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National Hispanic Heritage Month
No full textEach year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month
Early Life Factors for Complementary Feeding and Growth
No full textThis dissertation focused on the association of early life factors with complementary feeding and infant growth. Three studies were included: 1) to explore if there is an association between maternal postpartum depressive symptoms and complementary feeding practices among infants aged six to twelve months, 2) to measure the association between complementary feeding practices and infant growth during the first year of life, and 3) to assess the association between maternal gestational weight gain (GWG) and offspring\u27s obesity during the infant’s first year of life and the mediating roles of birth weight and breastfeeding in the association among women with overweight or obesity.
To achieve the first and second aims, we utilized the data from the Infant Feeding Practices Study II, a longitudinal study in the United States (U.S.) that followed mother-infant dyads from late pregnancy to twelve months postpartum. The first study found that women with likely postpartum depression were more likely to introduce complementary foods earlier, compared to those without likely postpartum depression. However, the association was weakened over time. Additionally, maternal postpartum depressive symptoms were positively associated with meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended minimum meal frequency from six to twelve months of age. No associations were found between maternal postpartum depressive symptoms and dietary diversity. Interventions targeting the alleviation of postpartum depressive symptoms should be developed and implemented early in the postpartum period to prevent the premature introduction of complementary foods.
The findings of the second study showed that the later timing of introducing complementary foods was associated with lower z-scores for infant growth from six to twelve months of age, such as the weight-for-age z-scores (WAZ), length-for-age z-scores (LAZ), weight-for-length z-scores (WLZ), and body mass index z-scores (BMIZ). Additionally, introducing complementary foods before six months of age was associated with higher WAZ from six to twelve months of age, and this association was strengthened as infants got older. Dietary diversity scores were negatively associated with WAZ from six to twelve months of age, while meal frequency was not associated with any indices of infant growth. Our findings suggest that introducing complementary foods at six months of age and feeding infants diverse foods may help prevent rapid weight and reduce the risk of infant overweight or obesity. The implementation of overweight and obesity prevention via complementary feeding practices may be initiated as early as infancy.
The last study, which used the data from a randomized clinical trial with mothers with overweight or obesity, found that there was a high prevalence of gaining excessive GWG among women with overweight or obesity. It was found that maternal GWG was not associated with infant obesity at six and twelve months of age, and breastfeeding and infant birth weight did not mediate the association. More studies are needed to explore the risk factors of overweight or obesity in infants whose mothers were overweight or obese. Future studies conducted in larger sample sizes and effective interventions to prevent women with overweight or obesity from gaining excessive GWG are warranted.
In conclusion, early life factors, such as postpartum depression, were associated with infant complementary feeding. Furthermore, practicing recommended complementary feeding (e.g., introducing complementary foods at six months of age and feeding infants diverse foods) may help reduce the risk of infant overweight or obesity. Developing interventions to prevent or treat postpartum depression and promote appropriate complementary feeding practices will likely facilitate healthy growth and lower the future risk of obesity among infants
Counterspace of Nostalgia: British and Hong Kong Literature in the 1980s and 90s
No full textHong Kong and Britain have usually been contextualized in terms of binary relationships such as former colony/colonizer, slave/master, and periphery/center in political, social and literary discourses. However, this dissertation moves beyond such reductive portrayals and reconsiders these two places against one another by reviewing their nostalgic cultural productions in the 1980s and 90s as a response to their respective situations: Hong Kong’s political and social uncertainty due to the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997 and Britain’s political and economic decline since the Suez Crisis in the 1950s. Specifically, this dissertation weighs Hong Kong and Britain against each other by analyzing four novels written and published during the same time period: Xi Xi’s My City: A Hong Kong Story (1993), Kai-cheung Dung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and Julian Barnes’ England, England (1996). The purpose of this comparison is to evaluate how these authors interpret Hong Kong and British subjectivities constructed in the very process of negotiating the forces of colonialism, capitalism, patriotism, and nationalism. These texts are usually analyzed in terms of historical-political perspectives without much reference to the conceptions of lived space in time. Therefore, this dissertation adopts Edward Soja’s Thirdspace as an investigatory tool in concert with Svetlana Boym’s notions of Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia as key concepts to analyze the aforementioned authors’ creative uses and imaginative reconfigurations of nostalgic space and offers a socio-historical-spatial reconsideration of the four texts. I argue that these narratives of nostalgic space of home function as a mode of existence in British and Hong Kong literary discourses of the 1980s and 90s. Specifically, in examining how these nostalgic narratives serve as a coping mechanism, I theorize Hong Kong’s mode of existence as a floating status, a product of its colonial history, and Britain’s as a backward glance, a symbolically productive dimension of its imperial history
