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Purpose – This chapter attempts to provide a literary analysis of the various ways in which the importance of basketball in North American Native culture has been represented in literature produced by three Native American authors: James Welch, Stephen Graham Jones, and Sherman Alexie.

Design/methodology/approach – The foundation of this study is derived from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s account of his experiences as a coach of Apache players in Arizona in A Season on The Reservation, and the example of Shoni Schimmel, from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, who is featured in the documentary, Off the Rez. These documentary accounts are supplemented by a critical apparatus drawn from the ideas of the Anishinaabe critic, Gerald Vizenor.

Findings – The character of the Native basketball star functions as a complex signifier that resists Western conceptions of individual achievement and success in favor of Native conceptions of community and cultural survivance.

Research limitations/implications – The limitations of literary analysis stem from the engagement with a body of Native literature that is by no means comprehensive. In addition, the views expressed by each writer are necessarily punctuated by narrative ambiguity and indeterminacy.

Originality/value – The chapter provides a unique introduction to the motif of basketball in contemporary Native American fiction and the storytelling practices from which meaning emerges. The analysis of the works addressed highlights a Native-centered interpretive approach that reveals the complex meaning of basketball in Native American society. The use of this culturally responsive critical paradigm allows readers to approach Native literary achievement on its own terms, rather than from the perspective of the dominant culture.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

Ayant le privilège de pouvoir présenter une communication dans un Congrès d'éminents spécialistes, j'ai préféré évoquer quelques hypothèses concernant un problème très simple: le Tourisme et la Méditerranée, plutôt que de décrire minutieusement une station ou un type de réception. J'habite sur les rivages de la Méditerranée et j'y pratique le tourisme; mais c'est surtout la préparation d'une thèse sur «L'évolution du Tourisme dans le Sud‐est méditerranéen» qui m'a conduit à ces réflexions que je soumets ci‐après.

This article aims to share findings from a youth-informed study with interracial anti-racist youth activist groups in two urban high schools.

The study used mostly critical ethnographic methods.

The findings showed that the agency of youth activists amplified their literacies of love and resistance, organizing, critical teaching, and knowledge. More research is needed in English education related to youth organizing activities across contexts as youth organizing work is largely unknown or underused by educators and schools.

Overall, this research supports humanizing collectives that amplify the literacies of youth and position youth-centered education for liberation.

This article calls for educational leaders to reexamine Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) frameworks through decolonial leadership lens, during and post-COVID-19. “Based on our individual journeys, our collective voice is grounded on a bond that spans the decades …Our voice here is the enactment of our decision to listen to the oral traditions and connection to spirit of our ancestors…as mentors and collaborators in this work…[t]he validity of their voices…is unquestionable” (Sullivan TwoTrees and Pinto, p. 197). In this article, I intentionally center Mother Africa/Earth and incorporate indigenized expressions from narratives, dialogues, and interviews from assorted studies and sources. In the article Rekindling the Sacred: Toward A Decolonizing Pedagogy in Higher Education, Shahjahan et al. (2009) use a “tapestry of dialogical insights into… theorizing of how spirituality may be incorporated into teaching in higher education” (p. 1). So, with respect to K-12 education, anchoring decolonizing educational leadership to Mother Africa and practices and attitudes which support students who are behaviorally racialized and marginalized in our schools is integral. All through the chapter, I interweave my story with the narratives and dialogues of other voices to make the case for decolonization leadership approaches in our schools. Joining my voice are voices taken from a previous study focused on Special Education Workers who foster relationship and work directly with Students Labeled as Behavioral (will be defined later in this chapter) (Mitchell, 2020). In section one I locate myself in relationship to Mother Africa which informs this anthology chapter. Section two focuses on defining colonization and the theoretical framework and themes discussed in the anthology chapter. Section three examines the role educational leaders may play in creating school spaces for socially just relationship building, nimble student and teacher dissent, and opportunities for personal and community transformation. Section four provides a contextual analysis of educational leadership's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely how they impacted schools, classrooms, students, and teachers. Lastly, Section five introduces “ROCK”, a forward-looking conceptualization of a decolonizing leadership practice aimed at reclaiming one's indigeneity through nurturing connections to Mother Africa.

By drawing on 18-month ethnographic fieldwork conducted among people who participate in state-regulated games of chance in Istanbul, during the recent Turkish economic crisis in 2021–2022, and engaging with scholarly work on the anthropology of Turkey, economic anthropology and local media and grey resources, this article illustrates the rise of cryptocurrency trading in Turkey. This article shows how my participants situated the cryptocurrency trading within their own techniques to ameliorate financial volatility and to compensate their mistrust in governmental financial institutions during times of economic turbulence. Cryptocurrency trading was viewed as an investment technique that assists in accumulating savings for ensuring the future amid fluctuating national currency and polarized political realities. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency trading was also identified as a game of chance that swings between hinging on luck or skill, and the research participants debated if cryptocurrency trading is permissible in Islam (Halal) or forbidden. Therefore, this article suggests that cryptocurrency trading, although on the rise, is still a contested topic in which the boundaries between perceptions and practices of investing and gambling are blurred within the Turkish context. The controversy of the cryptocurrency trading emerges from the polarized public attitudes and the dissonance between traditional ideals, that condemn easy money and emphasize the value of hard work, in contrast to the neoliberal realities of capitalistic modes of accumulation that encourages speculation over production.

This paper centers a decolonial and Indigenous methodological approaches to educational history research. This research offers how Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith impacts one education historian’s scholarship alongside conversations of historiography concerning the Lumbee people and how their education history becomes contextual and reclaimed through decolonial and Indigenous methodological approaches.

Leaning on epistemological questioning and historical research with decolonial and Indigenous methodologies to provide a needed approach to historical education analysis.

This research demonstrates how history and epistemology work together to decolonize educational histories by understanding the impacts of settler colonization and recenters histories with Indigenous (Lumbee) voices.

This approach to qualitative historical research provides space for Indigenous epistemology and decolonial and Indigenous methodological approaches to education history that critically examines history told from a European/Western epistemological lens as a way forward to center Indigenous communities.