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NEH awards Dole Institute, partners funds to build online portal for congressional archives
LAWRENCE – The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, in partnership with West Virginia University Libraries and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education, will develop an online portal through which researchers can access a vast collection of congressional documents. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a nearly $60,000 grant for the project.
Media advisory: Expert predicts Nigeria’s Twitter ban will fail
LAWRENCE – The government of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is likely to back down soon from its Twitter ban but will continue to look for measures to exert control over online political and social discourses, despite not being sufficiently adjusted to the requisite sophisticated computational thinking to attempt this control, according to James Yeku, Lagos native and University of Kansas assistant professor of African digital humanities.
Tulsa’s jazz-style evolution on flood control shows importance of collaboration, empathy, study shows
LAWRENCE — Tulsa may not be the first town one thinks of when talking about jazz, and flood management may not be the first vocation one compares to the musical genre. But the success that Tulsa, Oklahoma, displayed in going from one of the nation’s most flood-prone cities to a nationally recognized model of long-term risk reduction in just two decades is analogous to the evolution of one of the most American styles of music, a University of Kansas professor points out in a new study.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Zac Walker, Dole Institute of Politics, 785-864-9319, [email protected], @DoleInstitute
NEH awards Dole Institute, partners funds to build online portal for congressional archives
LAWRENCE – The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, in partnership with West Virginia University Libraries and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education, will develop an online portal through which researchers can access a vast collection of congressional documents.
The three organizations are members of the Association for Centers for the Study of Congress, and WVU will lead the initiative, called the American Congress Digital Archives Portal project. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a nearly $60,000 grant for the project.
“We are excited to be a part of this important and timely project,” said Audrey Coleman, Dole Institute associate director and director of museum and archives. “Archivists constantly strive to make collections more discoverable and accessible to researchers of all skill levels. This project will pave the way for increased use of congressional collections like the Dole Archives and lead to a deeper understanding of how Congress actually works.”
Congressional archives fall into two groups: the official records of Congress that are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration and the personal papers of individual senators and representatives. The personal papers, created by individual offices, are the private property of each member of Congress. The personal papers of members of Congress support scholarship about congressional procedures and leadership, Congress’ relationship with the other branches and public policy. They illustrate multiple narratives related to the country’s social, cultural and political development.
However, practical barriers to using congressional archives mean researchers may struggle to find and use them.
Many members choose to donate their collections to places where they can be preserved and, hopefully, made public. This leads to congressional collections that are geographically dispersed among institutions large and small with varying degrees of resources, unlike presidential papers, which are centralized in one location with dedicated staff and funding. For researchers, congressional collections may be difficult to use, both because of a lack of travel funding and the breadth and varying levels of description in congressional archives.
The pandemic has made these problems more acute because of archive closures and travel restrictions.
The project will address these challenges and provide easier access to archives for scholars, educators and the public. The project will give open access to congressional archives by bringing together sources from multiple institutions into a single online platform, illuminating the value of each collection and the relationships among them. The portal will include correspondence, memoranda, audiovisual materials and more.
“This is really the first phase of a larger goal,” said Sarah D’Antonio Gard, senior archivist of the Robert and Elizabeth Dole archive and special collections. “This grant will allow us to develop and test the portal itself using a smaller set of items. Once we have it built, the hard work of expanding the portal to include materials from around the country will start.”
“We aim to have a sizable open access digital portal to reach various audiences for the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026,” said Danielle Emerling, project director and curator of congressional and political collections in the West Virginia & Regional History Center.
“Ultimately, we believe this project will expand availability of documentation about Congress, public policy and representation in America. It will lead to new topics and methods of scholarly research and serve as a resource to advance civic education and knowledge of America’s constitutional democracy.”
The NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential underpinning for scholarship, education and public programming in the humanities. There are four levels of review before a grant is officially supported. The endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Media advisory: Expert predicts Nigeria’s Twitter ban will fail
LAWRENCE – The government of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is likely to back down soon from its Twitter ban but will continue to look for measures to exert control over online political and social discourses, despite not being sufficiently adjusted to the requisite sophisticated computational thinking to attempt this control, according to James Yeku, Lagos native and University of Kansas assistant professor of African digital humanities.
Yeku, author of the forthcoming book “Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture and Performance in Nigeria” (Indiana University Press, 2022), is available to comment on the Buhari government’s current and future moves in this regard.
Yeku was one of a group of 40 Nigerian intellectuals, mostly from the diaspora, who signed an open letter published June 13 in The Guardian decrying the ban, calling on Buhari to uphold freedoms in the Constitution as written, and then for reforms ranging from a “more equitable Constitution” to “delicately” handling calls for separatism.
Yeku said that in recent days, Twitter has created a workaround that allows the half of Nigerians with internet connections to access the microblogging platform once again.
However, the Buhari government further threatened criminal prosecution for those who use VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, to get around the ban by disguising their whereabouts.
The ban is about far more than Twitter taking down one of Buhari’s tweets for an alleged rules violation, Yeku said.
“The government has been seeking to regulate social media more generally in the last few years,” he said. “This one tweet seemed like the major trigger, but we must not forget Buhari has, in fact, not forgotten the role Twitter played during the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria in the fall of 2020. (CEO) Jack (Dorsey), probably acting on behalf of others on the Twitter board, strategically supported protesters across Nigeria, providing money in Bitcoin, and basically financing that particular protest movement against police brutality in the country. So, in my opinion, the Nigerian government took notice of that gesture by the tech giant and since then, and probably still, has been looking for opportunities for disciplinary actions against Twitter and its politics in Africa’s most populous country.”
The likely backdown from the Twitter ban is just a symptom, Yeku said, of an “analog” government that appears to be at war with its digital citizens. Don’t forget, he said, “President Buhari was a military dictator in the ’80s, and those dictatorial impulses are on display now.”
But Buhari is not the only political dinosaur in this regard, according to Yeku.
“In many African countries and indeed in oppressive contexts worldwide, there is a misreading of the digital moment,” Yeku said. “It’s not business as usual for tyrants and hegemonic ideas anywhere. In Nigeria, to be precise, ours is a digital milieu in which the traditional authority of the state is being challenged by young people, and a government that is, frankly, not familiar with that reality, is left frazzled even as it seeks avenues to coopt digital culture or substantially curtail its growth. The government has always muffled the voices of protesters, and anytime people are empowered to speak back to the tyranny and the dictatorial tendencies of the political elite… the government also pushes back, hence its insistence on regulating social media, essentially trying to control the uncontrollable. And I am not suggesting social media companies should have unchecked power; rather, to seek absolute control as the Nigerian government wishes is untenable.
“How can you even try to control a system whose operational and infrastructural materiality eludes you? Twitter, for instance, recently decided to locate its office in the region in Ghana, rather than Nigeria. In hindsight, the Twitter ban shows the company was right to avoid the more restrictive and infrastructurally porous Nigerian environment, despite the fact that Nigeria has more internet users than Ghana,” Yeku said.
Instead of its tactless spat with Twitter, he said, “What the government could do is provide alternatives to its digital citizens, empower them to make their own social media applications. With one of the most thriving tech spaces in Africa, Nigeria definitely has the human capital to build its similar digital ecologies. But the government doesn’t understand what it means to invest in digital infrastructures, a situation that means the government effectively remains an analog entity that undermines its own ability, because the future is digital, right?”
To interview Yeku, contact Rick Hellman at [email protected] or 913-620-8786.
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Tulsa’s jazz-style evolution on flood control shows importance of collaboration, empathy, study shows
LAWRENCE — Tulsa may not be the first town one thinks of when talking about jazz, and flood management may not be the first vocation one compares to the musical genre. But the success Tulsa displayed in going from one of the nation’s most flood-prone cities to a nationally recognized model of long-term risk reduction in just two decades is analogous to the evolution of one of the most American styles of music, a University of Kansas professor points out in a new study.
Tulsa, the second-largest city in Oklahoma, suffered several devastating floods in the 1970s and 1980s, then became a national model for flood mitigation by the 1990s. What hasn’t been studied closely is how a group of engineers, planners, government officials, journalists, attorneys and citizens came together as a network of champions that adapted and evolved over a period of decades.
Ward Lyles, associate professor of public affairs & administration at KU, co-wrote a study with Penn Pennell, KU urban planning graduate, and Rachel Riley of the University of Oklahoma detailing the group central to Tulsa’s success. “Jazz on Tulsa Time: The Remarkable Story of the Network of Flood Mitigation Champions behind the Tulsa Turnaround” was published in the journal Natural Hazards Review. The authors conducted interviews with local champions from multiple professions who began work on a flood mitigation plan in the 1970s, two of whom remained active in the work well into the 2000s, Ron Flanagan and journalist Ann Patton.
After a rapid succession of floods in the early 1970s, residents and some of the local professionals, functioning similarly to a loosely organized improvisational jazz band, seized the “window of opportunity” to press for change. Myriad approaches were pursued, including buying and demolishing homes in the floodplain and building more flood control structures. However, the band’s style fell out of favor, so to speak, when a more conservative city government came to power in the late ’70s and instituted more developer-friendly policies focused more on growth than floodplain safety. In their own words, some of the local champions were “exiled” from work in Tulsa and had to find jobs in other states. Meanwhile, flood control efforts cooled.
Tulsa suffered another devastating event, the “Memorial Day Flood” of 1984, just weeks after the election of new city leadership dedicated to renewing the commitment to flood mitigation. In subsequent years, members of the original band came back together and became more of a swing-style big band with organized sections compared to its more loosely arranged organization it the 1970s. Engineers, planners, attorneys, local residents and elected officials worked in concert to amplify and extend the efforts of the 1970s. Large swaths of flood-prone homes were purchased and the land was converted to open space suited to recreation and, when needed, flood storage. Land use regulations, engineered structure and education programs helped Tulsa become one of the dozen or so leading flood reduction communities in the early 1990s, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency initiated a program that rewarded proactive communities with lower insurances rates for residents.
The evolution was so successful that Tulsa received a major infusion of federal grant support in the late 1990s, cementing the transition of Tulsa’s mitigation jazz band from a popular local group to a nationally emulated act, the authors wrote. A novel local nonprofit spun out of this effort and became a jazz institute of sorts, engaging more deeply with the Tulsa community on other hazards like tornadoes, and extending its work more broadly across the state of Oklahoma. The successful evolution illustrates many key points of successful city planning and management; namely, the importance of weaving together a network of many local champions committed to thinking long term, as opposed to the common approach of dealing with disasters solely in the moment and mainly by depending on narrow groups of experts to set policy.
“Our approach nationally has long been to try to engineer your way out of disasters, frantically respond to them when they happen, or not deal with them at all,” Lyles said. “We often fail to think carefully about how land use and infrastructure decisions expose the entire community to risk until it is too late. Floods are a perfect example of this problem because flooding happens along rivers and streams, and we know very precisely where they are. The same tends to be true of areas at risk from hurricanes and wildfires, in contrast to tornados, which touch down randomly within a community.”
Through the study, the interviewees revealed the critical importance of having a diverse group of local champions with a wide-ranging set of skills, not only in professional expertise like engineering, planning or law, but perhaps most importantly in communication and collaboration. Varied skills and leadership styles among these champions provided adaptability and resilience to the network but also posed challenges, the authors wrote. A key finding of the study is the role Patton played in facilitating and managing relationships, sometimes between people with very different communication styles, political attitudes and even core beliefs. Patton’s professional journey – as a journalist working the “Black beat” in Tulsa in the 1970s, as a political operative and government official in the 1970s through the 1990s and a nonprofit entrepreneur in the 2000s — is all the more remarkable because she completed her college degree just shy of turning 80 years old in the 2010s.
Emergency response groups regularly feature experts who leverage skills in fire, law enforcement and logistics to prepare for and respond to events. The same is true for city planners, engineers and other public service professionals whose responsibilities relate more to long-term risk reduction. But, across each of these professions, historically dominated by older, white males, the so-called “soft skills” of emotional intelligence, social intelligence and cultural humility — just the kinds of skills Patton exhibited on top of her more traditional expertise — are often minimized or ignored in favor of technical skills or specialized forms of knowledge.
“The thing we don’t talk enough about in managing disasters – including public health emergencies like COVID — is critical importance of the ‘special sauce’ of relationship skills essential for fostering, sustaining and harnessing a diverse and dynamic network of people,” said Lyles, who has written previously on the value of caring as part of public planning. “You need someone who can help deploy the hard skills with the soft skills.”
That aspect is true in a city like Tulsa with a dark history of race relations, just as it is in any location that has people of different backgrounds, cultures and experiences living together, he added. The experiences of Tulsa and others who have successfully, or even unsuccessfully, handled emergency response and planning have a great deal of parallels to the current COVID-19 pandemic response, as political differences, poor collaboration, egos and poor communication hampering responses on national, state and local levels.
Understanding differences, or cultural competence, paired with cultural humility, or acknowledging that one does not completely understand the experience of others, could go a long way in improving responses to current disasters and preparation for those that will come in the future.
“It shouldn’t be revolutionary that relationships matter,” Lyles said. “But it takes skill to weave relationships together. It’s not enough to be professionally passionate. We need social and emotional intelligence as well, and especially cultural humility.”
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