The Echo
THE UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS’ STUDENT NEWSPAPER
WEDNESDAY
APRIL 12, 2017 Volume 111 — Issue 23
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76/56 THE NEWSDESK FROM THE EDITOR
I N T E R N AT I O N A L
Girl found in India forest lives, acts like monkey A girl was found in the forests of India living with a group of monkeys. The girl is believed to be 10 or 12 and is unable to speak; she was found naked and emaciated and was taken to a hospital. Medical staff said she behaved like an animal, ran on all four legs and ate off the floor with her mouth. After treatment, she began behaving normally and eating with her hands. The girl was spotted by woodcutters who were chased away by the monkeys when they tried to rescue her. Police are determined to find the girl’s parents and determine how she ended up in the forest.
N AT I O N A L photo courtesy of Leah Horton
After gas attack in Syria, U.S. launches airstrike
Lecturer II and assistant chair of the biology department Leah Horton completed her Ph.D. in interdisciplinary leadership. Horton’s dissertation is titled “Toward Capabilities-Based Environmental Leadership; A Case Study from Kanembwe, Rwanda.”
The U.S. has officially launched a military airstrike on an airbase in Syria. The airstrike consisted of 50 tomahawk missiles that were fired at Shayrat Air Base in Homs Province, Syria. The strike was prompted by a sarin gas attack by Syrian leaders that killed at least 86 civilians, including 30 children and 20 women. President Donald Trump said “something should happen” to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
46-year-old man accuses mayor of rape, molesting
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has been accused of sexually molesting a teenage high-school dropout in the 1980s. Murray denied the allegations presented by a 46-year-old man, who accused Murray of raping and molesting him over several years. The man said he came forward as part of a healing process.
S TAT E
Little Rock Zoo welcomes new female rhino Andazi The Little Rock Zoo welcomed a new female rhino named Andazi. She will join the exhibit’s male rhino, Johari, this week. Andazi is a 10-year-old, eastern black rhino that was transferred from Zoo Atlanta to be a part of the breeding program. There are only 5,000 black rhinos that exist in the wild today and the breeding program is critical for their survival.
Assistant chair of biology works to improve Rwanda by Sophia Ordaz Entertainment Editor
Leah Horton, lecturer II and assistant chair of the biology cepartment, recently attained her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Leadership, capping off her doctorate with her dissertation, “Toward Capabilities-Based Environmental Leadership: A Case Study from Kanembwe, Rwanda.” The dissertation emerged from the intersection between an economic theory called the capability approach and The Gusangira Project, an annual UCA service-learning trip to Rwanda that Horton and Director of Learning Communities Jayme Millsap Stone began in 2012. “The Gusangira Project team and I were very taken with how nice the people [in Rwanda] were but also just the complete poverty that we saw around us,” Horton said. “We were really filled with this desire . . . to do something to work with the people to try to make their lives better. So it was really important for us that we find a project that the people there wanted to do,
UCA welcomes the first Latina sorority on campus, Sigma Iota Alpha, Inc.
SGA voted to approve a resolution that would extend the 2020 academic school year and to start the year on a Monday, instead of a Thursday. Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Runge said the proposed calendar would allow more lab and studio times for students, and would add three more days of classes to each semester. “We have a lot of broken weeks in the fall semester and
it makes it difficult for lab and studio classes,” Runge said. “We really need a full week to have all classes.” Runge said the calendar would also help with retention rates because Welcome Week would be a full week, causing the often skipped “syllabus days” to fall on a Monday and Tuesday. “Students most often skip the first Thursday and Friday of the semester,” Runge said. “We think this is really going to improve learning on campus.” Runge said that waiting until
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Although Kanembwe’s leadership acknowledged the importance of rocket stoves, the workers who helped install the rocket stoves were, at first, primarily interested in a paying job rather than the benefits that could come from the stoves, Horton said. At the end of her 2016 trip, Horton observed that many of the villagers were recognizing the benefits of the rocket stoves and were motivated to share their knowledge with other communities. Horton sees the work that went into her dissertation as a first step in gathering data that can help improve Kanembwe and communities like it. She hopes to further quantify the benefits of rocket stoves to strengthen the case for funding future projects in Kanembwe. “We know from what the people tell us qualitatively in their interviews that the rocket stoves are cleaner and they make less smoke, but we want to measure that because from a public health perspective, smoke exposure from cooking over open fires is one of the leading causes of respirator and
eye disease in the developing world,” Horton said. “The more data that we can get that show the benefit of the stove, the better case we’re going to be able to make for funding for additional projects in the future that can continue to benefit the village.” The interdisciplinary leadership program’s goal to promote the common good first inspired Horton to pursue her doctorate. Now that she has completed the program, Horton emphasized the importance of using the skills she gained through her dissertation research to influence local and national environmental policy. “There’s no reason that we have to go to Rwanda to do these kinds of studies, especially with the current political climate,” Horton said. “An environmental leadership perspective that uses the capabilities approach is even more valuable now because if we’re going to be able to convince policy makers to make environmental policy that is good for the environment, we also are going to have to make a really strong case and show how it benefits the people.”
SGA votes on resolution to extend academic school year
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“From my Ph.D. program, I was introduced to a body of literature called the capability approach, which is interested in answering the question, ‘What is every individual able to do and to be?’” Horton said. “Typically, capabilities are another way of investigating quality of life that’s not just looking at economic markers like GDP.” Horton found that rocket stoves improved the lives of villagers with limited resources, widening their respective capabilities to better their quality of life with the time saved from collecting firewood. “The capability approach literature tends to be pretty abstract and philosophical . . . with a need for the theory to be operationalized and to be supported with more empirical study,” Peter Mehl, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a member of Horton’s dissertation committee said. “Leah’s dissertation research does just this . . . she extends the empirical support for the theory through her experiments with the rocket stoves and her extensive interviews with the people she lived and worked with.”
WINTER BREAK
by Caroline Bivens
WHAT’S AHEAD
[instead of ] coming in, saying, ‘We think this is what you need to do to make your lives better.’” Over the past five years, Horton has focused on improving Kanembwe, a village in Western Rwanda, through environmental leadership. The group taught the villagers how to build rocket stoves, a more environmentally friendly and time-saving cooking appliance. “We came up with the idea of building rocket stoves in the village to help reduce how much firewood [the villagers] were burning while they were cooking because firewood is the main source of energy,” Horton said. “Our students had collected some data about firewood collection habits, and what we were finding was that when the people didn’t have money to buy firewood, they were spending upwards of five hours a day gathering it.” In her dissertation, Horton analyzed the Gusangira Project’s effects with the language of the capability approach, a method of outlining human rights and describing quality of life by taking into account what an individual is capable of achieving.
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2020 would allow plenty of time to debate and plan in advance. There has been no discussion of the extra days adding extra tuition fees. The proposed calendar would also make the winter break shorter, causing students to leave for the break on Saturday, Dec. 19 and return on Monday, Jan. 11. “It’s easier to schedule and it allows for more experience for students for the entire semester,” Runge said. “Having a complete week makes a difference.”
Sophomore Class President Kelli Collins was in favor of the proposal, but expressed concern about the six extra days a year. “I’m already meeting my requirements now, so it just means I have to come three more days a semester,” Collins said. “I just don’t feel like I’ll be getting anything out of it.” Freshman Class President Cortney Banning was against the proposal because she believes winter break is essential for students recovering from the semester. “Christmas break is when
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I get my life together, and there will be weeks taken off,” Banning said. “I just don’t think freshman would like that.” Junior Class Vice President Lauren Reding was also against the proposal, saying she didn’t believe that extending Welcome Week would increase retention rates or get students more involved on campus. “I think that’s just wishful thinking, students aren’t going to do that,” Reding said. “I know I would rather work . . . during that time than play games.”
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Study abroad too pricy Students should experience culture, without paying fees
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