Suchergebnisse

Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017, and as a commemoration of the innovative text, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's Center for Mexican American Studies prepared a yearlong celebration in honor of its legacy. Many mujeres across a multitude of disciplines came together to coordinate events that ranged from poetry readings, symposia showcasing student research rooted in Anzaldúan theory, bilingual story hours, and the annual El Retorno: El Valle Celebra [a] Nuestra Gloria. This edition of Río Bravo, like the year itself, is dedicated in honor of Borderland's legacy, which has provided all of us the space to examine our own borders for a deeper appreciation and critique, as well as the possibility for healing those heridas abiertas (Anzaldúa 3) that still exist and hemorrhage today.

2020 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Due to the growing concern of the global climate change crisis and young adults responding to this crisis in large numbers by engaging in public-sphere environmental actions, this study seeks to more deeply understand motivations and barriers of this young population to engage in environmental action. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) framework, which uses attitudes, social norms and perceived behavioral control to predict both behavior and behavioral intention, often in a private-sphere behavioral context, this study aims to extend the TPB by adding additional variables, such as environmental communication, climate change social media use, environmental identity and political identity, that more accurately predict public-sphere collective action. It also examines practical constraints related to time, money and access. Using an online survey of adults aged 18 to 29, this study found that environmental communication, climate change social media use and environmental identity are all strong and significant predictors for both action intentions and action. It also found that political identity is a significant predictor of intentions but not action. Environmental action intentions are significant predictors towards action. Lastly, this study found that demographics, social norms, perceived behavioral control, attitudes and practical constraints are all not significant predictors of environmental action or intentions for this population. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, I wrote a short historical study of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The narrative read like a tale of two agencies: a largely ignored and inept FEMA during the worst of times under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr. and a revitalized and reorganized FEMA during the best of times under President Clinton and up through the September 11th disaster. The aim of the study was to glean insight into the relationship between the internal organization of FEMA and its perceived performance. This paper shows that when FEMA is internally divided—its national security and domestic emergency missions are under separate directorates without much contact or communication with one another—and there exist heightened pressures for FEMA to divert resources and attention to its national security programs, the Agency's overall performance in response and recovery efforts appears to suffer. With these findings I had hoped to make a conjecture about how the transfer of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might adversely affect the Agency's overall mission. As it happened, the negative attention paid FEMA in the months following its response to the 2004 Hurricanes seemed to bolster the hypothesis that a divided and militarized FEMA would not be able to respond to non-national security emergencies with the success exhibited by an integrated and demilitarized FEMA. The Agency's recent response to the disaster in New Orleans has rendered the question considered in this paper both timely and important and, regrettably, has seemed to reinforce its conclusions.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, I wrote a short historical study of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The narrative read like a tale of two agencies: a largely ignored and inept FEMA during the worst of times under presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr. and a revitalized and reorganized FEMA during the best of times under President Clinton and up through the September 11th disaster. The aim of the study was to glean insight into the relationship between the internal organization of FEMA and its perceived performance. This paper shows that when FEMA is internally divided -- its national security and domestic emergency missions are under separate directorates without much contact or communication with one another -- and there exist heightened pressures for FEMA to divert resources and attention to its national security programs, the Agency's overall performance in response and recovery efforts appears to suffer. With these findings I had hoped to make a conjecture about how the transfer of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might adversely affect the Agency's overall mission. As it happened, the negative attention paid FEMA in the months following its response to the 2004 Hurricanes seemed to bolster the hypothesis that a divided and militarized FEMA would not be able to respond to non-national security emergencies with the success exhibited by an integrated and demilitarized FEMA. The Agency's recent response to the disaster in New Orleans has rendered the question considered in this paper both timely and important and, regrettably, has seemed to reinforce its conclusions. Adapted from the source document.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples suffer higher rates of food insecurity and diet-related disease than other Australians. However, assessment of food insecurity in specific population groups is sub-optimal, as in many developed countries. This study tailors the Healthy Diets ASAP (Australian Standardised Affordability and Pricing) methods protocol to be more relevant to Indigenous groups in assessing one important component of food security. The resultant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healthy Diets ASAP methods were used to assess the price, price differential, and affordability of healthy (recommended) and current (unhealthy) diets in five remote Aboriginal communities. The results show that the tailored approach is more sensitive than the original protocol in revealing the high degree of food insecurity in these communities, where the current diet costs nearly 50% of disposable household income compared to the international benchmark of 30%. Sixty-two percent of the current food budget appears to be spent on discretionary foods and drinks. Aided by community store pricing policies, healthy (recommended) diets are around 20% more affordable than current diets in these communities, but at 38.7% of disposable household income still unaffordable for most households. Further studies in urban communities, and on other socioeconomic, political and commercial determinants of food security in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities appear warranted. The development of the tailored method provides an example of how national tools can be adapted to better inform policy actions to improve food security and help reduce rates of diet-related chronic disease more equitably in developed countries.

"Managing the (Post)Colonial" investigates a range of literary texts - from American newspaper articles to Philippine state-sponsored poetry - which circulated just before and during the Philippine Commonwealth period (1934 -1946), when the islands were neither an official U.S. colony nor an independent nation. I argue therefore that the Commonwealth period was an ambiguous and contradictory political moment which I signify through the parenthetical use of "post" in "(post)colonial." I thus call into question whether or not an entire nation and its subjects could be simultaneously colonial and yet not, for it is at the moment of seeming official separation from the U.S. that political, economic, cultural and social policies actually ensured U.S. hegemony under the guise of independence. Ultimately, I analyze cultural and literary texts of the period to show how sexualized and gendered representations of the Filipino subject were not only utilized in an attempt to reconcile this contradiction of the Commonwealth, but also to imagine alternative nationalisms and forms of social emancipation. In the first chapter, I focus on the patriarchal formulation of benevolent assimilation and on American journalist Katherine Mayo's 1925 book Islands of Fear. I argue that Mayo discursively enabled her own access to the masculine realm of imperial power by positing a theory of Anglo- Saxon racial superiority meant to overwrite the patriarchal hierarchy between genders. This chapter demonstrates the mutually constitutive yet simultaneously contradictory nature of the imperial systems of racialization, sexualization and gendering. I trace the lines of this argument further in the second chapter as I investigate the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Awards. As the formal structure of an independent nation was established, state-sanctioned cultural projects such as the Awards not only obfuscated but also enabled the persisting economic and political ties between the islands and the U.S. Such projects did so by cultivating a canon of Philippine writing in English that posited normative masculinist nationalism as the telos of American democratic tutelage. In the third chapter I focus on what I term the hypersexualization of Philippine independence and the (im)possibilities of queer moments of desire in Carlos Bulosan's prose and Josè Garcia Villa's poetry - the impossibility of asserting a normative Filipino American subject and the possibility of imagining an America that is in the heart. Focusing on the queer moments in Bulosan and Villa's texts, I trace how the relationships between race, gender and sexuality are not only inundated with power but are also productively contradictory, allowing one access to spaces and acts of freedom

En travaillant à décoloniser le récit sino-canadien et à envisager les différents aspects de la culture chinoise qui ont façonné le développement de l'identité sino-canadienne, on peut trouver des éléments essentiels à ces aspects dans le commerce d'importation de thé chinois par les voies britanniques et dans l'exportation canadienne-française de ginseng canadien vers la Chine. Le développement du commerce du thé entre la Chine et le Canada (La Grande-Bretagne a servi d'intermédiaire) a reflété l'expérience historique des Canadiens d'origine chinoise à bien des égards. Par exemple, le monopole britannique sur les importations de cette marchandise au Canada suit des politiques tout aussi restrictives sur l'immigration chinoise comme The Chinese Immigration Act. Cela annonçait également la progression de l'inclusion des Canadiens d'origine chinoise dans l'ensemble du tissus culturel canadien. D'une manière similaire, la « découverte » de la plante de ginseng, une plante indigène au Canada suivie de sa commercialisation en un produit exporté en Chine a mis en évidence la relation entre la Nouvelle-France (le futur Québec), la France elle-même, la Chine—ce qui a impliqué des autochtones. La notoriété du ginseng canadien reflétaient les attitudes de l'époque envers les biens et les ressources du Nouveau Monde et la façon dont les connaissances autochtones étaient perçues. Cette recherche vise à s'appuyer sur des études antérieures en documentant l'influence des composantes chinoises sur l'identité canadienne en mettant en évidence les influences de divers commerces, principalement le thé et le ginseng, mais aussi des différents marchandises artistiques qui étaient valorisés à l'époque.

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the socio-technical impact that social media has had on coordination between professional emergency responders and digital volunteers. Drawing from the research literature, we outline the problem space and explore ways to improve coordination and collaboration between these two groups. Possible improvements include mediators, revisiting trust, emergency policy and process changes, a bounded social environment, digital volunteer data as context, and computational solutions. As the space matures and collaboration improves, we predict that professional responders will begin to rely on the data and products produced by digital volunteers. Volunteer groups will be challenged to mature as well, to develop volunteer management systems, permanent staff, data management practices, and training for new volunteers to ensure consistent response to professional responders as needed.

AbstractMessage diffusion and message persuasion are two important aspects of success for official risk messages about hazards. Message diffusion enables more people to receive lifesaving messages, and message persuasion motivates them to take protective actions. This study helps to identify win-win message strategies by investigating how an under-examined factor, message content that is theoretically important to message persuasion, influences message diffusion for official risk messages about heat hazards on Twitter. Using multilevel negative binomial regression models, the respective and cumulative effects of four persuasive message factors, hazard intensity, health risk susceptibility, health impact, and response instruction on retweet counts were analyzed using a dataset of heat-related tweets issued by U.S. National Weather Service accounts. Two subsets of heat-related tweets were also analyzed: 1) heat warning tweets about current or anticipated extreme heat events and 2) tweets about non-extreme heat events. This study found that heat-related tweets that mentioned more types of persuasive message factors were retweeted more frequently, and so were two subtypes of heat-related tweets. Mentions of hazard intensity also consistently predicted increased retweet counts. Mentions of health impacts positively influenced message diffusion for heat-related tweets and tweets about non-extreme heat events. Mentions of health risk susceptibility and response instructions positively predicted retweet counts for tweets about non-extreme heat events and tweets about official extreme heat warnings respectively. In the context of natural hazards, this research informs practitioners with evidence-based message strategies to increase message diffusion on social media. Such strategies also have the potential to improve message persuasion.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples suffer higher rates of food insecurity and diet-related disease than other Australians. However, assessment of food insecurity in specific population groups is sub-optimal, as in many developed countries. This study tailors the Healthy Diets ASAP (Australian Standardised Affordability and Pricing) methods protocol to be more relevant to Indigenous groups in assessing one important component of food security. The resultant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healthy Diets ASAP methods were used to assess the price, price differential, and affordability of healthy (recommended) and current (unhealthy) diets in five remote Aboriginal communities. The results show that the tailored approach is more sensitive than the original protocol in revealing the high degree of food insecurity in these communities, where the current diet costs nearly 50% of disposable household income compared to the international benchmark of 30%. Sixty-two percent of the current food budget appears to be spent on discretionary foods and drinks. Aided by community store pricing policies, healthy (recommended) diets are around 20% more affordable than current diets in these communities, but at 38.7% of disposable household income still unaffordable for most households. Further studies in urban communities, and on other socioeconomic, political and commercial determinants of food security in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities appear warranted. The development of the tailored method provides an example of how national tools can be adapted to better inform policy actions to improve food security and help reduce rates of diet-related chronic disease more equitably in developed countries.