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Pathways to Prescriptive Sexual Agency and Sexual Self-efficacy: Exploring the Roles of Social Dominance Orientation, Heteronormative Sexual Beliefs, and Sexual Entitlement
No full textRecent research on sexual agency has argued that the construct assumes a single manifestation of agency and overestimates the ability of individuals’ willpower to counteract sexual vulnerability shaped by social injustices. This study is the first to create and validate a measure of prescriptive sexual agency which assesses the extent to which individuals endorse neoliberal and postfeminist sexual norms that consider sexual agency as a societal prescription. Further, past work has predominantly used the concept of sexual self-efficacy as the primary operationalization of sexual agency; in this work, I highlighted and examined how the construct of prescriptive sexual agency is distinct from sexual self-efficacy. Using Multi-Group Path Analysis, I examined beliefs about sex, gender, and power, including Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), heteronormative sexual beliefs, and entitlement to receive sex and pleasure, as predictors of prescriptive sexual agency and sexual self-efficacy. The results indicated that across gender, endorsement of SDO was positively associated with heteronormative sexual beliefs, which in turn predicted higher prescriptive sexual agency and lower sexual self-efficacy. Entitlement to receive sex and pleasure was positively associated with both types of agency. For women, SDO was also negatively associated with entitlement to receive sex and pleasure and positively associated with prescriptive sexual agency. Findings provide insight into how two types of sexual agency are enacted differently based on heterosexuals’ beliefs about power. The thesis suggests that the prescriptive side of sexual agency established under the current neoliberal and postfeminist discourse should be taken into account in future studies
Application of Traditional Vaccine Development Strategies to Sars-Cov-2
Get PDFOver the past 150 years, vaccines have revolutionized the relationship between people and disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, technologies such as mRNA vaccines have received attention due to their novelty and successes. However, more traditional vaccine development platforms have also yielded important tools in the worldwide fight against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). A variety of approaches have been used to develop COVID-19 vaccines that are now authorized for use in countries around the world. In this review, we highlight strategies that focus on the viral capsid and outwards, rather than on the nucleic acids inside. These approaches fall into two broad categories: whole-virus vaccines and subunit vaccines. Whole-virus vaccines use the virus itself, in either an inactivated or an attenuated state. Subunit vaccines contain instead an isolated, immunogenic component of the virus. Here, we highlight vaccine candidates that apply these approaches against SARS-CoV-2 in different ways. In a companion article (H. M. Rando, R. Lordan, L. Kolla, E. Sell, et al., mSystems 8:e00928-22, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00928 -22), we review the more recent and novel development of nucleic acid-based vaccine technologies. We further consider the role that these COVID-19 vaccine development programs have played in prophylaxis at the global scale. Well-established vaccine technologies have proved especially important to making vaccines accessible in low- and middle-income countries. Vaccine development programs that use established platforms have been undertaken in a much wider range of countries than those using nucleic acid-based technologies, which have been led by wealthy Western countries. Therefore, these vaccine platforms, though less novel from a biotechnological standpoint, have proven to be extremely important to the management of SARS-CoV-2. IMPORTANCE The development, production, and distribution of vaccines is imperative to saving lives, preventing illness, and reducing the economic and social burdens caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccines that use cutting-edge biotechnology have played an important role in mitigating the effects of SARS-CoV-2. However, more traditional methods of vaccine development that were refined throughout the 20th century have been especially critical to increasing vaccine access worldwide. Effective deployment is necessary to reducing the susceptibility of the world’s population, which is especially important in light of emerging variants. In this review, we discuss the safety, immunogenicity, and distribution of vaccines developed using established technologies. In a separate review, we describe the vaccines developed using nucleic acid-based vaccine platforms. From the current literature, it is clear that the well-established vaccine technologies are also highly effective against SARS-CoV-2 and are being used to address the challenges of COVID-19 globally, including in low- and middle-income countries. This worldwide approach is critical for reducing the devastating impact of SARS-CoV-2
Cylindrical Mega-Voids in Quaternary Aeolianites, Little Exuma Island, The Bahamas: Georadar Response
Get PDFIn addition to karst features, tropical carbonates contain a wide range of smaller cylindrical voids (“pipes”) attributed to bioturbation, tree molds, or dissolution, among others. During geophysical investigation of the Little Exuma Island, The Bahamas, several sites with enigmatic voids were investigated using a high-frequency ground-penetrating radar (GPR) imaging.
The aim of the paper is to assess the feasibility of GPR to detect voids within lithified Holocene calcarenites of the Hannah Bay Membe
Tolerance Over Inclusiveness?
No full textTolerance is a better approach than inclusiveness when it comes to fostering free inquiry and open classroom discussions, Joel Kaminsky writes
Episode 7: WHOI DC1011
Get PDFEpisode 7:
This episode features four alums from the class of 2011: Katie Mackenzie, Courtney Murphy, Sarah Pedicini, and Sally Stulberg. Their Design Clinic project with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI, was on the design of a sparging chamber subsystem for underwater radon surveying
Fossil Fuel Divestment in U.S. Higher Education: Endowment Dependence and Temporal Dynamics
Get PDFSince 2012, students and others have pushed U.S. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to divest their endowments from fossil fuel producing industries. In the past decade, fossil fuel divestment has become the fastest growing divestment movement in history, with over 140 U.S. HEIs announcing divestment commitments. We conduct a quantitative analysis of the three phases of U.S. 4-year HEI divestment announcements (as well as rejections of divestment) to better understand the dynamics. Announcements began (2012-2017) with a number of schools divesting, followed by a second phase where new divestment announcements slowed. The current phase, which began around 2019, shows a renewed increase in divestments. Formal rejections of divestment followed a similar pattern in the early years, where rejections were slightly more common and represented more endowment value, but have declined as some schools reversed public positions. Schools that have divested from fossil fuels now represent roughly 3% of 4-year U.S. HEIs and 35% of endowment value. Roughly 85% more endowment value is now associated with U.S. schools that have divested from fossil fuels than with those that have rejected it. Our analysis points to endowment dependence (the share of operating expenses derived from the endowment) as a potentially important indicator of whether a school would divest, with early divestments from all fossil fuels coming nearly exclusively from schools with a relatively low endowment dependence. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of different theories of change for the divestment movement. In particular, we note that over 99% of 4-year HEIs representing roughly 95% of endowment value are less dependent upon their endowment than at least one recently divested HEI, suggesting that large endowment or high dependence on endowment are no longer strict barriers to FFD for most schools
Reversing the Gaze What If the Other Were You?
No full textTired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other. Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/itl_books/1000/thumbnail.jp
Risk at the Boundaries of Social Work: An Editorial
Get PDFIn this editorial we introduce a special thematic collection of articles which focus on how risk operates, or is conceptualised, at the boundaries of social work practice. The collection includes theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented articles, each of which critically engages with contemporary debates about risk and social work and its complex intersections with boundary making in diverse fields. These fields include social work with older people, child sexual abuse and exploitation, and people with learning disabilities. We begin the editorial with a brief account of how social work can be defined and the competing ideological traditions that underpin differing forms of social work in practice, policy, and research. We also point to the contrasting nature of risk studies in relation to social work, ranging from the pragmatic concern with measuring and managing risk, to critical analysis of how and why risk is conceptualised and socially constructed in particular ways. We provide an overview of each of the five articles that comprise the special issue, their intersecting themes, and how they animate in different ways the idea of boundaries and boundary making. In the final section of the editorial, we consider the possibilities for the future direction of theoretical and empirical work in this field
The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality
No full textA fascinating exploration of the social meaning of digital death
From blogs written by terminally ill authors to online notes left by those considering suicide, technology has become a medium for the dead and the dying to cope with the anxiety of death. Services like artificial intelligence chatbots, mind-uploading, and postmortem blog posts offer individuals the ability to cultivate their legacies in a bid for digital immortality. The Digital Departed explores the posthumous internet world from the perspective of both the living and the dead.
Timothy Recuber traces how communication beyond death evolved over time. Historically, the methods of mourning have been characterized by unequal access to power and privilege. However, the internet offers more agency to the dead, allowing users accessibility and creativity in curating how they want to be remembered.
Based on hundreds of blog posts, suicide notes, Twitter hashtags, and videos, Recuber examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind. Combining these data with interviews, surveys, analysis of news coverage, and a historical overview of the relationship between death and communication technology going back to pre-history, The Digital Departed explains what it means to live and die on the internet today. In this thought-provoking and uniquely troubling work, Recuber shows that although we might pass away, our digital souls live on, online, in a kind of purgatory of their own. Source: publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/soc_books/1015/thumbnail.jp
