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Cultural, Economic, Political, and Social Perspectives in the Response to COVID-19 in Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa: An Annotated Bibliography
No full textThe primary aim of this annotated bibliography is to offer a comprehensive overview of the academic literature on the diverse ways in which cultural, economic, political, and social dynamics shaped the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022) in various Anglophone countries within Sub-Saharan Africa. The work seeks to highlight the scholarship on the unique and shared experiences across the region, emphasizing how local contexts informed public health strategies, community behavior, governance responses, and socioeconomic resilience during the crisis
A Conceptual Model for Addressing Weight Stigma and Health: Guiding Practitioner Conversations for Weight Health
No full textPractitioners working in a variety of healthcare settings increasingly face a dilemma when speaking with patients about weight health. On one hand, prescriptive weight-related health advice can exacerbate stigma, while on the other, ignoring insufficient health behavior engagement limits health and increases the risk of other adverse weight-related health conditions. Research has demonstrated that higher-than-optimal body weight is a correlate of morbidit and mortality, but has also demonstrated that weight stigma is pervasive, negatively impacting health, health behavior, and well-being. This article introduces a novel conceptual model to help practitioners initiate conversations about weight health by striving to support health behavior change in a way that deactivates and disempowers weight stigma. By advancing the acceptance principle from motivational interviewing and adapting its scope, the model focuses on destigmatizing attitudes and assumptions related to weight health to prevent or reduce generalized and internalized weight stigma. The model also focuses on limiting interpersonal stigma and its disruptive role in practitioner-patient communication by supporting personal autonomy for a lifestyle of health behavior. This article reports results from a rapid review and calls for research efforts to examine the potential causal role of active acceptance for reducing weight stigma. Overall, the conceptual model simultaneously promotes health behavior and reduces weight stigma for weight health
Invisible Labor, Invisible Rights: An Intersectional Analysis on the United States’ Au Pair Program
Get PDFImmigrant women of color have long formed the backbone of the American domestic workforce, and in the past few decades, they have been increasingly stepping in to fill the country’s deepening childcare crisis. While scholars have examined the racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions of domestic labor and the transnational “global nanny chain,” far less attention has been paid to immigrant women of color who enter the United States through legal, temporary guest worker programs. This Note focuses on the United States’ au pair program—a J-1 Cultural Exchange initiative—to examine the intersectional vulnerabilities faced by au pairs from the Global South and other developing countries. It argues that these au pairs are uniquely exposed to exploitation not only because of the inherent precarity of live-in domestic labor but also due to their “liminal legality”: a form of legal marginalization that simultaneously grants and withholds rights, creating a precarious state of in-betweenness. Drawing on recent litigation, demographic shifts in the program, and an intersectional framework, this Note highlights how these au pairs are often excluded from effective labor protections and struggle to assert their rights within both legal and social structures. It concludes by calling for robust anti-retaliation protections and expanded access to labor organizing as essential mechanisms for empowering minority au pairs and addressing the structural harms they face
Homeownership and Environmental Attitudes
No full textHomeownership is associated with financial stability, middle-class status, and the good life in the United States. On the national level, homeownership has been touted to improve social stability, generate wealth, and foster citizenship and solidarity. If true, expanding homeownership could help to solve the nation’s social, political, and thus environmental challenges. However, despite the popular currency of these ideas, existing research has mixed findings on the political consequences of homeownership. While previous research has linked homeownership to conservative political orientation, there is reason to believe that this may not apply to environmental attitudes. The conservatizing hypothesis is supported primarily by research on homeowners’ attitudes toward macroeconomic or local development policies, not environmental ones. The two mechanisms from the literature — social integration and locally dependent financial investment— can be expected to increase environmental concern among homeowners. Through six semi-structured interviews and a multivariate regression analysis using the General Social Survey 2021 Cross-section Study, this paper finds that homeowners tend to be more concerned about the environment than renters, especially if their neighborhood is highly exposed to environmental risks
Blocking Oil Development in Yasuní National Park: Ecuador’s Unprecedented Strides Towards Environmental Justice
No full textThis paper explores Ecuador's proposal to protect Block 43 of the Yasuní National Park from oil drilling through the Yasuní-ITT Initiative proposed in 2007. The paper will examine why the initiative failed and how community activists responded. Ultimately, it will argue that the Yasuní-ITT Initiative upheld environmental justice through its assertion of a moral economy and its potential to help Ecuador step away from oil dependency and protect the rights of Indigenous communities, particularly the two tribes living in voluntary isolation in the Yasuní region. When the initiative was terminated and Indigenous communities were not consulted in the decision to begin drilling for heavy crude oil, citizen activism and mobilization of democracy through a referendum reasserted environmental justice and Indigenous rights
Technological Innovations in Dementia Care: The Role of Social Work Advocacy
Get PDFAccording to the World Health Organization (2023), dementia affects over 55 million people across the globe, projected to increase to 139 million individuals by the year 2050. The caregiver burden, which compounds over the years of illness, includes emotional, physical, and financial challenges. These challenges disproportionately impact low-income and minority communities (Mickens et al., 2020). This research paper explores the role of technology in alleviating these challenges by improving the quality of life of both persons with dementia (PWDs) and their caregivers. Current technological tools, including healthcare monitoring tools, location-tracking devices, and reminiscence therapy platforms, are analyzed for their strengths in addressing the cognitive and safety needs of PWDs. I also address limitations such as financial barriers, digital literacy gaps, and accessibility challenges among older adult populations. The study emphasizes the significant role of social workers in advocating for equitable, person-centered care through policy and community-level interventions. Recommendations for social workersare provided, including promoting digital literacy programs, subsidizing assistive technology costs, and prioritizing user-centered designs to ensure equitable access to dementia care technologies
The Dual Tales of Moralizing Courts: Examining Party-Related Moralizing Keywords in Civil Judgments
Get PDFCombining Rule of Virtue with Rule of Law, a policy initiative in China that could be traced back to the governance of President Jiang Zemin, has drawn widespread attention from Western scholarship over the past few years. But how is this initiative carried out in everyday judicial decisions? The first part of this article tries to answer this question by searching for a group of 18 morality-related and Party-sanctioned keywords in publicly issued civil cases between 2001 and 2018. Here, we found judicial decisions incorporating extra-legal moralizing passages across a wide range of locations, court levels, subject matters, and individual judges. These judicial opinions include moralizing lectures on various topics and in various styles; and we further analyze their rhetoric and function through a close reading of over 1,500 sample cases. The second part of this article then examines whether this judicial practice accurately reflects the top-down policy initiative and seeks to explain the identified gaps by offering a second, bottom-up motivation for judicial moralizing. In conclusion, we posit that Chinese judges include Party-sanctioned moralizing language in their opinions to serve dual purposes: both to satisfy a political mission imposed from the top, and to win over populist trust and support on their own accord. We end with an analysis of the legal and structural implications of such practices, and a cautionary note about their potential impact on the legitimacy of the Chinese judicial system
What Remains
No full textThe second thing they tell you at a vicarious trauma workshop is to turn the audio off while watching the videos. The first thing is to not try to be a hero, and the more content you stoically expose yourself to the more insidiously it will take root. Of course I was too arrogant to listen. Spent hours at work combing through graphic material, listening to every gunshot and scream. Over and over again. I became more withdrawn, cried privately. Over and over again. The visuals are haunting, but they fade eventually. The sounds are ghosts that still live with me.
I used science to intellectualize my troubles. I researched the relationship between sound and memory, a lot of papers about remembering patterns. I researched the relationship between sound and violence, a lot of papers about vets and PTSD. I researched the relationship between violence and memory, a lot of papers about mice and their cortisol levels. And while I now understand why I get auditory hallucinations, I don’t know how to get rid of them.
So now, I use art to romanticize my deteriorating mental health. I journaled to log my thoughts, nagging daydreams, and irrepressible emotions. I want to share a translation of these ramblings, three poems expressed in video. The result is a collage of open-source video, 3D models, and diegetic sound; a quick peek into my quotidian, a chaotic tour through the real, unreal, and ultrareal.
Notes on Contributor
Gauri Bahuguna is a computational designer and researcher dedicated to exploring intersections of art, human rights, and emerging technologies. With over five years of experience investigating complex human rights cases, Gauri has collaborated with practitioners across the domains of advocacy, law, and art to create compelling narratives that are accessible to wider audiences.
As Deputy Director and Senior Researcher at SITU Research, she has led investigations into human rights violations in Sudan, surveillance along the U.S. Southern Border, and short form films for the UN mapping evidence of ISIL’s crimes in Iraq. She has also served as a researcher and curatorial adviser on “Patterns of Life” a collaboration with artist Mona Chalabi for the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. Additionally, Gauri has taught electives like “Spaces of Accountability / Models of Justice” and studios at the Cooper Union School of Art, given lectures at Carnegie Mellon, NYU, The New School, and participated in the inaugural Biennale College Architettura in Venice, 2023
Dividing Trademark Use
Get PDFThe trademark law of the United States places special emphasis on whether and how a trademark is used in commerce. But over the long history of the Lanham Act—including some less-than-careful drafting by Congress and some aggressive acts of interpretation by the federal courts—the concept of “use” has become complicated and in many ways confused. Two recent Supreme Court cases—Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC and Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc.—reflect and in some ways exacerbate that confusion. But the opinions in these cases also expose an interesting property of “use” in trademark law that has not been deeply examined in the caselaw or the academic literature. That property is that the use of a trademark can be divided among multiple agents with respect to a single product or service. The potential for divided use raises issues of secondary responsibility that trademark law has never comprehensively addressed. This Article catalogues the various notions of “use” in trademark law, shows how Jack Daniel’s and Abitron destabilize these notions, and applies principles of secondary responsibility to attempt to reconcile those cases with other contentious areas of trademark doctrine under the framework of divided use
