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This chapter presents a brief history of the James Partridge Award from its founding in 1997 to the present day.

The history of the James Partridge Award is told as a narrative account. Both authors were personally involved in the founding and early development of the award.

The James Partridge Award has celebrated the accomplishments of African American information professionals since the first award was presented in 1998. The award is an important part of the Conference on Inclusion and Diversity in Library and Information Science.

Dementia is characterized by the progressive decline in cognitive and daily functioning. Although the decline is often the defining characteristic of dementia in biomedical models, several scholars highlight the preserved skills of persons with dementia. Identity, or a sense of self, is among the areas relatively preserved in the later stages of dementia. It is the window through which caregivers understand the subjective experiences of persons with dementia.

This qualitative exploratory study highlights the value of social relationships, particularly the role of the Filipino family in recognizing personhood and maintaining identity in dementia care. Preserving identity entails understanding the person’s unique characteristics that reflect one’s sense of self. In a highly collectivistic culture, such as the Philippines, the family is crucial to preserving identity and overall well-being in dementia. This study explores the perspectives of 15 Filipino caregivers as regards caring for a family member with dementia. Participants discuss changes in family structure and the challenges in dementia care. More importantly, they delve into strategies used to preserve identity and encourage life participation in their loved one with dementia. Essential Filipino cultural values in dementia care, such as collectivism, religion, and the values of filial piety and utang na loob (or debt of gratitude) are further discussed.

What insights might attending to the cyclical history of colonially imposed environmental change experienced by Indigenous peoples offer to critical intellectual projects concerned with race? How might our understanding of race shift if we took Indigenous peoples' concerns with the usurpation and transformation of land seriously? Motivated by these broader questions, in this chapter, I deploy an approach to the critical inquiry of race that I have tentatively been calling anticolonial environmental sociology. As a single iteration of the anticolonial environmental sociology of race, this chapter focuses on Native (American) perspectives on land and experiences with colonialism. I argue that thinking with Native conceptualizations of land forces us to confront the ecomateriality of race that so often escapes sight in conventional analyses. The chapter proceeds by first theorizing the ecomateriality of race by thinking with recent critical theorizing on colonial racialization, alongside Native conceptualizations of land. To further explicate this theoretical argument, I then turn to an historical excavation of the relations between settlers, Natives, and the land in Rhode Island that is organized according to spatiotemporal distinctions that punctuate Native land relations in this particular global region: the Reservation, the Plantation, and the Narragansett.

Studies show that discourses are important in legitimating emerging fields. However, we still lack understanding of how potential participants’ interpretations of discourses shape their involvement in emerging fields – particularly when the field’s definition is ambiguous. Drawing on an in-depth study of the emerging nanotechnology field we show that individuals’ affective responses to discourses play an important role in their decisions to participate. We find that discourse, expectations, affective responses, and participation in emerging fields are mutually constituted, and develop a model that shows these interconnections. Theoretically, our study expands understandings of discourse and field emergence by incorporating affect.

While the issue of “Blackness” has long pervaded American society, it has rarely been problematized in social science literature and treated as a taken-for-granted. This article utilizes in-depth interviews with second generation West Indian adults in New York City to examine the ways in which they conceive of their Blackness, both racially and ethnically. New York City is viewed as an important urban context that in many ways facilitates the formation of identity for this population. The assimilation process, or not, of second generation West Indians is also considered in terms of socioeconomic status and gender. The results indicate that second generation West Indians strongly identify with both their racial and ethnic identities, which in turn calls for a reconceptualization of “Blackness”. There is also evidence that points to New York City as a space of cross-cultural integration where identity formation is significantly impacted by the presence of other immigrants (and their children) that leads to a pan-immigrant or pan-ethnic identity among young New Yorkers.