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Throughout human history and around the world, co-sleeping was the context for human evolutionary development. Currently, most of the world’s peoples continue to practice co-sleeping with infants, but there is increasing pressure on families in the West not to co-sleep. Research from anthropology, family studies, medicine, pediatrics, psychology, and public health is reviewed through the lens of a developmental theory to place co-sleeping within a developmental, theoretical context for understanding it. Viewing co-sleeping as a family choice and a normative, human developmental context changes how experts may provide advice and support to families choosing co-sleeping, especially in families making the transition to parenthood. During this transition, many decisions are made by parents “intuitively” (Ball, Hooker, & Kelly, 1999), making understanding the developmental consequences of some of those choices even more important. In Western culture, families are making “intuitive” decisions that research has shown to be beneficial, but families are not receiving complete messages about benefits and risks of co-sleeping. Co-sleeping can be an important choice for families as they make the life-changing transition to parenthood, if individualized messages about safe infant sleep practices (directed toward their individual family circumstances) are shared with them.

The issue of employment status lies at the heart of much conflict in the gig economy, with many gig economy workers effectively excluded from statutory employment protection because of it. Establishing employment status continues to be the gateway to accessing most UK statutory employment rights, a fact which makes the exclusion of casual workers from much statutory protection seem arbitrary and unjust. Employment status has been historically determined by common law conceptions of the contract of employment. This creates particular difficulties for casual workers, who have typically had to prove a requirement to perform personal service and to show that the contract was based on mutual obligations in order to be recognised as employees. The advent of the gig economy has seen the concept of employment status evolve as courts and legislators have struggled to adapt to a more flexible labour market. Likewise, gig economy employers have gone to considerable lengths to try to circumvent the legal protections available to their workers. This chapter will examine the evolving role of common law doctrine in defining employment status and the emergence of the category of ‘worker’ as an definition of employment status for those who work in the gig economy. It will analyse prominent cases involving gig economy employers (such as Uber BV v Aslam) and explore how these cases have re-defined contractual doctrine. Finally, the chapter will analyse the Taylor Review (2017) and examine the viability of a conceptual uncoupling of statutory employment protection from contractual doctrine.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

A quick search of the headlines of major newspapers reveals a treasure trove of technology procurement gone wrong. While the private sector seems to adopt and implement new technology seamlessly and quickly to deliver for customers, the government struggles to accomplish technology purchases and integrations with the same ease. As governments in the United States are looking to retain their current workforce and attract the next generation of workers, the technological capabilities and ethos of governments will be paramount. With nearly every industry being transformed by technology and Generation T being the first generation to have an ingrained “technology first” mindset, the ability of governments to attract these workers depends, in large part, on the ability to transform their government technology culture, policies, and practices.

In this chapter, the authors examine the administrative branch and observe two key components at the root of most technology failures: poor organizational structure in the bureaucracy and the lack of an empowered Chief Information/Technology Officer. Building upon case studies from Massachusetts and California, this chapter looks at the factors related to failure or success to understand the technology procurement culture. The chapter concludes by presenting four key “best practice” principles of public policy and administration that can be implemented by almost any governmental entity to improve their acquisition and implementation of technology.

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

The iconic vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returned to cinema screens via Death Wish 2 (Michael Winner) in 1982 and vigilantism would remain a key theme in American urban action films throughout the 1980s. Susan Jeffords subsequently argued that Hollywood's ‘hard bodied’ male action heroes of the period were reflective of the social and political thematics that distinguished Ronald Reagan's tenure as America's President (1994, p. 22). But while Jeffords' arguments are convincing, they overlook contemporaneous films featuring female and ‘soft’ bodied urban action heroes.

The Angel trilogy (Angel, 1984; Avenging Angel, 1985; and Angel III: The Final Chapter, 1988) features three such understudied examples. Indeed, the films' diverse and atypical range of action heroes demand that they are interrogated in terms of their protagonists' gender, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices and age. Featuring narratives about the prostitutes and street folk who frequent Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, the films' key characters are a teenage prostitute and her guardians: a transvestite prostitute, a lesbian hotelier and an elderly cowboy. All three films feature narratives that revolve around acts of vengeance and vigilantism.

This chapter will critically discuss the striking ways in which the films' ‘soft’ bodied and atypical protagonists are presented as convincing action heroes who subvert contemporaneous ‘hard’ bodied norms. It will also consider to what extent their subversive rewriting of typical urban action film narratives and character relations might be understood to critique and deconstruct the themes and concerns that usually characterized such films during the Reagan era.