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At the virus' US epicenter, New York City, teachers experienced the impact of the pandemic firsthand in real time. Consistent with intensification (Apple, 1986), as school struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing social and educational landscape, socioemotional stressors and occupational responsibilities increase. Through the metaphoric (Craig, 2018) image of a candle, and using the tools of narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) – broadening, burrowing, storying, and restorying – we surface four teachers' lived experiences in a year filled with incredible grief and loss, socio-political-cultural trauma, racial strife, and personal-professional challenges to show their resolve and resiliency to persevere through and beyond burning out.

Purpose: This ethnography examines West African immigrant youth attending an Islamic madrassa in a New York City mosque and their future educational aspirations.

Methods: This ethnographic research was conducted mainly through interviews of ten Muslim youth attending weekly madrasa at a West African mosque in the Bronx in New York City. I also did observations in the mosques, observing youth behavior, seating and listening in their classes, observing their interaction with one another and with their parents. While I had done this research within a month, I have been researching this community since 2006 at different times on the topic of parenting and schooling.

Findings: Muslim parents and teachers, concerned that children might fall into inner-city neighborhood life, engaged in teaching, guiding, and counseling the youth to keep them religiously and educationally engaged. As a result, the youth in this study demonstrated strong comittment to Islam and parental expectations but also expressed their own views of what their lives could become as transnational citizens.

Research implications: This research demonstrates that while schools, parents, and extracurricular programs are concerned with how youth will turn out, the youth are also making sense of their education experience in these spaces among others, and engage in carving a niche to inform their identity, education and career path. To this end, youth agency and voices should be acknowledged in educational research.

Value: The youth in this research demonstrate how contemporary young immigrants, living in a transnational world with diverse belief systems and ideals for success and socio-economic mobility, engage in imagination, resiliency and agency as they adapt to their new environment.

Previous quantitative research documents that college students with disabilities do not attain higher education at rates equal to their nondisabled peers. This qualitative study posits that socioeconomic status (SES) is a determinant of this discrepancy, and explores how SES and disability shape the college experience of New York City (NYC) students with learning disabilities (LDs), specifically.

Research findings from semi-structured interviews with students with LDs (n = 10) at a low-SES and a high-SES colleges are presented against the backdrop of administrative data from NYC baccalaureate-granting colleges (n = 44), disability staff surveys (n = 21), and disability staff interviews (n = 9). Examined through the lens of political economy, qualitative data demonstrate the ways colleges create environments that enable or hinder student success through difference in policy implementation.

Student themes like stress, identity, and entitlement are discussed against the theoretical and empirical exploration of the intersectionality of SES and disability. Socioeconomic differences are linked to variation in students’ college choice, accessing evaluations, requesting accommodations, and receiving supplementary supports.

New York City’s status as a majority “minority” city is reflected in many local neighborhoods that exemplify the racial and ethnic diversity of the urban landscape in the 21st century. In this quintessential immigrant city, the relative share of foreign-born has reached levels not seen since the historic immigrant wave at the turn of the last century (Foner, 2000; Scott, 2002). While “all the nations under heaven” are represented among old and new New Yorkers, researchers find that patterns of residential segregation persist and in fact, have worsened especially for African Americans (Beveridge, 2001; Logan, 2001). The racial balkanization of New York City, however, is tempered by the expansion of “polyethnic” or “global” neighborhoods. These racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods are found throughout New York City but their concentration in the borough of Queens is notable. Moreover, the magnitude of ethnic diversity in these neighborhoods has “no parallel in previous waves of immigration” (Foner, 2000, p. 58).

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.

Consistent research highlighting their utility for documenting historical protest events find social movement scholars relying heavily on newspapers. Simultaneously, research consistently finds racial bias in the media. Together, these findings suggest that scholars’ reliance on mainstream media accounts of protest by minority groups could lead to inaccurate histories and explanations. This chapter compares reports of a six-year-long protest case featuring African American activists found in both a mainstream media source, the New York Times, and two New York-based African American newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, which were then triangulated with data from archival manuscript collections. Doing so revealed considerable and important differences. The ethnic press reported more protest events than the New York Times, which contained descriptive bias reflecting existing racial stereotypes and effectively silenced activists. These findings suggest that social movement scholars focusing on minority activists should engage in both ethnic and mainstream press accounts of protest events and political activity to ensure accurate descriptions of events and activist sentiments.

To look at the role of local decision-making and control in the face of a trend towards unified national and transnational disaster protocols. To look at the implications of a shifting rhetoric – from sustainability to resilience – for this issue.

This chapter draws upon the author’s case studies of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in New York City and Hurricane Sandy (2013) in New York City, as well as studies of Hurricane Katrina (2006) in New Orleans, to discuss governance issues.

Empirical studies confirm the importance of locally based decision-making and control. There are tensions between national disaster protocols and local decision-making; urban governance matters given differences in political culture, leadership, and community participation.

We need a resilient social infrastructure as well as a resilient physical environment. Strong social institutions are an essential part of this process but communities must be given material, not only symbolic benefits.

The conclusion that the threat of natural disasters requires more rather than less autonomy in decision-making for the locality.

Furthermore, that the shift in objectives, from sustainability to resilience (mandating redundancy and sophisticated data retrieval) requires what we might call a more empowered city.

This chapter provides an overview of the policies that taxi and ridesourcing regulators in the USA and around the world have adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recovery from it, including regulatory actions and measures to protect driver and passenger safety and health, as well as various efforts intended to provide economic relief and assistance. This chapter raises the issue of guidance versus regulatory mandates by transportation officials, and what issues need to be further researched and evaluated for permanent implementation and/or to prepare for any resurgence of this or other pandemics.

It is a rare challenge in academia to be asked to write about yourself, and rarer still to engage with the multiple (social, spatial, political, embodied and private) selves that impact on our practice. In this chapter I consider how who we are in academia is not simply a matter of adopting a professional role but rather involves identity management and negotiation practices to obscure, perform or disclose identities in professional contexts. This chapter is informed by my first ethnographic research project at a non-profit youth media centre in New York City; a study exploring innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student-teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment and my practices as a teacher educator on the MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching: a two-year, initial teacher education programme designed from a social justice perspective and working to produce graduates who position themselves as activist teachers. In this autoethnography I explore the complex temporalities of my academic identities, arguing the need for a critical spatial practice.

The chapter relies on a variety of methods to trace the development of changing racial ideologies among Greeks. The methodologies used include: (1) historical secondary sources; (2) one hundred and ten interviews (of both immigrants and Greeks in Greece, with interviewees varying in age from 19 to 74); and (3) content analysis of poems, popular songs and electronic discussion groups. The primary aim of selecting the data was to understand the changing nature of racial classifications themselves rather than to measure rates and pervasiveness.