Welcome in a gloomy overcast cold day in London. I'm not sure what it's like, where you are. Karen, where in Canada are you right now? I'm just, I'm in Toronto and it can't tell yet. It's still dark out, I think we're fine. All right, well thanks for waking up in the wee hours of the morning in Canada to present and be a part of this presentation or be a part of the seminar series, it's great. Cool, okay, I think what we'll do is I'm just going to make sure I'm not excluding anyone from the waiting room and then, oh, there's one more person coming in and then we can begin. Right, okay. So, let me just, I think we're good. This whole cheering and running the IT, this multitasking is not a strong point but I'm working with it. So right, great. So I want to welcome everyone to our first new voices in global security rather, lunchtime seminar series of 2021. We're so pleased to announce our former, formal rather collaboration with the international affairs journal and that they were going to now be running a blog series that's based upon our seminar new voices presentations and our EDI chats themselves. So we're super excited about that. We have Joseph Hills here that is one of the editors for international affairs. I don't know, Joe, do you want to just quickly introduce yourself at this point and a little bit about international affairs for us? Yeah, sure. Hi, so I'm Joe, I'm the editor of assistant international affairs in terms of international affairs as a journal. We publish policy relevant research from across the discipline hosted by Chatham House and published by Oxford University Press. By policy relevant, we basically mean anything that can have a policy impact with policy makers being defined as broad as possible. So that's including like activists, people working in the end use basically kind of communities of practice within kind of like international politics more generally. We're currently the highest ranked by impact factor IR journal outside of the US according to most recent Thomson Reuters rankings. We're really enthusiastic to participate in this in the series because of how it like fits with our wider remit in terms of providing a quality diversity and inclusion in the discipline, which we do through our 50 50 initiative through which we've kind of striven to achieve gender balance within all of our outputs, which we were successful, broadly successful in 2020. And it's something that we're like continuing to work on going forward, but also through our diversity initiative, which aims to kind of support early career researchers from underrepresented backgrounds in the discipline in terms of the role we're going to play with regards to the kind of new voices and global security series. We'll be publishing a series of blog posts accompanying each of the kind of seminars, which we'll be promoting to our kind of through on our blog, which is a kind of key communications output of the journal. This is promoted to our 35,000 person chat and house mailing list, as well as viral Twitter account, which has 1,400 followers and will essentially be kind of like copy editing the journal and packaging it as a kind of a coherent series to be promoted to our kind of readers. Finally, I just want to say like, thank you to everyone involved in the program, we're like really excited to participate in it and I participate in it and I can't wait to hear what everyone has to say really. So yeah, thanks so much. Great, thanks so much Joe for that introduction and explaining more about our fabulous collaboration with international affairs. And so exciting, just the virtual footprints that the series can have now with this collaboration. So we're really excited, great. So briefly for those of you who don't know me, my name's Amanda Chisholm. I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies here at King's College London. I teach both in Shrivenham at the Defense Academy as well as war studies in London. And my research is broadly on gender and security most broadly. So yeah, I'm very pleased today to introduce Dr. Curinful. She'll be presenting her work titled of minds and methods, the global governance of public opinion in the Middle East past and present. This research begins by asking, how are we to account for the productive power of global public opinion research as something that plays a part in both the creation of populations and the conditions for possibility of their governance? This paper addresses this question by critically examining the production of data and knowledge on Middle Eastern politics starting in the early 20th century. Drawing attention to the connections between colonial administration, political patronage and the history and development of America social science, Dr. Ful considers how scientific opinion polling is intimately bound up in the structuring of global social knowledge as a political project. Using a different historical examples, Dr. Ful traces instances where Western surveys and polls as a novel social scientific method were employed in the service of modernization, democratization, intervention, and at times as a means of denying the rights of political self-determination. And these implications of this approach persist today. Dr. Ful is a lecturer in international relations at the Department of War Studies. Her research focuses on the politics of global knowledge production and the rise of scientific opinion polling. She takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of public opinion and is interested in how epistemology and epistemology technology, sorry, I think it's too early in the day for me, like polls, surveys, and data create and shape the conditions of governing social and political life. Before joining King's College London, Karen was a postdoctoral fellow at London School of Economics, taking part in teaching and design of the LSE 100, which is an interdisciplinary social science training program for undergrads. She received her PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics in 2019, where she explored the history of scientific inquiry into Middle Eastern publics. Her empirical work traces or sorry, her empirical work takes place in sites like social science institutions and universities, international private polling firms, and state departments. Her doctoral work was funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Karen has also experienced in the private sector working in qualitative methods and data analysis. So she provides consultation on data analysis survey research methods and data visualization in policy and higher education circles. Today, Dr. Full is joined by Dr. Mark Condos, also a lecturer in war studies as the role of the discussant. Dr. Condos is a historian interested in the intersections between violence, race and law within the British and French empires with a particular focus on India and Algeria. He completed both his MA and BA at Queen's University in Canada in 2013. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge where he worked under the late professor Sir Christopher Bailey. Prior to joining King's College London in January, 2020, Dr. Condos held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London between 2014 and 2017, and subsequently worked as a lecturer in the Imperial and Global History, or sorry, in Imperial and Global History between 2017 and 2020. Welcome to you both. We are so very pleased to have you here. So following our normal format, what we'll do first is Karen has agreed to talk for about 20 minutes, a little over 20 minutes, and share slides about her research. And then we'll hand the floor over to Mark where he'll offer some discussant points and reflections before then we open the floor up to you, the audience. So if you have any burning questions, you can either type them in the chat box and I can pose them to Karen, or you can raise your Zoom hand and ask them live. Either is absolutely acceptable. Without further ado, Karen, I'm going to pass the floor over to you. Thanks so much, Amanda, and thank you for hosting this lunchtime chat. I'm really happy to be part of this initiative and thanks also to Mark for very kindly agreeing to be discussant today. So appreciated. I'd also like to thank everybody who's taking the time out of their day to listen in. So I'm going to share some slides and just I guess let me know if you can't see them. I'm going to hope that that's visible. Yeah. Okay. So the paper that I'm presenting today is sort of in draft mode and the title is there. Thank you, Amanda, for the introduction. So there was a lot of information in there and I don't want to repeat any of that. But what I will say just to give some context to this paper is that it is one aspect of a larger program of critical theoretical research that I do on global public opinion and really specifically about data pertaining to the MENA regions of the Middle East and North Africa. This particular paper is historically situated. So it looks at the production of data measuring public opinion in the Middle East over the course of a time period where mass survey research and scientific opinion polls took hold as the sort of foremost method for understanding and representing public opinion globally. Okay. So the broad aim of the paper is to understand how global public opinion research as a sort of epistemological program that developed over the past century, how and in what ways it has played a part in bringing populations into being. So in constructing them, in defining them and then in also establishing the conditions for governing those populations. I believe that there are different ways to go about approaching this question of the relationship between what's come to be classed as scientific opinion research and then governing of populations. So what I've chosen to focus on here are instances of what I term epistemic interventions into the Middle East carried out by Western social science. So I'll briefly just explain what I mean by epistemic intervention as it sort of guides my selection of historic case studies. So for me, epistemic intervention is really about that moment of incursion where one system of knowledge interjects and disrupts and claims authority over other spheres of knowing. So just as maybe military interventions might be seen as political acts through the use of force, epistemic interventions are political acts that engage particular practices. So these practices might be methods of classifying and quantifying bodies. It might be imposing racialized social hierarchies or maybe architecting scientific institutions. So in practical terms, foreign epistemic intervention might entail the deployment of scientists into uncharted territories to collect, interpret and write data as the authors of new knowledge frontiers. So with this idea in mind for this paper, I locate different moments of foreign epistemic intervention into the Middle East where the goal was really about capturing collective attitudes and political opinions, almost always in the service of those doing the intervening. I should say that by focusing on foreign epistemic interventions into the Middle East, I'm not suggesting that indigenous knowledge of public opinion doesn't or hasn't existed through this time. But what I wanna do with this paper is draw a sort of narrative arc between cases that usually appear in very different literatures because I think there's something common about them. So what I see as common and why I bring these cases together is that to me they carry an ethos of scientific imperialism that accompanied Western efforts to understand and occupy public opinion in so-called empirically neglected territories in the global South. So I'll just say something about public opinion to start with. It can mean many things, but what I'm interested in specifically is public opinion as an empirical object. It comes as the result of particular practices, particular methods of inquiry. And the method that has come to dominate our knowledge of understanding of global public opinion is statistical and it employs technologies like polls, like survey questionnaires and systematic mass candidacy. So many of the questions that were asked in these surveys would be today considered wholly unscientific, but they were used to create an index of modernization that was considered wholly scientific at the time based on a variable of opinion. And the quote there describes what opinion was, not just to learner in this study, but at the time this became a kind of popular idea. So a person becomes participant in society by learning to have opinions. The more numerous and varied the matters on which he has opinions, the more participant he is. So each participant was ranked in the Middle East opinion arena, was ranked and the number of opinions were counted and the variety of items in the questionnaire on which he expressed some opinion were counted. And what this means is that people were classified not on what they said, but on whether they said anything at all. So it was just the ability to say something that counted as opinion. And that translated into the characteristic of being modern. So the more answers a person gave the more modern they were, it was as simple as that. It's insane. The result was that learner's model served to essentially reify preconceived and racialized myths of Middle Eastern society that it sought to find. He created this index. Here you can sort of see the trajectory from what he labels as traditional to modern. He was interested in how to bring individuals and societies into modern, into being modern. So yeah, so it produced a little more than a neat historical inevitability towards the Western ideal type. And within the study itself, there's a pervasive moralizing attitude. Again, this attitude that traditional societies had to be reorganized to make individuals subject to the epistemological control of science, of social science. There's a scientific language that permeates the study. Again, replete with statistics and latent variable analysis. And again, it projects, it all it really does is project a racialized primitiveness, sorry, primitiveness on non-Western opinion and also situates the Middle East as a place in need of expert taming. So this was the second case study I wanted to point out. And there's a third. And that's the third case is public opinion production during the period of 1944 to 68 that was targeted towards advancing the goals of Western foreign policy. So during this time, this type of data was on overdrive. And what I'm doing here at this logo is from a sort of Gallup, an old Gallup study image, which I really like, it's very interesting, but it was about translating anything and everything that you could ask people into an indication of opinion and then using that in the service of sort of governing and policy work and whatnot. So the third case covers a period that includes in 1947, the UN partition plan for Palestine, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and then follows after the Six Day War in 1967. And what I found going through old archart polls was that public opinion was really called upon to guide the American position on the Palestine question, which was becoming more and more salient. So during this period of time, I haven't found any major scientific polls that were commissioned to measure public opinion inside Palestine. Instead, the question of whether the expulsion of Palestinians beginning in 1948 was permissible was asked to people who were not living in the region. So it is in the sort of history books of Western public opinion that I trace these polls about Palestine. So these were polls that were sort of asked of Americans and Western Europeans between 1944 and 1968. And I cover about 50 polls during this time that I've been able to find. What I do here is I read into the methodology of these polls conducted by actors like Gallup and other American pollsters. And I try to locate specific instantiations of opinion on the Middle East, about the Middle East. And the analysis that I do here is really kind of discursive, looking at the question wording and how the methodology was structured. And what becomes evident, sorry, is that there's a displacement of Palestinian identity within these sort of research design of these polls. And there's the construction of a very clear binary between Israel and Palestine that forces opinion to one side or the other. So I'll show an example. I'll throw these up here. I'm not gonna read them out. But what these are are examples of questions that were asked of mostly Americans, but some Europeans on either side, the dividing line is sort of on either side of the Six Day War. So leading up to the war and after. And as you maybe sort of read through, what I'll say is that examples like these, I mean, they all kind of look a little bit similar. So they kind of account for the majority of survey questions that cover this period of 20 years, which strike at one basic question, which is where do you stand on the question of Palestine? And through these questions, ordinary people, ordinary Israelis, Palestinians become locked into a sort of binary structure. What I argue is that this binary ethno-nationalist conflict therefore was not wholly endemic. It was not already in Western public opinion. It was not found there necessarily naturally, but it was derived through binary data, through questions like this that encouraged dichotomizing the problem into one of two possible mental states. You could either be on one side or the other. Which side is to blame? Which side do you sympathize with? And this was pursued by social scientists. So what I argue is that we can't ignore the role that social scientists played in constructing a biased paradigm for motivating support on one side or the other and towards Israel in this case. And these questions were designed to polarize, right? There's no middle ground. There's no possibility for compassion or peaceful coexistence or any alternative. So it's in the formulation of these questions that Jewish and Palestinian statehood are reduced to an either or conditional statement. And what I'll do in the interest of time is I'll move on to the last case study, but just the sort of final point here is that the racialized sort of politics of inquiry are embedded then, it's not from the data, right? It's embedded there already in the human design of social science research. So the final case study I'll cover very quickly explores the dichotomization of sort of West and non-West, West and East that came about in the post-911 era. And again, in this case, knowledge production on Middle Eastern societies was voraciously consumed by American policy actors and it shaped a discourse of sort of civilizational conflict. That we can reference in so many ways, but I look to where polling came into play. And what this is on the right, sorry, left-hand side of the screen there is a list of, this was really unprecedented, a list of commissions, the congressional hearings, essentially evidence that was called upon to using public opinion data to understand a sort of central question, persistent rallying cry in the 9-11 era, which was the American sort of the Bush phrase, why do they hate our freedoms? Targeting al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists. That was in 2001 and these instances of evidence come in between 2001 and 2011 and they seek to on overdrive measure public opinion and also the 9-11 commission report is another very strong source of this sort of data. So pollsters and experts with access to publics in the Middle East drew, mostly American, drew on their full knowledge to sort of serve federal investigative commissions. And this meant that the specific policy needs of the US administration at the time forced a very like narrow form of inquiry and interpretation within the polls and we can read into this. So many of the questions that were asked and much of the data that was drawn upon reflects a narrowness in terms of most of the questions have to do with a sort of America's global image in the eyes of Middle Easterners and that's what comes to dominate the body of polls produced during this time. And we can read into this through transcripts from those hearings and the 9-11 commission report and they're in there as this sort of volatile reification of us versus them, a clash of civilizations mentality and there's a fascination with sort of parochial ideas about the Arab street. It's very interesting to pull out a sort of discourse that is reminiscent of all of the previous cases covered and it sounds like no time has passed at all. And I mean, I can answer more questions because I know I'm running on 25 minutes here but what I wanted to do with this case anyways and it's a bit more spelled out in the paper is to pay attention to the sort of discourse and the direction of policy that emerged from calling upon this evidence from polls, understanding that it was used in the service of a sort of larger intellectual intervention into the region for the purposes of again what I call sort of scientific imperialism. Yeah, so in concluding, I will just reiterate that each of the case studies, I know they're kind of disparate, contributes to an understanding of public opinion as an empirical object, right? That's derivative of practices of rational calculation and political categorization. And I don't think we can divorce these cases from their histories. The research design itself is essentially political and that's what I want to sort of show. And I know I'm sort of kind of spread all over these cases but what I'm trying to do is unite them by showing a phenomenon rather than putting forth a very strong theoretical argument. It's more about uniting these examples that are kind of lost to history along the way. So these cases may not be representative but what I do hope they do is sort of lead us to this lingering question about what constitutes legitimate knowledge on public opinion. Where does the authority to create this knowledge come from? And if we can sort of understand that, we can start to contest the power dynamics that are embedded within the production of knowledge. That's all for me. Sorry for going over time. Amanda, do you want me to jump in? Okay, so thanks, Karen, for that really interesting insightful paper. I've already told you this but I'll preface this to everyone else. I don't do IR, so I'm gonna sort of talk about things that I know of as a historian but one thing I really appreciate about Karen's paper is it was accessible for a historian and it was very historically based in a lot of ways. I was very interested in this point that she made in her paper in a presentation about the King Crane Commission and the authority of King and Crane being predicated on actually their ignorance and disinterest in the Middle East. And this reminded me a bit of James Mills infamous quip from his highly influential history of British India where he said that he had no need for ocular knowledge of the country or acquaintance with its language. A duly qualified man, Mills continued, can obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life by the use of his eyes in India. So of course Mills position seems quite ridiculous to us today but it was emblematic to a particular post-enlightenment imperial self-confidence about the ability of Europeans to not only understand but also to reshape the world according to its own image. And Mills history was very much imbued with a sort of bent the might utilitarianism that viewed history through a teleological lens in which Indians occupied a lower level of development and required a firm guiding hand by the British to reach their full potential as modern rational beings. And as Karen said, non-European peoples were seen as being stuck in time. They needed Europe and Europeans to bring them into modernity from the perpetual waiting room of history. If we look at sort of, you know, Mills and other writers, you know, this is an example of what Bernard Cohen in his very influential book, Colonialism and its Formative Knowledge, referred to as a historiographic investigative modality. And for Cohen, the European imperial project was crucially informed by various different investigative modalities which sought to render colonial subjects visible, legible, and manageable. And although these modalities were ostensibly about describing, classifying, and monitoring individuals, groups, cultures, religions, traditions, and institutions that already existed, one of the key points Cohen makes is that in so doing, these modalities actually helped to shape and create new forms of identity, affinity, belonging, traditions, and institutions. And so this brings me again back to Karen's paper because I think, you know, while a lot of scholars so far have been talking about colonial knowledge and colonial epistemic interventions and how they operate as a form of coercion and control, none that I know of have looked at this question of opinion polling and how this functioned within the nexus of colonial knowledge and power. And as we've just heard from Karen, the selective framing of polling questions, the careful curation of respondents, not only helped reinforce particular ideological and political assumptions, but it also served as a way of identifying might be amenable to state manipulation and control. And I think this has important implications because it's not only an example of how colonial control and coercion could often be manifested in much subtler forms of almost invisible violence, but it also reveals the deep ways that the emergence of the modern social sciences was deeply implicated in colonialism. But the participation of academics in these projects, I think is a very salutary reminder of the ways that we as academics have historically been implicated in this imperial project and might prompt us to think about how we might start thinking about how to critically engage with this troubled past, particularly in contemporary calls to decolonize the curriculum. At the same time, I wondered reading and listening to Karen's paper a question about intentionality because when we talk about colonial knowledge, there's always a tension between the extent to which these epistemic interventions or violence are the products of genuine misunderstandings in some cases or whether they are the products of deliberate strategies meant to impose state authority and regulate discipline upon these subjects. So the case of Karen's paper, it seems to me, learner's work and the framing of the Israel-Palestine binary is clearly a deliberate instrumentalized strategy. But I was a little less clear reading about the King Crane Commission, for instance, because obviously King and Crane had particular agendas. But I just wonder if maybe you could clarify, Karen, whether they specifically set out to skew their data sets, knowing this would produce the desired results about the questions of Arab nationalism or self-determination, or was this the product of sort of unconscious, sort of orientalized views of the Middle East? You talked about Joel Isaac's work and this being a problem of epistemic design where you arrange data to undergird your theoretical assumptions. But this also seemed to me a very common thing we see across colonialism more generally, where colonial officers, academic scientists, often insisted on working with reductive and ultimately untenable categories. Some cases, they recognized them themselves that these categories that are supposed to be scientifically objectively true didn't actually fit, but they still insisted on using them in a sort of almost a hope that by willing them hard enough, they could bring sort of these categories into ontological reality and existence. You sort of touched on this in your paper, sorry, in your talk a bit more than in the paper, but it was also how these polling methods built upon previous problematic forms of colonial knowledge, such as ethnographies and census data. So even in the case of the King Crane Commission, I'd be interested, you know, are they working with previous census data, ethnographies on who to interview and who's going to give them the most reliable information. And this also led me to wonder about the question to the extent to which these sensible objects of epistemic interventions, that either people being interviewed, had agency in shaping these opinion polls. And I'm just thinking in India, for instance, certain groups were able to help shape British conceptions of the Vedic hierarchies in their collection and classification of census data and in order to actually improve their own position of their own cask group. So I was wondering in polling, it seems initially there are fewer possibilities for agency because you respond to questions you're given. But I wondered, can do people have agency and power enabled to shape, resist, deflect these epistemic interventions in meaningful ways? And just sort of two last quick things, I was very interested, kept talking about the Middle Eastern mind and the sort of Orientalized Exotic Abstract. It reminded me of how there's an Indian mind or there's an African mind. And these different minds have very peculiar characteristics. Africans are seen as childish and prone to psychic hysterias and whatnot. I was wondering what characterized the Middle Eastern mind for these Westerners and did it change over time? I was also wondering finally, about the questions of decolonization. I mean, there's a question of whether the Middle East has been decolonized ever in terms of the entire former colonial world also. But I was wondering, does the way these Western imperial powers use and wield public opinion, does it differ from say, how a modern Middle Eastern leaders use public opinion? This is one of the key challenges of decolonization is actually getting rid of the institutions, the mindsets that have previously problematically helped colonize and enslave people, I guess, for lack of a better word. Sorry, that's the end of my very long rambling discourse. Thank you again for your paper, Karen. I'd love to hear thoughts on some of the issues I raised, but I also recognize that people probably want to ask questions as well, so. Klausho, it's such a great detailed discussion, Mark and Karen, from both of you. Karen, while I'm collecting questions, do you just want to jump in and start responding to Mark's comments? Sure, yeah. Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you for all of those questions. They're really excellent. And I'll just go in order of the order that you went through. So on the question of intentionality and the extent to which this, especially in the King Crane case, the basis upon which scientists were acting was intentional, that they knew what they were doing. That's a, I mean, at least for me, as a non-historian, that's difficult to discern in the materials that I have. But I think about, and I mean, it's just off the top of my head now, the recent paper that was published by Mira Sabaratnam, where she talks about white subject positioning as patterned by epistemologies of eminence, ignorance, and innocence. And I'd have to, I mean, I'm not going to do the best job of linking the paper to my work very closely, but I think there's this, if not intention, there's a sort of sense of innocence in what was being done, right? In the actual act of going out in the name of science, in the name of progress. And it was like a willful ignorance as well that was built into these sort of methods. And it positioned sort of Western science as imminently ahead of other forms of knowing. So I don't know about full intentionality, but I do think there's a willful ignorance that creates sort of the white innocence there. And that can be read into how these scientists sort of managed and negotiated going into these regions, doing the work that they thought they were doing really well, and then coming out with what they thought was very, very good quality scientific data that would progress the world, that they were doing us all a favor. So that's what I would say about that. On the question of building up data, so the sort of stratification, what, I think that's really interesting, like what is the information that underlies and the assumptions that underlies these polls? What censuses were they based on if there were censuses at all? And I mean, I think we know from social science, even when we conducted ourselves today, we don't always have access to everything that we want. So we can assume that in many cases, data wasn't available, census data that wasn't necessarily accurate. And I think it's good then to recognize that a lot of the studies that were the public opinion polls that were crafted were built on imperfect data and imperfect assumptions, but it's the way in which they're framed. It's the way it's the sort of confidence with which the findings are put forth, especially within the Western sort of social scientific realm. That's the problem, right? There's no admission of possible mistakes or wrongdoing. There really is this confidence that I think comes with quantifying and it comes with sort of the power of data to just be able to account for everything, help us to understand everything as if it is perfect. On the possibility for agency in polling, I mean, I want to link this maybe to the decolonization question and getting rid of in these institutions. I won't go into it in too much detail now, but what I have found is through research otherwise conducted where I interview pollsters, especially in the region because there is a fledging market for opinion data there is that when you do have people who understand the local context, the methods themselves start to change. They look a bit different from what's being done in these studies that I've showcased right here. There's greater empathy that's built into the methods. Yeah, I won't go into too much detail, but the methodology itself starts to change and especially in the case of Palestine, I found that from talking to pollsters there that they really see themselves as part of the public opinion data as a participatory, it's performative. It's sort of meant to bring people into a conversation and engage politics and move things forward. So it's not a scientific according to sort of Western terms. That's interesting. And then on the Arab mind and how that was categorized, I think it's the 9-11 commission that and the commission reports yet from the 9-11 era that pulled that out really well in this idea of the Arab street because there was such a deep debate on what the Arab street was and this sense that Americans didn't understand what was going on, that it was a place of sort of mystics, it was mythical, it was messy, it had back alleys, it was sort of backward, it was dirty, it was unscientific. And the way that the street is described in these commission reports points to, I think a strong sense of what the Arab mind is. And it's really again, very close to those sort of orientalizing ideas about East. So yeah, and I hope that answers some questions. Great, I think I'm not sure if we have a shy audience or they're like me and just absorbing the richness of this broader discussion. So, oh, we do have a question from, it looks like, Aggie, Aggie, do you just wanna ask it live? Sure, yeah.  Hi, everybody. Thank you so much, Karen.  Really glad to have heard a bit more about it. I have a question, well, partly I have a request of next year. I'm gonna ask you to come and talk to us on my second years about this in the context of the methods teaching that I'm currently doing with them. And the question I have kind of relates a little bit to that. How do you negotiate the kind of tension that we might experience between wanting to kind of present methods as viable options across the board in terms of doing research and these kind of, you know, irredeemable, possibly a redeemable colonial imperial histories. You know, it can be quite tempting if one is oriented in a post-positivist, you know, place if one is an anti-racist or decolonial has those commitments. Is there anything kind of redeemable about positivist methodologies? Is there any kind of right way in your view to negotiate how we teach this in a way that leaves open the possibility for students to use these techniques in their research whilst at the same moment taking account of these extremely important origins and histories and of course, continuities. Thanks. Great, Karen, before you respond to Aggy, now all the questions are rolling in. We have Inga and Claudia. Though Claudia's might be a little bit sketchy because she's en route between different locations. So let's start with Inga. Inga, did you wanna ask your question live? Yeah, sure, I can do it if you can hear me. You're quite quiet. Okay, wait, one second. Is it better like this? Yeah, that's better. Okay, so thank you so much, Karen. Like this was super fascinating. Like I'm a PhD student at the school, my work focuses mostly on Libya. So your Middle East focus, et cetera, was also just very interesting. I have not as elaborate and thoughtful question as Aggy has, so let's just keep it different. But I'm really wondering if you, given your expertise and how embedded you are, et cetera, do you have an opinion on, so there's a lot of social media research happening, especially on Libya. It's so difficult to poll people, to still find people that actually want to participate in all of these surveys that everyone wants to undertake. So isn't there an argument to be made, or maybe a trend that there's so much data on social media about people's opinions and what they have about different policies, et cetera, that instead of having polling, you could invest in broad-scale, qualitatively high, hopefully social media research more, question mark, yeah, that's it basically. Great, thanks, Inga. Claudia, do you want to give it a go, asking the question live? I'm going to try, hi. And thank you so much, Kieran, it was really fascinating. I have two quick questions. I think one, the first one is about your own methodology. And the reason I think this happens because it was very close analysis of the studies, I'm sorry about noises. But I'm wondering if you place them in wider scientific fields, right? I assume there is a lot of contestation. I'm thinking about, from the start of the 20th century, not just kind of marking and writing on it here, and instead of have a very different view, right? But it would also use to link back to I guess questions as well, would also use statistics and so on. So I'm just thinking how you think about that. And then, yeah, I want to ask you to reflect on what I thought was a very interesting conversation between you and Mark on this relation between ignorance, what you called willful ignorance as well and the production of knowledge. So I'm thinking here about some work in the colonial archives that makes the argument that actually we have a lot more uncertainty, right? Rather than the claim to knowledge that kind of governs populations and this knowledge of control and mastery and thinking of ignorance, tolerance and so on. So I found it really interesting that there's an assumption of ignorance, but then there's also the production, the work for production of ignorance. And I just, yeah, I don't quite know how to think about this, so I'm actually asking you whether you've come across more work on this or how you think about this tension because I think, yeah, they're really important, but also not, yeah, I think not so easy to track them. But none of my camera and stuff, I don't hear all the trends and cars and stuff. Great, thanks Claudia for asking that question on the move. The final question, Karen, and then I'm going to give you two minutes to reflect and answer all of them, is coming from Catherine Allen. And she asks, she says, I was just wondering to what extent the context of the knowledge and understanding of the best ways to collect epistemic data was taken into account and the scientific understanding of the time. I think this links into Mark's question regarding intentionality quite a bit as over time our notions of how best to collect data in unbiased fashions changes without influencing the outcome. Also, I was wondering what Karen, your thoughts are on the influence of opinion polls and epistemic, why can I not say that word? Epistemic over time with the growth of technology and media. Do you think that the access to a wider range of information allows individuals answering such questions, the ability to battle against the inherent flaws within the methodology? There you go, Karen, the floor is yours. You've got two ish minutes to respond. I'll do my best. So just one of the last points linking what Claudia mentioned about uncertainty to what Catherine mentioned about, we have to understand that there was a scientific context within which these studies were created. There was a certain understanding. What I really do pick up on within the texts and the archives of these polls is a strong confidence that this knowledge was truly objective. And this is where the sort of regime of calculation, the language of quantification comes in to assure us that this information is timeless. And that's what I want to contest. I mean, we do a very good job of admitting the limitations of our study, outlining the contours of our research. In this case, not so much, right? And that's the danger here is the universalizing effect of these studies that really do influence research that comes after it. On Aggie's question and just jumping around here, redeemable, is there anything redeemable about positivist methods? So I use positive methods quite a bit and I enjoy doing so. I think they can be very, very enlightening for some questions. I think this is a real case for methodological pluralism, right? For diversifying the ways in which we tackle questions, the ways in which we come to understand the world. And I think that's something that I would always transmit to students, is that there is no one right way and each way will give you a certain picture, a certain lens. But in broadening our perspectives, we also need to acknowledge that there are very, very difficult histories from which certain methods emerge, many more beyond this, too, many more beyond positivist methods, including within anthropology and ethnographic methods as well. So this is all part of that same conversation of awareness and coming to terms with how we study the world and how it might be dangerous. And then quickly, there was a question on data, the influx of data, media research from Inga on this sort of trend of looking at social media. And this is a whole other discussion that I think would be really interesting. I would say that the influx of data has changed the setting and we can talk later about how but what it moves away from moving away from polling and moving into sort of social media research, it's a different terrain that comes very close also to sort of surveillance through people's online behaviors. And this I think is a direction within which sort of opinion research is heading, it's just becoming accessible to understand people's behaviors online, not through consent of actually answering these public opinion studies, but just from the sort of way in which we navigate, the internet and social media and whatnot. But yes, that raises some very difficult questions. I'll end it there, but thank you everybody. Thank you for those great questions. Gosh, thank you so much for your presentation, Kiran. And for your really rich kind of analysis under these broader themes that us as academics or anyone who is interested in research and critically evaluating research needs to take these considerations into account and scaffolding is being done. So I apologize for the noise in the background, working from home. Also wanna thank Mark so much for your very thoughtful engagement with Kiran's work and invoking much more discussion and also to you, the audience. But before I go to that, actually sorry, I just saw Joe Hills, too, International Affairs Wrap, thanks for coming along to and explaining the collaboration. Watch this space, everyone, for Kiran's block piece that's gonna be featured in International Affairs Online alongside with a link to the video or the recording of this presentation. And yes, again, thanks to you, the audience for coming along, taking a lunch break out and listening to Kiran's research. So everyone have a great afternoon. Thank you.


FAO, with funding from the European Union, promotes environmental sustainability in agriculture with the ACP-MEs3 programme. FAO's ACP-MEs project in St. Lucien, the Caribbean is working in four main focus areas. Those are forestry and agroforestry, management of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, responsible pesticides management including farmer capacity building through farmer field schools and enhancement of the regional cocoa sector. We used to catch crayfish in the rivers, drink directly from the rivers. Now we are no longer able to do that. Through this project, we were able to plant about 1,500 species of forest trees along the riverbank. So you're hoping when these trees grow, they will be able to stabilize the soil. The forestry, the planting is very good because first it protects my agriculture, then the village too because it used to, when we have overflowing river, it even crosses to the village and we're having a lot of problems with this. So it is very useful to us. We have supported the preparation of a rapid assessment of the state of St. Lucien's plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Plant genetic resources is very important for our food security, food and nutrition security, livelihoods. What we have realised over the years is that the farmers have been coming to appreciate some of the resources, the plant genetic resources that are around us. Our farmers, they are very dependent on pesticides. Any problem, they'll get a pesticide. So these are some of the issues that we face in terms of highly hazardous pesticides. They need to be regulated, we need, in order for that to be done, we need to strengthen pesticide legislation and we need to introduce alternatives to the farmers. Aiming for a safe management of pesticides, ACP Mears 3 works on assessing national procedures and practices related to pesticide policies. Analyzing customs control processes for pesticides imports to defeat illicit pesticides. Updating the FFS manual about pesticide management good practices. And training farmers to promote the use of ecosystem-based alternatives to synthetic pesticides. As it relates to enhancement of the cocoa sector, we have provided training to farmers in St. Lucia as well as to agricultural extension officers in ecosystem-friendly cocoa agronomy and safe methods of post-turbis management of cocoa that rely less on, for example, harmful pesticides or chemical inputs. So right now, they hired me as a trainer and we ran the training session. It was excellent. The farmers benefited a lot from this training session. So right now with the group I organized, we are turning cocoa into different products. So meaning my life has changed and even the community life is going to change because we're doing so many different products with the cocoa. Chuffles, cocoa blocks, cocoa sticks, cocoa powder, chocolate, name it. So it has changed our life and I wanted to change the whole community. When we think of biodiversity, we think of the biological resources. We think of the ecosystems and the ecosystem services that they provide. When we look at agriculture, fisheries and other economic sectors without the natural resource base we would not have viable sectors. So for us, biodiversity and ecosystems are very, very important. We're hoping to take the accomplishments and the successes that we've achieved in St. Lucia and share those with neighboring countries in the eastern Caribbean so that our best practices, our lessons learned, the capacity that we've built will be able to expand that to other countries in the region and build their capacity as well for sustainable agriculture, for ecosystem friendly agriculture, for sustainable livelihoods and for climate resilient agriculture as well. One of the major achievements in St. Lucia has been the improvement of the cocoa farming sector which has placed St. Lucia as a leading country with one of the best cocoa qualities that is now being recognized worldwide. So far, over 200 farmers across five communities have joined the workshops from the MIRS program which has also enabled them to re-vegetate and repair three important degraded rivers helping to create a more sustainable and resilient environment that promotes sound pesticide practices while safeguarding the biodiversity of the region. For more information about the program, please click in the link in the description and access the ACP MIRS3 website.


Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today we're very pleased that our guest is Shannon Hayden, the Director of the Planning Department for Sheboygan County. Shannon, welcome. Thank you. Welcome. Shannon oversees one of 23 very important departments and today she's going to discuss the roles and responsibilities of the Planning Department. So Shannon, please start by sharing a little bit about yourself and your background. Thank you. I run the Planning and Resources Department. It's actually kind of got some dual duties. We currently have 13 employees on our table of organization. We do have one vacancy right now, so I supervise 12 staff. We have two major divisions within our office, the Planning and Zoning Division and then the Real Property Listing Division and each of those has their own unique roles and responsibilities in the department. Planning and Zoning regulates land division, shoreland permits and septic system, which is a real glorified job, I guess. And then Real Property Listing is responsible for making sure that the tax rules are developed so that all the tax bills can go out each year. So that's in a nutshell. In a nutshell, who is Shannon Hayden? I know you were our system planning director and I get nothing but good feedback about yourself, but why don't you share with our viewers a little bit about your background and how long you've been with us? I've been with Sheboygan County for almost four years. I started out as assistant planning director. I was here for one year and then upon a vacancy that was created for the planning director, I decided to, after some soul searching, decided to apply for the job. I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree both in geography. I tell people geography is where it's at. It's all encompassing and I continually meet more and more geographers. It's kind of exciting. And I've worked for the Department of Natural Resources. I've worked for the federal government, the EPA. And now I'm here in Sheboygan County and I actually really enjoy it here. I think it's a great community to be in. So what do you see as the primary mission of the Planning and Resources Department? Probably the primary mission ultimately is to protect the natural resources as a whole. And in order to do that, there are a number of different things that have to happen. Such as regulating land divisions to make sure that that occurs in an orderly fashion. And then also with the septic systems making sure that our drinking water and groundwater stays clean. And with the shoreline zoning making sure that the structural setbacks and everything else, the lot coverage doesn't damage the water resource and it maintains an aesthetically pleasing environment for people who are, we look at from the water and from the lake. I mean, we want to make it nice for the people who have property on the lake, but we also want to make it nice for people who are out on the lake fishing or canoeing or whatever. So I would say if there was one core function that would be it, we oversee the Sheboygan Marsh. We have a total of five public boat landings that we oversee and the recreation trail. And so, you know, I guess if you had to have a little theme or a sentence to try to sum it up, it's trying to make Sheboygan County a healthy place to live, work and play. I mean, that's our ultimate goal. And healthy can mean recreation. It can be emotional or physical with hunting or fishing or those sorts of things. And it's also the actual clean, you know, cleanliness of the environment. And then real property is kind of a little bit of an aside. The tie-in is with the land information and how that's all based. And the work that we do with the land division reviews ties in with that. And in the past, the link has been computer mapping and things like that. So even though they're not part of that protecting the environment theme that runs through the overall department, they definitely have a tie-in with maintaining the land-based records that we have in the county. Oh, you mentioned you have a total of 12 staff. Right. And I know they encompass a lot of responsibilities, as you mentioned, county code administrators, planning responsibilities. You work with other municipalities and you're protecting the resources from boat landings to, again, where septic systems are located. And often people, I think, don't realize that the real property listing office is part of your department. Right. Please share a little bit more about their roles and responsibilities. Sure. Well, you know, one of the things that we really talk about is that if it wasn't for real property listing, government couldn't function because we wouldn't have the tax bill prepared and we wouldn't be able to collect the money that we levy. Any time a transfer property occurs in the unincorporated, we do not list for the city of Sheboygan. They have their own assessment process and their own assessor. But we list for every other community in the county. When that document comes in, if I were to sell you my house, let's say, and we live in the town of Sheboygan, my staff would process the document to put it from me to you for the tax bill purposes. There isn't any kind of automatic. The bank does their thing with the mortgages and things like that, and it's recorded with the register of deeds, but somewhere along the line that has to actually, the data needs to be entered to transfer the property. If a new subdivision is platted from a farm field or a vacant lot, real property listing is responsible for entering in that split of the property, getting new tax key numbers for it so the assessor can do their job and assign an assessment to that property. So not only do we deal with the straight transfers, we deal with the land divisions as well. And ultimately, our role is to support the assessors, to prepare a role for them to work from to go through the assessment process, make sure it's done in a timely manner so that the local governments can have their board of review and set their budget and do all of those things. So really, they need to work closely with the local units of government, the Department of Revenue, the state of Wisconsin gets involved too because there's constantly data that we're sending to them as well. So there's a lot of different facets of getting that done, and it's kind of amazing sometimes when you see all of the different things that have to go into that. But final question before turning it over to the chairman, one of the initiatives I know you've been a big part of is increasing our capacity with GIS and mapping. And in fact, your department works closely with the sheriff's department so they know how to most quickly respond to folks. Touch on that just a little bit. What's happening with GIS and mapping in your department? Well, up until this point, most of the work that's been done with GIS is data development, trying to get the data prepared so that it can be used. The power of GIS or geographic information systems or geographic information science, sometimes people call it, they interchange it, is the application, the ability to do analysis on the ground. And so now we're going through this planning process with our land information committee to update moving from a data development phase to an applications phase. And we've been working with the sheriff's department, health and human services. We've now brought into the loop. I'll be doing a presentation with some of their key managers next week on how I think GIS can help them with what they do. For example, we could use some readily available US census data to identify housing units built before 1950, and then they can decide to target those neighborhoods for a lot of abatement. If there was ever an outbreak for tuberculosis, an active case of tuberculosis, they could pinpoint that on the dot. They could put a buffer on the map, put a buffer around that spot and say, we need to contact all of the people around this area because they may have been exposed to tuberculosis. So there's a lot of different things that they could do. We need to get the users or the people that can use that information familiar with it because it's always been planning and land records and geography-based. But the whole purpose in GIS is for analysis, and now we need to take it to that next step. With the sheriff's department, we're trying, even, I mean, it's amazing. We never had a map before, really, of all of the jurisdictional boundaries of the first responders, and our office has been working very closely with the fire departments and ambulance companies and things, and we're finding there are places where there are actually gaps on the ground where if somebody had called 911 in that area, the dispatcher certainly would have been able to figure out who to send, but it wouldn't have been a quick pop-up. So we've been going through, and without that map, when you actually, it's very difficult to see that. And so I think that we've been having a really good relationship with the sheriff's department for sure, and they're starting to really value a lot of the things, and we've even had the DA come over a couple of times and have us put together some aerial photograph poster size for trials that they had so they could show, you know, this guy was here or if there was a drug unit bust or an accident that they wanted the intersection. So it's pretty far-reaching and the sky's the limit. There's a lot of really neat stuff out there that you can do with that tool. Excellent. Thank you. Shannon, let's go back to talking about recreational facilities that you oversee within the county. You mentioned that there are several that could give us a little advertisement for some of the what's available throughout the county. Well, we have one of the most visible is the 14-mile old Plank Road Trail, which you can take from Erie Avenue in the town, it's actually in the town of Sheboygan, all the way out to the old Wade House now. We just completed a mile-and-a-half extension from what we called the Green Bush Trailhead. If you're heading on Highway 23, it's where that log cabin was, and well, it still is. That's where it used to end, and now it goes another mile-and-a-half to the west, and you can bicycle to the road that takes you into the old Wade House. With the Highway 23 expansion project, it is hoped that that trail will go all the way to Fond du Lac. We only have about three to four miles that we would need to complete to get it from the end of where it is now to the county line. Fond du Lac County has nothing at this point in time, but they're very interested in bringing that together, and they did some work on the Highway 151 bypass there that they found very successful that they'd like to replicate here. So there's the old Plank Road Trail. There are some trailheads. There's one at the intersection of Meadowlark and Highway 23, and there's actually a boat landing there that you can, it's just a walk-in boat landing. You can't put a motorized craft in there, but if you're interested in canoeing the Sheboygan River, it's a really nice place to put in. And if you, you can actually drive along that segment, there's a small segment of the trail, probably about 500 feet with a cul-de-sac at the end, where you can park and load your canoe, and then go park up at the top of the parking lot. We have boat landings at Yetsers Lake, Little Elkhart Lake, Elkhart Lake, and Crystal Lake, and then we also have one at Gerber Lake, which Gerber Lake is not just the lake, it's also a hunting and fishing and wildlife area where people can do hunting out on that property. And so that I think a lot of times people don't fully understand that that is available to them. And then probably the most prominent, well, the most visual is the old Plank Road Trail, but one you hear a lot about is the marsh. And we have, overall there's about 14,000 acres that are all encompassed in the marsh. I wanna say there's about 7,000 that are owned by the county. We recently got a new vendor in there about a year ago, three guys in the grill, and they are, they've been remarkable in running the restaurant, and they've come up with some really unique things, some unique dishes to have, and they've been running the campground very well from what I understand, and we're really quite pleased with the way that things are working. So if people haven't been out there, I would certainly encourage them to go take a look because I think that they're doing an excellent job. You can even, my big thing was, as long as you can buy a t-shirt that says Sheboyga Marsh, it will be exciting, you can. So that in a nutshell is what we have right now. Are there any plans for any additional facilities that might be coming online down the road? Well, right now we actually are working on a seven mile extension of the Interurban rail line. It is in our five year capital plan to be constructed in 2006, and obviously with budgets, there's a lot of things up in the air, but we're gonna keep moving forward. We've formed an advisory committee, and we've been looking to Ozaki County, which has been very successful, and they have, for example, they were able to successfully fundraise for a pedestrian bridge to go over I-43. That will be constructed within the next year, so that was an over $1 million project alone, and a big chunk of that was from the grass roots, the citizens in the community really working together. So we've been tapping into their knowledge and expertise in helping us with the development of this trail, and we had some of the key players come up this last week. We're meeting once a month right now to try to get things really rolling, and speak to us about their experience, what they've done, things they might do different, and next week, or next month, we'll have somebody from Ozaki County come up and talk about the economic impact of the trail that they've seen in Ozaki County so that we can get a better feel for what that might do for us. Excuse me, we hope to bring it from the Sheboygan County line through Cedar Grove, and then ultimately into Usberg, and with the growth that those communities in Cedar Grove and Usberg have seen recently. I think there's definitely a need. I think that there's a lot more families moving into those communities. I may be talking out of turn, but I believe Usberg, for example, added an extra kindergarten class last year as a rumor that I had heard, and I think that's an indication of what is happening in those communities, and I think that there's a lot of people that would like to see more opportunities for recreation down there. But at this point, that's really the only facility that we're working on. The Resources Committee, which oversees my department, would like to see an observation tower out at the marsh, and so we're working on that, and we're working with an architect to try to come up with some conceptual drawings for some other multi-use type of things out there, but that's preliminary, but there's a big, strong goal to get that observation tower moving forward, and there's talks about fundraising potential and donations that could help fund that, and I think that's a reality. Okay, if the county implemented a stewardship fund a number of years ago, how has that worked? What projects have been funded? Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure, there have been quite a few, and they've been mixed. The first year, I think, it was kind of people getting used to it and learning, and a lot of the projects that were done were in the urban areas. The city of Sheboygan received $20,000 to help with the promenade or the walkway along the river associated with the south pier. The village of Elkhart Lake received the money for a nature trail, and that's done. The city of Plymouth received another $20,000 in that first year, too. They were removing a dam in one of their parks, and they were doing a restoration project with that, and all three of those projects turned out really well. The next year, we had the town of Rhine, and initially their dollars were for an acquisition project, and when they first did the application, I was looking at some of the site conditions and thought that there were some really great opportunities for a wetland restoration project, and ultimately that's what they ended up doing, and it's turned out to be a really beautiful project. I don't know if you've had a chance to take a look at it, but they worked very closely with the County Land and Water Conservation Department, and did a wetland scrape, is what we call it, where we take some of the topsoil off and get the water flowing in there, some prairie plantings, some shrub plantings, and it's really turned out nice, so some of the funding went to that, and then that same year, Trout Unlimited received $10,000 to put in lunker structures. They're called their habitat for trout in three different areas along the Onion River, and then the next year, the Sheboydon County Conservation Association received, I believe about $6,000 to assist with the acquisition of a 10 acre piece in the marsh, and the other half of their funds came from state stewardship dollars, so that was really a good match of how those funds worked out. The Village of Howard's Grove, which is another village in our county that's growing very quickly and has a lot of families, they're doing a wetland restoration on a new park that they're developing, so there were some funds for that, and I'm sure I'm probably, oh, the city of Sheboydon Falls, they're dredging out their lagoon, and as part of that, they are putting in a wheelchair-accessible fishing pier. So those are things that have happened to date. There was an emergency fund request made by the Department of Natural Resources for some money for an acquisition for, it's really in conjunction with the Onion River and the trout streams, the Land and Water Conservation Department received money for buffers in that area as well. So we have all these different projects in the Onion River dealing with the trout streams and this acquisition. Ultimately, I think they're asking for about $12,500 out of a total project cost of about $450,000. So if it wasn't for the county and the Sheboydon County Conservation Association stepping up in the last final hour, I guess, if you will, the whole project probably would have failed. It probably would not have happened because they couldn't get any additional dollars from the state, but because we've worked together and made this happen, it is going to happen and it's right along the line with a lot of the work that we've been trying to do over time. So I think that that was a really positive thing that happened and I think that there have been, now that more people are aware of what's out there and what the fund can be done with and we've tweaked the application process and everything, I think that it's really starting to fall in line. Really the same thing happened with the Gerber Lake project. Were you chairman at that time, Bill? I know you were on the executive committee and at that time we had the opportunity to save one of the last lakes in the county, if not in the area, that when you're on the lake, you see no development around you and between the Department of Natural Resources and the Conservation Association and Sheboydon County stepping up and leveraging scarce resources, we were able to protect that property forever and as you mentioned earlier in this segment, if folks haven't been out there, I sure encourage them to do so because it's a little jewel in the county that gives you almost a feel as though you're in Canada. So the Stewardship Fund now has provided planned opportunities to take benefit of leveraging funds and doing good things for the community. So you've done a great job. Yeah, thank you. Now the Stewardship Fund also has helped with smart growth in communities, hasn't it? Right. What have you been doing in that area? Early in the process, there was this Stewardship ad hoc community that was formed and one of the things that was raised is that not a lot of the communities in the county had a plan. So if a project was being brought forward, how would we know whether or not it was worthwhile for funding and we really should have a direction to know that a community has thought out this project and that is something that they're working toward. So the thought was that a portion of the Stewardship money would be spent to grants for local communities for smart growth planning assistance. And I think that as some of the things that plans are starting to come forward, some of the communities are in some early visioning stages and things like that, but when we've had these projects come forward, we can say, oh yeah, the residents of this community have said at a rate of 80% of the residents said this is really important to them. And so this is a good fit. Or if they've said we don't need any more of that at all, I don't know, should Sheboygan County be a part of helping with funding if the people don't find it important? Or if there's a list of priorities, maybe we can only fund five out of eight, those that are part of a plan can help be funded. We can decide that as criteria. So, and I think that if it wasn't for that, a lot of communities would still be kind of, I know everybody knows they have to do it. And I think that it helps them be a little more comfortable with moving forward and feeling like they can do it. And I think that whereas maybe four years ago, most people were saying, well, we'll just wait till 2009. It's the state law requires that you need to have the plan in place by 2010. There's probably only three or four communities in this county that I have not had active dialogue with regarding SMART growth. The rest of them been meeting with them periodically. Some of them were frequently than others, but all of them I've had good dialogue back and forth with. So, I think that it's really, there are some things that are happening in this county that I would have never thought would happen before. For example, one that you're familiar with is a partnership between the village of Adele, the village of Random Lake and the town of Sherman, where they're all sitting around the table talking to each other. We have a similar situation in an area that I call Lake Country. It's three towns and two villages in the northwest corner of the county. And another one, another partnership north of here, town of Mosul, town of Herman and village of Howard's Grove. Those communities are actually, every month we sit down at a table and we talk about this is what's important to my community or that's what's important to your community. And we start to hash out some of the issues and come to a better understanding. In one community, for example, open space is valued from an aesthetic resource and in another one it's only valued from a farming resource but they can talk to each other and understand and begin to respect that a little bit more whereas in the past there would just be this friction and anger sometimes between those two groups and it's a little bit easier when the face is familiar that you don't agree with it. And so I think that it's really made a positive difference and I think that people are really working together where before they didn't, I think they always kinda knew that it was a good idea but they didn't really even know how to start. Here's another example, town of Linden and town of Mitchell. One of the things that came out of this was that they now send notices if there's a rezoning request to their neighbors across the border where they weren't doing that before. But obviously something that if the town of Linden does it right on that border it could affect somebody in the town of Mitchell but now they're having a dialogue. So I think that though somewhat controversial I think that in the end it's better for everybody not just in each of the communities but if all the communities are planning it's best for the county as a whole. So I think it's working good. And even though your department is an awful lot on your plate you've taken a personal interest in helping several of the communities. Yeah, I think. Excuse me, I think that's really great. I think it's important and I think it's fun. And yeah, it's good. Thank you. Well we've already covered a lot of ground and one of the things that can sometimes not be a lot of fun in your department is you have very capable good staff who often have to put the black hat on. The Land and Water Conservation Department for example or the extension, UW extension. They often have the white cap on and they're working with folks and providing information and it's more of a voluntary situation where some of your staff obviously yourself included as the director need to enforce codes, need to enforce zoning laws that the county board or the state has mandated. Very briefly, we only have a few minutes. Talk a little bit about that challenge. What's your staff have to do in regards to septic system location or when it comes to development along the lake or river? Right, well as far as the septic systems go anybody who lives in the country or on a septic system will have to deal with our department at some point in time. Whether it's upfront in the beginning if you have a vacant lot and you have your soil test done and your installer is putting in the system, our staff are out there making sure that the installer meets the state plumbing code for that to make sure that that system doesn't back up into your house or no corners were cut and you know, from time to time, the staff do find things but everybody works together and get it done. I mean, ultimately want to make sure that the system is functioning and you as a landowner have a place to put the stuff that you use in your house. The other time that you might deal with us is if you have a discharge to the surface whether it be a drainage ditch or a river or whatever we respond to complaints. A lot of times I'll be honest with you what we see is two neighbors are mad at each other and then this one calls and says I can see it flowing down the ditch and then that you know and but once we get a complaint what we'll do is contact the landowner. We'll try to find an outfall at first. If we can't, we'll ask to die test the system when we put some dye down the sinks and the toilets and things and we wait a couple days to see if it shows up and sometimes even when we suspect it's a discharging someplace that's not supposed to you don't find it, you can't see it there's not a whole lot you can do about it if there's bright green water running through a drainage ditch one day then we can start, we'll issue an order and we always try to work with people in a reasonable time frame if an order is issued to replace a system or update a system, you know we don't give you one month if it's December because obviously you can't do much we try to look at that. If you live on a lake you need a permit if you live within 300 feet of a river or 1,000 feet of a lake you need a permit from us and there's a number of different criteria and if I had any advice for anybody buying land on the lake is come to our office and ask the questions because a lot of times we see people buying property with the assumption that oh I can just tear this down or I can add on here and then they've spent 300, $400,000 sometimes to find out that they're stuck with this property and now they're mad which I can fully understand but that makes things difficult and if you build something without a permit and we couldn't issue a permit for it you will remove it. People sometimes have this opinion that well I'll just pay the file building pay the fine and that's not the way it works we do issue orders for removal and we've been to court before on it so it's always best to just do everything on the up and up, get your permits and ask the questions beforehand. Though again it may not always be pleasant for your staff or the people interacting with your staff, the earlier they contact your office the better and the bottom line is you're seeking to protect the resource whether it's water quality or the interest of the individual looking to build that house or put that septic system in. Absolutely. Well Shannon we covered a lot of ground and time went quickly and I hope our viewers in this brief snapshot got a picture of just the energy and vitality you've brought to the department I know you've only been with the county about four years or so but Bill Gehring and I both appreciate the work that you and your staff do and we're very appreciative of the good things that are happening in the community as a result of your department. Thank you. If you have questions don't hesitate to contact Shannon Hayden or her staff at the planning and resources department in the county administration building they're always looking to help you and until next time on behalf of chairman Bill Gehring and myself Adam Payne thank you for joining us, next month we'll have the child support director Jim Groff here, again thank you for joining us.