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I’ve been part of a lot of conversations lately around digital accessibility. Part of this is because, during lockdown Microsoft made a major play to certain kinds of organisations, especially higher education institutions with certain kinds of management cultures, to be their software package of choice for ALL things. This has led to a very sudden shift to Microsoft Teams. I didn’t notice this when it happened, because the transition happened in administrative support across the university before it started to creep about a year later into reshaping interactions among academic staff. But by this time, policies had been developed around enforcing use of the platform, and exclusive use of that platform for “University business”. It has been weirdly difficult to problematise this as responses are quite binary: people either (1) “get it,” that is feel these problems deep in their psyche the moment they start using the tools, or (2) people are unaffected and quite skeptical about anyone who raises issues about Microsoft UX digital accessibility. This isn’t unusual for matters of accessibility which can be quickly invisibilised. It doesn’t help that Microsoft has made a pretty strong attempt to ND-wash their work by proactively asserting that it *is* accessible based on their comprehensive(TM) consultation of autistic and ADHD people.

My presentation this past summer marked an attempt to frame out my protest on the level of critical theory.

Since then, I’ve been involved in more practical discussions about what is going on here. Part of my anxiety relates to the way that the tool is meant to mobilise more stringent workplace surveillance as part of “performance management”. For those who haven’t yet been looped in on this concern:

(excerpt: “Your employer can monitor what you’re doing within Teams. They can also log conversations, record calls, and track your camera when you’re in a meeting. But there are also things they cannot do…”)

https://www.guidingtech.com/can-microsoft-teams-be-used-to-spy-on-you/

(excerpt: “Everything from how many meetings that user organized to how many urgent messages they sent is recorded. Separate numbers are given for scheduled meetings and those that were ad hoc. Even individuals’ screen-share time is there… Microsoft is measuring privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons why someone may have been blocked, and “the number of messages a user posted in a private chat.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-microsoft-teams-tracks-users-and-my-head-is-spinning/

Discussion of this by various remote workers here:

Could my boss be using teams for surveillance? To what extent is it possible?
byu/ParmyBarmy inMicrosoftTeams

I had a few thoughts this week on the matter from a more practical level which I wanted to get down here:

  1. I think it’s important to start by opening up the categories a bit, e.g. between the tech we DO use and the tech we WANT to use. So far arguments I’ve heard in favour of using teams (from sympathetic allies) have never rested on a claim that it is a nice / good tool that people actually want to use. The vibe seems to be, this is the thing I have to use, and because inertia / flow I would rather just use one thing please. I totally understand this! But it troubles me a little bit because we’re going with the flow and further consolidating the hold this social communication tool has on our life as a community because we’re too tired to fight it.
  2. I do also think that some of us are exposed in different ways to the downsides of Teams. I know a few people might not worry about surveillance because (a) they are happy to be bold and loud about their radical action (me!) or (b) because they’re already surveilled all the time and it doesn’t matter. But some (disabled) others will find the levels of surveillance and enforcement psychologically unmanageable.
  3. Or some people aren’t really affected by the visual clutter and bad UX choices around “noise” in teams which makes it hard to find information, or to silence unwanted notifications. I know this stuff hits me HARD and some other people are relatively unaffected. Like, I sometimes find that the inability to curate notifications in teams can make me feel panic and that is disabling – there is stuff coming in from lots of different directions and I can’t turn off messages from my HoS or some other team I’ve been drawn into but didn’t want to join. At least for my kind of autism, this is kryptonite. I can’t find things, and I can’t focus the stream of information, and these are mutually reinforcing bad things. And Microsoft has made the tool impossible to customise BECAUSE this gives managers and executives the ability to control the flow of information you receive, and this is a USP for the product.
  4. So it’s a bad tool, but only some of us feel those consequences at levels which are disabling.
  5. But also, teams is embedded in a structural problem, that is, it’s controlled utterly by people who do not consult end users on their product aquisition choices and do not have feedback mechanisms which are tied to authentic willingness to make adaptations. And to get changes made we need to convince those people (who are already skeptical) who aren’t interested in consulting us before they roll out products and policy changes.
  6. So part of my resistance to this tool lies in a political or organisational culture direction – we need to be able to make choices and how we communicate, and if someone wants to tell me that they have utter control over how I receive information and communicate in my day to day work, that is a form of (ableist?) oppression which needs to be resisted at all costs.

Question for #ActuallyAutistic and #ADHD ers, as well as UK HE specialists and lawyers… I’m wondering if it is a breach of the UK 2010 equalities act to deny students reasonable accommodation until they have formal diagnosis of their neurodivergence?

I gather waiting lists for diagnosis are in some local authorities more than 3 years (eg an entire University degree) and the diagnostic instruments authorised for use in most cases (eg ADOS) are known to be significantly flawed (disproportionately denying diagnosis at rates of greater than 2x to non-male, non-cis and non-white folx).

I’ll post later on a deep dive I’ve done into HESA data on underreporting of invisible disabilities in British Universities which is pretty shocking.

But my key curiosity for now is whether it would be reasonable to suggest that Universities are risking viable legal action based on their disability and accommodation policies. It seems that the moral arguments are often less effective than procedural and legal ones, so just vetting tactics of resistance that work within these cultural dynamics…

For those who are wondering, you can find the specifics of the act re: disability here: https://www.gov.uk/definition-of-disability-under-equality-act-2010. A disability which qualifies is “a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities”. I know of some conditions which are de facto be self-certified, but this has always been problematic for autism which is far more medicalised and controlled as a category.

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I’ve been thinking quite a lot this summer about Autism/ADHD and digital accessibility. I’ve experienced a huge amount of personal friction and stress around the various digital tools we’re given, the instability around our offering, etc. but have struggled to articulate what exactly the underpinning source of that challenge is. I suspect there will be some conflicting or diverging needs coming from colleagues navigating similar impulses in different ways. One key issue, I think is that the current model works off of stereotypical presentations and is not drawing actual ND people into the design process.

One of mine big frustrations is when IT tools change their layout just “cause”. I am constantly cursing “try the new outlook” messages which keep popping up with increasing aggressiveness. When I know where stuff is, I can use it really efficiently. When stuff gets moved around, esp. without warning, but also without any functional benefit (e.g. rebranding), it takes energy to reorient, and then friction for several weeks as I get used to the new pattern. Way too many spoons for something that has no link to actual changes in work practice or productivity.

Approaching software from a ND perspective, interface design is really important. Good design has a kind of flow which can make work a joy. I don’t think this is unusual or uniquely neurodivergent as we’ve all worked with an app that made us want to throw a device across the room. But, bad interface design can be literally painful for ND folks to navigate (there is scholarly literature around good UX practice here). All that to say, putting in the time to learn an interface is a major investment of energy. With that in mind, I completely resent unnecessary interface changes that aren’t attached to feature enhancements. Changing the “look” of a piece of software for the sake of an arbitrary rebranding exercise may seem innocuous for many people, but it can actually be a pretty cruel thing to inflict on autistic end-users. So it’s with this in mind that I’ve got a question for the experts here… Microsoft wants me to “try the new outlook for Mac”. I have tried it and prefer not to bother as it is an unnecessary cosmetic change. Microsoft pretends that I have a choice not to adopt this change, but then badgers me with reminders every time I open the app. I have changed and reverted back several times as these “hints” escalate to enforced demands. TBH, if Microsoft can’t figure this all out I’m going to just have to find another email client, as this is the third arbitrary redesign in the Outlook UI in 5 years.

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I’ve spent part of the day yesterday looking into HESA data on staff and students who are reported to HESA for their annual data collections as having reported a disability. The results are pretty stunning.

Quick headlines – general:

According to HESA data, reporting re: invisible disabilities is astonishingly (at least to me!) low. The HESA categories are not great, but bracketing out concerns there for a moment, here’s what we have:

“No known disability/unknown” (falling very slightly year on year until last year) – 2014/15: 95.67%, 2020/21: 94.04%, 2021/22: 94.22%

“Mental health condition” – Sector wide this is reported as a disability for less than 1% of all staff on typical contracts and seems to be falling: 2020/21: 0.93%, 2021/22: 0.77%

“Social communication/Autistic spectrum disorder” follows a general upwards trend:

2014/15: 0.04%, 2015/16: 0.04%, 2016/17: 0.05%, 2017/18: 0.06%, 2018/19: 0.07%, 2019/20: 0.09%, 2020/21: 0.11%, 2021/22: 0.12%

Brief commentary:
Upwards trends are nice, but if we apprecaite that actual prevalence is probably 2-5% of the population, at this rate, the sector wouldn’t even get to 1% until 2075. We can and should have a chat about whether staff should feel like they need to report their autism as a disability, and maybe in a perfect world we wouldn’t need to. Or maybe in a perfect world disability wouldn’t be stigmatised and there wouldn’t be a downside to asking for accommodations. In any case, we are looking at rates of reporting that are exponentially below the actual rates of prevalence (prevalance of “mental health” e.g. low mood or clinical anxiety is generally accepted to be in double digits). Similar realities seem to hold for “Specific learning difficulty” (which I think is meant to be a proxy for dyslexia) and “Another disability, impairment or medical condition” categories. I’m not sure where ADHD is hiding in there

I was inspired to poke around in this data by a recent study by colleagues in the USA, which examined the increase in Autism prevalence data. cf. here: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/u-s-autism-prevalence-continues-to-rise-as-race-and-sex-gaps-shrink-new-stats-show/

As many of you will be aware, prevalence data around autism spectrum conditions has been a soul-destroying ground for conspiracy theories and dissemination of false narratives about an “autism epidemic”. A range of researchers have refuted this over the years, but this study in particular emphasises the way that prevalence figures are increasing primarily due to improvements in diagnosis to counter bias around sex and ethnicity in diagnostic tools. It has become widely known that (obvious in retrospect given the spectrum concept!) that autism presents differently for different gender identities, and historically autistic Black and asian youth have been diagnosed with low IQ instead of autism, so the pool skews towards persons racialised as white as well.

Quick headlines – intersectional elements:

When we compare prevalence (and I’m just going to use autism as an example here, but we could do others) we see signs of this inequality: For 2021/22 AY, female staff = 0.08% reporting, male staff = 0.11%, roughly a 40% difference. That’s not great and seems to confirm that prevalence in reporting maps onto more general gender inequalities. If we look at ethnicity, it’s even more severe. Only 0.04% of persons who report their ethnicity as “Asian” also reported being autistic. These numbers are so small that they are statistically unreliable as HESA anonymises by rounding to 5s. So in 2021/22 only 5-10 people in the ENTIRE higher education sector, this is all staff both non-academic and academic reported autism as a disability. For staff who identify as “Black,” the count in 2021/22 is 0. This means that whomever was being counted as the 1-5 persons in 2020/21 either left the sector or stopped being counted.

The same patterns hold for students:

HESA data for UOB students from 21/22 shows only 0.20% of “Asian” students (6-10 total) 0.30% of “Black” students and 0.87% of “white” students identify being autistic as a disability. Again, for UOB students in 21/22, 0.40% of Female students and 0.96% of Male students. Among students who put down their sex as “Other” for HESA data sector wide 3.24% also reported autism as a disability.

For every category where I looked at UOB data against sector averages, UOB is below the median Half of the sector wide averages in some cases. This intensifies quite sharp questions I already had around why staff (like me!) choose not to report a disability to Uni HR, and by extension equality around who gets to access accommodations, and behind the scenes, cultural and structural injustice around access to diagnosis. It also sharpens questions raised above around the importance and salience of self-diagnosis.

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I’d like to argue for a pluralism of human rationality, that is, that different persons deploy forms of reasoning which are structurally quite different from one another. Such a statement seems, on the face of things, to be obvious, and so it is interesting to note how we do not seem to deploy it in everyday interactions.

What are these differences and how are they constituted?

The first form I’d describe is a difference between working from ideas vs. working from problems. I’ve encountered this in my own daily practice, with scholarly colleagues reflecting upon the ideas they find in books, deploying them as forms of arguments in a relatively free-standing way in debate. In my own mode of reflection, ideas must be situated in some kind of problem or solution context. This is not part of an intellectual programme by which I mean to establish the importance of context through a form of stubborn refusal to engage with ideas lacking in context, and it is important to establish this as many scholars I know do engage in this tactic (with my blessing). What I mean is that I cannot process information coming from various sources without being able to place it in the context of production, that is, why did this information come to be, what prompt, problem or challenge provided the catalyst for the production of this information. If I do not possess this knowledge, everythign coming at me feels very slippery and only with great and artificial effort can I put it in places which synthesise it as information and locate it within a space of understanding (and by extension long-term memory) and comprehension, as opposed to pure noise which fades away quickly.

Now it may be tempting to describe this experience as a problem, a deviation from the norm, or a disability requiring accommodation. Much of my formal learning has treated me as such (albeit implicitly in most cases), where the expectation of proper cognitive functioning was to find ways to translate information coming to me and do so in a way which was as seamless as possible for the person delivering it. This is the way that our culture of disability and accommodations can often reify difference as pathology. The trouble with this is that processing information in the way that I do is clearly not inferior in many ways. To give a few examples, because my mind is constantly looking for a problem and the context for a range of phenomena, I am a skilled diagnostician, often detecting issues intuitively ahead of others, and with more intractable problems, I am able to very quickly deploy deduction and inference (in ways that colleagues who have different ways of thinking are unable to follow without slowdown and narration) in a systematic way towards an understanding of what is happenning. Pedagogical researchers have pointed to the benefits of problem-based inquiry as a mode of teaching and learning which can embed knowledge in more practical and enduring ways for a wide variety of learners. This situation where accommodations for autistic persons can serve as a kind of “rising tide which lifts all boats” strikes me as an important thing to observe. If the unique traits which are being singled out are a problem, and by extension niche and exotic, why is it that forms of accommodation actually deploy a wider range of benefits?

This is just one of many possible examples of ways that processing information and the process of aquiring understanding can be constituted in quite different ways. For some people with the condition known as synesthesia, information is processed in terms of colours, and by extension, things with colour can literally “speak” to them. Some persons with autism have a special facility for intuitively connecting with and communicating with animals. While much attention has been devoted to the ways in which autistic communication can be “overly” literal, there are other forms which veer towards indirect significations of meaning. In some noteworthy cases, people speak using allegories and metaphors in the foreground, leaving co-communicators to process the signification of meaning.

What does this mean for us? I think there is a need to consider first how our own forms of thought and developing understanding represent a unique constellation of processes. We reach understanding with others by constructing bridges out of that uniqueness and into another which is foreign to us. That we do this every day and in every interaction is usually utterly transparent to us, until we reach forms of difference which are more challenging to bridge and require additional work. Sometimes there is a complete breakdown in understanding or communication, which has been represented in the “double empathy” problem. But breakdown in communicaton ought not be seen as a disability in one person, requiring adaptation on their part or accommodation on the part of the receiver, but an unusal level of challenge for a completely regular process.

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so there has been a lot of noise about the flight from birdsite, justifiably so. But I’m left wondering… when are we gonna raise similar protest around the ways that academia.com, researchgate.net, elsevier platforms (like PURE) are enclosing community and dampening FOSS development around sharing of research. The work is just starting folks!

I’m just gleefully watching birdsite go down in flames and wondering, how do we prep the fedi ground for when this happens on fb? Pixelfed is a totally obvious alt to insta, peertube clear victor over yt, and no one wants to replace tic-toc. But I’m intrigued that fb alt options are diverse and generally none well adopted.

Also, for the coders and academics on here, I’m wondering when we start to galvanise protest of proprietary and non-federated repositories. The tech is *out there* e.g. gitea instance federation being worked out and CKAN server federation concept developed more than a half decade ago. But we keep allowing our orgs to pay license fees for walled gardens rather than embrace commons… strange….

For those who are curious about this, see more on CKAN federation here: https://ckan.org/features/federate/ and git activitypub federation here: https://discourse.gitea.io/t/forgefed-federation-in-gitea/1157 #librarians take note!

Worth noting for those who are curious about running your own self hosted git repo which can federate with friends, a gitea fork called forgejo (which runs codeberg) is getting pretty close: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

I wonder what folks out there are doing for code repo? I’ve noticed a lot of migration away from now-Microsoft owned GitHub to places like codeberg. Looks like self-hosted platforms getting closer to federation and social sharing in a decentralized way… Am currently on gitea, but looking around and wondering. What are you on?!

I’m wondering if colleagues in education have been watching the #OpenBadges space? I’ve long been interested in certifying students as the develop transferrable skills in our classes (e.g. visual communication, web design, survey design, etc.) using badges they could deploy alongside their diploma. There’s so much EdTech distractions around monetising the concept and it seemed to stall some years ago. Just wondering if there’s a good option that I haven’t noticed.

One example here: https://openbadges.org. But not sure if this has been used in (non-monetised ways in) Higher Ed?

The whole field seems ripe for federated open access disruption. Reminiscent of DNS and SSL cert provision, trying to enclose digital commons by glueing revenue generation to FOSS technologies. Universities have expertise and infrastructure to selfhost and develop cert auth, creative talent for visual design. It seems absurd to pay edtech startups to develop and even more ironic to squeeze tuition paying students to “certify’ their learning rather than approach as value-add.

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My current take on least subverted options for digital chat:

1. Matrix
2. Mastodon, GNU Social, Diaspora (e.g. activitypub)
3. See “honourable mention” below
4. Telegram / Signal / Keybase (centralised but virtuous)

Honourable mention (exciting, but still a bit experimental):

* Secure scuttlebutt
* DAT

“yuck” – Please don’t make me use:

1. FB messenger / whatsapp
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIn
5. Instagram
6. etc., etc., etc.

I also think it’s really time to revisit human communication technologies as public utility. Seems like this should be a first
principle. To be clear I do not mean a “utility” controlled by our emerging fascist democracies, but true *public* as in developed and maintained transparently in the commons.

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If you’re looking for some post-earth-day reading, just up on the International Affairs blog, an interview I did a few weeks ago on “Understanding religious environmentalism” (which covers some high points from recent journal article in IA). I’ll include the text below just for the sake of ease:

When looking at the recent rise in environmental activism an often-neglected factor is the role played by religious environmental groups. From eco-churches to interdenominational and multi-faith organisations, religious environmental groups have played a key organisational role within the environmental movement in the UK and beyond. But how can policy makers better understand and support religious environmentalism? We spoke to Jeremy Kidwell from the University of Birmingham about his research into the politics of religious environmentalism.

What are the most common pitfalls you see policymakers falling into when trying to understand religious environmentalism?

Many people in a governance context, particularly international governance, approach major religious organisations assuming there’s a clear top-down flow to decision-making. People will approach Christian environmental organisations and assume that if you can get to their religious leaders, then they’ll just disseminate the information for you. In reality things are more complicated.

One example I point to is Laudato Si, an encyclical [Papal statement] from Pope Francis which was published in 2015. This was really exciting because it was the first official statement of a position toward papal environmental activism. However, some research by Pew conducted before and after the encyclical was released, indicates that Roman Catholics weren’t necessarily changing their environmental behaviours in response to the article and many had never read or even heard of it. Sometimes people in larger organizations assume that if you can get to senior figures within a religion, you’ll be successful in having an impact, when this isn’t necessarily the case.

Mapping the field of religious environmental politics article.

If this high-level work is not as effective as it’s perceived to be, what are the implications for how and if people choose to work with religious groups when supporting the environmental movement?

I think people could assume based on what I’ve just said that if worshippers aren’t paying attention to their leaders, what’s the point of engaging with religious environmental organisations? That would be a real disappointment because there’s a unique opportunity we miss when we don’t have effective engagement. In the UK, of all different types of environmental groups operating at the sub-national level, the most numerous are these religious environmental groups. Yes, religious environmental groups are more complicated than some might expect but given the scale of the role they play there is huge potential for nuanced engagement and we really are already working in similarly nuanced ways with other demographic groups.

You write about the complexity and variety of how religious groups are structured. What do these structures look like, and what examples are there of effective engagement that capitalises on this complexity?

In the article, I develop four categories for understanding local engagement which underlines the many iterations this kind of mobilisation can take: from the lone individual who’s doing good work but is a bit isolated to the large local groups which have all kinds of different participation in them. This reflects the fact that local branches of religious environmental organisations vary in the structure and size of groups and in the dynamic of their relationship to parent organisations.

In terms of positive examples of operationalizing this complexity, a great example can be seen in the work of Eco-Congregation Scotland as a large multi-denominational organisation. Eco-Congregation Scotland realised that there were many different environmental groups across their networks that weren’t necessarily coordinating with each other at local and regional levels. In response, they actively developed regional networks between their local groups, forming collections of units that were better able to practically support each other and coordinate their activities. So there are opportunities for working in a lateral way across groups but sometimes that needs an outsider to come in and make those connections.

How does this mid- and local-level coordination look when carried out by explicitly multi-faith organisations?

That’s a big question. On a local level I’ve been to many gatherings where you’ve got people who are mobilized because of their religion, but it’s not uniform in terms of what religion each person is from. You have people from all different faiths all hanging out together talking about why their faith is relevant.

One area where you see this is in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement. For the People’s Climate March in New York religious groups marched in relatively separate blocks, with different songs and posters. XR is much messier. They tried to create a faith bridge at the most recent London demonstration, which was going to be a focal point for all the people of faith, to bring that aspect of their environmentalism forward, but one of the problems with this was that people felt a little uncomfortable trying to contain the ‘religious’ aspect in just one place. I think part of the ongoing learning there is that religion is more prevalent than we expect and the everyday expression of it can confound our stereotypes.

If these networks are often porous and focused around pockets of shared organisational culture, how do you see tensions between organisational levels playing out and what are the lessons for policymakers?

One of the classic case studies that you could look at would be the divestment movement. Look at religious environmental divestment campaigns within denominations, like the Church of Scotland for example, which just completely fizzle when you get to big synod meetings. You may have huge support at the grassroots for divestment but when you get to the bureaucratic meeting with the standard elected leadership, there is a real lack of interest or even obstruction for sometimes arbitrary and unanticipated reasons.

This partly explains why this model I’m trying to develop is important. For large organizations like Greenpeace or the WWF I think there are real opportunities to create campaigns that connect with local churches. Our first reflex might be to try direct market campaigns to the individuals (in the basis of their religion), you might say ‘we know that there are a bunch of individuals that all go to church, could we find a campaign that would connect with those people on the level of their church belonging?’. An organisation like Christian Aid has done an excellent job of mobilising people at these intermediate organisational levels. I think these opportunities are there for effective campaigns that are being missed when policymakers focus either on the senior hierarchy or individuals in isolation of their various forms of belonging.

Isn’t there a risk of alienating the senior religious and bureaucratic leadership of the organisations you’re working with?

Even if you’re a big organization, you don’t want to burn your bridges. As I discuss in my article, within international relations there’s an appreciation of the fact that we’re not often dealing with easily defined political units. Elinor Ostrom refers to this in what she calls polycentric reality; that we’re not just working with a nation state but a whole interlinked web of different policies and actors vying for significance. It’s the same with religious environmentalism. We need to take the knowledge that we have of the complexities of political action and use it in the context of religion by working on multiple levels simultaneously.

I also think there’s a need, at the highest levels organizationally, to start comparing playbooks. The landscape is complex, and no single NGO or government unit can connect with everyone effectively. In any given area there might be different organizations with specific denominational and organisational knowledge that can succeed best supporting different parts of the religious environmental network. If we can divide up the landscape and tackle it in different ways, I think that could lead to some really effective work, particularly working with conservatives who are currently not highly engaged by the movement.

You mention the difficulties sometimes encountered when engaging with more conservative religious groups. What does this look like in practice?

Here’s another area where stereotypes can impair effective engagement. To give one example, during research I did with a religious environmental movement, I noticed when we were discussing their footprint of local groups that they didn’t have any groups in a particular local area. When I asked why, the answer was that the region was traditionally conservative and that they just aren’t interested in environmental activism (that wasn’t the actual wording). I thought this was interesting so I made a trip over and did some interviews.

I found that the reason that groups hadn’t joined the network wasn’t because of opposition to environmentalism, but simply because no one had invited them to join. I think we operate in a political context where stereotypes about ostensibly conservative religious groups get tacitly mobilized in a way that produces the lack of engagement they predict. The big lesson for the environmental movement from this, is that we should try to talk to people who we think are a lost cause. There are tonnes of unexpected opportunities hiding in plain sight.


Jeremy Kidwell is Senior Lecturer in Theological Ethics at the University of Birmingham.

His recent article ‘Mapping the field of religious environmental politics’, was published in the March 2020 issue of International Affairs. It formed part of a section of articles on ‘Engaging religions and religious studies in international affairs’, guest-edited by Katherine Brown. Read the article online here.

Joseph Hills is the Editorial Assistant for International Affairs.