No abstract

A new crown and root rot disease of landscape plantings of the malvaceous ornamental common rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos) was first detected in Washington State in 2012. The main objectives of this study were to complete Koch’s postulates, document the disease symptoms photographically, and identify the causal agent using multilocus molecular phylogenetics. Results of the pathogenicity experiments demonstrated that the Fusarium sp. could induce vascular wilt and root and crown rot symptoms on H. moscheutos ‘Luna Rose’. Maximum-likelihood and maximum-parsimony phylogenetic analyses of portions of translation elongation factor 1-α and DNA-directed RNA polymerase II largest and second-largest subunit indicated that the Hibiscus pathogen represents a novel, undescribed Fusarium sp. nested within the Fusarium buharicum species complex.

Previous scholarship has documented women of color's experiences in professions such as law and medicine, but less research has explored how women of color experience the process of becoming members of professions. Using academia as a case I draw from interviews with thirty women at a single research-intensive university to demonstrate that women of color have different orientations to professional membership as compared to white women. These differences are made evident by women of color's extra work to justify and make sense of inclusion in the profession, their beliefs about research, and their participation strategies. I argue women of color differentiate themselves from their white peers by crafting a moralized version of the profession.

Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support. Our interviews with activists and consultants and content analysis of stories they rated as successful point to an expert discourse that emphatically rejects “victim” storytelling. Instead, activists are instructed to tell stories of hope and resilience, avoid referring to the graphic details of abuse, and only hint at their emotional pain. Experts justify these strategies as the best way to avoid exploiting storytellers, and only coincidentally as also appealing to audiences. However, we argue that, rather than superseding the tension between empowering movement participants and persuading those outside the movement, storytelling as currently practiced has reproduced that tension.

Abortion work has changed in the decades since Roe v. Wade, and concerns over efficiency and cost reduction have resulted in increased specialization and compartmentalization of duties among health workers. This study examines the current state of surgical abortion at a clinic in southern California. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at an abortion clinic, I use theories of dirty work and intimate work to examine how abortion work is organized and allocated among staff. I find that work in the clinic is best understood as existing on two intersecting spectrums of intimacy and dirtiness. Whereas existing research on abortion workers has primarily focused on doctors and nurses, this study includes medical assistants and compares experiences across different occupations. I conclude that frequency, intensity, and purpose of intimate work and dirty work coalesce to create distinct types of abortion workers.