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This chapter outlines the successful development of a women’s initiative from a grass roots organization to a firmly established institution within our medical school. Championed by a group of dedicated women leaders, the mission of the Alliance for Women in Medicine and Science (AWIMS) is to provide a supportive forum to promote honest discussion and positive change in the realms of gender equity, career advancement, work-life balance, and community service, and to champion professional development and promotion of women in medicine and science. What started as an informal gathering within Southern Illinois University (SIU) School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine in 2015, led by Dr Vidhya Prakash, first morphed into a robust, vital organization called Women in Medicine that contributed meaningfully to SIU Medicine and to the community before it broadened its focus to women in medicine and science and expanded its reach to the entire SIU system. In January of 2018, the initiative was firmly institutionalized as AWIMS, an organization open to ALL members of the SIU community. AWIMS seeks to advance women’s rights through various initiatives. This chapter is co-authored by AWIMS director Dr Vidhya Prakash, and Dr Anne Scheer, a qualitative sociologist in the medical school’s Department of Population Science and Policy, who hopes to help tell the story of AWIMS and translate the Alliance’s successful development process into a narrative accessible to other professionals interested in creating innovations to promote women’s interests in traditionally male-dominated professional settings.

Early in 1931 the Students International Union had invited Williams College President Harry A. Garfield to nominate a Williams student with “interest and knowledge of world affairs” to attend its annual intercollegiate conference of students, some of whom would be chosen to receive scholarships to attend its summer program in Geneva, Switzerland.

For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

The Chicago School of Sociology heralded a new age: that of the rise and establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in the US. It also spurred on an intellectual tradition in ethnography that focuses on a wide array of methodological tools and empirical data with a focus on the specificity of place that continues to live on in contemporary urban sociology. Yet, its traditions have also been extensively criticized. Burawoy (2000) is one preeminent scholar, who has denounced the Chicago School as being parochial, ahistorical, and decontextualized from the national and international processes that shape cities. Instead, he calls for a move toward “global ethnography,” one that focuses on “global processes, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al., 2000). Increasingly, US urban sociologists study research sites that are located outside the US and pay attention to how global actors and/or transnational connections influence US dynamics. Given this trend, what, if any lessons can global and urban sociologists take away from the Chicago School? In this chapter, I highlight three such lessons: (1) the global is central to city life; (2) rooting our work in the specificities of place helps extend and build theory; and (3) the School still provides useful conceptual and methodological tools to study the global. In doing so, I argue that scholars should recognize the plurality of approaches to global ethnography and how each approach can further our understanding of how the global shapes social life.