering, skills to adapt to new information and structures, and the confidence that they can integrate with good effect into the whole world.

So maybe think of this issue as two things that are really one: a glimpse into the extraordinary range of places and topics that our faculty and students are studying and an implicit brief for why the study of the liberal arts is more rather than less essential in periods of rapid technological, cultural, and economic change.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you have thoughts on the issue, or anything else, and I look forward to being in conversation with you.

Yours,

David Sosa, Interim Dean David Bruton, Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts

BOLOGNA STUDY PROGRAM

summer I

FACULTY-LED PROGRAM FOR ITALIAN LEARNERS

The Bologna Study Program, established in summer 2025, provides UT students of Italian with the opportunity of a lifetime to immerse themselves in Italian culture, language, and life in Bologna, the thriving capital city of the Emilia-Romagna region.

Interested in the program? Please reach out to faculty leader Amanda Bush of the Department of French and Italian at: amanda.bush@utexas.edu

More information on the program:

Curious about the city of Bologna? Learn more:

The Colonization of Names: Symbolic Violence and France’s Occupation of Algeria

Benjamin Claude Brower

Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231216012

Scripting Suicide in Japan

Kirsten Cather

University of California Press

ISBN: 9780520400269

Economies of the Inca World

R. Alan Covey and Jordan A. Dalton

Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781009552080

Making a Canon: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka, and the Place of Buddhist Art

Janice Leoshko

University of Chicago

ISBN: 9780226836065

The Birth of Democracy in South America

Raúl L. Madrid

Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781009633802

Diversity and Decolonization in Teaching Russian Studies

Thomas Jesús Garza

Palgrave

ISBN: 3031906934

Circulations: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

Courtney Handman

University of California Press

ISBN: 9780520416000

The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain’s Atlantic Empire

Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez

Duke University Press

ISBN: 9781478031840

Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife

Chelsi West Ohueri

Cornell University Press

ISBN: 9781501781889

The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders

Jacob Daniels

Stanford University Press

ISBN: 9781503642911

Capoeira Journeys

By Celina de Sá

Adapted from the preface to Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal (Duke University Press, 2025), by Celina de Sá, assistant professor in UT Austin’s Department of Anthropology.

This is a book about returns. Capoeira is a combat game that came to Brazil, likely in the 17th or 18th century, along with enslaved West Central Africans. Its official return to Africa came in 1966, when legendary Brazilian capoeirista Mestre Pastinha (Vincente Ferreira Pastinha) performed with a small crew of his students at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. A more lasting return, however, came early in the 21st century, when one of the subjects of this book, Moctar Ndiaye, saw a young boy throwing his legs in the air on the historic Gorée Island beach.

The boy and his adoptive mother were on their own personal origins journey. It was their first trip back to Senegal since she had first brought him to live with her in France, where he had studied capoeira with Brazilians. He had struggled as a Black child in French society, and his mother was advised by the adoption agency to ground him in his place of origin. He became Moctar’s first teacher, and Moctar has spent the decades since spreading the gospel of capoeira in Senegal, teaching and modeling its complex interplay of instrumentation, song, values, techniques, community interactions, and aesthetics.

This is also the story of my own return. My father, Mestre Beiçola (Ronaldo de Sá), was among the cohort of the first Brazilians to bring capoeira to California in the late 1980s. In fact, my parents met through capoeira when my mother was training in Berkeley and my father taught a workshop at her academy. My siblings and I were

raised in a capoeira household, and as kids we took samba and Afro-Brazilian dance classes, paraded in the San Francisco Carnaval every year, and learned to play a range of instruments, all with my father as our teacher.

I was a reluctant student. Capoeira’s spinning moves often made me dizzy. I dreaded the intimidating moment of approaching the bateria (orchestra) to play in the roda (ring) in front of so many staring eyes and to face the unpredictability of my opponent’s attacks. I also struggled with my connection to the idea of Brazil, a place that was integrated into my daily reality but that I visited only every other year. Growing up with a capoeira legend also meant having other (mostly Black) Brazilian mestres around, along with countless (mostly white) Americans who were dance, music, and capoeira students passionate about “Brazilian culture.” I vehemently rejected capoeira training for many years, aspiring to be a normative American teenager who played volleyball. Still, my background had always made me curious. 

We welcome readers’ letters, which should be emailed to oppenheimer@utexas.edu. Letters accepted for publication are subject to editing. Priority is given to letters of fewer than 300 words.

In response to “Marketing the Liberal Arts: Recruitment Season,” from the Spring ‘25 issue

I read your piece and was so interested in what you had to say I thought I would take you up on your invitation to respond.

My name is Anna Grace Holloway, and I’m a current undergraduate at UT studying philosophy and government with an English minor in Liberal Arts Honors (LAH). I’m involved on campus with Civitas, the Liberal Arts Council, and admissions for LAH. All this is just to say that I too am an advocate for the liberal arts. I very much agree with you that the liberal arts’ image in general suffers from a certain softness. It often lacks the edge of “the cutting edge of innovation” or the boldness of “make it in the world.” I do think, however, that, in competing with business and STEM, COLA cannot try to sell their same kind of ambition. In order to market what COLA is, we have to be careful not to market what McCombs or Cockrell is. While all kinds of drive go by the name ambition, it is always a drive to do something. The liberal arts, and the humanities especially, motivate students to a

fundamentally different end. I’m suggesting a way to see ambition through a uniquely liberal arts lens so that we can compete with, but differentiate ourself from, other schools.

Part of the problem is probably Locke and his particular influence on America. Unlike Machiavelli and Hobbes, Locke thought that “the great” (the elite, ambitious people in society) weren’t a problem to be managed but rather potential to be harnessed. He encouraged channeling the usual political ambitions of the great, which pose threats to rulers and government stability, into economic acquisition and industrious innovation. His works morally sanctioned limitless ambition and encouraged drive redirected from government. The result has been, I think, that modern great minds find welcome homes in science and especially business, where they are urged to reap the fruits of their excellent labor and superior intellect. There is little money to be made toiling in books, and people are less interested in the posthumous fame social science greatness provides.

But it is this kind of excellence — living long after your death — that liberal arts affords in ways that business and science cannot. In business, your individual success lasts only as long as you do — after your death you live only in the name on your building or through your nepotism. After all, money only works if you’re there to spend it. In science, while great

thinkers are respected, the goal is always to best the last guy’s theory and defeat his life’s work with your own — to disprove, to improve, and principally to replace. In both business and STEM, it’s a winnerstays-on system. The liberal arts is different; our problems are perennial and our solutions are timeless. The greatest minds are never outpaced by technology, never horizontally or vertically integrated into oblivion, and never nullified by their contexts. We surely innovate, but the immutable truth discovered by the study of the liberal arts is undying. This is what we are driven to achieve.

You can see the other, pre-Locke, Grecian, ancient type of ambition well-represented in our college in the future politicians and lawyers. These are only a small part of the leaders and occupations in the college, but there are numerous others (as the “Wheel of Destiny” gets at). If the goal is to bring vigor to the college’s image and emphasize the ambition of our students, I don’t think we need to borrow from other disciplines to do so. The Aristotles, Herodotuses, Napoleans, Shakespeares, and MLKs have achieved just as much as, if not more than, the Newtons, Rockefellers, and Sergey Brins of the world. There is much more to say about what exactly that special something is, but I’m sure anyone in COLA already has a sense of it. This is about those who aren’t yet in the college, and to recruit them we need to articulate what that secret sauce is.

The philosophers, historians, generals, playwrights, and activists of the future have a kind of ambition that differs from a business or STEM student: one that is older, nobler, but by no means weaker. A liberal arts student’s ambition is not so much for success or innovation, but for greatness.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my thoughts, and I’d be delighted to hear yours.

Best,

Anna Grace Holloway ‘26, Austin, TX

As a former UT graduate with a degree in English, I think the core problem here is something bigger than messaging: there’s no clear, direct path from a liberal arts degree to a guaranteed job the way there is with, say, engineering or business. And the outside world’s perception of the “value” of a liberal arts degree isn’t something students can control, which is frustrating when your worth ends up being measured by how easily you can land a job rather than by the actual skills and knowledge you’ve gained.

That’s been my experience, anyway. While I absolutely learned valuable skills during my time at UT, it didn’t translate into immediate, tangible “success” after graduation. I applied for countless jobs and ended up returning to self-employment as a photographer, not because

I planned to but because the market simply didn’t value the degree I’d earned. There are, of course, other factors in play (age, gender, parenthood, etc.), but I don’t think I’m the only one who felt like the degree didn’t open doors the way we were promised it would.

That’s why I’m not sure about the “Wheel of Destiny” concept. It feels like an attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole, spinning a narrative about where a liberal arts degree might take you when that’s not the story at all. The truth is, students who choose a COLA degree aren’t looking for a predefined, predictable outcome or they wouldn’t have chosen COLA; they would’ve chosen health or business school. They’re rebels, creators, thinkers, people who want to ask big questions and find new answers. They’re not following a script; they’re writing their own. Is there data on the first-choice colleges that the students who are ending up in COLA originally wanted? What are the values of those different colleges and what is the overlap between the two?

To me, that’s the real story. It’s about the kind of person who chooses this path.

If the campaign leaned into that spirit, into the unapologetic curiosity, rebellion, and innovation of COLA students, I think it would hit harder and feel more true to the kind of people who choose this path, which would hopefully in

turn call out to others who identify in the same way.

I hope my perspective is helpful, even if imperfect.

Best, Jessica (Seay) Martin ‘19, Austin, TX

I don’t have a brilliant idea, and I’m not great at marketing to say the least (I have spent my entire professional life working for not-for-profit entities), but on the other hand, I am a scholar of storytelling and an experienced opinion writer. So, I have some relevant communication skills, and I am very interested in this effort.

My own way of thinking about this is that liberal arts is where you learn to roll with the punches that happen in any person’s life in the world, whether because there is a global pandemic, or because your job has been obliterated by the latest AI, or whatever. Liberal arts gives you the long view (via subject-area knowledge) and the habits of mind (via your skill set) that enable you to contextualize those experiences on the large scale and on the personal level to figure out how you personally can, will, and/or should respond.

My $0.02.

Best wishes, Deborah Beck

Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts

ST. AUGUSTINE’S BIG MESSAGE

By Peter LaSalle

I doubt you would find much argument that the best-known quote regarding travel comes from — or is at least attributed to — philosopher/theologian St. Augustine there in the ancient city of Hippo: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”

His famous metaphor still just about says it all.

I learned its message early. While in college, I was sent to Ireland one summer by a then-new type of guidebook for European travel, Let’s Go: The Student Guide to Adventure. Written entirely by Harvard students, it targeted a shoestring-budget audience of that age, and I was assigned to contribute the entry on Ireland.

Actually, the assignment itself was a bust. Instead of generating the expected recommendations on the best cheap pubs and hostels, I was more interested in using the stay to track down sites and practically anything else associated with the Irish literary giants I was crazy about, like novelist James Joyce and poet William Butler Yeats. I acquired some good Irish friends before long, too. Back in the U.S. that fall, I turned out a

dozen pages of hurried, somewhat bluffed copy for the guidebook, little of which the editors saw fit to use. But that didn’t bother me, because, most importantly, in Ireland I’d been bitten by the travel bug, all right.

I wanted to learn more about the world and its people and, yes, its literature. If put on this sweet planet for only so long, I wanted my share of that action, trying even today to pursue it the way I did when a kid — as a genuine traveler and not merely a tourist.

And for me travel continues to have a literary focus, however wide the geographical range over the years. I’ve spent time in Vietnam and Cameroon interviewing writers. I’ve made multiple trips to South America (from Colombia to Argentina and spots between); there, I bounced around by bus, river ferry, and on occasion bicycle, losing myself in the continent’s culture and hoping to better understand why it has produced an uncanny abundance of acclaimed contemporary literature.

Similar explorations in many other countries have also reinforced how lucky I was to get that first taste of true travel in Ireland, granting I did disappoint the guidebook editors.

So, to now address the specific matter at hand here, Life & Letter’s invitation to offer supposedly “highbrow” advice on life. Of course I realize that I am far from qualified to pontificate with any windy comprehensive master plan of my own on that. Nevertheless, I won’t hesitate to echo St. Augustine, a certified highbrow authority, and tell anybody I can — especially students — to without question try to include some travel in life. It’s always best and most satisfying when young. And it doesn’t have to be prompted by something like my literary obsessions. Whether study abroad or employment abroad or simply a month or two of serendipitous backpacking — as the ad says, just do it.

Let me cite a case in point.

A year ago, a UT undergrad student of mine, Jess Smith, wrote a wonderful short story collection for her creative writing honors thesis. Jess needed no advice from me concerning her plans upon graduation. She went right into the

Peace Corps, and after a language crash-course stateside she headed to rural Thailand to live with a local family and teach school.

Summoning her writing talent, she has launched a several-page newsletter, which she regularly sends me. The contents give a mix of news of the Peace Corps’ Thailand program and spirited articles that describe her own recent activity, flanked by photos. There are bright-color shots of Jess surrounded by happy children; Jess with monks at a Buddhist monastery; Jess bicycling alone out on a day trip along an arrow-straight road in the panoramic countryside, smiling. When each emailed issue arrives, I read every word.

In this case envy seems only natural, and I do envy Jess being so young and adventuresome and her rare opportunity for such valuable experiences that will enhance her life to come. But I suppose it’s not exactly envy — rather, it’s just my admiration of the way she is contributing so much internationally in these turbulent times worldwide, when we definitely could use a whole lot more American understanding of other places as well as full personal contribution.

Jess Smith, she’s somebody who has really tuned in on old St. Augustine’s essential message. 

Peter LaSalle teaches creative writing in UT Austin’s English department and the Michener Center for Writers. A novelist and short story writer, he has also published two books on literary travel, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (Dzanc Books, 2015) and The World Is a Book, Indeed (LSU Press, 2020).

COLLEGE NEWS

Two Faculty Named AAAS Fellows

Sociology professor Chandra Muller and anthropology professor Arlene Miller Rosen have been elected to the 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows class, a distinguished lifetime honor recognizing exceptional scientific achievements. Muller, who focuses on how education shapes population health, leads two national longitudinal studies tracking high school students into later life to inform interventions against dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Rosen studies human-environmental relations in ancient societies, examining how civilizations responded to climate change through archaeological analysis. The prestigious fellowship joins them with notable scientists including Nobel Prize winners and other internationally distinguished researchers.

Psychology Professor Receives NSF Grant to Study AI Emotional Intelligence

Assistant professor of psychology Desmond Ong has received a prestigious five-year NSF CAREER grant to develop scientific benchmarks for measuring emotional reasoning in artificial intelligence. As millions use AI chatbots like ChatGPT for emotional support and advice, Ong’s research addresses a critical gap: determining whether AI truly understands emotions or merely mimics empathetic responses. The project will create educational resources on AI literacy while establishing frameworks for responsible AI use in emotional contexts.

Jennifer Chang Named Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Jennifer Chang, a poet and associate professor of English at UT Austin, was named a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for An Authentic Life, her third collection. The Pulitzer board called the work “sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid.” Her previous collection, Some Say The Lark, won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award, and An Authentic Life was also a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Chang’s poetry appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, and other prestigious publications.

Nancy Rodriguez Named Director of UT Austin’s Latino Research Institute

Nancy Rodriguez has joined UT Austin as director of the Latino Research Institute and a professor in Mexican American and Latina/o studies. A former presidential appointee who led the U.S. Department of Justice’s research division under President Obama, Rodriguez brings extensive experience in criminal justice research and public safety strategies. She previously served at Arizona State and UC Irvine, focusing on crime prevention and evidence-based approaches to improving criminal justice systems and reducing prison violence.

Professor Emeritus James W. Pennebaker Elected to National Academy of Sciences

James W. Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, joining 149 other scholars in the prestigious 2025 class. A pioneer in the study of natural language use, group dynamics, and personality, his text analysis program LIWC is widely used across psychology, computer science, business, and medicine. The West Texas native earned his Ph.D. from UT in 1977 and spent the latter half of his career here, teaching thousands of students and publishing extensively.

David Sosa Appointed Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts

David Sosa, the David Bruton, Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts and chair of the Department of Philosophy, has been named interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts, effective June 1. Under his leadership since 2006, the philosophy department has risen in national rank from No. 14 to No. 8. A specialist in the philosophy of mind and language, Sosa has supervised 12 doctoral candidates and previously directed the Plan II Honors program. He brings extensive university service experience, including roles on presidential and dean search committees. He earned his undergraduate degree at Brown University and his Ph.D. at Princeton University.

Liberal

Arts Programs Excel in

National Rankings

The College of Liberal Arts continues to demonstrate academic excellence across multiple disciplines in national rankings. The philosophy graduate program climbed to eighth place nationally, tying with the University of Pittsburgh and surpassing Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. The program also ranked third in epistemology and normative ethics, fourth in philosophy of language and Chinese philosophy, and first in history of analytic philosophy. Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report rankings show psychology jumping nine spots to 14th nationally, with five COLA programs now in the top 20. The college also excels in specialty rankings with Latin American history and sociology of population both at No. 1, plus top-10 positions in African American history (tenth), behavioral neuroscience (eighth), sex and gender (sixth), and social psychology (ninth). 

RESEARCH NEWS

ANCIENT ROMAN BORDERS STILL SHAPE WELL-BEING AND PERSONALITY

Why are people in some regions happier and healthier than in others? It may be due to their history. A new paper from an international team of historians, psychologists, and economists has linked ancient Roman borders in Germany to contemporary differences in personality, health, and well-being across regions — and their findings have implications beyond Germany.

In “Roman Rule Explains Regional Well-Being Divides in Germany,” the researchers examine the long-term psychological and well-being effects of Roman rule on present-day Germany. Their study looks back 2,000 years to Roman times, comparing German regions influenced by Roman culture and protected by the Roman Limes wall — once the frontier of the Roman empire — with those German regions outside its reach.

By comparing personality traits, health, and life satisfaction metrics from the historical border regions with those immediately north and south, where many other

factors are similar, the researchers were able to identify significant differences and to conclude that it’s the border areas’ Roman past that explains those differences.

“These patterns cannot be explained by other historical influences, such as religion or more recent events, reinforcing the idea that Roman economic and institutional investments left a lasting macro-psychological imprint that continues to shape regional disparities today,” says Samuel Gosling, a professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and a member of the research team behind the paper.

Major improvements in health and well-being have been unevenly distributed throughout history, but one stable factor that helps explain these differences is regional variation in personality traits, such as extraversion, neuroticism, or agreeableness. Using advanced statistical methods and psychological data from large-scale surveys with over 70,000 respondents, the research team was able to

compare the personality patterns of people living in regions that had been developed by the Romans millennia ago with those of people living in neighboring areas. The comparison showed that the people in Roman-influenced regions showed more adaptive personality traits. They also reported greater life satisfaction and better health, as well as higher average life expectancy.

“Even after accounting for recent historical factors and a variety of physical and economic conditions, including geology, climate, and regional economic development, we found a clear link between Roman rule and present-day personality traits, such as higher conscientiousness and extraversion and lower neuroticism — traits known to drive happiness and healthier lifestyles,” says Martin Obschonka, a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam and the lead author on the paper. “This pattern was further confirmed using a specialized statistical method that examines the border regions along the Limes frontier.”

The study suggests that Roman investments in economic advancements such as the Roman road system and Roman markets and mines were crucial in creating this effect. “The Limes Wall marked the boundary between one of history’s most advanced and influential civilizations and the comparatively undeveloped ‘barbaric’ Germanic tribes,” Obschonka explains. “Roman occupation left a significant and lasting economic legacy, which in turn shaped a deep and enduring macro-psychological profile, predisposing these local populations to greater happiness and better health.”

That this effect was so long-lasting could be explained by the human capacity to build on cultural advances over generations. Still, “it was surprising that the effects of activities undertaken hundreds of years ago still show up in regional differences in psychology today,” says Gosling. “That’s a long time!”

To see if their findings apply elsewhere, the researchers tested them in the Netherlands, which was also divided by the Limes along the Rhine. Despite using a smaller study area, they found similar effects of Roman influence on personality traits, with some effects even stronger than in

Germany. This suggests that the researchers’ findings could apply to other countries with a different history, though they caution that it’s too early to say whether their results can be extended to every country with a Roman past.

Roman empire aside, this study highlights the importance of examining ancient history to understand modern divides in happiness, health, and underlying differences in personality.

“History shapes us in ways we often overlook. The psychological borders we see today might have their roots deep in the past,” says Obschonka. 

HOW DOES EDUCATION AFFECT ALZHEIMER’S AND DEMENTIA RISK? IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN DEGREE ATTAINMENT

Education has long been associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, but a new study reveals that this protection extends far beyond diplomas and degrees. Co-led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University, the study investigated how high school contexts, opportunities, and outcomes shape midlife cognition even among people with the same completed degrees.

The research, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, expands upon previous research about education’s protective effects against late-life cognitive impairment and offers new pathways for dementia prevention strategies.

“When we talk about education, the quality of your high school experience, not just whether you received a diploma or went on to college, shapes your brain health decades later,” said lead author Chandra Muller, professor of sociology at UT. “Students who attend better-resourced schools and perform well academically tend to maintain stronger cognitive skills as they age. Unfortunately, when we only look at degrees earned,

we miss this important part of the story. This means that improving our high schools today could help protect an entire generation from memory and cognition problems as they grow older.”

The study used data from surviving members of the High School and Beyond (HS&B:80) cohort, a nationally representative and highly diverse sample of more than 27,000 Americans who were high school sophomores or seniors in 1980. This unique dataset allowed researchers to examine how early educational contexts and experiences relate to cognitive functioning four decades later.

Key findings include:

• Degree attainment predicts midlife cognitive functioning, but a large portion of that association is accounted for by students’ high school academic performance as measured by test scores, grades, and course completion.

• High school contexts and learning opportunities predict midlife cognition mainly because they play a role in shaping students’ academic performance.

• Understanding the potential benefits of education for later-life cognitive functioning requires

attention to broader schooling processes and to students’ academic performance beyond degree attainment.

“What we’ve discovered is that it’s about the entire educational journey,” said John Robert Warren, co-lead author and professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. “Schools differ with respect to their resources and academic environments, and students certainly vary with respect to what they learn and accomplish in school. These inequalities create ripple effects that influence cognitive health decades later.”

Other principal investigators include Eric Grodsky, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Jennifer Manly and Adam Brickman, professors of neurology at Columbia University. Other collaborators include Koit Hung and Michael J. Culbertson of UT and the University of WisconsinMadison, respectively.

Supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association, the findings highlight the importance of addressing educational opportunities early in life as a potential strategy for reducing disparities in cognitive aging. 

STUDY REVEALS $1.3 BILLION IN TEXAS WATER MARKET TRANSACTIONS

A groundbreaking study led by UT Austin associate professor of geography and the environment Eugenio Arima, UT geography alumnus (2011) Charles Wight, and their colleagues revealed how active the water market in Texas is. Their research uncovered over $1.3 billion in water trades, involving a massive 4 million acre-feet — enough water to supply almost 15 million U.S. households for a year.

“Texas has successfully created a flexible water market that adapts to the unique needs of each region, offering a potential model for other areas facing water shortages,” says Wight, who earned both his B.A. and M.A. at UT and now works as a consultant on water issues. He highlighted the urgency of this adaptability

given the increasing water scarcity and droughts and the prediction that urban water demand in Texas will surpass agricultural use by 2060.

This research was published in the November edition of Ecological Economics.

Key findings:

• Over 2,350 individual surface water transactions were documented across 13 major basins between 1987 and 2022.

• Market activity has significantly increased over the past decade.

• Temperature, groundwater levels, and commodity prices for rice and cotton are significant predictors of market activity.

The research reveals that different river basins have developed distinct “signatures” of transactions, adapting to local conditions and needs. This flexibility has proven crucial for addressing varying water management challenges across the state.

“Most Texans recognize that water scarcity is increasingly threatening the environment and the economy, but few are aware that existing tools for decreasing demand exist,” notes Wight. “While supply side measures like reservoirs and desalination have dominated historically, they are costly, produce environmental externalities, and can paradoxically increase demand. Incentives, like water markets, work on the demand side by reallocating water based on the needs of different users.

While they have been touted from a theoretical perspective as a cost-effective tool for managing water scarcity, evidence of their effectiveness has been mixed. Our study provides statewide evidence that they have been used to deliver water to different water users and are being used more today than they were even 15 years ago.”

PEOPLE PARK OF THE

LESSONS FROM UGANDA’S ECOTOURISM INDUSTRY

BY ALEX RESHANOV

Brenda Boonabaana grew up about 20km from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, a sprawling habitat for endangered mountain gorillas in southwestern Uganda, near the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bwindi was designated a national park and achieved protected status in the early 1990s and has since become a major source of tourist revenue for Uganda.

The youngest of three daughters, Boonabaana was raised by her mother and grandmother on a small farm. She recalls hearing stories about the forest and its abundant resources from her grandmother, who remembered the wild pigs hunted by the men of her community when she was a child and how they were roasted on firewood gathered by the women. As she grew up, Boonabaana watched the influx of tourists and the changes they brought with fascination.

Now an assistant professor of geography and the environment at UT Austin researching sustainable tourism and development, Boonabaana’s understanding of her field — and of the complexities involved in creating truly sustainable tourism industries — is informed by both her training and her life experience.

“The beauty of sustainable tourism, which is anchored in the sustainable development agenda, is that it thrives on three pillars,” she explains. “Environmental integrity, people and culture, and economic stability.”

All three pillars must be balanced, Boonabaana says,

“It’s

difficult to tell economically disadvantaged people to protect animals and not to cut down trees when they’re hungry.”

for tourism industries to provide continuing benefits to the communities in which they operate.

There was another, equally crucial early influence on Boonabaana’s career trajectory: her name. Many families in Uganda do not have a single last name shared from parent to child. Instead, a different last name is chosen for each child. Boonabaana’s older sisters’ last names translate approximately to “God protects” and “God is there,” whereas “Boonabaana” means “whether boys or girls, they are all children.” This was her mother’s defiant response to a prevailing sentiment of the time: that girl children were less valuable than boys and that a third female child was a terrible misfortune. With her name a daily reminder of both the discrimination faced by women and her mother’s support despite it, Boonabaana says she became determined to “undo that kind of damage and become a role model for my community.” She excelled in her education and turned her research focus to Uganda’s

growing ecotourism industry and how it was impacting the social status of women.

The establishment of Bwindi as a protected national park drastically restructured resources and opportunities for people living in the surrounding communities, Boonabaana says. Over the past 15 years, she has conducted hundreds of interviews with local women and men to find out how the tourism industry that grew around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park has shaped their lives.

With access to the forest limited by conservation efforts, locals were barred from hunting and collecting timber. Men who had previously worked in mining and lumbering in the forest were also displaced. And government enforcement of the new regulations, with heavy military presence, caused tensions.

“It’s difficult to tell economically disadvantaged people to protect animals and not to cut down trees when they’re

hungry,” Boonabaana says, “or when they don’t have fuel.”

To help locals adjust to life without forest access, and thus protect its lucrative park resource, the Ugandan government, along with outside aid organizations, channeled funding into offering alternatives, one of which was tourism work. If people could use their earnings from the nascent industry to purchase food and fuel in stores, the

reasoning went, they wouldn’t be tempted to illegally seek them in the forest. If their earnings were high enough, they might even come to view the arrangement as superior to the days of collecting sticks for firewood. Because women handled food production and preparation within households, they were prioritized in these aid efforts.

Traditionally, women’s rights in the region were limited

and their activities tightly controlled. Most didn’t work outside the home or own property. (Boonabaana’s mother and grandmother were notable exceptions, taking on typically male roles after the demise of their marriages.)

The tourism industry upended these norms. Women could now work in hospitality jobs and fields that catered to tourists’ desire to experience local culture, such as producing crafts and engaging

“As women were now shining, men were no longer the men they thought they were.”

in dance performances. Those who did often became primary earners for their families.

Women’s newfound financial autonomy improved their households’ living standards and allowed them greater freedom of movement, but there were also unexpected impacts to communities’ social dynamics. One involved competition for tourist dollars. Boonabaana describes a situation in which dance performances had to be temporarily halted due to escalating conflicts between rival dance groups.

The most notable issue, however, was the effect that shifting gender roles had on men and on men’s treatment of their female partners. While they benefited financially from their wives’ employment, Boonabaana explains, many men’s self-esteem took a blow. They were no longer the sole controllers of household spending. Some worried about threats to their marriages as a result of women’s increased interactions with other men in the tourism industry, such as dance group managers. As men’s success lagged, many became depressed. Alcoholism

increased, and with it, domestic violence.

“As women were now shining, men were no longer the men they thought they were,” says Boonabaana, noting how the prioritization of training and assistance for women may not have best served either gender. “Men should have been integrated into this so that there was a more balanced equation. It was a missed opportunity. And now the women are shouldering the negative emotions that are coming from men’s isolation and lack of financial independence.”

This is one of the reasons Boonabaana interviews both women and men when conducting fieldwork — both in her tourism research and in a more recent project focusing on helping farmers adapt to the challenges of climate change. While her research focus emphasizes impacts to women’s status and empowerment, these women’s lives are often intertwined with those of their male partners. The lesson from Uganda’s tourism development is that both genders need to be included for women to succeed.

As Uganda’s forest-adjacent Bantu communities grappled with the benefits and costs of the tourism industry, its Indigenous Batwa population was experiencing entirely negative impacts.

The Batwa didn’t just rely on forest resources, the forest was their home. Unlike communities situated near the edges of the forest, such as the one Boonabaana’s grandmother was raised in, the Batwa didn’t supplement their hunted and foraged goods with agriculture. They didn’t have to. Everything that sustained them was readily available in the forest. When they were evicted from Bwindi by Uganda’s government to make way for tourism, they found themselves landless and without practical alternatives. The process, says Boonabaana, was neither gradual nor gentle.

“The government came with a lot of force, with soldiers and guns,” she says. “There was a lot of shock.”

No compensation was offered to the Batwa for the loss of land, she explains. They were advised to find schools and jobs: to quickly adapt to a way of living they had no experience with and no interest in. Despite efforts by NGOs to provide assistance, Batwa life expectancy has plummeted since their eviction from Bwindi.

“We failed to understand their realities,” Boonabaana says about Uganda’s abrupt relocation of the Batwa. “We didn’t prepare them for the challenge. The government should have been at the forefront of protecting these people. There should have been more engagement with experts who study Indigenous people.”

Boonabaana hopes that lessons learned from her and others’ research can improve future sustainable development efforts. The more successful aspects of Uganda’s ecotourism industry are due in part to the government seeking input from sustainability experts from the very beginning. Limiting the number of visitor permits granted helped them avoid the pitfalls of overtourism experienced by nations with older, less methodically planned tourism economies, allowing the country to benefit financially without destroying the resource its tourism was built upon.

In her most recent research, which focuses on women smallholder farmers in regions of eastern Uganda hit hardest by climate change, Boonabaana is also employing knowledge gained from previous qualitative work to test novel interventions. In

Sustainability is about keeping this for the future, for others who are not yet born. No one made the gorillas, we all found them there, and so we should be good stewards.

collaboration with the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) organization, she and her colleagues are providing training and smart phones with a climate app designed to help mitigate the impacts of climate change to a subset of female farmers. The research will follow women and their male partners over the course of several years to track effects of the interventions on both climate change resilience and women’s empowerment.

Boonabaana’s work can also help inform travelers hoping to protect not just the places they visit but the people who inhabit them. For one, she says, use your money wisely. Boonabaana stresses that the higher cost of Uganda’s forest permits is necessary to prevent overtourism while also providing reasonable compensation for those working in the industry. But don’t be reckless with your generosity. Boonabaana has observed that tourists often come to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest wellinformed and with good intentions, “but they’re so

fired up that sometimes they overdo it.” There is a tendency for people from more affluent countries to assume they can easily fix a region’s problems with money. Money can be helpful, but it needs to be spent in a thoughtful way, with thorough consideration of potential downstream impacts. As an example, Boonabaana notes that tourists often sponsor local children’s educations. But the children they sponsor are those of the women most visible to them through the tourism industry, such as dancers. This piecemeal philanthropy risks overlooking other equally deserving children and creating fierce competition for any jobs that might result in tourist sponsorships.

Overall, Boonabaana says, our goal should be maximizing the long-term health of both natural resources and communities. “Sustainability is about keeping this for the future, for others who are not yet born. No one made the gorillas, we all found them there, and so we should be good stewards.” 

ECONOMICS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Economic sociologist Daniel Fridman on what Americans can learn from Argentine therapists

By Lauren Macknight

The world’s therapy capital isn’t Los Angeles, where celebrities like Kieran Culkin and Merritt Wever shout out their therapists during awards shows, or New York. Instead that honor belongs to Buenos Aires, where Argentina’s 222 psychologists per 100,000 people (compared to just 30 per 100,000 in the United States, according to the World Health Organization) have created a culture in which therapy isn’t just normalized — it’s practically required.

Beneath its ubiquity lies a tension that troubles even the most analyzed city on Earth: the intersection of money and therapy. Psychotherapists in Buenos Aires do not simply have a fixed rate for their time and services. Instead, therapist and patient often negotiate rates case-by-case and then theoretically revisit their negotiations in the midst

of treatment, often using the price-setting conversation itself as a therapeutic tool.

If that sounds unusual to you, you might be American. For UT Austin economic sociologist Daniel Fridman, who grew up in Argentina and bases a large body of his work there, this is commonplace. Now the negotiation between psychotherapists and patients in Argentina has become the latest site for Fridman’s sociological investigations into everyday economic transactions.

“We treat money as if it were completely fungible, without meaning, or as if people only use it rationally. But when you look at real economic exchanges, you see money in the context of relationships,” says Fridman. “It’s rooted in relations and rooted in meaning.”

To illustrate the way money and relationships blend, Fridman points to the way we might fight over a restaurant bill, struggle to decide how to pay for a wedding or funeral, or look down on “dirty” money. Money, he says, shapes how we define value in our lives.

In the price-setting dynamics of Argentine psychotherapy, Fridman has found a productive place to examine a certain set of economic behaviors and the cultural setting that surrounds them. “This behavior and its context are so intertwined,” he explains. “How people interact, consciously make things work for and against their economic needs, their economic interest — all this mixes within the context of a relationship.” It is a relationship, he says, affected both by the economic transaction of a cost for a service and the therapeutic bond.

It’s worth noting that the overwhelming share of therapy in Argentina is psychoanalytic psychotherapy as conceived by figures like Freud and Lacan. Unlike other therapies more familiar to an American audiences, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), psychoanalysis is rooted in understanding the unconscious. In Argentina, therapy is the sacred and often mysterious

work of mining the psyche, and payment is seen as another point of interpretation and uncertainty.

In practice, this takes many forms. The first, as Fridman describes it, exists in the negotiation between psychotherapist and patient in the absence of fixed prices. This might look like the initial session with a new patient wrapping up with the question, “Are you comfortable with this rate today?” If the patient is not comfortable, the therapist and patient discuss the patient’s financial situation, the therapeutic work, and where they might meet. Fridman describes this as an “inverted bazaar,” a version of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s work on the organization of Indonesian bazaars where buyer and seller explore pricing through conversation.

“But unlike the bazaar, they can’t just try to walk away with an amazing deal (or maybe having paid a lot more than they should have if they lost the negotiation),” Fridman says. “They are trying to

build a solid therapeutic bond that cannot be framed as a competitive, self-interested, commercial transaction,” even while it is, in fact, a commercial transaction. But the logic of the transaction, according to Fridman, is closer to giftgiving, where both parties try to give instead of take, than to the haggling you’d get at the bazaar. While patients want to pay enough to maintain balance and avoid feeling indebted, analysts can also charge little or nothing as long as they maintain the relational work needed to preserve the therapeutic bond.

Beyond the negotiated fees lies an equally intricate dance around time itself — how long each session runs, how long the overall treatment lasts, and what to do about no-shows. In every case, therapists find themselves having to balance their therapeutic ideals with the realities of making a living. They also hope to respect “the time of the unconscious,” the idea that breakthrough moments can’t be scheduled and healing doesn’t follow a clock. So, they can (theoretically) abruptly end a

“They are trying to build a solid therapeutic bond that cannot be framed as a competitive, self-interested, commercial transaction,” even while it is, in fact, a commercial transaction.

session after 20 minutes if they sense that the patient would benefit from stopping then, and they could also expect that very same patient to remain in treatment for years without any clear endpoint. When patients miss appointments, deciding whether to charge them anyway becomes a therapeutic tool rather than just a business policy.

What makes these practices even more complex is that Argentine psychoanalysts operate within a professional culture that explicitly positions itself as anti-capitalist. They see themselves and their flexible approach to time as resistance to market logic, viewing shorter, goal-oriented therapies as symptoms of American-style commodification. In research for his current book-in-progress, Fridman has documented

how deeply this thinking runs through analysts’ own language, citing one interview in which an analyst dismissively labels cognitive behavioral approaches as resultadistas, a soccer term used to describe coaches who care only about winning rather than beautiful play. Just as a results-obsessed coach misses the art of the game, these analysts argue, outcome-focused therapists miss the deeper ambiguity of real therapeutic work.

It’s a complicated balance of interests, beliefs, and philosophy, says Fridman. Therapists need to sustain themselves financially while preserving the therapeutic relationships that define their practice and resisting some of the structures of the free market.

For patients, this economic dimension remains in the background as they focus on the work of personal growth. Their drive for self-improvement isn’t unique to therapy, however. Fridman observed similar patterns in his earlier exploration of financial self-help culture in his 2016 book Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press), in which he studied people who were devotees of American businessman and best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad Robert Kiyosaki.

What distinguishes Kiyosaki’s approach from standard financial advice, Fridman found, is its scope. Followers aren’t just learning investment strategies or financial terminology. The program presents financial success as fundamentally tied to personal transformation, suggesting that achieving economic goals requires rethinking one’s entire relationship to money, work, and self-worth. It is financial education that doubles as identity work, embedding what Fridman sees as neoliberal economic principles within a framework of personal development.

In other words, whether in therapy or financial self-

help, people are seeking both validation of their worth and guidance in reshaping it by turning to experts who can identify areas for growth and provide roadmaps for change.

The patterns become clearer when viewed against economic conditions. Fridman’s current research shows how payment flexibility in Argentine psychoanalysis evolved alongside broader economic pressures, while his financial self-help work reveals similar dynamics in the face of employment uncertainty, shrinking retirement security, and eroding social protections. “I think it’s a combination of practices that were present since the beginning,” he says about

“The question becomes: what values are embedded in our own system, and what might we gain — or lose — by examining them through the lens of Buenos Aires’ therapeutic culture?”

Argentina’s therapeutic payment arrangements, “but also extended as therapy became more popular in Argentina and as financial crises and inflation pushed them to extend this flexibility even more.”

Economic uncertainty, Fridman’s work suggests, creates conditions where industries focused on personal transformation tend to flourish. These sectors are

adaptive responses to changing circumstances that leave people seeking to improve their situations. What emerges is economies embedded with meaning, where financial transactions carry symbolic weight and social relationships shape market behaviors in ways that purely rational economic models can’t capture.

But perhaps the most compelling question Fridman’s research

raises isn’t about Argentina at all but about what we might be missing in our own approach to care and money. The Argentine approach may seem financially chaotic or therapeutically indulgent to American sensibilities, but it also suggests possibilities for organizing care around human connection. As Fridman’s work demonstrates, the way we handle money reveals the way we understand value itself. The question becomes: what values are embedded in our own system, and what might we gain — or lose — by examining them through the lens of Buenos Aires’ therapeutic culture? 

Т U V A В U S Т O

Jason Roberts on Siberian shamanism, or how to cross a river on a roll of plastic wrap

BY LEORA VISOTZKY

Imagine experiencing the coldest of cold plunges. Now imagine colder. Colder still. It takes your breath away, your teeth chatter, and you feel as if your soul has fled your body. No, this isn’t a New Year’s frolic into the frigid Atlantic at Coney Island seeking a sense of renewal. It’s the experience of a Yakutsk scuba diver searching for fossils below meters of ice in the Adycha River in Northwestern Siberia, the coldest inhabited place on Earth.

While reading a recent New York Times Magazine photo essay on these divers, I wondered what it would take, mentally, to make these arctic explorations. You would have to be able to access some kind of “other” plane beyond your conscious mind, I concluded, one that would allow you not to feel the cold or the fear and to commune with ancient nature, leading you to mastodon tusks and prehistoric shark teeth, while your conscious mind kept an eye on your oxygen tank.

It turns out this idea of an “other” plane is a welltraveled one in Siberian culture. It’s a spiritual place, an altered state of consciousness, and not everyone gets to go. Those that do cross over have a special title: shaman. They are thought to be able to communicate with the spirit world and to use its energy for the purposes of healing and helping others. They also function as soul escorts to make sure the dead cross into the afterlife and to offer general help from the spirit world for day-to-day difficulties, like infertility or lost livestock.

You may already know of shamanism, but it might not be quite what you think. That’s because, in our Western understanding of the word, it’s used to refer to a broad variety of religious settings worldwide. In fact, shamanism comes specifically, in name and concept, from its ancient Siberian origins, says Jason Roberts, an associate professor of instruction at UT Austin who holds joint appointments in the Departments of Religious Studies and Slavic and Eurasian Studies. Roberts teaches a course about shamanic cultures and has also witnessed them first-hand in his travels to Russia’s Republic of Tuva and to the Transbaikal region, which sits in south-central Siberia and shares a border with northern Mongolia.

In his research, Roberts explores certain phenomena and themes in shamanistic groups that seem to us observers to be widespread. But he has come to believe that understanding these similarities as such might be a little bit of a cultural bait and switch, because in framing them as sharing or overlapping traditions we risk imposing a Western understanding that doesn’t necessarily exist in or apply to these cultures. Roberts emphasizes that while there is such a

thing as a shaman in the specific sense, meaning the word comes from a Siberian language and refers specifically to their ritual specialist, it was through Western scholarship and theology that the word made its way into English and other languages.

So, what really makes a shaman a shaman? And what can we learn about ourselves from understanding our position as observers and students of shamanism? Roberts dives into these questions in his class “Shamanism and the Idea of the Primitive,” where he examines the origins and nature of Siberian shamanism, as well as its contemporary context, to get at answers.

“We’re looking at whether, regardless of what the cultures call their ritual specialists, they are essentially the same and it’s fine to just use one word to refer to all of them, or whether this was some medieval theological Christian bias that says all heathens are the same,” he says. “Is it reductionist to call everyone a shaman?” The class toggles between some of the obvious similarities worldwide, Roberts says, but probes whether those similarities are essential.

One of those similarities across cultures is the idea of an upper, middle, and lower world. “There is a reason that thought about the divers would occur to you,” Roberts told me, “because they are going into an underworld.” Other perceived similarities include the playing of drums; the wearing of feathered headdresses and leather coats with ornaments; the trance that takes the shaman to the other world; and scrying, which is a technique that includes looking into a reflective surface or object with the hope of connecting to spiritual wisdom. In some parts of the world, though not where Roberts traveled in Tuva, shamans use substances like psychedelic mushrooms or ayahuasca to aid in soul travel.

While we can look at these apparent commonalities and try to draw conclusions, there is no holistic way to understand shamanic culture without inhabiting the mind of a shaman or a person who goes to a shaman, Roberts says. This is a fundamental tenet of ethnographic research, but it can also be part of the fun. As long as we’re taking a thoughtful approach, Roberts says, trying to get to this other place can actually be a pretty useful and rich exercise.

“There’s a responsibility that goes along with focusing on difference not to exoticize or fetishize,” Roberts says, “so when I share this with students, I try to show that my/our own mental frameworks and fundamental assumptions are not immutable. Sometimes it’s the only way to notice those things about ourselves as a product and a part of our culture. Often the only way to check the mental furniture is to look at someone else’s, which I find endlessly useful.”

So how to check the mental furniture? Partly by exploring a culture’s history, though, in the case of Siberian shamanism, this can be a challenge on its own. Though there are records in Tuva, like standing stones, and early Western accounts of religion in the area by explorers and missionaries,

the roots of shamanism aren’t exactly easy to pinpoint. Religious scholars don’t know for sure when shamanism started, so they can’t exactly say where it came from.

“Scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries posited shamanism as the oldest form of religion,” says Roberts, “so to ask about its roots in a context in which we’re first trying to decide if it is the oldest form means that it is, by definition, beyond intellectual recovery.” It’s impossible to know what was there before with certainty, he says. Furthermore, we’re talking about a preliterate society, so it’s not exactly easy to find archaeological evidence for ecstatic states or what else people were experiencing.

But this conundrum doesn’t get in the way of exploring other influences on shamanism’s history or practices, like why Siberia seems to be such a center of shamanic practice, Roberts says. After all, there’s more to it than just recorded history. There is something tangible about the landscape, nature, and animal world of Siberia that cultivates the idea of a shaman.

“For a steppe culture, their worldview is symbolically totally vertical, with the sky god, Tengri, being up,” Roberts explains. Given how far north Siberia is, the summer sun is basically omnipresent, and the growing season is fast and intense. Typical Siberian yurt dwellings have grid-patterned openings at the top, which are the central pillars of the spaces, and their doors always face the sun. The hearth is sacred (not surprisingly, in such a cold place) and is at the center of the yurt, letting smoke travel up and out the central pillar. The steppe landscape also tends to be relatively devoid of trees and is sometimes peppered with colossal mountains, leading to distinct horizon lines — a clear separation of above and below. The visual divide is everywhere you look, says Roberts, which has fundamentally shaped how Siberian people understand their world.

To illustrate to his students how the Tuvan environment impacts its peoples’ mindset, Roberts juxtaposes certain Tuvan traditions with Western ones. In his shamanism course, students examine two systems of divination — a Siberian system of divination called Kumalak and the thoroughly European tarot — to show how time and space are encoded in a system of somewhat familiar symbols.

“For most tarot readings,” Roberts says, “the past is to the left, the future to the right, and up and down tend to have meanings that reflect upper and lower worlds. But in Kumalak, a system involving pebbles organized on a grid, which mirrors the one at the top of the yurt, you start in the upper right and then move left then down, which is very different than how a tarot reader lays out cards. And in Kumalak, the past is down.”

During the month Roberts spent in the Transbaikal region, he observed and talked to people who went to shamans and met the chief shaman of Tuva. He says his experiences there were a dip of the toe into the other plane and gave him more insight into the mindset of Tuvan people. “I hesitate to generalize from Tuva to all of Siberia,” says Roberts, “but I can say that I’ve noticed that there are ideas about time and space that seem so self-evident in the West that just don’t exist in the Tuvan mental framework. There are some questions that we think about all the time that are just nonsensical there.”

Roberts’ hypothesis is that the Abrahamic god is viewed by believers as the creator of everything outside of time and space — a god that made everything that ever was and ever will be (in the past and future). This, he believes, has created a conceptual structure for Western thought within which it is possible to imagine an answer to any conceivable question about the future. We may not know the answer, but we assume there is

one, even if we don’t have an explicit belief in a providentional god. In a society like Tuva’s, however, there are certain questions about the future that are fundamentally inaccessible, since god is watching it unfold with us.

“So,” says Roberts, “while a Tuvan nomad might ask about past events — ‘Where is my goat?’ or ‘Who stole my goat?’ — to ask questions about the future — ‘Will I find my goat?’ or ‘Will my goat be stolen tomorrow?’ — is ridiculous. Westerners are overwhelmingly concerned with the unknowable future, and this concept doesn’t exist in the most traditional Tuvan mindset.”

When he’s trying to explain the conundrum of ethnography to students, Roberts usually recounts a story from his time in Tuva that illustrates the concept and gets specifically at how Tuvans don’t even conceive of agonizing about the unknown like we might. To get to the yurt camp where he stayed for a week in the wild, Roberts went offroad with his guides for hours and stopped at the bank of a river with no bridge. The hosts promptly began wrapping parts of the engine of their Soviet-era Jeep in plastic wrap because, he says, “we were just going to drive through the river with our luggage in our laps while water came up through the floorboards.”

As the engine was being prepared, Roberts saw one of the guides kneel at the river in prayer and drink directly from the water while doing some sort of prostrate, push-up movement.

“When he finished, I asked what he was doing,” says Roberts, “and he told me he was asking the river for permission to cross. I was so excited to be getting such juicy bits of religious studies ethnography, and the follow-up question seemed obvious to me: How do you know if the river says no? At that, he looked at me like I had two heads and said, ‘you drown.’” 

BLOOMING WHERE YOU’RE PLANTED

A U.S. Marine’s journey from São Paulo to UT Austin

BY LAUREN MACKNIGHT

Gunnery Sergeant Sal Doghri knew he wanted to study international relations long before he entered a University of Texas at Austin classroom. The decision took shape during his 18 months stationed at the U.S. Consulate in São Paulo, Brazil, working with State Depart-

ment personnel on diplomatic security operations. “I really enjoyed working with foreign service personnel and the missions they pursued,” he reflects. What began as military duty became something deeper — a crash course in cultural bridge-building that shaped his academic path and worldview.

Now a sophomore in UT’s international relations and global studies (IRG) program, Doghri exemplifies the Marine Corps philosophy of “blooming where you’re planted.” The Marine Corps taught Doghri resilience and adaptability, but his Brazil assignment taught him something else: the power of human connection across cultural divides. Working with Marine Corps staff members and Brazilian liaisons, he forged relationships that were deeper than what’s typical of brief overseas assignments.

“My staff was as close as blood,” he says. “Good wholesome people who went the mile to ensure our aid and safety. We’d break bread with them, share holidays with them, and even discuss life. The goods and bads. No matter what day or hour, you could always count on them.”

The experience challenged his assumptions about cultural difference. “I was not expecting how similar Brazilian culture is to American culture, especially through the lens of home values and beliefs,” he says. This recognition — that beneath obvious differences lay shared human experiences — later influenced his decision to pursue the formal study of international relations.

“Having our jiu-jitsu family significantly bridged gaps for us if there was any assistance needed with the culture or language.“

Nowhere was Doghri’s cultural immersion deeper than on the jiu-jitsu mat. In search of authentic cultural experiences beyond tourist activities, Doghri gravitated toward what he knew: physical challenge and disciplined training. A nearby jiu-jitsu academy became his most effective cultural classroom, where language barriers dissolved through shared struggle and mutual respect. His Brazilian teammates were also drawn to the discipline and commitment his military background represented, values that were core to their understanding of martial arts.

“Sweating and bleeding together, trying to reach the very best you can be even though it hurts, builds lifelong bonds between you and the community you train with,” he says. “You really become a family.”

The jiu-jitsu community provided more than friendship to Doghri and some of his colleagues: it became a vital cultural support network. He was able to participate, for instance, in a joint symposium with legendary fighter Antônio Rodrigo “Minotauro” Nogueira. Friends from the mat were able to facilitate connections to other organizations in the city. And he had a perpetual sounding board when it came to confusion or misunderstanding about the nuances of the culture and its language. “Having our jiu-jitsu family significantly bridged

gaps for us if there was any assistance needed with the culture or language,” he remembers. Doghri, who earned a blue belt while he was in Brazil, now continues his training back in Texas, at Atomic Jiu-Jitsu in Buda.

Reflecting on his journey from São Paulo’s training mats to UT’s classrooms, Doghri is grateful both for where he is now and what he’s been able to learn before getting here. “I recognize I have been lucky to be privileged with all the experiences life has taken me to,” he says. “All I can do with those

privileges is learn from them and pay them forward to enhance the betterment of people around me no matter where I am at.”

This service-oriented mindset guides his approach looking ahead. “It does not matter what level of IRG I might find myself in, I feel confident that whatever experiences I have gained from the past can only assist me in the future,” he explains. “I look at it as another chance to grow, assist, and share.”

Snorkeling for Solutions

The Great Barrier Reef May Term program combines natural wonder and policy studies

By Olivia Ring and Kaulie Watson

Of all the study abroad programs led by College of Liberal Arts faculty, only the Great Barrier Reef May Term includes snorkeling as part of students’ required coursework. Sponsored by the Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies and led by government professor and center director Rhonda Evans, the program takes undergraduate students to Queensland, a state on Australia’s northern coast and home of the Great Barrier Reef. The course investigates the reef’s contemporary challenges and explores what it will take to develop solutions.

Earlier this year we sat down with Evans to talk about the program, what she thinks students can learn from the reef, and the value of difficult conversations. An edited and condensed version of that conversation is below, and more information about the course and the Clark Center can be found at https://liberalarts. utexas.edu/cas/great-barrier-reefmay-term/.

First things first, tell us about the Great Barrier Reef program. Why did you decide to take students to the reef? How has the program changed since it first began?

I wanted students to have conversations with various stakeholders, like sugarcane farmers, tourism operators, commercial fishers, and government officials, to try to understand the social, political, and economic contexts within which challenges for the reef are created and solutions have to be implemented — and, of course, to experience the Great Barrier Reef itself.

Over the years, I’ve worked closely with American Universities International Programs (AUIP), a New Zealand-based company, to realize my vision for a program built around student conversations with residents, business owners, and government officials. These engagements show students how locals view the reef, how they see their responsibilities

regarding the reef, and what they think of policies meant to protect it. The dialogues also transform how students see the various actors whose activities affect the reef. For example, because agricultural runoff adversely affects water quality along the reef, it can be easy to see cane farmers as onedimensional villains. However, conversations with a farmer and a tour of a working farm offer a different perspective. Rather than wanting to eliminate farming, students start thinking about how you can accommodate competing interests. 

Continue reading at: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2025/08/ snorkeling-for-solutions/

PRIMATES AND PARASITES IN AMAZONIAN ECUADOR

BY KRISTIN PHILLIPS

Separated from a soundscape of cicadas, tamarins, and toucans by a thin plate glass window, Anthony Di Fiore hunches over a new white microscope, looking through lenses that illuminate several delicate oval structures.

Guessing that they are eggs from hookworm that parasitize the gut of the common woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii ), which he studies,

Di Fiore shifts the cover slip and suddenly sees something with legs and a cloaca. It looks like a mite, squished on its side. He grabs an old iPhone, holding it against one of the eyepieces to record a short video by manipulating the focus and bringing different parts of the microscopic creature to light.

“It’s so cool,” he says. “It’s a whole different world, isn’t it?”

Di Fiore’s excitement is infectious. Students and a colleague hover around for a peek to see what is new.

For more than 30 years, Di Fiore, a professor in UT Austin’s Department of Anthropology, has been conducting research in the Amazonian or eastern part of Ecuador, working in both Yasuní National Park and at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS).

Much of his work has focused on the behavior, ecology, and population genetics of atelid primates, the large-bodied woolly, spider, and howler monkeys that have prehensile tails, allowing them to grasp and hang from branches high above the rainforest floor.

Now, at 56, Di Fiore is embarking on a new area of research identifying the parasites that infect the wild primates he studies at TBS, as well as those found in the monkeys kept as pets by several Indigenous Waorani communities further to the west.

The latter portion of the research is a collaboration with community members and Ciara Wirth, a research coordinator for TBS who has spent the better part of a decade working with Waorani colleagues to detail how these communities interact with and classify the natural world.

Relatively little is known about the parasites of Amazonian mammals compared to those from other parts of the world, although a scan of academic publications demonstrates a recent uptick in research on this subject.

The new project aims to document the diversity of species found among Yasuní’s monkeys as well as to explore whether close contact with wild-born pets in communities could lead to the transfer of parasites into new hosts, such as humans or other domestic animals.

Just before dawn, Di Fiore, clothed in an old white dress shirt that saw him through a decade of teaching undergraduates, puts on an old red backpack, reinforced in several places with hand stitching and laden with several liters of water, a camera, and sample-collection equipment. He walks past the field station’s open-air dining area and into the forest, at times sliding in his rubber boots on the sticky mud created by the previous night’s rain.

He is heading to the location where he left the “C” group of woolly monkeys — one of the eight groups studied in the area — at around 5:30 the evening before. After walking quickly on the trail and over a mossy bridge made of two fallen logs, he reaches a Spondias tree, a distant relative of cashews and mangos that is filled with small, ripe yellow fruit,

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and waits. Within an hour, his breakfast-to-go and thermos of coffee have been consumed.

The morning is sunny, brightening the canopy of trees 20-30 meters above, although very little direct light filters to the rainforest floor. Even though the humidity is over 90 percent, the temperature is pleasant, birds are calling, and insects are buzzing. The most consistent noise is a low mechanical pulse emanating from the north, the sound of an oil extraction facility near the wide Napo River, about seven kilometers away.

The morning’s quiet briefly breaks when an adult female woolly monkey, closely followed, with a little less skill, by her female offspring, jumps into the Spondias from a nearby palm. Woolly monkeys have plush, velvety brown fur from which their black faces, hands, and shiny brown eyes

are revealed. After a few minutes of eating fruit, she emits a soft “chirp” contact call that other members of her widely dispersed group respond to. All goes still again; Group C is still not yet ready to begin their morning.

“Is today Sunday? Maybe they’ve all gone to church,” Di Fiore quips, constantly looking up and listening for new vocalizations or movement. He walks down into a small stream and up the next ridge — a lovely area with an open understory free of vine tangles — partly for entertainment, partly to avoid missing potential movement, and partly to thwart the ever-present mosquitoes.

It takes over two hours before the group begins to move through the canopy, most woollies picking their own path as they forage on new leaves, flowers, and insects. Tropical trees vary in height

and openness, and many trees carry a heavy load of vines, moss, and epiphytes, which can quickly obscure an individual, although the movement of branches always reveals their location.

Di Fiore, following different adults in turn, navigates his own path over logs and around understory plants in order to collect scat samples, a noninvasive method to gather DNA for genetic studies. When scat does fall, he spends a few minutes searching for the sample, often cued into an exact location by dung beetles who are invariably sitting on a leaf nearby, antennae waving in anticipation.

He slings his pack onto the ground, dons purple latex gloves, and uses a stick to isolate one portion of the sample in a small vial with a solution that preserves DNA of both parasites and host, then puts the remainder into a larger vial for day-of screening under the microscope.

After collecting seven samples, Di Fiore leaves the field early, returning to the project’s treehouselike laboratory. He opens one parasite sample

onto a thin plastic weigh boat, commenting on how stinky it is. After mixing the sample with a solution that allows parasite eggs to float to the surface, he spends five minutes spinning it in a crank-powered centrifuge to help separate the eggs from the undigested plant and insect bits.

Several processing steps later, he sits down to a prepared slide at the microscope, where he distinguishes five different types of parasites … and makes a mesmerizing video of a larvae wiggling within its egg.

“All right,” he concludes, opening an unprocessed sample. “This stuff is too cool, but I have to go through another six samples tonight!”

On returning to Austin, Di Fiore will analyze the DNA samples using metabarcoding to determine the species and diversity of the parasite community infecting the monkeys. 

Science writer Kristin Phillips has written for The University of Texas, the American Natural History Museum, the National Audubon Society, and other nature and science organizations.

BETWEEN DIONYSUS AND ATHENA

Understanding the ancient world through its food and wine

BY MAUREEN TURNER

It was an introductory course on Mediterranean archaeology in her first year of college that hooked Catherine Pratt. “I just fell in love with it,” she recalls. “So I met with the professor and said, ‘How do I do this?’”

The signs were there even earlier: a love of history, a sense of wanderlust, and an affinity for a certain swashbuckling archaeologist. “I remember being in eighth grade and watching Indiana Jones and saying, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” says Pratt, now an assistant professor of classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

Pratt’s first-year professor outlined the courses she would need to take — in archaeology, history, classics, Latin, and ancient Greek — to prepare her for graduate studies. The summer after her sophomore year, she attended a field school he ran at an excavation site on Crete. “He said to me, ‘You might like the material, but you don’t know if you like archeology unless you’re in the field, unless you’re getting dirty, unless you’re wheelbarrowing 50 wheelbarrows a day full of dirt in the sun,’” Pratt says. “Thankfully, I loved it, and there was no going back for me.”

Pratt went on to earn her master’s and doctorate in archaeology at UCLA. She taught for 10 years at the University of Western Ontario before joining UT Austin in 2023.

Pratt’s area of specialty is the pre-Classical Mediterranean, with a focus on socioeconomics and cultural interactions. Her first book, Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2021), looked at the significance of the two commodities from the Bronze Age to the Archaic period, demonstrating how they became integral to Greek identity. This year, she published a second book with Cambridge University Press, Economy and Commodity Production in the Aegean Bronze Age, which focuses on the Minoan and Mycenaean states.

She also serves as co-director of the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (or BEARS), an archaeological project in the Greek town of Porto Rafti, which stretches around a bay of the Aegean Sea. The project, which launched in 2019, brought together a diverse team of archaeologists to survey the area to determine its use from the Neolithic period to the early modern period. After three

the script of the Mycenaeans, who flourished on the Greek mainland from 1700 to 1100 BCE. “We know a little more about them, but even those texts are very enigmatic,” Pratt says.

Study of the Bronze Age also had a relatively late start as a discipline, she adds. “The study of the classical period in Greece, or the Roman imperial period, was happening since, well, the ancient period. Romans were studying Greeks and so on. The Bronze Age, in a lot of ways, was forgotten for a long time.” And the interest the Ancient Greeks did have in this earlier period was mainly limited to the myths and epics of that era, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey

summers of field work, team members spent two summers processing their finds and analyzing data, which will be compiled into a volume about the project. The materials are housed nearby at the Brauron Archaeological Museum, the site of a sanctuary to Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

Pratt has been drawn to Greek archaeology, and the Bronze Age cultures of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in particular, since her undergraduate days. “Something about the mystery of Bronze Age archaeology really called to me,” she explains. “We know very little about the cultures. There’s still a lot that we don’t understand and that’s debated.”

That’s in part because scholars have yet to decipher Linear A, the written language developed by the Minoans, who built a civilization on the island of Crete from about 3000 to 1100 BCE. Scholars have succeeded in cracking the code of Linear B,

“People really didn’t even know the Bronze Age existed — that the people really did exist; that they weren’t just stories,” Pratt says. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that scholars became interested in the era, and then, she notes, it was with the questionable goal of “proving” that the Homeric epics were actually true. In their quest to find remains from the tales, archaeologists explored sites such as Troy, where they found evidence of ancient cultures that predated the Bronze Age.

As Pratt delved further into her studies, her interests focused on the interactions among the cultures around the Aegean and the Near East. “One of the ways that we can see those types of interactions is through the economy, through trade,” she says. “Because we can physically see, archeologically, things moving around. I can find a pot in Crete that was made in Egypt, and that tells me that they had some sort of connection. Whether it was direct or whether it was through trade networks is a different story. But we know that the connection existed.”

Pratt was interested in the inter-cultural transmission not just of items but also of ideas and technology. Much of her work looks at the trade of commodities such as olive oil and wine —

the subject of her doctoral dissertation, which became her first book. “I was interested in the fact that those two commodities were really integral to the functioning of ancient Greek societies from the Bronze Age onwards,” she says. Both served important social purposes, as key elements in rituals and celebrations, and both continue to be used that way across many cultures. “Most people have at least one of those things, probably more, in their kitchen today,” Pratt notes. “We still value them very highly.”

Wine and olive oil lend themselves well to study because they can be traced through the amphoras and similar containers that held them, which have held up better over time than less durable containers, such as baskets. “Archeologically, pottery is the most enduring material that humans

engaged with, other than maybe stone,” Pratt explains. “It’s ubiquitous in the ancient world. So we can use things like amphoras as a proxy, as a signifier of the contents.” The specific content — wine, oil, other substances — can be determined through residue analysis.

In her most recent research, Pratt applied a similar lens to the study of another food that played a crucial role in ancient Greece: figs. “I realized that we know a fair amount about commodities like olive oil and wine and wheat,” she says, “but no one had ever done a deep dive into figs, even though in the tablets that we have from the Bronze Age they are so prominent.” While figs weren’t significant in ritual and social events, as wine and olive oil were, they played an important practical role in the economy, she notes. “They’re

easy to grow, they’re easy to dry, they’re easy to store. You can carry them around with you. You can distribute them easily, and they have a lot of calories. In an agrarian economy, figs are a good source of energy.”

Pratt is currently working on her next book, Gift of Athena: Panathenaic Amphoras and the Making of Athens It will look at the iconic olive oil-filled amphoras that were given to winners of the Panathenaic athletics games. “The amphoras were beautifully decorated by famous artists and were full of very good olive oil, sacred olive oil from certain groves that were owned by the state,” she says. As the victors returned home from the games with their prizes, the vessels spread throughout the region — a “clever marketing” strategy, she says, that resulted in amphoras emerging as an enduring symbol of Athens. In June, Pratt received a Faculty Research Fellow Award from the UT Austin Humanities Institute to support the project.

Pratt is also kept busy in the classroom, where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, including classes on ancient Egypt, the ancient Mediterranean world, and Greek archaeology. This

year she’s teaching, for the second time, “Ancient Societies and Sustainability,” an interdisciplinary course that looks at the effects of climate change on ancient societies. While we tend to think of climate change as a modern problem, “humans have been dealing with it ever since we were humans,” Pratt says. “How did ancient people deal with climatic problems? How did they adapt? How did they manage their resources?”

The first time Pratt taught the class, it was evenly split between classics majors and sustainability majors. “I had the students who knew more about sustainability and then students who knew more about the history and the ancient world, and it led to really interesting discussions,” she says. “I’m a historian. I know about ancient climate change. I don’t know much about modern sustainable practices. So we all learn together.”

Every year, Pratt sees a handful of students in her undergraduate classes who have identified archaeology as their life’s passion, just like she did 20 years ago. And, as her advisor did for her back then, she strives to offer them an honest sense of what to expect, both the joy and challenges of the field.

Most students, however, are there for other reasons: maybe they like history; maybe they need to fulfill a graduation requirement; maybe they grew up enamored of the Percy Jackson books. Whatever brings them to the class, Pratt says, they leave with valuable skills — how to write, how to conduct research, how to analyze visual information — that they can apply to whatever they choose to pursue. They also usually leave with an appreciation of archaeology’s ability to unearth fascinating stories of people and places from long ago. “It’s hard to make this material terribly boring,” Pratt says with a laugh. 

Chelsi West Ohueri, assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, took this photo of a couple in a Romani neighborhood near Tirana, the capital city of Albania. West Ohueri’s research trips to Albania over the past two decades form the basis of her new book with Cornell University Press, Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife.

Read the full story on our website:

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Every trip booked through the Texas Exes’ Flying Longhorns program helps further the association’s mission of uniting alumni and friends of The University of Texas around the world. While you don’t have to be an alumnus of UT to join our tours, we do ask that our travelers carry an active Texas Exes membership.

To view upcoming trips and learn more, visit travel.texasexes.org

More Than a Language

UT’s Yoruba studies program goes beyond grammar to connect students with Yoruba culture in West Africa and the diaspora

BY KAULIE WATSON

In the lead up to the summer of 2024, undergraduate Deborah Oyawe had a decision to make. Should she stay in her native Texas and get an internship, perhaps something related to her new

informatics major? Or should she spend two months studying Yoruba language and culture in Ibadan, Nigeria, as part of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Yoruba Group Project Abroad?

“I didn’t know if I wanted to spend my whole summer abroad,” Oyawe remembers. “But I did want to become fluent in Yoruba. That was one of my biggest goals, because I am Yoruba. And Ibadan is where my family is from; it’s my ancestral home. So ultimately I was like, you know what, this is an amazing opportunity. There will probably never be another point in my life where I’m able to spend two months in Nigeria just studying this language and culture.”

And so she went. Together with her fellow Fulbright-Hays students, Oyawe spent two months studying at Ibadan University while living with a host family and immersing herself in Yoruba language and culture. She attended cooking classes, learned about traditional medicine and spirituality, and traveled with her peers across Nigeria’s Yorubaland. Even the moments of culture shock and difficulty — Oyawe remembers learning to successfully haggle in the city’s busy markets being especially challenging — ultimately proved to be the lessons that shaped her the most.

Altogether, Oyawe says, her summer in Ibadan was an incredible experience, and it grew directly out of her time in UT Austin’s unique Yoruba Studies program.

Like the Fulbright-Hays project Oyawe joined, UT’s Yoruba program focuses on the language and culture of the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group concentrated in Nigeria and parts of Benin and Togo with diasporic communities around the world. The university’s only sub-Saharan African language program, Yoruba Studies is part of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) and features courses in the Yoruba language as well as subjects like Nigerian history, Afro-Caribbean diasporas, and the Yoruba experience in Brazil.

The department’s decision to focus an entire program on Yoruba and its diaspora makes sense

given AADS’ concentration on both African and diasporic studies, says Omoniyi Afolabi, a professor in the AADS department and the head of the Yoruba program. After all, it’s right there in the name.

“The strategic place of the Yoruba people of Nigeria in diasporic identity formations in Brazil, the U.S., Cuba, and Trinidad is what initially kindled the interest in a Yoruba language program,” he explains. “And in addition to the international efforts of UT, the Yoruba/African heritage students who were born in the U.S. often have a deep-seated desire to reconnect with their place of origin, hence the passion to take Yoruba and African courses in history, sociology, religious studies, and more.”

Afolabi is particularly qualified to speak on Yoruba’s diasporic links. Born and raised in Nigeria, he went on to specialize in the study of the Yoruba presence in Brazil, and he regularly teaches courses on Yoruba, Brazilian studies, and the AfroBrazilian diaspora. A large number of the students who take those courses, especially the introductory Yoruba language series, share elements of Afolabi’s diasporic background. Many come from Nigerian families who have settled in Texas, particularly in the Houston area, he says, and they often see the courses as offering them a way to reconnect with their families and heritage.

“There are people who are born in the U.S. but are children of Nigerian immigrants, and they come to

the Yoruba program because they want to understand the language,” says Abimbola Adelakun, who taught in the program as an associate professor for many years before leaving UT Austin at the end of the spring 2025 semester. “Ninety percent of the time, they’ll tell you, ‘I want to be able to speak to my grandmother,’ or, ‘When my parents are talking to themselves, I want to know what they’re saying, because I have a feeling they’re talking about me.’”

Other students grew up in Nigeria but didn’t learn to speak Yoruba as children and want to learn now, Adelakun says, while some arrive at UT from other African countries or diasporic communities and want to learn an African language and culture, even if it isn’t that of their families or backgrounds.

“There was even one woman in my course who worked at the university,” Adelakun remembers. “She was going to marry a Yoruba man, and she wanted to learn the language to speak to her in-laws. This language brings in so many people with diverse interests and stories.”

The diverse interests of UT’s Yoruba students can be seen in their choice of major: many are pre-med, pre-law, or engineering students. But no matter what leads students to the program, Afolabi and Adelakun say they want students to take away more than just an understanding of the language.

Teaching students about Yoruba culture brings its own challenges, however. Foundational understandings around the respectful treatment of elders, for example, can be difficult for American students to internalize yet are integral to the Yoruba way of life.

Yoruba culture also differs from American culture in its emphasis on what Afolabi calls “collective spirit” rather than individualistic pursuits and achievements. This, he says, is why he regularly has students in his advanced Yoruba course prepare a play for public performance.

“To successfully produce a play, students learn the need for team spirit and collectivity,” Afolabi explains. The play also gives students an opportunity to understand the Yoruba value of respect, which he says “comes with learning to greet and acknowledge people around us, learning wisdom and survival skills in ambiguous situations, and striving to promote the best in each other through the collective spirit of winning.”

For students who complete AADS’ two-semester Yoruba language sequence and want to go further in their study of the language, there are opportunities to move far beyond UT campus, including the Fulbright-Hays Group Summer Abroad Project in Nigeria that Oyawe participated in. She’s not the only UT student to join the project — over the last 15 years, several others have won a place in the competitive program and spent a summer studying in Ibadan. For UT students who are accepted to the program, AADS and the university’s John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies often offer financial support for expenses not otherwise covered.

Oyawe says her Yoruba studies and study abroad experience in Nigeria taught her more than just a language. “I really learned how to adjust under different circumstances,” she says when reflecting on her time in Ibadan. “This year, when I was interviewing for my summer internship, I was asked which of my experiences at UT helped me the most, and I said my study abroad in Nigeria because it taught me how to adapt. I learned how to accommodate myself and maximize opportunities to the best of my ability, and I think that’s really important.”

In late April, the Yoruba program held its annual celebration, Yoruba Day. A crowd of students, staff, and faculty members gathered in the UT’s GordonWhite Building for an afternoon of Yoruba food, music, and performances — and to hear a presen-

tation by Oyawe on her time in the Fulbright-Hays Program. Shortly after she concluded, students in Afolabi’s intermediate Yoruba course performed this year’s play, Moremi Ajasoro, which tells the story of a 12th-century Yoruba heroine. Finally, Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in UC-Davis’ Department of African American and African Studies, closed out the day with a guest presentation on “Afrofuturism and the Black Diaspora.”

Ultimately the celebration was, like the program that hosted it, more than the sum of its parts. It offered an important opportunity for the UT community to come together and celebrate a shared heritage, language, and culture — and to share the joy of Yoruba with anyone interested in learning more. 

RUSSIA TOWITHLOVE

THOMASJESÚSGARZA REFLECTSONFOUR DECADESOFTRAVEL TOACHANGINGNATION BYALEXRESHANOV

“I

s that really necessary?” Thomas Jesús Garza recalls thinking as he descended the stairs to the tarmac of Leningrad’s airport and saw two flanks of armed guards. It was the summer of 1979 and Russia was still part of the Soviet Union. Garza, now an associate professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at UT Austin and director of the Texas Language Center, had just completed his sophomore year at Haverford College. This was not only his first trip to Russia but his first time outside of North America and, while he didn’t buy into Cold War propaganda of Russia as the enemy of all things wholesome and American, these men with guns were certainly alarming.

But Russia’s stunning cities and welcoming people would quickly win him over. Garza had initially taken Russian to fulfill a language requirement and found its sound and structure captivating enough to already be contemplating further study. Seeing Russia and experiencing its culture up close removed any doubts. He declared Russian as his major upon returning to the U.S. and spent the next four decades regularly visiting, conducting research in, and sometimes living in the country as it underwent profound political, economic, and cultural transformations.

Garza spent much of that first trip in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) taking courses at Leningrad State University, bunking in a dormitory on the banks of the Neva River, and touring the city with his classmates and their Russian “handler.” Toward the end of the summer, the group traveled through the Baltic states and Ukraine before flying home from Moscow.

Moscow, with its bustling streets and world-class museums and theaters, convinced Garza to commit to studying Russian.

“I loved Leningrad, but Moscow was like visiting New York for the first time,” he says. “It was a capital city. Busy, huge. The scale was something I’d never seen before: the scale of buildings, the scale of streets, the number of people on the streets. And I just knew I wanted to come back.”

At the same time, Garza was also perplexed that the inhabitants of such a thriving, culturally sophisticated city would tolerate living under authoritarian rule, an observation he now views as naïve. Subsequent trips and study made clear to Garza the challenges and repercussions for Russians voicing any criticisms they might have had of their government.

Soviet communism didn’t just stifle political opposition; it seemed to prevent any form of change. Garza notes that his early trips were marked by an uncanny stability. “One could go to a street corner and then leave for a year and come back to the same street corner, the same cars, the same people, the same clothing,” he says. Not being subject to the whims of Western consumerism had created a sort of aesthetic stagnation. “It was austerity to the point of monotony. There was this greyness to everything.”

That all changed in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took office, ushering in a period of reform that would eventually lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had no freedom of assembly, and, in the past, all organizations, from political parties to hobby clubs, had to be officially approved by the government, which prevented many from forming. Suddenly, for the

first time since Garza started visiting the country, he saw unofficial groups — some political, some just social — cropping up and holding public meetings, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years before.

It wasn’t completely without risk, Garza says, but “people weren’t afraid to be afraid.”

This new openness ( glasnost in Russian, which was the slogan of Gorbachev’s administration) came at the expense of the old stability. Garza came to UT Austin in the fall of 1990, just as the Soviet Union was unraveling, and took his first group of UT students to Moscow in the summer of 1991. He recalls the ’90s as a period of rapidly changing regulations and drastic financial fluctuation. It was hard to advise students (and their worried parents) on what to expect or even how much money to bring as the value of the ruble changed constantly. During one particularly volatile summer toward the end of the decade, he says, his Russian teaching salary was paid in bags of cash due to hyperinflation and then, when currency ran low, in crates of crystal, or food, or whatever other goods were on hand.

The privatization of Russia’s economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union created a more colorful but also more unequal consumer

landscape. Many of Garza’s friends and colleagues who worked in education took second jobs to afford the cost of living. Meanwhile, the “new Russians” — entrepreneurs of varying degrees of lawfulness who amassed enormous wealth in the nascent market economy — drove around in imported luxury cars wearing conspicuous quantities of gold and diamonds.

In the past, visitors with foreign currency could purchase Russian goods, like caviar and furs, that were inaccessible to locals. Now any perks were reserved for Russia’s new elite.

“It was a real wake-up call,” says Garza, describing a time when he offered to treat Russian friends to dinner at a popular restaurant only to have them explain that it was impossible for ordinary people to get in. “An assistant professor from UT just didn’t have the clout.”

Garza continued taking students to Moscow every summer through 2019, in addition to personal trips. He saw the economy stabilize under Vladimir Putin and watched Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) transform into technologically modern, Westernized cities. He recalls feeling initially optimistic when Putin was first elected in 2000 and then that optimism fading over the next two decades as Putin consolidated power, suppressed dissent,

and incrementally eliminated so many of the freedoms won during the 1990s. In January of 2020, Garza vividly remembers watching from his hotel as a procession of cars left the Federal Assemby State Duma building. This, he would later learn, was the day Putin dissolved his government in order to revise Russia’s constitution and stay in power beyond his term limit.

What Garza also didn’t realize back in early 2020 was that it would be his last trip to Russia for an indefinite amount of time. Travel to Russia from the U.S. became harder due to Covid-19 restrictions and then due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And in March of 2024, Garza was added to Russia’s growing list of visitors banned for being “anti-Russian propagandists.” He notes, with irony, that he received this news while giving a paper on the importance of reading Russian literature, both past and present.

When I ask Garza what he misses most about traveling to Russia, he’s unable to limit himself to a single answer: Moscow’s excellent theaters, his dear friends and academic collaborators, his favorite cafés. But there is also something intangible.

“I miss the feel of being there. It’s a lightness of being,” he says. “In Moscow, I never thought about presenting myself, I could be myself more than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. The irony is that the word that comes to mind is ‘freedom,’ and of course I was never free in the Soviet Union or even in Putin’s Russia, but it was this feeling of liberty.”

Even more than all those things, though, Garza misses being able to take student groups to Moscow. “I loved that I could vicariously relive through them that moment when they first see the place. Nothing prepares you. It’s jaw dropping.” 

REVERSE THE CURSE

Political scientist Delgerjargal Uvsh explores how resource-rich countries can turn crisis into change

BY KAULIE WATSON

It’s a well-known truism that money can’t buy happiness. Just think of the clichéd miserable lottery winner or an oil-rich nation suffering from the “resource curse.” But what if that unhappiness is a phase rather than a permanent state? Is it possible to “reverse the curse”? And if so, how?

These are the questions that interest political scientist Delgerjargal Uvsh. A professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at UT Austin, Uvsh researches the “resource curse,” the longstanding theory in social science that developing countries with abundant natural resources, such as oil and gas, will typically experience worse political and economic outcomes than their comparatively resource-poor neighbors. These nations, the theory goes, frequently have lower economic growth, less democracy, and generally poorer development while experiencing more corruption, more autocracy, and greater state interference in the

economy. Think of OPEC countries with authoritarian regimes, or the diamondrich Democratic Republic of the Congo’s long history of exploitation and civil war.

It’s an old theory, at least by the standards of social science, and continues to be influential (and debated). But Uvsh is less concerned with the resource curse itself than with what comes next.

“How do countries get out of this? When is it possible to reverse the resource curse, and when is that most likely to happen? That’s what I’m interested in exploring right now,” she says.

Uvsh’s interest in resource-rich nations is itself a natural one. She was born and grew up in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert just as the country was emerging from its Soviet past and transitioning to a democratic government. The questions that confronted Mongolians then continue to influence her research now. “My formative years in Mongolia

were shaped by this curiosity about, ‘is Mongolia on the right path politically, economically, and policy-wise? Are we going in a direction that will benefit the country as a whole or not?’ That is what we would hear on the news, what my parents and relatives were talking about,” she remembers. “So, it was natural for me to be curious about how changes happen in these post-Soviet countries.”

It turns out the answer, at least for Mongolia, is closely tied to

“MY

FORMATIVE YEARS IN MONGOLIA WERE SHAPED BY THIS CURIOSITY ABOUT ‘IS MONGOLIA ON THE RIGHT PATH POLITICALLY, ECONOMICALLY, AND POLICYWISE?’”

the country’s natural wealth. Its deep deposits of copper, gold, and coal helped fund its transformation from one of the poorest former Soviet nations to an “oasis of democracy” and continue to support a huge portion of its economy. But while Mongolia’s enduring democracy is remarkable, the country hasn’t proven immune to the resource curse. It experiences a high level of corruption, and the Mongolian government has not always been transparent about how revenues from natural resources are handled or spent.

So how can a country like Mongolia reverse elements of the resource curse? In her current book project, Uvsh outlines one possible answer. It all has to do with “negative shocks,” or sharp and sustained declines in government revenues from resources that can lead to economic crises.

“In almost all cases of natural resource-dependent countries,” she explains, “they inevitably go through a decline in natural resource revenue. When it comes to oil and gas in particular, these times of negative shocks, particularly times of long-lasting negative shocks, are the exact moments when positive changes can happen. These moments of tough times can be used as opportunities to make policy

changes because it’s then that governments are most willing to listen to business owners or other non-government actors. They are, in some ways, in a fiscally patient position.”

Mongolia’s recent history offers a helpful example of this theory in practice. In the early 2010s, commodity prices were high and money was flowing into the country, Uvsh says. Then, beginning around 2014, prices fell, with serious implications for government budgets across Mongolia. Tellingly, this period coincided with Mongolia taking steps to diversify its economy, such as increasing its support of the cashmere industry, small business owners, and female entrepreneurs.

The negative shock effect can be seen outside Mongolia too. Take the oil-and-gas-producing regions of Russia. “When the governments of these regions were faced with what they considered permanent negative shocks — when they thought the lost oil and gas revenue wasn’t coming back and there was a political story behind that — they worked really hard to expand their tax base,” Uvsh says. “They established things like one-stop windows that make state business interactions easier and state organizations that facilitate dialogue between the government and businesses. We see this increase in

initiatives that the governments took because they needed to tax these businesses. That incentivized them to be more open, to be more inclusive, and to listen to these businesses more intently than in positive shock times.”

It may sound counter-intuitive that something called a negative shock could have such positive downstream effects, but Uvsh sees her findings as analogous to other parts of day-to-day life.

“On a personal level, when there’s something negative going on, we can look at it as an opportunity to change our lifestyle,” she points out. “So, I think this is a very intuitive finding that tough times force us to think about the longer term and can require us to make painful changes that we

didn’t have to make when times were good.”

It’s the longer term thinking here that’s essential, Uvsh says, because short-term negative shocks can actually further entrench resource-curse-type governmental behavior. In the case of Russia’s oil-and-gas regions, for example, shortterm shocks see upticks in corruption, state inspections, and general government interference in business.

“We can think of these instances as the government trying to hang on until their revenue comes back, and in order to do that sometimes they may have to resort to more extractive behavior from the business community,” she explains.

In addition to her work on the resource curse and negative shocks, Uvsh approaches her main theme — the causes of change in post-Soviet nations — in other ways. There’s her work on Mongolian political parties, for one, which she sees as both foundational to the country’s democracy and as exhibiting warning signs of instability. And then there are the undergraduate and graduate courses she leads, which expand far beyond Mongolia and Russia to encompass almost 30 present-day countries across two continents.

“We look into the experiences of the 28 countries that were either part of the Soviet Union or were satellites to it to understand how the political regimes and institutions have developed since the fall of the Soviet Union,” Uvsh says. “And we do a lot of comparison between different countries and different modalities that these countries have gone through in order to transition to different political regimes from the communist regime.”

Her emphasis on comparisons marks Uvsh as a scholar in the comparative politics subfield of political science, she says. It’s also one of the most important things she hopes students take

away from her teaching and her work.

“These scientific-inquiry techniques are something we spend considerable time on,” Uvsh says, “because I want my students to be better thinkers and readers of science, to think about their own reflections, conclusions, and observations in comparative terms and be aware of why they’re reaching the conclusions they do. If they change their lens with another one, will that change their conclusion? How? The idea is that these are skills that they can then use for any question about any topic, whether it’s about politics, economics, or health.”

“IT’S THE LONGER TERM THINKING HERE THAT’S ESSENTIAL, BECAUSE SHORTTERM NEGATIVE SHOCKS CAN ACTUALLY FURTHER ENTRENCH

RESOURCECURSE-TYPE GOVERNMENTAL BEHAVIOR.”

While the future for Mongolia and other resource-rich nations is far from settled — Mongolia itself is currently experiencing ongoing political uncertainty related to allegations of government corruption, and global resource markets remain unstable — Uvsh is certain that the social science techniques she practices in her own scholarship and shares with students will continue to expand our understanding of both the resource curse and what comes after. And she’s certain of this, too: The resource curse, like everything else, can change for the better. 

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Energy and the Environment | Health and Well-Being

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Health and Well-Being

Tasting India

through historical texts

Andrea Gutiérrez explores Indian culture through premodern recipes

By Erin Russell

As a scholar of South Asia’s food history and assistant professor of instruction in UT Austin’s Asian Studies department, Andrea Gutiérrez has spent years tackling modern misconceptions about how the peoples of South Asia eat and filling in literal missing chapters from historical books. But her love affair with India didn’t begin with food.

When she was in her 20s and living in Spain working as a teacher and translator, Gutiérrez became serious enough about her yoga practice that she wanted to go to the source of the teachings. So, she set off for India. She remembers staying in a sparse hotel room in Mysore, in the southwest of the country, and waking up in the morning to the clamor of birds and calls to prayer at the mosque. “It’s a very different sensory experience from our compartmentalized Western living,” she says. “I fell in love with it instantly.”

Visiting India before beginning her career as a researcher proved valuable to Gutiérrez’s ability to absorb different aspects of the country’s culture. She traveled and explored vastly different regions over extended periods of time, noting how migrations of people and ideas influenced culinary traditions.

The common American experience of Indian food — tandoori, biryani, creamy curries — stems from when the Mughals ruled the subcontinent in the 16th to the 19th centuries, relatively late in India’s history. Restaurant dishes also often serve

ingredients like tomatoes, potatoes, and chilies that aren’t native to India and thus wouldn’t be available in premodern recipes. As a result, Gutiérrez says, our sense of Indian food in America is profoundly narrow. The truth is, “there are micro cuisines for every single region, ethnic group, clan, community, and family,” she explains. “All these different ways of cooking amazing food demonstrate innovation given the restrictions in terms of access, poverty, and droughts.”

While in India, Gutiérrez began a cookbook project to record some of the older traditions. She convinced various housewives in South India to let her take notes and document their cooking and food processing methods in their kitchens, on their cool black kadappa (granite) counterslabs, and on their bright sunny rooftops. She spent hours testing their traditional recipes in her own kitchen and writing cultural and historical articles to intersperse in the cookbook, sometimes writing on food processing methods and other times writing on individual food items, like clarified butter (ghee) and the overlap between its role in everyday kitchens and its ritual uses in gesture and mantra during sacrifice. The roots of her cookbook project transformed over her years of graduate study into research on different sorts of historical textual analysis, as she produced articles on historical recipe collections recorded in manuscripts and stone temple walls. She has presented these as the early culinary sciences of India,

technical knowledge that kings needed to know well to successfully entertain vassal kings and other elites.

The longer she worked on the topic and wrestled with its challenges, the more she noticed many writers and food historians who focused on India hadn’t read the original texts and didn’t know any Indian languages. Instead, these writers were essentially playing a game of historical telephone and drawing their evidence from outdated and incomplete translations and summaries. This meant they didn’t — or couldn’t — make connections that were evident to Gutiérrez. “Food is so popular and accessible that it has become an area where anyone feels qualified to write books about it,” she says. “My priority changed from personally replicating modern dishes to realizing, ‘Wait a minute, no one has ever bothered to read the historical recipes.’”

Translating historical texts from India is a notoriously difficult task — the country has 22 official languages, and its people speak more than 100 others. Still, Gutiérrez believed it was important to find out what she could learn from the texts. In 2020, she completed her Ph.D. in Asian cultures and languages at The University of Texas at Austin, having gained the language skills and rigor in historical methodology necessary to interpret historical recipes, and in 2022 she joined the Asian studies faculty.

Throughout her studies and her scholarship, Gutiérrez focused on the practical art of

cooking as much as she did on language and history. “It’s one thing to read about a yogurt that was fermented with a ground sesame culture, but it’s another thing altogether to taste and smell it and use it in your cooking,” says Gutiérrez. “The ground sesame, much like tahini, lends such a different depth to yogurt fermented this way. But my point is that you actually can taste differences that are lovely and help you step into the past — in this case into a past of almost 1,100 years ago!”

Food is also a vehicle of personal, cultural, and political expression. There was a big push for regional cookbook writing during the late colonial period in India for this very reason, Gutiérrez says. “When the British were in power and bossing everybody around, something that Indians could still do was cook their own traditional food the way they wanted it,” she explains. “So even though British people popularized foods like pudding and toast and jam as mainstream, Indians could still maintain their own traditions by cooking their heritage foods at home in the kitchen, sites that the British empire wasn’t able to gain control over.”

Much of India’s population today continues to follow a historical practice of traditional medicine called Ayurveda, which includes the idea that food is medicine. Following an Ayurvedic diet today often means no alcohol and vegetable-forward meals. However, Gutiérrez found that meat was relatively common in ancient and premodern Indian food writing, but modern publications of

classical cookbooks sometimes totally omit the meat sections. This discovery earned her the Emerging Global Food Historian Prize awarded by the journal Global Food History

“People in India today always mention Ayurveda as a medical tradition where what you eat is also your medicine,” says Gutiérrez. “And in the past food was certainly used medicinally. But those foods may have included meat, bone broth, or alcohol depending on what kind of medical treatment you were getting. It’s quite different from the popular idea today that Ayurveda means healthy, low-fat vegetarian food. The idea of eating for health almost

never comes up in these royal recipe collections. They wanted things to taste good!”

Gutiérrez’s research on food is not simply confined to early texts and academic journals. She has a longtime collaboration with researcher, cultural anthropologist, and blogger Deepa S. Reddy. Reddy’s blog, Pâticheri, explores Indian food traditions and their intersections with the many ethnic groups and foods of India. Reddy is also a capable and persistent cook, and she partners with Gutiérrez to reproduce dishes in the hopes that making meals from the past will inform their understanding of the present.

“With modern recipes, you get the name of the dish and then the ingredients and then the preparation method and so on,” Gutiérrez explains. “Premodern recipes were very different. You wouldn’t have the name of the dish, so you have to guess what sort of dish it might be as you’re reading, and sometimes it can be baffling.”

For example, Gutiérrez found that several texts mention buttermilk recipes that were written by Nala, a legendary Indian king, but when she examined the cookbook titled Nala’s Mirror on Cooking (Pākadarpaṇa), the buttermilk chapter was missing. So Gutiérrez took the buttermilk recipes purportedly by Nala in other books, compared them to other recipes from Nala’s Mirror on Cooking, and translated them. Then Reddy experimented, cooked, and photographed many versions to compare their culinary and regional styles.

“Academics working on South Asian history have already invested a lot of time thinking about ideology, social change, and texts across genres,” says Gutiérrez. “For example, I’ll read something in the Hindu epic Ramayana that is relevant and discussed in cookbooks written 1,500 years later. A non-expert or non-South-Asian-languagereading food historian won’t be able to put these data sets together, and in translation they would never recognize that the same categories of dishes or dish types are even being discussed.”

Take the example of a recipe fragment that puzzled Gutiérrez for years. Part of the original stone carving had rubbed off and become illegible, and she couldn’t figure out what dish would have both eggplant and jackfruit. The key came when she examined a historical text that described local food

offerings to the gods and realized a signature offering of the local temple was eggplant gotsu. This meant that the same dish had been offered to the deity at that temple for over 700 years, a verifiable line of culinary presence few other temples could boast. “It’s only with all sorts of cross study, returning to material after years, re-translating, and thinking seriously about place, that one can come to certain discoveries,” says Gutiérrez. “I have come to many similar discoveries with various sets of materials after returning years later to re-translate and tackle the problem again, but with new eyes.”

In 2024, Gutiérrez collaborated with Seattle restaurant Nirmal’s to recreate dishes that would have been eaten in premodern India before the European encounter, like jungle fowl tahari, pumpkin curry with broad beans, and King Bhima’s sweet and cooling shrikhand. (The restaurateur, Oliver Bangera, had to source the wild hen from a wild game farm in Canada.) She plans to complete her book, Royal Pleasures of the Kitchen: Recipes & Dining in India’s History, in the next few years, and Nirmal’s has agreed to host a similar premodern dinner night for the book release party.

However meticulous her research and recreations may be, Gutiérrez will never be able to try the exact dishes she studies, as ingredients, tastes, and cooking methods have changed over time. But this doesn’t faze her. “We take photos in the hope to have a memory of a moment, but the moment is ephemeral. It’s gone and you’re not going to experience the moment in the photo again,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s bad to have a photo.” Recreating historical recipes, for Gutiérrez, is another way to get a taste of the past.

✤

Erin Russell is a journalist who has covered food and restaurants for eight years. She was previously associate editor of Eater Austin and has been published in Texas Monthly, The Barbed Wire, Roads & Kingdoms , and Hideaway Report . She frequently leads SXSW panels, TV segments, and author interviews.

The word worker is more loadbearing than most when it comes to politics and culture. It carries weight in seemingly every system of propaganda. It features in every articulable political program. It plays a commanding role in many social antagonisms — the industrious we versus the lazy them, or the virtuous past versus the sinful present.

This complexity is at the heart of The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019, the most recent book by UT Austin professor of history and Asian studies Huaiyin Li. In it, Li shows how Chinese workers were ensnared not just by their immediate circumstances but by these reductive tropes that treated them variously as victim, bystander, or paragon.

It’s a book that challenges both Cold War-era critiques and romantic socialist portrayals. Li pulls back the curtain on a world in which workers were labeled and ranked based on class origin, political behavior, and workplace participation. It’s a world of complex social rewards and sanctions. Factory workers were symbolically elevated as political “masters” of the factory while being trapped within a rigid and exploitative system. Their rights were conditional, their autonomy constrained, and their participation choreographed.

“My inquiry centers on the roles and agency of Chinese workers, both as individuals and as a collective within factory settings,” says Li. “How did they perceive themselves, and how did this perception shape their actions in the workplace?”

FUNCTION OVER FORM

One of the three pillars of Li’s work is its focus on actual function over stated form. He looks, for instance, at institutions like the Staff and Workers’ Congress (SWC) and trade unions. These groups paid lip service to empowering workers democratically, but their practical function was to maintain labor discipline and ideological conformity.

Similarly, employees of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) “enjoyed lifetime employment, higher wages, and comprehensive benefits — privileges not extended to the broader working class.” But this security came at the cost of being effectively indentured, with little mobility or autonomy. Since independent trade unions were non-existent, employees of SOEs couldn’t collectively bargain for better wages and benefits, and they lacked the mobility of even many of their counterparts in the Soviet Union.

The Maoist state also implemented measures to reshape workers’ political consciousness. These involved “classifying family backgrounds, stigmatizing ‘undesired elements,’ encouraging party membership applications, awarding political honors, and holding regular political study sessions,” says Li.

These efforts didn’t always succeed in emotionally binding workers’ hearts to the socialist party-state, but they proved

effective, says Li, “as disciplinary mechanisms, shaping workers into a compliant labor force.”

A second pillar of Li’s work is his “microhistorical” approach to the subject, using close-up studies of different contexts and institutions to better understand general principles. In his first monograph, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936, Li used this method to examine the everyday lives of Chinese

villagers. This work led to his second book, Village China Under Socialism and Reform, 1948–2008, and now to The Master in Bondage, where the primary site of investigation is no longer the village but rather the factory and the institutions and forces that surround and shape life within it.

Li moves fluidly back and forth between formal entities, like unions, party-state organizations, and factory management,

and less tangible but no less significant factors, like workers’ self-identity, shared values, peer pressure, kinship structures, and workplace norms.

“It is the interplay between these tangible and intangible forces that creates a social milieu in which villagers’ behaviors can be better understood across different circumstances,” says Li.

This approach aligns with a larger shift in Chinese social history as a discipline. “The traditional focus on institutional transformations, significant events, and grand narratives of revolution or modernization has given way to a growing interest in grassroots experiences,” he says.

This focus on grassroots experiences points to the third pillar of Li’s approach, which is a revisionist effort to loosen up some of the old narratives that have shaped how Chinese workers have been understood.

“For nearly three decades after the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949,” says Li, “state-owned enterprise workers were celebrated as socialist ‘masters,’ portrayed as highly motivated and efficient in their duties. Yet this idealized image underwent a dramatic reversal

during the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.”

In contrast to the Maoist era, the reform period of Deng Xiaoping made it fashionable to portray workers as lazy and inefficient. In this new telling, the “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed employment and equal wages was to blame for poor worker motivation and performance.

A major aim of Li’s project is to bring the everyday reality of workers out from under these tendentious narratives. His Chinese worker is an active agent moving through a complex social world. It’s a world that incentivizes conformity while still allowing workers some freedom to assert their needs. And Li stresses the social part. It’s a world in which pride, social rank, and peer pressure matter as much as formal policies and procedures.

Li’s empiricism adds texture to the debate around worker productivity and motivation. In interviews with Li, surviving SOE workers strenuously defended their work ethic and insisted that outright shirking was rare. But a true accounting of their on-the-job behavior also pokes holes in the “master” image of Maoist propaganda.

“Workers, as rational actors, were reluctant to exert maximum effort when labor was not directly tied to reward,” says Li. “However, as our informants consistently emphasized, outright shirking or deliberate slowdowns were rare due to the strong formal and informal constraints shaping workplace behavior.”

This “contextualized rationality” of workers, as Li puts it, brings into relief the legibility of their choices without idealizing them. If workers give less than their all, it is not a moral failing but a strategic compromise, “a way to avoid reprimands from cadres while preserving solidarity with peers,” says Li.

The era Li recounts is decades in the past. Across years of reform, the old Maoist system has been done away with in favor of a new normal in which workers have more flexibility at the cost of greater job insecurity. Today, core economic sectors such as manufacturing and construction are dominated by rural migrant laborers employed by private companies.

“Decades of reform have dismantled the old equilibrium in labor relations,” says Li, “yet the restructured enterprises of the 21st century have failed to establish a new one.” 

WHY WE LEARN

By Daniel Oppenheimer

Do we sell a liberal arts education as preparation for the professional world, or as a chance to explore the deepest questions of human existence? This is the x or y question that haunts my professional existence. One of my least favorite answers, usually, is “x and y. It’s both.” Yeah right. It’s an evasion of the hard choice, with the result that neither narrative gets its due.

It was a nice surprise, then, when associate professor of sociology Jordan Conwell persuaded me that we really could have both.

I’d reached out to him because his department chair, Shannon Cavanagh, had sent me a link to some materials about a project that Conwell is coordinating with Liberal Arts Career Services.* This project, the Sociology Pathways and Career Engagement Resource, or SPACER, is an online curriculum that can be incorporated into a standard sociology course. It’s made up of 15 modules, one for each week of a semester-long course, that cover topics like transferable

skills, “marketing your degree,” resumes, interviewing, social media, and creating a “career game plan.” A National Science Foundation award to Conwell, set to run through 2029, is funding the work.

Conwell piloted the curriculum in his spring 2025 section of “Social Research Methods,” a required course for sociology majors that enrolls sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and the department is planning to expand it to other courses as well. The hope is that SPACER will not just prepare students for careers but will inform their course, certificate, and extracurricular decisions so that they align with students’ long-term goals; familiarize students with where to find expert career help on campus; and pre-empt the fears that keep many students from joining or staying in the major in the first place. It’s a program, but also a sales pitch for the major.

At first glance, SPACER appears to be very much on the pragmatic side of the binary that I’m always worrying over

when it comes to pitching the liberal arts to the world. It’s about the job, the brand, the resume, the interview, and the game plan rather than the Truth and the search for knowledge and wisdom for their own sake. Talking to Conwell was gratifying, though, precisely because he doesn’t see the two narratives as being opposed. Instead, he sees the program as a way of helping students to accomplish two complementary goals: They’ll better articulate to themselves what values they want to bring to the world while also making a plan for concretely realizing those values in the work they do.

“A small number of our students will go on to get their Ph.D.s in sociology or a related field, as I did, and get university teaching jobs,” says Conwell, who arrived at UT Austin in 2021, “and that’s great. But the reality is that most of them won’t. They’ll become K-12 teachers, lawyers, social workers, doctors, tech executives, clergy. What we want them thinking about, from the beginning, is how

what they’re learning in our program can lead them to a life of purpose and meaning. That exploration shouldn’t be separate from thinking about the job they’ll do to earn a living, and the two can be mutually reinforcing.”

One of Conwell’s theoretical touchstones in thinking about the purpose of higher education is W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic essay “Education and Work,” which Du Bois first presented as Howard University’s commencement speaker in 1930. The speech was a return to Du Bois’s famous debate with Booker T. Washington over how Black men and women should be educated in the United States in the aftermath of emancipation but in the face of continued discrimination and segregation. Should technical and professional skills be prioritized, as Washington believed, so that students would be optimally prepared to attain material success (and therefore better positioned to attain political power as well)? Or would too much of a focus on the pre-professional, and too little focus on the underlying nature of the society, simply prepare them to continue to be exploited by a rigged system, albeit at a higher income level?

Du Bois’s answer, in 1930, was both x and y. “We need then,

first, training as human beings in general knowledge and experience,” he wrote, “and then technical training to guide and do a specific part of the world’s work.” Students need to understand the world in order to form and sustain a vision of how they want to shape it, and they need the pragmatic skills and knowledge to realize such a vision.

SPACER, for Conwell, is a Du Boisian endeavor. It’s not an evasion of the tension between the practical and idealist ends of a liberal arts education but rather is an effort to breach what is too often a firewall between what students are learning in their classes and what they’ll go on to do professionally after graduation. Conwell sees embracing that tension, as opposed to running from it, as critical at the current moment in higher education. “Now more than ever, we should be clearly articulating the multiple dimensions of value that sociology and other liberal arts degree programs offer our students, their families, and their communities,” he says.

For me, as a salesman, a nice side benefit of this way of looking at a liberal arts education is that it points to certain language and concepts we might be able to deploy in our recruitment efforts that

would tap into some of the deepest symbolic currents in American culture and history. I’m thinking of words like “vocation” and “calling” and “purpose,” and of symbols and stories drawn from ancient religious and wisdom traditions that see our labor as one of the primary vehicles for realizing our spiritual ideals in the world.

It would be challenging, of course, to take these heavyduty ideas and symbols and translate them into… well, a sales pitch. But that’s precisely the kind of challenge that the field of university communications has evolved to confront, and one that has its own Du Boisian spirit. It’s a pragmatic task, with a material goal in mind, but it’s informed at the deepest level by humanistic education and humanistic objectives.



*Along with months of conversations with Liberal Arts Career Services staff, led by Tatem Oldham, the materials benefitted from input from Conwell’s student research team: Brynn Boise-Fults, a senior economics major; Alison Chavez Caldera, a senior sociology major; Carly May, a junior sociology major; Cameron Rua-Smith, a graduate student in sociology; and Aria Welch, a senior biology and sociology major.

House Museum by

Anna Sudderth

In the photo, you have nothing to hold. Your brothers and cousins hitch guns

over their shoulders, angled at threats unseen, but you hold your hands empty

in your lap, in the white froth of your dress, and in your face

an ugly thought: family that would keep you here in the heat, at the edge of the lake and ignore what you see, what is stirring on the lake’s other side, behind the man with his camera — there

in the tall grass disturbing the blades. You want to go inside. But your sister

standing behind you has the ties of your dress in a tight grip,

will not let you move for anything, not while the photographer is watching and waving his hand. You don’t need to turn around to know what she looks like,

mouth a pinched line and back straight as she can make it, still a little crooked,

like she appears to you each day stalking the house, directing others,

unaware of her bones clicking engine-like beneath her thin, dull skin. But

it is lovely to be in a lovely place and while there to feel lovely, to think

lovely thoughts, your mother loves to say, waving her hand Anna Sudderth

and directing men with tools to add another room to her studio.

Several children away from you, you hear her now

in the center of things, laughing across the lake at the cameraman, though she can’t have heard a word he said, his voice does not carry, so why is she laughing? And what is lovely

in the dead smell of the water, the straw hat an aunt forced on your head, the other girls

in their cotton dresses but none of them in a hat, bare heads of hair shining in the sun soft

as horses’ coats? You want to run away and you want someone to find you

curled in the brush, bleeding, bitten by foxes. You want to jump into the lake

and disturb the image of your family — reflected there, they would live forever. It is no comfort to you

that they will drain the lake soon by town mandate, the water

judged toxic, that your mother will pass her life attempting perfection, to smooth out cracks in marble, that your face will age

into something less recognizable as you learn how to get what you want.

Flying Longhorns trips blend exploration and education with amazing, full-service travel. We are able to create authentic and meaningful experiences by incorporating expert tour guides, engaged historians, and enthusiastic naturalists into personalized events and excursions. But the very best thing about traveling with us, frequently listed as the trip highlight from participants, is getting to know the other fun, interesting, energetic, warm-hearted Texas Exes in your group. Lifelong friendships are established during Flying Longhorns trips!

Office of the Dean

116 Inner Campus Drive, G6000

Austin, TX 78712-1257

“Hardtack” and Other Stories

Art Galleries at Black Studies/ Christian-Green Gallery

Curated by Kaila T. Schedeen

September 12 through December 6, 2025

Rahim Fortune Home and Windmill, Hutto, Texas, 2004

Silver gelatin print 16 x 20 in