By Bryan Johnson
English, senior

Associate Professor Marifran Mattson and Ph.D. student Jennifer Hall detailed how their work on a motorcycle safety campaign resulted in a recent publication in a new online journal.

Mattson, a motorcycle accident victim, founded the safety program based at Purdue in 2006. After losing her own leg in a motorcycle accident, Mattson began to research motorcycle safety.

Mattson was contacted more than six months ago by an online research journal, "Cases in Public Health, Communication, and Marketing," which is a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on case studies and is edited by graduate students across the country, to do an article on the creation of the campaign.

Hall and Carin Kosmoski, another Ph.D. student who has worked on the safety campaign, were lead authors on the article, which was published in the most recent edition of the journal.

"I was really put in the position, specifically, as a mentor," Mattson said. "I was to work with them through the process of review, which is something new to most graduate students."

The article, titled "Reconsidering Motorcycle Safety at Purdue: A Case Study Integrating Theory and Practice," can be found at http://www.casesjournal.org under the current volume of peer-reviewed cases.

While Mattson said spreading the word about motorcycle safety can be an uphill battle, she is hoping that the campaign will spread to other universities and communities in the future.

"One of the main ideas of our campaign is to get the message out that motorcycle safety involves everyone," Mattson said. "In fact, that's our slogan, ‘It involves you.'"

By Robert Virgin
Communication, senior

Ever taken something from your workplace you really didn't need? So why did you do it?

Your thievery was possibly a form of resistance. And resistance is a research interest of Samuel McCormick, department assistant professor, who studies what he calls "ambivalent modes of resistance."

According to McCormick, there are two types of resistance in every society: overt, or outright acts of rebellion, and covert, those acts people keep hidden from authorities.

McCormick is working on a book that focuses on covert acts of resistance in what he calls "open" societies, or those in which people are free to practice overt forms of resistance if they choose to.

In the book, titled "Artistry of Obedience: A Critical history of Minor Political Works by Major Western Thinkers," McCormick uses the works of many great Western thinkers, ranging from Kant to W.E.B. Du Bois, as examples of "ambivalent modes of resistance."

Many of these works are letters written to governments in protest. While these works usually criticize authoritative figures, at no point do they attempt to outwardly rebel against them.

The works of these thinkers serve as examples of how they mastered the ability to, as McCormick says, "become capable of action in an entirely bureaucratic world." In other words, these men learned how to create change in a society without rebelling against its authority.