Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Monique Truong’s 2003 novel The Book of Salt takes its inspiration from a historical fragment, a brief reference in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to two Indochinese cooks who worked for Gertrude Stein and Toklas in their Paris apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, home of the famous salon at the center of both high modernist culture and a developing public culture of homosexuality. Truong turns to fiction in an effort to imagine who these anonymous servants might have been, inventing a rich history and affective life for her central character Binh, whose migration from Indochina to Paris is also bound up with his homosexuality. Binh’s story gives us another vantage point on queer transnationalisms also embedded in Gertrude and Alice’s expatriate lives.

One of the key languages of the novel is that of food, the form of communication that is available to Binh when French and English fail him, and the meals that he painstakingly prepares for Stein and Toklas, form the basis for Truong’s contemporary version of high modernist prose. The salt of the book’s title refers variously to sweat, sea, food, and tears and Truong’s interest in the sensuous world of taste signals her affective approach to history.

In its concern with food as language and exchange, the novel trafficks in familiar associations of ethnicity with food but does so in order to disrupt a comfortable multiculturalism and to point ultimately to the oblique incorporation of traumatic histories and their accompanying affects into foodways. Truong uses the language of food to convey the complexity of Binh’s story, which cannot be reduced to stock narratives about servants or gay men or immigrants. I take Truong’s work as a model for both the importance of a language of affect to a fuller account of sexual and racialized subjects in a transnational frame and as a model for how little that language often fits the customary idioms of legal, ethnographic, or documentary representation.

Indeed, the novel might he understood as an oblique response to other more contemporary questions that Truong herself grapples with about her own identity as a Vietnamese American who is part of the generation who came as children after the fall of Saigon. Monique Truong’s attention to salt as the form of appearance of pain and trauma, her attention to cooks and homosexuals in Paris rather than U.S. military involvement as part of the history of contemporary Vietnam and a post-war Vietnamese diaspora, provides an important model for forms of public feeling that provide new models of transnational experience.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Literary scholarship on American domesticity has been insufficient in the analysis of how queer identities operate within the home. Applying a queer domestic reading in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt and Stacy D'Erasmo's A Seahorse Year expands the field of literary domestic studies to include those identities that have been excluded while retaining the essential concept of difference: the home may be a shared universal concept, but those who exist on the margins/outside heteronormativity will construct this space and engage in practices from their socio-political subject positions and inhabit it with this difference always present.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Public administration scholars have perennially cited the importance of public servants' adherence to standard operating procedures (e.g., Gulick, 1937). However, scholars have also emphasized the importance of professional autonomy and discretion for public employees (e.g., Romzek & Dubnick, 1987). As part of a larger study, this paper uses qualitative data obtained through in-depth interviews with 12 county sheriffs and 18 municipal police chiefs in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin to explore how county sheriffs and municipal police chiefs make decisions when the professional discretion of their officers conflicts with their agencies’ written policies._x000d__x000d_Data from this exploratory study indicate four critical factors that account for a law enforcement manager’s perspective on this conflict: (1) agency coordination; (2) legal liability issues, (3) the complex terrain of law enforcement at the street level, and (4) acceptance of personality differences between field officers. Data also indicate that some instances of bureaucratic accountability are mechanisms by which law enforcement managers achieve what they believe to be professional accountability in their respective agencies.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Although geophagy (soil eating) is widespread in parrots of the Peruvian Amazon, it remains unclear why parrots consume soil. To test hypotheses on the soil characteristics that parrots select for, we collected soil samples at 18 parrot geophagy sites and 18 control sites across the Department of Madre de Dios in southeastern Peru. We analyzed soils for percent clay and for concentrations of 21 metals, using an extraction procedure for “available” metals to simulate the parrot digestive system. Only sodium and magnesium were significantly higher in consumed soils vs. unconsumed controls. Sodium concentration in soil consumed by parrots averaged 1137 (+/- 382) parts per million (ppm), eight times higher than control soils and 27 times higher than was found in macaw foods. Although magnesium concentration in consumed soils averaged 527 (+/- 248) ppm, twice that of controls, this was six times less than in macaw foods. We conclude that magnesium and clay percentage are not likely targets of geophagous parrots and that sodium needs may drive parrot geophagy in southeastern Peru. We stress the need to evaluate the importance of this under-protected resource to the maintenance of parrot populations in this remarkably species rich region.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: The 2003 public acquisition of 5,471 ha of salt ponds provides an unprecedented opportunity to restore large areas of tidal marsh in San Francisco Bay. It also introduces management trade-offs, since the existing ponds support large numbers of waterbirds that could experience declines with the loss of this managed habitat. Thus our objective was to identify configurations that simultaneously maximize populations of marsh- and pond-associated species.

For each salt pond, we modeled the basic choices: should it be restored to a tidal marsh, or kept as a managed pond, with what salinity and depth? We used habitat-based models that predict avian responses to these decisions and to future tidal marsh conditions and landscape context. The models were used in integer programs that find optimal solutions and support non-linear density models and objective functions.

We found that a too-simple objective, such as maximizing a weighted sum of all species' populations, leads to simplistic optimal designs (all managed pond or all tidal marsh) that are driven by one or two species. Optimizing the sum of log populations prioritizes rare species, giving heterogeneous solutions that benefit more species. Setting a minimum population size for species of greatest conservation concern gives further improvements, as does including landscape variables.