Search results

This research underlines the usefulness of Civil Rights Geographic Information Systems (CR-GIS) for understanding the social struggles and assessing the critical needs of the disempowered population of Alabama’s “Black Belt.” The social struggles have been persistent for decades in the Southern states, particularly in Alabama. Researchers have recognized the political and historical root causes and implications for these social struggles. The geographic region of Alabama’s Black Belt is significant because it became the epicenter of the Civil Rights struggle and still represents the vestiges of the social policy known as “Jim Crow.”

Although GIS has a great potential to explore social and political struggles, currently, it is not profoundly associated with Civil Rights studies. This research employs CR-GIS to illustrate the impact of the disfranchisement caused by biased geopolitics in three selected cases/issues: (1) gerrymandering and voting rights, (2) transportation, and (3) poverty in the State of Alabama. While there has been some progress in overcoming the social struggles in the Black Belt, there is a need for qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand persistent social, economic, and Civil Rights struggles in the region. GIS could be a valuable tool to understand and explore the social struggles in the disempowered communities of the “Black Belt” in Alabama. By incorporating the existing information and conducting ground truth studies, this research will lay the basic foundation for extended research by creating a policy template for empowering the disempowered for better social, economic, and political integration in the “Black Belt region.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every community across the globe, but the global COVID-19 data show that the United States remains the most affected country where well over 666,000 people died, and approximately 40 million citizens became ill due to the virus' spread by mid-2021 (CDC, 2021). It is also noteworthy that extreme racial disparities in rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths are high in the United States, specifically among African American population. This situation is particularly evident among African American population in Alabama's Black Belt. Subsequently, COVID-19, racial disparities, and health inequalities have become central to the national and regional conversation. This chapter examines the associations between COVID-19, social determinants of health, and the systematic health disparity in African American population in Alabama's Black Belt region using Geographic Information Systems and the concept of uneven spatial development. Understanding the relationship between COVID-19 and these disparities within a spatial context vital to developing pathways to overcome the pandemic's effects and combat the systemic discrimination in this region. The derived policy recommendation could apply to other regions experiencing social inequality and health disparity.

The Black Belt of the Deep South with rural areas in the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi has historically faced challenges that come with rural isolation, limited industry and financial services, poor healthcare options, and lack of educational opportunities. In the early 1990s, some institutions of higher education, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, sought to increase educational opportunities for African Americans living in these areas. This chapter provides a historic case study of a doctoral education program that was founded to increase the number of education leaders, especially African Americans with advanced degrees, who would work in Alabama. As a historic case study, it provides a general overview of the founding of the program including mission and vision, a retrospective of the types of opportunities provided to doctoral students, and reflections on ways in which the program has improved the students' professional practices from both faculty and students. One component of this retrospective is to trace those students living in and working in the Alabama Black Belt. A key understanding undergirding the importance of this work is that as school administrators educational knowledge levels increase, so does the personal knowledge base that they can contribute to the communities in which they live and work. In this way, the educational reach of the doctor of education program leads to improvements in the larger Alabama Black Belt through both community and P-12 school interactions.

Six sigma is a structured methodology that uses mathematical and statistical tools to increase productivity and business efficiency. In order to apply it, it is necessary to have a very broad knowledge in the fields of mathematics, management, and sector to which the process or the product under consideration (mechanical, electronic, chemical, etc.) refers. It is based on guidelines with a rigid and formalized approach to deal with misunderstandings and minimize subjectivity as much as possible.

This chapter will provide the basic information regarding the birth of the methodology and the composition of the work team; moreover, the procedure define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC) will be presented and some tools will be described in order to obtain the improvements desired for the product or the process.

Strategy Question: How should we approach our internal cost reduction/value enhancement efforts?

Summary: Cost reduction and process improvement techniques are everywhere. The tools all work, but how do you know which tool to use when? You can waste precious time and demotivate your teams if the wrong approach is chosen. But where to start? It is a dilemma for all of us. This chapter discusses the basics of each improvement approach. It is in no way a comprehensive treatment of each, but it is thorough enough to steer the user to the right approach. The tool provides guidance regarding proper selection among numerous methodologies and techniques currently ubiquitous in business literature. Overviews of three major cost reduction/process improvement approaches are discussed, (1) Seven Basic Quality tools, (2) Lean Manufacturing, and (3) Six Sigma. The Process Improvement Clarification Tool helps direct the user to the appropriate approach based on the user’s knowledge of the process state. Real-world examples are used to help users select the right technique for the right situation.

To provide a primer on the major project management protocols and examples of how these protocols have been used to manage library projects.

The chapter presents a broad review of the literature on project management in general, and as it has been applied in library settings, including brief histories of each major methodology, its development, component elements, and examples of its use in libraries.

Many of the major project management protocols, such as Six Sigma, Agile, Lean, Scrum, and Waterfall, have been used successfully in library settings across a broad range of areas and project types.

As libraries continue to innovate and expand their services, the management of complex projects and processes has become commonplace. This chapter will serve as a primer on the major project management protocols, highlighting the ways in which they can be used in libraries, and to which types of library projects they have been successfully applied.