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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is developing and supporting various strategies for emergency bioterrorism preparedness and response. To assist response teams, an informationist participated in preparedness teamwork and developed an electronic reference library with books, journal articles, and CDC documents. This laptop reference library was structured to be completely autonomous but also updatable. The library was tested during an FEMA emergency response exercise that included the informationist librarian. The majority of response team members agreed that both the reference library and librarian were valuable during an emergency response. The exercise emphasized the response team’s need for information and a librarian to find the right information at the right time.

The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.

Stay-at-home and lock-down orders issued by the Ontario government at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of many community-based programs for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities. L'Arche Toronto Sol Express, an interdisciplinary arts program located in Toronto, is one example of a program that rapidly changed its program delivery to an online format so that participants could remain engaged and collaborative projects could continue. Similarly, participants had to adapt to new programs with virtual formats, and to accessing programs from their own homes as opposed to gathering with others in the community.

To reflect on these changes, Sol Express members and creative facilitators together conducted a participatory research project which considered the impact of the online format on individual participants and the group as a whole. Following the principles of emancipatory and participatory research, a research team was established and focus groups were held to explore people's experiences.

Our findings suggest that while there were many difficult aspects to the pandemic, people also experienced situations of learning and growth. However, our project also points to issues of inequity in the pandemic's effects, such as the inability for technology to incorporate diverse communication methods, and concerns regarding members of the extended community who remain disengaged or ‘lost’ due to a lack of technological and personal support.

Although our research focused on an arts group for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities, our findings can be applied to the broader community, especially regarding the benefits of in-person gathering and what is lost when programs are held exclusively online.

We discuss a recent effort of institutional resistance in the context of the 2008–2011 Apostolic Visitation of U.S. women religious motivated by Vatican concerns about perceived secularism and potential lack of fidelity among Catholic sisters. We examined the process of and women’s responses to the Visitation to shed light on the institutional work associated with productive resistance and the role of identity and emotions in transforming institutions.

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

– Lisa Miller, Female Troubles, Newsweek, May 27, 2010

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

We reviewed three existing reviews of literature: two related to cultural and linguistic diversity in well-regarded special education research outlets including Advances in Special Education, and the third regarding constructions of culture, race, disability, and risk in early childhood and early childhood special education (ECSE) literature. Some of our findings reflected ongoing oppressions for young children at the intersections of race, disability, and other forms of social difference to which negative treatment has been attached, including static and deficit-based framings of disability, reliance on whiteness, and English as the norm for developmental benchmarks, and failure to account for disability beyond medical models. We present a preliminary framework for special education research and practice considerations in order to remediate these issues in ECSE for young learners of color, among others, with disabilities.

ELSEWHERE in this number we list libraries which have Esent us copies of their annual reports which we are glad to have. Now and again we are able to elaborate on these, but in the present issue that has not been possible. We would say, however, that these reports are deserving of the attention of librarians generally, and of students at the library schools. They are records of work in progress, and they do suggest the development of library policy. The best of them are of textbook value.

Social policy linked to child poverty, welfare programs and needs of children has been undergoing major change in the United States. In 1996, major welfare reform was passed that eliminated the old cash assistance program of AFDC (Aid to Families of Dependent Children Program) and replaced it with a new block grant program, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Advantages of the new TANF program were that it provided more flexibility to States, made the time period for which funds could be received much shorter, and therefore strongly encouraged adult welfare recipients to enter the workforce (Sherman & Sandfort, 1998; Watts, 1997). As part of this change, along with changes enacted earlier from 1984 to 1990, Medicaid eligibility for low-income children was expanded by gradually delinking Medicaid eligibility from welfare eligibility (Kronebusch, 2001). As part of a continued policy goal of expanding access to health care services to children at lower ends of the income spectrum, Congress in 1997 passed the Balanced Budget Act of that year. That act created the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This program provided an opportunity for States to participate in CHIP and thus acquire funding from the federal government to expand their health care coverage to uninsured, lower-income children. This program was particularly aimed at children of the working poor, whose parents were often in the labor force but worked for an employer who did not provide health care insurance. The numbers of these parents were expected to increase in future years, as the TANF welfare reforms decreased the number of parents on welfare who were receiving cash benefits and increased the number of parents who accepted jobs. Many of these jobs will not provide the full set of benefits that are common in many white-collar and middle income jobs (Seccombe & Amey, 1995). The legislation allowed States to expand their Medicaid programs, create a separate CHIP program, or combine the two options (Shi, Oliver & Huang, 2000).