Professor Shipu Wang Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo . December 1, 2023
Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo brings together over ninety works by three pioneering Japanese American artists from the pre–World War II era. Despite long careers and critical acclaim, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo have largely been overlooked in traditional American art history. This groundbreaking exhibition reintroduces their work and explores their deep connections with each other for the first time.
Almeida, Paul D, Luis Ruben Gonzalez Marquez, and Eliana Fonsah The Forms of Climate Action. November 29, 2023
Scientific research on the mechanisms to address global warming and its consequences continues to proliferate in the context of an accelerating climate emergency. The concept of climate action includes multiple meanings, and several types of actors employ its use to manage the crisis. The term has evolved to incorporate many of the suggested strategies to combat global warming offered by international bodies, states, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and social movements. The present work offers a classification scheme to build a shared understanding of climate action through a lens of environmental justice and just transitions developed by sociologists and others. The classification system includes major institutional and noninstitutional forms of climate action. By identifying the primary forms of climate action, analysts, scholars, policymakers, and activists can better determine levels of success and how different forms of climate action may or may not complement one another in the search for equitable solutions in turning back the rapid heating of the planet.
Almeida, Paul, Luis Ruben Gonzalez, Edward Orozco Flores, Venise Curry, and Ana Padilla The Building Blocks of Community Participation in Local Climate Meetings. November 2, 2023
To make greater strides in reducing city-level greenhouse gas emissions, more collaboration between civil society and local governments is necessary. Participation in neighborhood and town meetings about climate change sets the stage for enduring community involvement in resiliency and mitigation planning. This study examines the correlates of individual interest in attending local climate meetings. The work is based on a random sample of 1950 registered voters in Fresno, California (the fifth-largest city in the state). The findings suggest that those individuals with ties to capacity-building organizations in the labor and community sectors were the most willing to attend meetings about climate change. The types of civic engagement activities encouraged by labor unions and community-based organizations (CBOs) were also associated with a greater willingness to participate in gatherings about global warming. Increasing public participation in local climate programs may be enhanced by investing in the types of civic organizations that specialize in mobilizing residents to engage in municipal initiatives.
Whitney Pirtle Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States. August 1, 2020
Racial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in the U.S. The overrepresentation of Black death reported in Detroit, Michigan is a case study for this argument. Racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities.
Denise Diaz Payán The Food Environment in 3 Neighborhoods in South Los Angeles, California: Access, Availability, Quality, and Marketing Practices. July 16, 2020
We developed a mapping component as part of a multilevel church-based intervention that used community-based participatory research to prevent obesity in African American and Latino churches in South Los Angeles. We developed neighborhood maps of local food environments and provided churches with standardized information on food access, availability, quality, and marketing practices.
Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Zulema Valdez, Kathryn P. Daniels, Maria D. Duenas, Denise Castro Conceptualizing Ethnicity: How Dimensions of Ethnicity Affect Disparities in Health Outcomes Among Latinxs in the United States. July 1, 2020
This study considers how attributional and relational dimensions of ethnicity affect Latinxs’ health outcomes. Analyzing data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, we examined how dimensions of ethnicity affect intragroup differences among Latinxs and intergroup differences between Latinxs and non-Hispanic Whites with regards to mental and physical health status.
Michael J. Spivey Who You Are The Science of Connectedness. April 28, 2020
Why you are more than just a brain, more than just a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are.
Carolyn Dicey Jennings The Attending Mind. April 1, 2020
An ancient metaphor likens attention to an archer pulling her bow - the self directing her mind through attention. Yet both the existence of such a self, and the impact of attention on the mind, have been debated for millennia. Advancements in science mean that we now have a better understanding of what attention is and how it works, but philosophers and scientists remain divided as to its impact on the mind. This book takes a strong stance: attention is the key to the self, consciousness, perception, action, and knowledge. While it claims that we cannot perceive novel stimuli without attention, it argues that we can act on and experience the world without attention. It thus provides a new way of thinking about the mind - as something that can either shape itself through attention or engage with the world as it is given, relying on its habits and skills.
Charlie Eaton and Mitchell Stevens Universities as peculiar organizations. January 9, 2020
Eaton and Stevens theorize universities as unusual as organizations for their centrality, polysemy, and quasi-sovereignty.
Hamilton, Laura T., Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Seelely, J. Lotus, and Elizabeth M. Armstrong Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination. December 17, 2019
We argue that hegemonic femininities reference a powerful location in what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as a matrix of domination, from which some women draw considerable individual benefits while shoring up collective benefits along other dimensions of advantage. In the process, they engage in intersectional domination of other women and even some men.
