OPUS: Open Ulethbridge Scholarship
Open ULeth Scholarship (OPUS) is the University of Lethbridge's open access research repository. It contains a collection of materials related to research and teaching produced by the academic community.
Self-archiving your research in OPUS is one way to meet Open Access policies of granting agencies. It is important to retain your final, post-peer-reviewed drafts for submission to OPUS, as this is often the only version publishers will allow to be archived. Click here for information on the U of L Open Access Policy.
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Planetary health: preparing nursing students for the future
(Lippincott, 2023) Vandenberg, Shannon
Background:
Climate change around the globe is impacting human and planetary health at unprecedented rates. Nurses are well positioned to act as climate leaders, given their critical role globally.
Problem:
Current and future nurses must work to mitigate climate-related health effects. It is necessary that a planetary health approach is integrated into nursing education.
Approach:
Curricular modifications, using the Planetary Health Education Framework, are presented, which will promote awareness and understanding of climate health among future nurses. The framework is grounded in equity, which is well suited to nursing education, and can be readily adapted into current nursing curricula.
Outcomes:
Recommendations for nursing education are presented within the 5 domains of the framework.
Conclusions:
Future nurses are called on to be exemplary planetary health communicators, educators, advocates, and leaders. The Planetary Health Education Framework promotes nursing leadership in practice and in advocating for a climate-resistant future.
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Setting precedents without making norms?
(Springer, 2020) Stevens, Katharina
Some authors argue that the rule-of-law ideal gives judges a prima facie duty to provide a determinate formulation of the precedent’s general norm in all their precedent-opinions. I question that claim. I agree that judges have a duty to decide their cases based on reasons and that they should formulate these reasons in their opinions. I also agree that formulations of general norms should be the goal of common-law development and that judges have a duty to contribute to the realization of this goal. However, I argue that judges may sometimes do so better if they do not provide a determinate formulation of a general norm in their opinion. Often, judges may not feel confident that they are able to formulate a good general norm for their precedent decision, even if they believe that their decision is both correct and justifiable through argument. In this case, various reasons speak against providing a determinate formulation of a general norm, including rule-of-law reasons.
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Regional differences in high elevation snowpack decline along the North American Rocky Mountains
(Wiley, 2025) Zanewich, Karen P.; Rood, Stewart
The Rocky Mountains (RM) provide the ‘water towers’ for western North America, with deep winter snowpack accumulations that melt to contribute flows for the extensively utilised Columbia, Colorado, Saskatchewan, Missouri and Rio Grande River systems. With climate change, winter and spring warming are increasing seasonal and elevational rain versus snow proportions and altering the annual patterns of snowpack accumulation and melt. Prior studies have reported declines in snowpack extent or water content, especially on an index date, April 1. These declines could reflect reductions in the total annual snowpacks or earlier transitions to snowmelt. To resolve these influences, we assessed daily snowpack patterns at 314 snow pillow stations in the higher elevations along the 2500 km transboundary RM corridor, over three decades from 1991 to 2020. We found regional differentiation, with little change in the maximum snow water equivalent (SWEmax) or its timing (Daymax) in the most-northerly, Canadian RM region (BC, AB); slight declines in the Northern US (ID, MT, WY) and Central US (UT, CO); and major declines in the Southern US (AZ, NM; average ΔSWEmax: −2%/yr; ΔDaymax: −0.75%/yr). With compound influences of declining SWEmax and earlier Daymax, the April 1 SWE (SWEApr1) was more responsive, with progressive decline at some Northern US and Central US stations, and steep decline in the Southern US region (ΔSWEApr1: −6.5%/yr). Due to these compound influences, we recommend that future analyses include snowpack maxima and seasonality as well as April 1 measures, since that precedes the peak snowpack for higher elevation and northern sites, but follows the peak for lower and southern sites, confounding trend comparisons. Thus, higher elevation RM snowpacks are declining but with considerable latitudinal variation, displaying slight change in magnitude and seasonality in the northern regions, and greater change southward. These patterns contrast with some other climate change patterns that display increasing responsivity with higher latitude.
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Angelic devil’s advocates and the forms of adversariality
(Springer, 2021) Stevens, Katharina; Cohen, Daniel
Is argumentation essentially adversarial? The concept of a devil's advocate—a cooperative arguer who assumes the role of an opponent for the sake of the argument—serves as a lens to bring into clearer focus the ways that adversarial arguers can be virtuous and adversariality itself can contribute to argumentation's goals. It also shows the different ways arguments can be adversarial and the different ways that argumentation can be said to be "essentially" adversarial.
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Charity for moral reasons? – A defense of the principle of charity in argumentation
(Taylor & Francis, 2021) Stevens, Katharina
In this paper I argue for a pro tanto moral duty to be charitable in argument. Further, I argue that the amount of charitable effort required varies depending on the type of dialogue arguers are engaged in. In non-institutionalized contexts, arguers have influence over the type of dialogue that will be adopted. Arguers are therefore responsible with respect to charity on two levels: First, they need to take reasons for charity into account when determining the dialogue-type. Second, they need to invest the amount of effort towards charity required by the dialogue-type.