<![CDATA[Jes Heppler - Portfolio]]>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:22:33 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Photographer takes his skill from hobby to profession at Disney]]>Fri, 25 May 2018 03:28:09 GMThttp://www.jesheppler.com/portfolio/photographer-takes-his-skill-from-hobby-to-profession-at-disneyAuthor's Note: I conducted an interview for my college newspaper's "Invasion of Privacy" feature. I conducted and transcribed an interview and discussed the student's accomplishments, passions, and aspirations. The original post can be found here.
Senior Michael Worboys manages an impressive and complementary set of interests. His passion for education, photography and the outdoors has led him to his next adventure as a photographer in the parks through The Disney College Program. Self-proclaimed “outdoors guy” Worboys noted that he got his start with photography by taking trips to the Adirondacks. Raised in Brockport, New York, he grew up hiking with his dad.
“I grew up going to the Adirondacks three or four times a year, and just a few years ago I got really into hiking,” Worboys said. “It was a very scenic place.”

His photography interest began as a hobby, but his natural talent has brought him far. In addition to being a staff photographer for The Lamron, Worboys has also done family portraits for cousins, aunts and uncles. Despite being mostly self-taught, he said that he is looking forward to being a photographer for Disney next semester.

Evidently a family man, Worboys’ decision to attend the Disney College Program next semester was influenced by his sister. Being 12 years her junior, he reflected on visiting her when she did the program herself. He explained that he was young at the time and he recalled his sister telling stories “about how much fun it was.”

“I love Disney, so it was always something I wanted to do in college,” Worboys said.
The spring 2015 semester was the best opportunity to achieve his goal. Worboys was ultimately accepted and said that he looks forward to putting his photography skills to good use as a photo pass photographer.

Worboys is particularly excited about the prospect of taking pictures of people in the parks and mentioned the possibility of “get[ting] placed in front of the castle, like the iconic Disney picture in front of the castle or in front of any of the characters.”

Following his semester at Disney, Worboys will return to Geneseo to complete student teaching. Currently an education major with an environmental studies minor, Worboys pointed to his family as his inspiration for going into education. He grew up surrounded by kids, as his mom was a babysitter, and this fostered his love for children.

“I knew I wanted to work with kids and being a teacher is a good outlet for that,” Worboys said. “When my older brother and sister had kids, that solidified it.”

When he isn’t taking photographs or looking forward to working for National Geographic, Worboys loves to return to his roots in Brockport. He noted that he hopes to take more pictures when he returns home in the summer in addition to hiking; he particularly enjoys the high peak mountains.

“Me and my dad have [hiked] 31 of the high peak mountains, so it’s something fun to work at,” Worboys said.

Despite being modest about his achievements, Worboys has big ideas for his future. He said that he plans to complete his student teaching after working at Disney and hopes that this opportunity could open the door to a professional internship with photography down the line.

Ideally down the road, Worboys noted that he hopes to work at a prestigious job such as National Geographic Education or National Geographic Kids. “It’s kind of far off,” he said. “But that’s my dream.”
]]><![CDATA[Legal and social science annotations]]>Thu, 24 May 2018 19:29:39 GMThttp://www.jesheppler.com/portfolio/legal-and-social-science-annotationsAuthor's Note: I have linked several legal and social science annotations I co-authored with another intern during my summer at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at UC Berkeley's School of Law. This particular wing of the Reproductive Justice Virtual Library is part of CRRJ's strategic initiative to repeal Harris v. McRae. ​The annotations are summaries of legal and social science articles intended to be accessible for a general audience. 
From CRRJ's Reproductive Justice Virtual Library's wing on abortion funding bans:

Fully funding abortion is essential to making the abortion right a meaningful reality for people living in poverty. One Supreme Court case standing in the way is Harris v. McRae, which upheld as constitutionally valid the Hyde Amendment's ban on use of federal Medicaid funds for nearly all abortions. Getting the Supreme Court to revisit and reverse its ruling in Harris v. McRae is the goal of one of CRRJ's and If/When/How's long-term strategic initiatives. Correcting the case law is an essential element of a multi-faceted strategy to restore and secure coverage of abortion in public insurance programs, which also includes research, movement building, and state and federal policy advocacy. Replacing this dangerous Supreme Court precedent with a case that declares abortion funding bans unconstitutional would secure abortion coverage in public insurance for the long haul, regardless of future shifts in the political balance of Congress and possible efforts to resurrect Hyde.
​
Sample Annotations
Keighley, Jennifer. “Health Care Reform and Reproductive Rights: Sex Equality Arguments for Abortion Coverage in a National Plan.” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 33 (2010): 357–402.

ANNOTATION
This article argues abortion is a sex equality issue and concludes that restrictive abortion funding constitutes sex discrimination, which should be examined under a transformed understanding of the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Constitution. Keighley argues that the sex equality argument has strategic appeal because it focuses the legal issues on equality rather than current legal thinking on these topics. The author examines how legislative discussion around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 showed a more expansive understanding of sex equality and healthcare, which ought to be adopted in abortion funding analysis today. The article contends that in order to ensure gender justice and to prevent sex-based discrimination, abortion funding must be included in healthcare coverage. The article also argues that the Court’s focus on poverty, instead of sex equality, in the Supreme Court’s case Harris v. McRae demonstrates a reluctance to confront sex equality issues within the abortion funding context. The author suggests, however, that the Supreme Court might one day change its approach to reproductive rights by viewing abortion through a sex equality lens.

Roberts, Sarah C.M., Heather Gould, Katrina Kimport, Tracy A. Weitz, and Diana Greene Foster. “Out-of-Pocket Costs and Insurance Coverage for Abortion in the United States.” Women’s Health Issues Journal 24, no. 2 (2014): 211–18. http://www.ansirh.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/roberts-mar14-out_of_pocket.pdf.

ANNOTATION
This article analyzes how pregnant people pay for abortion care in the U.S., including through private and public insurance, non-profit abortion funds, and out-of-pocket. The data show that regardless of insurance status, most people must pay out-of-pocket for abortion care. On average, participants in the study paid an average of $370 in out-of-pocket costs for an abortion, whereas participants whose public or private insurance did not cover abortion paid an average of $575.The article also details the development of abortion funds, which provide subsidies (both partial or full) to healthcare facilities to cover costs of a low-income person's abortion. The authors explain that even in states where Medicaid coverage for abortion is extended beyond the narrow exceptions listed in the Hyde Amendment, it is still difficult for a person to access insurance coverage and rare for any insurance to cover the all of of the related costs. Despite the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), which is meant to increase access to public and private healthcare, this article points out how new federal and state laws restrict the use of private and public insurance coverage for abortions. The article warns that, when it comes to abortion, limitations of the ACA may counter potential gains, and some people will even lose the abortion insurance coverage they previously had.


Binion, Gayle. “Reproductive Freedom and the Constitution: The Limits on Choice.” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice 4, no. 1 (1988): 12–41.

ANNOTATION
This article insists that because abortion was declared a fundamental right in Roe v. Wade, state restrictions on abortion funding should be subject to the highest level of legal review (commonly referred to as strict scrutiny). Binion argues that although the government defended its decision to financially support childbirth but not abortion in order to “protect potential life,” the Court should have required a stronger justification. The government’s choice to provide Medicaid coverage for childbirth but not for abortion constitutes an abridgement of a fundamental right, because without coverage, millions of low-income pregnant people cannot obtain the abortion care they need.
]]><![CDATA[final report for internship]]>Tue, 22 May 2018 22:04:08 GMThttp://www.jesheppler.com/portfolio/center-on-reproductive-rights-and-justice-final-report-on-internshipAuthor's Note: As part of the requirements for my summer internship through the Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps, I completed a final report on my experience in August 2016. Here is an example of my more technical writing. My profile from the internship can be found here.
Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice
This summer, I completed my RRASC Internship at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice (CRRJ) at UC Berkeley School of Law. CRRJ is a multidisciplinary research center dedicated to reproductive justice. CRRJ is especially committed to “bridging the academic-advocate divide” to find policy solutions to various issues in reproductive justice, including halting the criminalization self-induced abortion, overturning Harris v. McRae, and abolishing welfare family caps. As a Summer Intern, I was able to learn about each of these issues through various projects. I worked primarily on the Reproductive Justice Virtual Library, and particularly, on the newly released library wing dedicated to research and articles on Harris v. McRae. I also provided research assistance on CRRJ’s non-partisan policy analysis, “Bringing Families out of ‘Cap’tivity: the Path Toward Abolishing Welfare Family Caps.” Outside of these two major projects, I completed several other assignments involving research and press releases. Overall, interning at CRRJ was a fantastic opportunity where I got to employ skills I had gained from previous academic and activist experiences, and where I was able to further hone these skills in a new environment.
Reproductive Justice Virtual Library
The Reproductive Justice Virtual Library is an online searchable catalog of resources related to reproductive justice. As part of CRRJ’s mission to bridge to academic-advocate divide, these resources include work by advocates, non-profits, social scientists, and legal scholars. The collection also aims to be accessible to anyone—not just academics. Part of cultivating this accessibility is writing detailed and easy-to-understand annotations for each article.

My assignment was related to the recently released library wing dedicated to Harris v. McRae. Harris v. McRae was a court case, which determined that it was constitutional for Medicare to deny health care coverage for abortion care. This decision, which has resulted in the Hyde Amendment, has left those with unintended pregnancies in dire situations. Women who are on Medicare and become pregnant still require abortions, and denying abortion care coverage means that women often have to go into even further poverty in order to obtain an abortion. This ruling especially affects women of color, women in poverty, immigrant women, and any civil servants who receive Medicare.

In line with CRRJ’s strategic initiative to overturn Harris v. McRae, I was responsible, along with another intern, for editing some annotations and writing new ones for various articles. These annotations went through various stages. The other intern and I often struggled to make certain annotations accessible, especially legal articles. With help from our supervisors, we were able to make succinct and comprehensible annotations for each article. We were also responsible for making decisions about which new articles and resources to include. While writing annotations was a new experience for me, I had prior editing experience from editing undergraduate academic journals and from working as a newspaper editor. I was excited to employ these skills in a new context, and it certainly helped with the process. Moreover, I learned a lot about different legal strategies for overturning Harris v. McRae. My philosophy background helped considerably with understanding legal literature, and I became increasingly interested in philosophy of law.

In addition to editing and writing annotations, I also learned how to use Zotero. Zotero is a citation management software, and it is often used by academics to keep track of annotations (and by me when I write long philosophy papers!). In this context, I was uploading articles and annotations to the system via Zotero, which was an altogether new experience for me. While I was able to understand it quickly, there were some hiccups with the system that were beyond my control and CRRJ’s control. So, I uploaded each article along with the annotation and sent reports to the programmers who eventually fixed the coding. This particular project showed me how important it is to learn how to navigate institutional systems. Even though the project is under CRRJ’s domain, CRRJ collaborates with other organizations, past interns, and programmers within the UC Berkeley system in order to make the RJVL possible.

Welfare Caps Issue Brief
This summer, the Center released a non-partisan policy analysis on Welfare Family Caps. Welfare Family Caps, in varying degrees, prohibit families on welfare with more than one child from receiving additional cash aid from the state. This policy was introduced along with so-called “welfare reform” which sought to disincentive families in poverty from having children. In addition to being empirically unsound and unsuccessful in its goals to “disincentive” having children, the policy has had racist, sexist, and classist implications. It is CRRJ’s intention to help abolish these laws across the U.S., and indeed, it has already helped to do so in California, which abolished its Welfare Family Caps policy this summer. The report details the history of family welfare caps, and it elaborates upon the states that have abolished the law and the states that have attempted to do so unsuccessfully. It is the Center’s hope that this policy analysis will be useful to other activists and academics that seek to work towards the abolition of these laws across the U.S.

When another intern and I started working on the report, most of it the report had already been written. There was, however, considerable editing, restructuring, and reformatting work to be done, particularly in one section dedicated to California’s recent repeal. I spent a significant amount of time reading and re-reading the brief and editing it for concision, clarity, and comprehensibility. Most of my work involved editing, which again, made me grateful for my extensive background in editing. I also helped with research assistance by double and triple-checking citations. Additionally, I was assigned the task of creating a map that would detail the states that have and have not repealed the law, and what sort of cap each state employs. I had little to no graphic design experience prior to this assignment. There is a website that helps with creating maps, but I still had to do considerable work in order to include all of the necessary information in a way that was easy-to-read and aesthetically pleasing, and I only had a very basic photo program to work with. This was time-consuming, but incredibly rewarding, and I was happy to have picked up a new skill. One of my supervisors explained to me how working for a non-profit often makes people into a jack-of-all-trades. This experience showed me how valuable this versatility and flexibility can be to organizations and to one’s own development as an activist.

Others Projects
In addition to these two major projects, I also worked on press releases for the Purvi Patel case and for the Whole Women’s Health case. For each case, I wrote or contributed to press releases for each potential outcome. It was important in these statements to communicate CRRJ’s commitment to reproductive justice. I also tied CRRJ’s work to each potential outcome, especially in the Purvi Patel case since CRRJ coordinates the Self Induced Abortion Legal Team. In this project, I also applied my previous editing and writing skills. It was also exciting to be among others working in reproductive justice during these court cases.

Finally, I worked with my supervisors to consolidate the way in which CRRJ collects and organizes research completed by their legal interns. Brainstorming the best way to organize Excel documents was challenging and required problem-solving skills as well as putting myself in the shoes of both researchers and supervisors to see which set-up would be best for everyone.

Reflections
Overall, this internship was a wonderful experience. I learned a lot about reproductive justice, and especially about self-induced abortion and how important it is to make self-induced abortion safe and accessible for those who don’t feel comfortable having abortions in a traditional medical environment. I was exposed to organizations like Women on Waves and Women on Web who make abortion pills and medical abortions available to those in countries that ban abortions, and I learned about how the law can even affect women in the U.S. who attempt to self-induce abortion. While I had previous organizing experience from my campus and from women’s & gender studies classes, this was entirely new to me. Integrating issues related to self-induced abortion into my larger social justice framework revolutionized my understanding of reproductive justice issues. Furthermore, this internship allowed me to work much more closely with the laws and policies that affect real people. While I am, as a philosophy major, most comfortable working at the abstract and theoretical level, CRRJ allowed me to apply my analytical skills to concrete issues. I especially enjoyed working on the RJVL for this reason.

I am grateful to have had such an incredible work environment. My only difficulty was that much of my work was remote, and so it was sometimes difficult to be as productive as I might have been in a more traditional office environment. However, my colleagues and I worked around this by meeting up to do work together. We all found this helpful.

Despite this, the internship was excellent. I had the opportunity to work with three other brilliant interns with a variety of backgrounds, and it was an honor to collaborate with them as well as our supervisors and other CRRJ staff. CRRJ has done incredible work, and will continue to do so, and its mission to bridge the theory-practice gap is closely aligned with my own goals. I hope to take this experience and continue connecting my academic work to reproductive justice .
]]><![CDATA[Keeping philosophy human]]>Tue, 22 May 2018 21:58:11 GMThttp://www.jesheppler.com/portfolio/keeping-philosophy-humanAuthor's Note: This blog post was written in the context of a 400-level ENG course on The 2008 Housing Crisis. The blog post stands alone, but was also in conversation with other blog posts and with class discussion. All of the blog posts I made during this class—most of which integrate my philosophical interests into larger discussions about literature, class, and economic crisis—can be found here.
As we begin reading The Parable of the Sower and thinking about the nature of things like safety, necessity, violence, homes, or adequacy, some of the philosophical tools I mentioned in class on Friday might allow us to pursue a more fine-grained analysis of the issues that will continue arising in this class. I also want to use these tools to reflect on Francesco’s post on the problem with words—and especially words like “necessary.”

The major question Francesco’s post raised for me is, What are words for? This question bears on metaphysical issues insofar as we usually want the words we use to track something that is true and real about the world. Yet, words and how we use them also shape and filter our experience of the world. When it comes to thinking about the identity of certain words, there are surely meta-linguistic issues that are salient. I could go down the rabbit hole with this, as I have on other posts, but I won’t today. Instead, I want to reiterate the different kinds of conceptual analysis I discussed on Friday while also convincing you that these philosophical tools are useful for what we are doing in this class.

When you hear me discussing “possible worlds,” some of you might think, “Why do possible worlds matter when we are thinking about issues as pressing as water shortages, housing crises, and racism?” And sometimes, I think this too. I sleep at night by reassuring myself that there are myriad ways to make sense of the world—we can gain new perspectives and a greater understanding of the important issues from light and color and sound (photography, art, music), from prose, from economics, from sociology, from psychology, and from philosophy. Even applied ethics that seems “relevant” bears on questions related to the nature of moral propositions, the nature of moral psychology, what it means to change something, the right way to define words, and so on. So, although I bring up philosophy yet again, I encourage you all to remember the profoundly human aspects of philosophy that motivate the cold-looking logical proofs: we’re trying to better understand the nature of the things around us, and sometimes, this more abstract understanding might illuminate a question or solution that we might not have otherwise seen.
Now, for conceptual analysis. In “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds,” Sally Haslanger discusses complications related to the social constructionist project of analyzing discourse and concepts, especially those like “gender” and “race,” which differ from natural kinds like “water” or “trees.” Haslanger points out several approaches one might take to analyzing a concept.

One might take a “manifest” conceptual analysis—it is a priori(something that can be known without going into the world) and looks at our intuitions about some concept, like “knowledge.” I might reflect on knowledge, and attempt to define it and list the necessary and sufficient conditions for something counting as “knowledge.” One could do this for a word like “house as well.”

A descriptive analysis would be concerned with the referent of our “epistemic vocabulary,” which might be done by seeing which paradigmatic cases track the concept “knowledge.” If someone has a justified true belief that it is 11:59am but the justification rests on the fact that the clock says 11:59am but the clock it broken, this would challenge my belief that knowledge is defined as a justified true belief since this is a case of a justified true belief that doesn’t count as knowledge. In the “house” case, I might look around and see what people are usually referring to when they use the word house, and get together some paradigmatic cases of “houses” to better understand what a house is. Our drawings were a great example of this.

Between these two modes of analysis, Haslanger believes that the goal is to create a more accurate concept. If the descriptive and conceptual accounts are “misaligned,” one might decide between fixing the referent (in the cases of natural kinds, like water) or drawing further conceptual distinctions (as in the case of knowledge).

In resolving this “misalignment,” Haslanger notes that there is also an ameliorative approach that asks about the point of having a specific concept at all; this approach asks about the utility of a concept and what concept would do best to achieve the desired outcome or idea. If we think whether one has knowledge depends on practical interests, we adjust our concept of “knowledge” for this (e.g., Do I trust that the bus time is correct if I overhear a stranger talking speculatively about what time the bus will come? Do I trust this if I’m just going to a friends house? Do I trust this stranger if I am on my way to a job interview?). If the descriptive analysis of woman seems wrong because it excludes transgender women, we might adjust our concept of “women.” If we think the very categories of woman and man are oppressive altogether, an ameliorative analysis might look like an eliminativist project. we think the ideas we all have of what a “house” is are classist, elitist, and normative in a way we don’t approve of, perhaps we would be right to adjust our concept of what a “house” is. Finally, if we think the ideas we all have of what a “house” is are classist, elitist, and normative in a way we don’t approve of, perhaps we would be right to adjust our concept of what a “house” is.
​
There are obviously complicating factors here: is “house” a social kind in the way that “gender” or “race” are social kinds? Is there a metaphysical truth to house—or to something being the same over time—that we might be missing if we pursue an ameliorative analysis? Could the metaphysical truth of a thing (if there is such a thing) be time-indexed or contextualist? Is President Donner’s conception of “adequate housing” true in that context, or does it fail to live up to an objective truth to what it is to adequately housed? How many of these concepts are socially constructed? Do socially constructed kinds still have a metaphysical realness, even if it is different than that of a kind like “water?” Is it morally and intellectually irresponsible to think about these questions when social constructs like “safety” and “housing” end up being life or death for some people? Like Francesco, I do not have the answers either, but perhaps these modes of analysis will serve us well as we continue reading.
]]>