Search results

On September 9, 2018, Hurricane Irma swept across south Florida, leaving a path of destruction across the entire state. Miami-Dade County, at the southern tip of the state, avoided a direct hit. However, the storm left the county and its dozens of municipalities with gigantic mounds of storm debris. As the weeks went by, the piles festered and frustration with the pace of the clean-up mounted. Two dump sites in particular drew the attention of media and community activists: a park ringed by single family homes in Liberty City, a black community in the heart of Miami; and historic Virginia Key, the only beach open to black citizens under Jim Crow segregation. This research examines three narratives -- media coverage, official explanations from local governments, and reactions on social media -- as a way to investigate how the dumping of storm debris in black spaces was justified, interrogated, and contested in the aftermath of one of the worst hurricanes to strike Miami-Dade County in over a decade. Climate change models predict the increasing frequency of super storms like Irma, and discussions of how coastal cities respond in terms of infrastructure and resiliency are growing. This investigation looks at two components of this response that have not been as widely considered: what are the institutional and citizen responses in the aftermath of these storms, and how will issues of race and historic geographic marginalization be either acknowledged or ignored as the problems associated with climate change grow ever more acute and pressing.

By extending their campaign beyond its NIMBY and health risk frames, GSE were able to open up a third frame, which was established from the political opportunity of democratic deficit surrounding the state's response to their campaign. This democratic deficit frame had its inception in the state's initial omission of the health risks of incineration in the CWP. By exploiting this opportunity, GSE were able to establish their own credentials through their provision of interest-led science about the health risks. Another area of democratic deficit exploited by GSE was seen in the state's attempt to rush the CWP through without undergoing the proper public consultation process that was written in to regional waste plans. Furthermore, the state's removal of the councillor's powers to decide the waste issue contributed significantly to a local sense of democratic deficit.

Many students with learning disabilities (LD) experience significant difficulties in developing writing proficiency. Early identification and intervention can prevent long-term writing problems. Early identification and intervention require reliable and valid writing assessments that can be used to identify students at risk and monitor their progress in response to intervention. One promising approach to assessing students' performance and progress in writing is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). In this chapter, we provide an overview of CBM. Next, we describe a theoretical framework for writing development, and discuss implications of this framework for developing writing assessments. We then describe current efforts to develop a seamless and flexible approach to monitoring student progress in writing in the early elementary grades, and highlight important directions for future research. We end with a discussion of how teachers might eventually use CBM to make data-based decisions to provide effective individualized interventions for students who experience writing difficulties.

How we should behave online is an issue that is deceptively complex. The online community, whether in a professional or a personal context, is much broader than the communities in which all but the youngest of us grew up. As such, the standards of propriety in this space can differ, in ways unexpected and dramatic, from those we are used to. In this chapter I ask whether and when we are under an obligation to conform to the expectations of the dominant groups within the online communities we participate in, and argue that there are at least some times when it is defensible to conform to one’s own local norms and expectations rather than subordinating these to the broader online community.

Although we have yet to experience a major bioterrorism event in the U.S., we are nevertheless preparing for such an event. In this paper, we consider the nature of bioterrorism and the threats and challenges it brings to managing health care organizations. Because existing managerial theory may be inadequate in responding to bioterrorism events, management scholars are advised to approach their research with a great deal of humility and openness. Inasmuch as emerging theoretical frameworks based on complexity science and chaos theory are not fully developed, we propose that stakeholder management theory may be the best approach at this juncture.

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

Crisis management (CM) has gained prominence in the last decades, as the complex global business environment has forced executives to pay attention to practices that may safeguard organizations against potential crises. However, despite the fact that various scholars point to the need for autonomy and delegation of authority when responding to crises, it appears that the overarching rationale in the crisis literature is geared toward a centralized approach. This suggests that preventive actions and response to crises lie mainly with the leader of the organization and with designated crises teams. It is also apparent that this literature places too much weight on contingency plans and classification schemes. Although behavioral factors have been discussed by some authors as a fundamental element in dealing with crises, it is not clear how to develop these traits. It is our contention then that these conventional perspectives, although valuable to CM, are insufficient to deal with the uncertainty that characterizes global business today where firms must be prepared for the unexpected. We discuss the limitations of this traditional approach and argue for a combination of central control with decentralized execution when responding to unexpected crises situations. This enables management to better comprehend the complexity embedded in any crisis and allows adaptive practices to emerge throughout the organization. An analysis of two cases paired with empirical field studies support our proposition.

This chapter explores the notion of the European Social Model (ESM) and examines the EU-level social policy reforms that have taken place since the 1950s. ESM is taken to be distinct from but intimately related to the web and patchwork of rules explored in this volume. After sketching out the development of ESM since the 1950s, up to and including its near-death experience in the context of the Great Recession and the EU's turn to austerity, the chapter considers the social and political consequences of the EU's lurch to austerity as well as the consequences this might have for the web and patchwork of rules. The chapter ultimately reflects on whether another ESM might be possible in the context of the EU's response to the economic and social consequences following the onset of COVID-19, particularly in the context of the EU's Next Generation EU programme whereby the EU provides financial assistance directly to the regions worst affected by the pandemic.

To describe the development of a rubric for identifying diversity in children’s literature to inform literature selection for classroom instruction. Drawing on research literature and data collection reporting the need for increased awareness of the use of diverse children’s literature in elementary and middle school classrooms, we designed and field-tested a rubric for use in identifying diversity in children’s literature. Using constant comparative methods to identify themes in the data, we continually refined the categories in a rubric designed to guide the selection of diverse children’s literature. Content analysis of children’s literature for diverse elements informed the development of the rubric categories. The results of this study produced a field-tested rubric that can be utilized by classroom teachers and researchers to guide their literature selections with the goal of representing increased diversity. Findings demonstrated that a rubric with four clearly defined categories was more user-friendly to classroom teachers, and that applying the rubric when discussing children’s literature led to conversation and collaboration among colleagues. This study demonstrated that the rubric can be applied to literature selections with classroom teachers and can be used to stimulate conversation about diversity in children’s literature as it applies to the classroom context. This chapter’s rubric provides a useful tool for classroom teachers. Teachers can use this tool to assist them in selecting diverse children’s literature for their classrooms. Administrators and literacy coaches can use this rubric as a way to stimulate conversation surrounding diverse children’s literature.