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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The impact of baseline BMI on glycemic response to group medical visits (GMV) and weight management (WM)-based interventions is unclear. Our objective is to determine how baseline BMI class impacts patient responses to GMV and interventions that combine WM/GMV. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We will perform a secondary analysis of Jump Start, a randomized, controlled trial that compared the effectiveness of a GMV-based low carbohydrate diet-focused WM program (WM/GMV) to traditional GMV-based medication management (GMV) on diabetes control. The primary and secondary outcomes will be change in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) and weight at 48 months, respectively. Study participants will be stratified into BMI categories defined by BMI 27-29.9kg/m2, 30.0-34.9kg/m2, 35.0-39.9kg/m2, and ≥40.0kg/m2. Hierarchical mixed models will be used to examine the differential impact of the WM/GMV intervention compared to GMV on changes in outcomes by BMI class category. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Jump Start enrolled 263 overweight Veterans (BMI ≥ 27kg/m2) with type 2 diabetes. At baseline, mean BMI was 35.3 and mean HbA1c was 9.1. 14.5% were overweight (BMI 27–29.9) and 84.5% were obese (BMI ≥ 30). The proposed analyses are ongoing. We anticipate that patients in the higher BMI obesity classes will demonstrate greater reductions in HbA1c and weight with the WM/GMV intervention relative to traditional GMV. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This work will advance the understanding of the relationship between BMI and glycemic response to targeted interventions, and may ultimately provide guidance for interventions for type 2 diabetes.
Disasters are typically unforeseen, causing most social and behavioral studies about disasters to be reactive. Occasionally, predisaster data are available, for example, when disasters happen while a study is already in progress or where data collected for other purposes already exist, but planned pre-post designs are all but nonexistent. This gap fundamentally limits the quantification of disasters’ human toll. Anticipating, responding to, and managing public reactions require a means of tracking and understanding those reactions, collected using rigorous scientific methods. Oftentimes, self-reports from the public are the best or only source of information, such as perceived risk, behavioral intentions, and social learning. Significant advancement in disaster research, to best inform practice and policy, requires well-designed surveys with large probability-based samples and longitudinal assessment of individuals across the life-cycle of a disaster and across multiple disasters.
The final chapter lays out strategies for reducing poverty and discusses three areas of work. The first is to pursue a broader frame for the work in order to command national attention more effectively, by including people with incomes twice the poverty lines and emphasizing both the interests of people of all races and the unique interests of people of color and of women, and by fighting the ever-widening chasm of inequality as well. The second is to consolidate our work about issues of income, jobs, and cash assistance, which the chapter calls the three-legged stool. It argues that past strategies have tended to consider these areas in isolation, not thinking of them coordinately and, therefore, failing to produce the most effective results possible. Wages, quality, and income supplements for workers; job creation as needed; and cash assistance must work in tandem to get the best outcomes. Finally, to move forward in very low-income areas (both urban and rural), actors must have a perspective of place that addresses all the multiple causes that produce the high poverty.
In stark contrast to the ideal of an impartial judge who reaches a decision by impassively applying the law to the facts of a case, decades of research on judicial decision-making show that judicial reasoning is in reality affected by judges’ political views and attitudes, by strategic considerations, and by historical and cultural factors. Attitudinal theorists emphasize the impact of judges’ ideological values on judicial decision-making and point out that, especially where law is ambiguous, partisan voting tends to influence judicial thinking (Epstein, Landes, and Posner 2013; Pritchett 1948; Segal and Cover 1989). Strategic choice scholars qualify the attitudinal model by arguing that judges take into account the preferences of their colleagues, elected officials, and the public, in part to minimize the likelihood that their decisions will be overturned (Epstein and Knight 1998; Wahlbeck, Spriggs, and Maltzman 1998; Epstein and Knight 2000).
We propose that food-related uncertainty is but one of multiple cues that predicts harsh conditions and may activate “incentive hope.” An evolutionarily adaptive response to these would have been to shift to a behavioral-metabolic phenotype geared toward facing hardship. In modernity, this phenotype may lead to pathologies such as obesity and hoarding. Our perspective suggests a novel therapeutic approach.
By
A. Edelman, James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA,
P. B. Littlewood, James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago
By
P. B. Littlewood, University of Chicago, USA,
A. Edelman, James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
A central idea of this book is that claims to autonomy are important for the agents in theatre fields, but for a variety of reasons; autonomy is useful, but different agents will use it differently. This chapter is devoted to analysing how agents claim theatrical autonomy and to what ends. We begin this chapter with a closer look at how agents, through their claims to autonomy, can change the dynamics of a theatre field, including an examination of those agents who serve in the important and distinct role of consecrators. This also includes a look at agents who are not able to make a successful claim to autonomy because of the position they take within the field. As our examples will demonstrate, the dynamics of the field cannot be understood simply as a question of claiming as much autonomy as possible from a position that is as autonomous as possible. A successful claim to autonomy might also be made from the more heteronomous parts of the field. In the last section of the chapter, we analyse what agents in the theatre field gain by claiming autonomy. First, we analyse how their claims offer them possibilities inside the theatre field. This largely regards how agents position themselves (or take up new positions) within the field. But these possibilities are not limited to the theatre field itself. Claims to autonomy also make for possibilities to influence and interact with other fields—and thus other value systems—such as the political and economic field.
Claims to autonomy influence the shape of the theatre field
By their actions, agents can affect and thus change the dynamics of a theatre field. However, they cannot do so arbitrarily. As we argued in Chapter 1, we understand the theatre field as historically constructed and continuously reconstructed by the agents within it. In this section, we will examine how agents claim and thus use autonomy when positioning themselves within the theatre field.
Consecrating agents
A quite particular means by which some agents can change the theatre field's dynamics is the process of consecration. Such agents are able to influence the distribution of capitals between the agents in the field (and thus their ability to claim autonomy) by serving as gatekeepers, ensuring that uninitiated outsiders do not make specious claims to theatrical autonomy.
When we go to the theatre, we understand that we are doing something different. It is not just that sitting and watching others for two hours (or performing for others’ gazes) is different than other daily activities; it is that theatre itself is a particular social setting, obeying its own rules and operating by its own standards. That difference makes theatre feel free and unencumbered by many of the things that tie us to society and the world in the rest of our lives. Of course, this feeling is misleading. Theatre may be distinct, but it is still connected to the wider world. Performances may be built out of the forms, ideas and material from the ‘real world’, and as audience members, we may take the experiences, stories and insights we find in the theatre with us when we leave, and make use of them in our daily lives. How is it, then, that theatre is distinct from—and yet connected to—the social world around it? This book explores that question. We aim to describe the particular relationship that theatre has to the larger social world, how that relationship works, what it enables theatre to do and how it can change.
When scholars want to refer to the difference between an art form like theatre and the rest of our lives, they refer to artistic autonomy. The concept makes intuitive sense to us as theatregoers: we recognize theatre's difference from other aspects of our lives. Theatre makers also recognize their field's autonomy. They know that, when they engage in their work, they ‘play the game of theatre’ and make conscious and unconscious decisions according to or against the rules of that game. But they are also aware that this autonomy is not absolute. They still need to earn a living, communicate with others, vote, eat, make ethical decisions and so on. And even a theatrical performance itself is not completely free: to work, it needs to be funded, produced, distributed, advertised, attended and comprehended, all of which involve links with the outside world. And yet, the particularity of theatre remains.
There is a tension here. On the one hand, theatre makers and theatregoers want theatre to be something distinct from ordinary life. On the other hand, they know that theatre depends on a web of relationships with the rest of the world.
Now that we have discussed the concept of autonomy, the agents in and around the theatre field who make claims to it, and the reasons why they do so, we need to turn our attention to autonomy's relationship to the shape of theatre fields as a whole. The aim of this chapter is to describe the ways in which organizational forces shape and mediate autonomy in theatrical fields, and are, in turn, shaped by the autonomy they mediate. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the formal and informal structures that organize, fund and maintain theatrical infrastructure (i.e. the relationship between B and C in Figure 1). Changes in organizational features of theatre fields provide rich study material for the sociology of theatre.
In his analysis of artistic fields, Bourdieu never offered an extensive discussion of public subsidy, as he considered it to be a political force heteronomous to the field. Nonetheless, in an interview included in the Norwegian translation of Reponses. Pour une anthropologie reflexive, he suggested that other types of capital, such as political capital, might be relevant for the Nordic countries with their tradition of a strong, intervening welfare state (Bourdieu 1993e [1992], 246–247). Building on this, cultural policy researcher Per Mangset suggests that the introduction of modern cultural policy has influenced and shaped the artistic field, at least in Norway (Mangset 1998, 117–123). We have extended this idea to include other European countries with a strong cultural policy tradition. This necessitates that we address the question of how different countries’ political structures deal with the notion of autonomy of the field in both the subsidy-based funding systems and the theatrical training systems. There is no doubt that the state and its recognition play an important role in the process of claiming autonomy, but it is not always a simple one.
This is a paradox in cultural policy, which we will address continuously throughout this and the next chapter: though the political field on the one hand is obviously outside of the theatrical field and has its own valued capitals (social betterment, promotion of national or local identity or economic prosperity, for instance), it often does not intervene in the theatrical field to advance its own values directly. Rather, it does so in order to reinforce or protect the autonomous values of the theatrical field from third (social, political or economic) forces.
As any devoted theatregoer will attest, watching a performance is a unique experience, as the social setting, rules, and standards of theatre often combine to create a feeling of liberation from the everyday world. This book explores the phenomenon of theatre as simultaneously distinct from and yet connected to society as a whole. Combining theoretical reflections with materials from European case studies, the authors offer intriguing new methods for the sociological study of theatre while contributing equally to theatre and performance studies.
Based on the idea that claims to autonomy can work in different ways, we move forward by introducing analytical examples at work. We start out by discussing an objection towards the argument that we advance in this book—that the problematics of autonomy provide a key tool for the development of a sociology of theatre. The objection is that, while the notion of autonomy may have been a useful tool in the past, it is simply not relevant to theatre in its contemporary form. Does contemporary theatre, with its keen awareness of itself as a social activity and its frequently critical stance towards that, still make a claim to autonomy? This chapter sets out our response to that argument. Through the analyses of different types of contemporary theatre forms, we will demonstrate that much contemporary theatre depends on a claim to autonomy, even if those claims are critical or implicit.
In this chapter, we will focus on the aesthetics of contemporary forms of theatre and investigate how these allow agents in and around performances to stake claims to autonomy. First, through a pair of examples, we will examine two forms of the argument against the importance of autonomy for contemporary theatre—the strong and the weak form. We will relate these objections back to our conception of the relationships within and around the theatrical field as presented in Figure 1 in the introduction. Then, we will discuss three different forms of contemporary theatre that seem to weaken or question the pursuit of specific value in theatre practices: post-dramatic and immersive theatre; verbatim and documentary theatre; and applied and community theatre. We will also take a closer look at the heteronomous part of theatre fields that, though not relying on a direct claim to autonomy, have developed specific forms that do still participate in the field's autonomy in meaningful ways. These forms include the commercial musical and stand-up comedy. They present their own compromises between value regimes that are sustained in an implicit (and sometimes more explicit) claim to theatrical autonomy. Through these examples and analysis, we will demonstrate that autonomy continues to be a necessary and useful intellectual tool for understanding the place that the theatre occupies in our contemporary society, even if claims to it are more opaque than they once were.
In ordinary English, the word ‘autonomy’ is used to mean something very close to ‘freedom’. So, for many people, the term ‘the autonomy of the arts’ would seem to refer to the freedom of artists to make the work they wish to, how they wish to and where they wish to, without political or ethical constraints. But this is not what we mean by autonomy in this book. Here, we propose autonomy as a structural property of social fields. This is an essential difference. We want to propose that autonomy is a part of the basic structure of an area of human activity that we will call a social ‘field’. These fields are social spaces in which people come together to pursue the same sorts of practices so that they all understand, more or less, what others are doing, and thus are able to work with one another cooperatively, competitively and creatively. Autonomy, then, is what separates one field from others: what makes the field of law different from the business world or the art world, for instance. A social field that does not have a certain degree of autonomy simply does not exist as a field at all. Elements within that social field may have different relationships to that field's autonomy or exemplify it to a greater or lesser degree, but it only makes sense to talk about their autonomy in relationship to their membership of (and place within) a field.
We need to make use of this understanding of autonomy—and not the more general concept of artistic freedom—if the concept is to be useful in shedding light on the role of the arts in society. If autonomy is simply a question of the rights of artists, the concept may be useful for engaging in political debates but will do little to move beyond them. A rights-based discourse will do little to help us once these rights clash with the rights of others or with other values (such as justice or democracy) that a society holds dear. A fuller, more genuinely social concept of autonomy, such as the one we propose here, will be a more helpful tool in understanding the function that theatrical events have in and for society.