Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque has been an expert source for the media on gun violence for years and has also regularly authored opinion pieces on the topic. In the wake of the mass shootings in Lewiston, one year ago, he wrote , calling for legislative action, as well as .

But in , Rocque took a new approach to the issue, delving into the available data around weapons used for hunting versus self-defense, and calling for more nuance in discussions on how gun volume in the U.S. relates to violence. 

Raised in Maine, Rocque has been a hunter since he was a boy. He vividly recalls taking his required hunting safety course with his father at his side. As a sociologist, he’s long puzzled over why Maine, a place with a high rate of gun ownership, has had low rates of gun crimes. But as he writes now, “I was overlooking the reality that a large portion of guns [in Maine] are likely meant for killing wildlife. What’s the difference? I would argue a lot.” 

“There is a symbolic difference between owning weapons for hunting and owning weapons for sport or defense. The former is not infused with the implication of violence against humans. The latter carries with it that possibility.”

�ֲ���ý News had questions for Rocque about how this piece came about, his evolving thoughts on how a decrease in hunting nationwide might be linked to the data around guns and violence and what’s next for him in terms of scholarship.

BN: When did you realize that you’d been overlooking this differential between Maine’s relatively low gun violence rates versus its high rate of gun ownership? 

MR: I thought about this initially when the Maine Legislature was considering a group of gun laws a few years ago and the media was asking me questions about how much of a likelihood there was for a mass shooting in Maine. We have low gun crime but relatively high gun suicide rates, which is part of this puzzle. 

BN: In the piece you review some of the studies available and outline what we are missing in terms of data. There’s no national registry of guns in the U.S., or comprehensive data on the amount and type of guns that Americans own. There have been some analyses around types of firearms, such as handguns, but not much in the way of studies around a possible connection between hunting and crime.

While you as a hunter are horrified by even the idea that a gun you buy for hunting could be used to harm a human being, you write, “an argument can be made that hunting would be related to a higher propensity to commit crime. After all, hunters kill animals and are used to handling weapons. Perhaps a willingness to take a life translates to a greater willingness to cause pain across species.” But you haven’t found any data that show a conclusive connection between hunting and crime, one way or another. Does this mean you’re about to dive deeper into this as a scholar?

MR: I would very much be interested in exploring this topic further on more than a surface level. I think there are interesting logical arguments to be made about how hunting may be related to crimes. Putting data to work to better understand this relationship is important and can add nuance to the gun debate we’ve been having for 50 years.

BN: What has the response to the Slate article been so far? Have you heard from a lot of hunters? You write about being in the woods with your dad’s old hunting buddy Jack and his stance that “it’s not the guns, it’s the people” behind these mass shootings. While you write, “No, guns on their own don’t kill people, but they do allow a person intent on killing an easy way to do so,” you’re not picking a fight with him. You’re more interested in nuance, and frustrated by the way both sides, as you write, “overlook so many shades of grey.”

Have you heard from Jack since the piece was published? Or others? 

MR: I have not heard from Jack but I’m looking forward to discussing the ideas with him. I have heard from a few people who have appreciated the perspective and a few who think I missed the mark. It’s always great to write something that people are considering and thinking about even if they disagree though.

BN: You seem to draw the conclusion that the decrease in hunting nationwide — i.e., gun ownership not just for sport but also literally for filling freezers for families to eat — and the increase in gun crime might be linked. Is this right?

MR: Yes, and more specifically, if the decrease in hunting is linked to mass shootings. The connection is a bit complex and not likely to be direct, but to the extent that there are more guns in circulation now and fewer hunters suggests that those guns are meant to be used on humans, not animals.

BN: Do you mean that given that the number of hunters continues to decline, it’s hard to overlook that, overall, the purpose of gun ownership has shifted? 

MR: Yes, I think that’s a fair question to ask. We know that the NRA, for example, shifted quite significantly from advocating for gun safety initially to now primarily being concerned with making sure there are no limits to gun ownership. So I think culturally there has been a big shift in the US. .in terms of what guns mean and what they symbolize.

BN: How did this piece end up in Slate?  

MR: My �ֲ���ý colleague [Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies] Tyler Harper let me know that one of their editors was interested in essays exploring the gun debate in unique ways, and she mentioned hunting in her list of possible topics. I pitched the idea to her, and she accepted it in the spring but wanted to wait until hunting season before running it.

BN: I know you’ve been working , which sounds fascinating. Will you have to put that aside to do this work on gun ownership?

MR: The lobster project is my main priority in terms of research but the violence and gun crime topic is still one that I’m working on with some colleagues across the country. I like to diversify the topics that I work on to avoid burnout!

This month’s selection of media coverage highlighting the insight, expertise and achievements of �ֲ���ý professors has a little bit of everything, from the presidential election to personal economics, news about a top literary award, and even, a major fish tale.

For a creative writing professor who is also a novelist, there’s nothing like being in the running for a major book award to spread the word about your novel in a wide variety of publications. That’s what happened to Lecturer in English Jessica Anthony ’96 this week when her novel The Most was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Meanwhile, economics professor Paul Shea weighed in on American personal savings rates for Marketplace and the newest issue of The Atlantic includes a deep dive by Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental studies, into the secret world of extreme fishing. Wetsuit required. Read below to learn more and get links to coverage of other faculty members in the news.

Jessica Anthony ’96

National Book Foundation announces the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction — People

The fourth novel by Lecturer in English Jessica Anthony ’96, The Most, made the National Book Foundation’s longlist of 10 books for its 2024 Fiction prize. The news was featured in numerous outlets, including , and , along with .

Here’s what the had to say about Anthony’s book:

“This year’s Fiction Longlist features two titles that interrogate the role of gender in marriage, in sex, and in artmaking. On an unusually warm Sunday in November, housewife, mother, and former tennis champion Kathleen Beckett puts on her old, red bathing suit, enters her apartment complex’s semi-abandoned pool, and refuses to come out. Set over the course of eight hours, Jessica Anthony’s The Most paints an intimate portrait of marriage in the late 1950s — and the secrets, expectations, and lost loves that tells the story of one seemingly unremarkable couple and a larger cultural moment.”

The finalists will be announced Oct. 1.

For more on Anthony’s much-lauded novel, and her insights into her craft, see earlier coverage from �ֲ���ý News.

Paul Shea

Americans are spending a lot and not saving much. Economists aren’t too worried. Yet — Marketplace

Marketplace tapped into Dowling Family Professor of Economics Paul Shea’s expertise for a story about news from the Bureau of Economic Analysis . The savings rate in July was only 2.9 percent, while at the same time consumer spending increased.

“The spending part is a sign of a strong economy,” Marketplace‘s story read. “But the data shows we’re continuing to buy stuff while not putting money away. You can see the problem here.”

Paraphrasing Shea’s reassurances, Marketplace reporter Caleigh Wells wrote “it’s not that saving rates are frighteningly low, it’s just that they’re coming down from when they were really high early in the pandemic, when people had money to spend and nothing to spend it on. Now things are different.”

Then she quoted Shea directly: “The average household is, in a way, normalizing. They’re starting to move towards more normal levels of debt.”

Francesco Duina

Who cares about inequality, and what should we do if we want less of it? —Researching Sociology

Writing for the blog Researching Sociology, Dana Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina and colleague Cary Wu . 

Historically in America, across party lines, the richer one was, the less worried they were about income inequality. “In 1987, for instance, poorer Democrats and Republicans [both] perceived income differentials to be too big,” the scholars write.

But now, party affiliation plays a huge role in how people view income inequality. Across all income levels, “those who identify as Democrats care a great deal about income inequality while those who identify themselves as Republicans…care a lot less.” But “concern [about income inequality] among poorer Republicans has actually dropped over time.”

For the blog post, the scholars drew from their recent article, , “Political Polarization and the Dynamics Between Actual Income and Perceived Income Inequality in the United States, 1987 to 2021.”

John Baughman

Maine political scholars see no precedent for divisive, unpredictable presidential race — Portland Press Herald

Published prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race, , associate professor of politics, and other Maine politics scholars about the fraught race.

Baughman spoke to comparisons to the 1968 election, when incumbent Lyndon Johnson declined to seek a second term. While comparisons to the 1968 election are valid, today’s political climate is driven more by negative partisanship than in the past, Baughman said.

“I don’t want to overplay how fraught politics are today in light of what was happening then with Vietnam and civil rights, but I think there is one thing different now that is important to consider, and that’s the role of negative partisanship in driving behavior of voters.”

Tyler Austin Harper

Inside the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing — The Atlantic

Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies who is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, writes about his penchant for . Eighty nights a year no less.

This despite some expert guidance he got when first getting into the sport of “wetsuiting” a few years ago: “The advice I received from another fisherman was simply: �ٴDz�’t.”

Wetsuiting is a form of saltwater fishing that involves wearing a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks — almost exclusively at night, often during storms — to access deeper water or faster currents than can be reached in traditional waders.

For Harper, the quarry is striped bass, a popular gamefish that migrates every spring, mostly from the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, to as far north as Maine, and back down again in the fall.

White Dudes for Harris’ was a missed opportunity — The Atlantic

Harper, who also has an interest in politics, wrote in another piece, in July, that , a group of voters supporting the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Democrats have “peddled condescending, divisive, and often bizarre rhetoric in the name of ‘anti-racism.’”

“So imagine my shock when I found myself, slowly but surely, charmed by the White Dudes for Harris call.” 

Still, he writes, the “White Dudes” name “risks solidifying the public’s impression that the Democratic Party is for overeducated elites with laptop jobs and performative progressive politics. That is a shortsighted move “when the GOP is on its way to achieving a multiracial working-class coalition, cobbled together with increasing shares of Black and Hispanic voters driven by male defections from the Democratic coalition.”

Harper’s other recent writing for The Atlantic includes:

• ““
• ““
• ““

Paul Schofield

‘These people are looking back at us’ — Seattle Met

Paul Schofield, an associate professor of philosophy whose research focuses on moral and political philosophy, writes frequently on the issue of homelessness. Last month Schofield was quoted in a Seattle Met story about a retired history professor, J.M. Simpson, in Washington state. 

The writer of the article had learned about Simpson’s work via in April, lauding the photographer and sharing some of his photographs. The thread has over 24,000 likes and three million views. In the story, the writer quotes extensively from Schofield’s response to Simpson’s work:

“It’s easy to imagine them having friends and having dreams and having things that they care about just as a result of sitting there with the photo for a few minutes,” noted Schofield, whose writing on homelessness had caught Simpson’s attention.

“It’s got to be something about him that brings this out,” Schofield concluded.

With the Grateful Dead playing in the background, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Tyler Harper led a dozen students through “Just Flour,” a step-by-step, hands-on exercise in bread making that included discussions about environmental justice and African American baking.

With assistance from Phoebe Stern ’24 of Nashville, Tenn., Harper encouraged the students — most of whom came dressed in T-shirts and sweatshirts ready to get dirty — to pound, knead, and cut the dough on the kitchen counter, which they did with boisterous zeal.

Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College

The four groups worked in a cozy kitchen on the ground floor of Roger Williams Hall, but the classroom buzzed as they joked, shared stories, and laughed together. 

Two years ago, Harper taught a Short-Term course that looked at how we think of food and how we imagine the future of food. The course, Harper said, looks at two ways to think about food: the futuristic kind of “dystopian sort of technological meals” and “a kind of return to sort of older and more ancestral food traditions.”

Given the fact Martin Luther King Jr. was such an advocate for labor rights and food rights, a bread-baking class seemed more than appropriate on the day that honors his legacy, Harper said.

“There’s something about cooking that I think empowers students to go out in the world and feel like they can feed themselves and carve time out of their day to attend to something that isn’t work or the television or TikTok,” Harper said. “I would love to see in higher education, in general, food and cooking, food being taken more seriously as both an art form and as something worthy of study.”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the fourth of our nine new faculty members, Tyler Harper.

Name: Tyler Harper

Position: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Degrees from: New York University, Ph.D. in comparative literature and M.A. in comparative literature; Haverford College, B.A. in English

His work: Harper researches the evolving ways in which science fiction writers have depicted human extinction, and how the concept of extinction has changed since 1796, when scientist Georges Cuvier proved that species extinction was in fact possible.

Completed in May, Harper’s dissertation was on “The Specter of Extinction: Environmental Nihilism in British Science Fiction (1800–1945).

Why sci-fi? With a literary canon that includes books from L. Ron Hubbard, and with movie titles like Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, science fiction in America is a “heavily stereotyped genre,” Harper says. “We’re often used to thinking of sci-fi as entertainment or as beach reading.” Plus, it’s a genre that’s frequently “coded as both white and male,” he says. 

For a liberal arts professor, stereotype is a door waiting to be kicked open. “One of the joys of teaching science fiction is getting students to see sci-fi differently — as a genre that not only engages with big ideas but also that includes some great works written by marginalized voices.”

A sample lesson: Harper says that he’s always loved introducing students to the novel Dawn, by Octavia Butler, the first Black female science fiction writer to reach national prominence. 

One of her earlier works, Dawn poses the “big questions that I find tend to excite students. Questions like, is the fear of otherness innate? Or is it learned? Can it be unlearned? And, is the exploitation of nature or other species ever justifiable?”

In class, he’ll lead an exercise in argument mapping to “break down the various worldviews presented by a novel or film and look who is presenting those views, how they clash, and how they’re reconciled.”

The exercise “gets students to slow down, look past the aliens and the spaceships, and really confront the profound and topical questions about the environment and our place in it that a novel like Dawn ���DzԱ�����.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “�ֲ���ý struck me as an institution that really strives to navigate a balance,” Harper says. While “upholding the traditional concept of a liberal arts college as a space in which students are able to think on a campus — free from the distractions of the world around them,” the college also works to bring “the liberal arts model into the 21st century.” 

Imagining Extinction: British science fiction writers of the 1800s and early 1900s, like Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and H.G. Wells, imagined that the natural world was the prime threat to human life.

In their works, “nature was re-imagined as not only a threat to the species, but a threat to the very moral vision that informed Western thinking about humanity in general,” Harper says. He calls this ‘environmental nihilism’: the threat of meaninglessness posed by the recognition that nature is completely indifferent to human existence.”

In Britain during the early Romantic era — the late 1700s into the early 1800s — these initial extinction narratives also tended to “imagine threats to the species as arising from absolute catastrophes that could not be avoided or prevented,” he explains. 

Later, particularly in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries in the mid-1800s, the threat of extinction was re-imagined as “something that could be mitigated by human ingenuity and power, something we might be able to prepare for politically, technologically, scientifically and so on. This view still informs contemporary reflection on human extinction.”

The idea that nature was the major threat to humankind changed after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan: “Human extinction was now recognized as something that humans might bring about,” says Harper.

Now, climate change: A legacy of 19th- and early 20th-century science fiction is today’s belief that “we can confront the threat of climate change with large-scale technological solutions, like geo-engineering,” Harper says. 

However, clinging to a magic-bullet solution, he says, merely “becomes a way to avoid thinking about climate change as a political crisis.” Today’s science fiction can address this avoidance and reinforce the politics of the climate crisis by imagining the “ways different groups of people are more or less implicated by environmental violence.” 

In other words, writers of climate fiction can show us new worlds after climate change and raise the question: Who gets to live in these new worlds? 

Any catastrophe, whether it threatens extinction or not, “impacts different racial groups unequally and acts on different communities in different nations unequally. It’s imperative that we think about a problem that seems fantastical but is in fact quite pressing.”

Do we survive? “I remain an optimist,” Harper says. “But I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to thinking about human extinction is that there are people with tremendous power and wealth who take the question of human extinction very seriously. You have people in Silicon Valley building compounds in New Zealand in preparation for a coming climate catastrophe.”

Harper adds, “We have, especially in academia, a duty to think seriously about this as well and to draw attention to the oversimplifications that we see in a news item, for example, about Elon Musk wanting to establish a human colony on Mars as a backup if Earth were to become uninhabitable.”