July 31, 2015 3:15 PM

UMBC is a founding member of a new consortium of 14 U.S. academic institutions and key partners addressing challenges that threaten urban water systems in the United States and around the world. With support from a $12 million cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation, Colorado State University is leading a collaborative effort to establish the Urban Water Innovation Network (UWIN). The mission of UWIN is to create technological, institutional, and management solutions to help communities increase resilience of their water systems and enhance preparedness for responding to water crises. 

Claire Welty, professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering at UMBC, serves as the associate director of research for the UWIN project.  Other UMBC faculty involved with UWIN include Professors Andrew Miller and Christopher Swan of the department of geography and environmental systems. The UWIN project takes advantage of UMBC’s strong research and educational programs in urban water, including stormwater management and green infrastructure, water quality control, groundwater-surface water interactions, urban flood dynamics, and urban biodiversity.

According to the 2014 Global Risks Perception Survey by the World Economic Forum, water crises are the top global risk to the viability of communities throughout the world. From the crippling droughts and water shortages in the West to the devastating floods in the East and South, water systems in the U.S. have been impacted by changes in climate, demographics, and other pressures. Our reliance on water is why Americans express greater concern about threats to water than about any other environmental issue and why more than half of all Americans worry a great deal about it, according to the latest Gallup poll of environmental concerns.

Extreme events and global climate change can have profound impacts on water security, shattering the most vulnerable communities and instilling enormous costs on governments and economies. Effective response to these challenges requires transitioning to both technological and management solutions that protect water systems from pressures and enhance their resilience.

The vision of UWIN is to create an enduring research network for integrated water systems and to cultivate champions of innovation for water-sensitive urban design and resilient cities. The integrated research, outreach, education and participatory approach of UWIN will produce a toolbox of sustainable solutions by simultaneously minimizing pressures, enhancing resilience to extreme events, and maximizing co-benefits. These benefits will reverberate across other systems, such as urban ecosystems, economies and arrangements for environmental justice and social equity.

The network will establish six highly connected regional urban water sustainability hubs in densely populated regions across the nation to serve as innovation centers, helping communities transition to sustainable management of water resources. Strategic partnerships and engagement with other prominent U.S. and international networks will extend UWIN’s reach to more than 100 cities around the world. Key UWIN partners and collaborators include the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), and the Network for Water in European Regions and Cities (NETWERC H2O).

This innovative and adaptive research approach will ultimately produce an Urban Water Sustainability Blueprint, outlining effects and tradeoffs associated with sustainable solutions for cities of all sizes. It will also provide steps and guidance for action based on the collective knowledge gained by the research and the collaborative approach of the SRN. The Blueprint will be rigorously vetted by regional stakeholders across the U.S. and the global urban water community.

The UWIN consortium includes:

• Colorado State University
• Arizona State University
• Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
• Florida International University
• Howard University
• Oregon State University
• Princeton University
• University of Arizona
• University of California-Berkeley
• University of California-Riverside
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• University of Miami
• University of Oregon
• University of Pennsylvania

For more information on the project, contact UWIN Coordinator Meagan Smith atmeagan.smith@colostate.edu. To reach UMBC faculty involved UWIN, contact Director of Communications Dinah Winnick at dwinnick@umbc.edu.

During Pride Week, Kate Drabinski, a lecturer of gender and women’s studies, wrote a column in City Paper about the work being done to document and preserve Baltimore’s LGBTQ history.

In her article, Drabinski described the work of several local activists who are conducting research and publishing articles and books related to LGBTQ history in Baltimore, including Louis Hughes, Louise Kelley, Jodi Kelber, April Householder, and Betsy Nix. Drabinski wrote that as gay bars have been closing in Baltimore, the public history work being done should be reflected in contemporary conversations.

“Yes, we may be saying goodbye to the Hippo this year, but we are not saying goodbye to the histories that supported that bar, or the harder histories that come along with it as the LGBTQ movement has struggled with its own racism, sexism, and classism. It’s different now, but how it got to be that way is the result of a whole lot of work that must be remembered and taken forward in contemporary organizing. And that is work that should be celebrated this Pride season,” Drabinski shared.

Read “Recording the Rainbow Revolution: As gay bars in Baltimore shut their doors, activists work to document LGBTQ history” in City Paper.

Clifford Murphy, an adjunct lecturer of American studies, has been selected by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to be its new director of folk and traditional arts. Murphy, an adjunct lecturer of American studies, will manage NEA grantmaking in folk and traditional arts, oversee the NEA National Heritage Fellowship program, and represent the agency in the field as part of the new role.

Murphy is currently director of Maryland Traditions, the folklife program of the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) and last year helped bring MSAC’s 40 years of folklife archives into UMBC’s library system, making the collectionavailable to the public.

“Working as a state folklorist in Maryland has brought me into close collaboration with remarkable artists, communities, and innovative organizations” said Murphy in a press release announcing the new position. “I’m incredibly excited about joining the NEA and being of service to folk and traditional artists, advocates, and programs nationwide.”

“Clifford has an impressive range of experience in the folk and traditional arts,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “The NEA will surely benefit from his skills as an administrator, a university professor, a field folklorist, and his time as a touring musician.”

Murphy was featured in UMBC Magazine earlier this year for his research on country and western music in his home region of New England. The New Hampshire native and ethnomusicologist recently published his findings in a new book: Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (University of Illinois, 2014).

With Puerto Rico currently $72 billion in debt, School of Public Policy Ph.D. student Justin Vélez-Hagan has been in the news recently explaining the severity of the situation and its potential impact on the world economy.

Vélez-Hagan, who is executive director of the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, shared his views on what has contributed to the debt crisis and what can be done to help get the economy back on track. “Not being able to have autonomous control over all of its policies puts Puerto Rico at a major disadvantage over other economies that it competes with for labor, business investment, and tourism,” he wrote in an op-ed for Fox News Latino.   

Vélez-Hagan was also a guest on “The Takeaway with John Hockenberry,” a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with the New York Times and WGBH Boston, to discuss the debt crisis. “The best solution is really a court overseeing restructuring through Chapter 9 bankruptcy. I think would be the best way to start,” he said during the segment.

Update: Watch an interview with Vélez-Hagan that aired July 13 on the Al Jazeera English world broadcast about his analysis on Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis. 

On July 21, Joseph Tatarewicz, an associate professor of history, published an article in The Conversation analyzing the history of space exploration in light of the recent NASA New Horizons Pluto mission. Professor Tatarewicz teaches the history of science and technology, policy, and public history. He has done extensive work in public history, including eight years as a Smithsonian museum curator and ten years in private practice. He is author of Space Technology and Planetary Astronomy. 

“The boomers are the first generation to witness the initial exploration of our solar system and the last to be taught that standard phrase, ‘the nine planets.’ During the last half-century, scientific research and Cold War politics brought to a head changes in scientific disciplines and organization that had been maturing for centuries,” Tatarewicz wrote in the article.

Tatarewicz stated that the New Horizons voyage marked the end of the Copernican revolution, but there is still plenty to discover: “The entire New Horizons mission over 15 years cost about US$700 million, or $47 million per year – less than Americans spend on soft drinks. All of space exploration is but spare change, and this mission’s tariff almost invisible on anybody’s ledger. Like the Romans, we demanded bread and circuses during the space program’s heyday in its first decade or so. This circus is already quite a bargain. Throw some spare change into the next model of an orphan mission of exploration. You will need to have patience, but you will be rewarded.”

Read “New Horizons brought our last ‘first look’ at one of the original nine solar system planets” in The Conversation.

On July 23, James Smalls, professor of Visual Arts and affiliate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, published an article in The Conversation that discussed the rationale behind his upcoming course, Roaming the Star Trek Universe: Race, Gender, and Alien Sexualities. Sensing that students often seem very “connected” but are simultaneously distanced from the overwhelming complexities of the world around them, Smalls set out to find ways in which to explore the difficult topics of race, gender and sexuality. “I found part of the answer,” he said, “by traveling back to the 1960s, when difficult social change movements around race (civil rights, black power), gender (the women’s movement) and sexuality (the gay and lesbian movement) were in full swing and paralleled the national obsession with technology, the space race and indulgence in popular culture as a way to both escape and liberate ourselves.”

“One way to do this,” he added, “is to ask probing questions so to get students thinking about ways in which interspecies conflicts among humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Andorians, Betazoids, Cardassians and Bajorans, to name a few, are portrayed and how they mirror or parallel disagreements between today’s nations, races, genders, religions and classes.”

Read “A teacher uses Star Trek for difficult conversations on race and gender” in The Conversation.

Sunil Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities of Shady Grove, recently published an article in International Relations and Security Network (ISN) News on the establishment of world powers through norms and institutions instead of superior capabilities over others.

Using the example of Britain, Dasgupta noted that despite its decline, its membership in international institutions ensures the country staying power on the world stage: “Britain remains a veto-carrying, permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, one of a handful of nuclear weapons states, a rich country, and one of the closest allies of the United States. Despite Prime Minister Cameron’s focus on domestic politics, there is no expectation that the British government will concede any of these positions in the future. To the contrary, Security Council membership can be seen as ensuring that Britain remains a ‘world power’ no matter what other circumstances change. Indeed, has Britain really resigned as a world power?”

Dasgupta wrote that in modern times there is more than one way to become a world power than merely having advanced economies and militaries: “Since the end of World War II, however, international norms have reduced the importance of both 1) conventional economic and military capabilities and 2) a country’s position relative to others in this regard. While the intense rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union overshadowed serious discussion of norms and beliefs during the Cold War, it became clear thereafter, with the rise of Japan and Germany as economic heavyweights with limited military capacity, that there were other pathways to great power status.”

Read “What Makes a Great Power?” in ISN.