This Woman's Work

Author(s):  
Osizwe Raena Jamila Harwell

This Woman’s Work: The Writing and Activism of Bebe Moore Campbell is a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell. This manuscript examines Bebe Moore Campbell’s life and activism in two periods: first, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s Black Student Movement; and second, as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. Primarily known as a bestselling novelist, Campbell’s first and final novels, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992) and 72 Hour Hold (2005) reveal a direct relationship to her lesser-known activist work. As a writer and activist, Bebe Moore Campbell used frame shifting within each of her works. Her writing thus becomes a powerful vehicle through which subject matter is enlivened and expanded, immersing her readers in relevant historical and sociopolitical phenomena. As a novelist, Bebe Moore Campbell utilized recurring signature themes within each novel to theorize and to connect popular audiences with African American historical memory and current sociopolitical issues. Similarly, Campbell’s bridge leadership, charismatic personality, and writing merge within two social movement organizations as she aids in significant grassroots/local and institutional change.

Author(s):  
Osizwe Raena Jamila Harwell

Chapter one commences with a detailed account of Bebe Moore Campbell’s experiences at the University of Pittsburgh. Blending social history with biography, the chapter explores Campbell’s activism within the Black Action Society at the University of Pittsburgh from 1967-1971 and narrates her activities as a student in this period. Accounts of key organizations, political events, protests, and campus events are used to establish the general climate of the campus and to consider the author’s participation and leadership therein.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 011
Author(s):  
Virginia Ávila García

This research was carried out during a 2017 sabbatical spent at the University of Salamanca. My objectives were to recover the historical memory of the early figures of the feminist struggle in that university and its context in the years of Spain’s transition to democracy, elucidate the processes through which women sought institutional empowerment over almost four decades, and explain the diverse interests that converged in different ways to understand women’s rights and the integral insertion of women into domains of academic and social life. The study had two axes: first, to ascertain the convergence-divergence of interests among Salamancan women from the 1960s to 1990s, especially between two groups of militants, one social, the other academic, where the variables of social class and professional formation became apparent; and, second, to reconstruct the paths that women professors took to improve their status and gain recognition for their contributions to science in Spain’s oldest and most conservative university, by creating a Centre for Women’s Studies (Cemusa) at the dawn of the new century. The methodology involved rescuing the voices of women citizens, housewives and long-serving professors who narrated their lives as social fighters. The review of documents, pamphlets, photographs, videos and the collection of Cemusa’s publications facilitated recreating the life of Salamanca, its university and its women.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Berrey

AbstractThe politics of affirmative action are currently structured as a litigious conflict among elites taking polarized stances. Opponents call for colorblindness, and defenders champion diversity. How can marginalized activists subvert the dominant terms of legal debate? To what extent can they establish their legitimacy? This paper advances legal mobilization theory by analytically foregrounding the field of contention and the relational production of meaning among social movement organizations. The case for study is two landmark United States Supreme Court cases that contested the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper analyzes BAMN, an activist organization, and its reception by other affirmative action supporters. BAMN had a marginalized allied-outsider status in the legal cases, as it made a radical civil rights claim for a moderate, elite-supported policy: that affirmative action corrects systemic racial discrimination. BAMN activists pursued their agenda by passionately defending and, at once, critiquing the university’s policies. However, the organization’s militancy remained a liability among university leaders, who prioritized the consistency of their diversity claims. The analysis forwards a scholarly understanding of the legacy of race-conscious policies.


1966 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
A. Kent ◽  
P. J. Vinken

A joint center has been established by the University of Pittsburgh and the Excerpta Medica Foundation. The basic objective of the Center is to seek ways in which the health sciences community may achieve increasingly convenient and economical access to scientific findings. The research center will make use of facilities and resources of both participating institutions. Cooperating from the University of Pittsburgh will be the School of Medicine, the Computation and Data Processing Center, and the Knowledge Availability Systems (KAS) Center. The KAS Center is an interdisciplinary organization engaging in research, operations, and teaching in the information sciences.Excerpta Medica Foundation, which is the largest international medical abstracting service in the world, with offices in Amsterdam, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo and Buenos Aires, will draw on its permanent medical staff of 54 specialists in charge of the 35 abstracting journals and other reference works prepared and published by the Foundation, the 700 eminent clinicians and researchers represented on its International Editorial Boards, and the 6,000 physicians who participate in its abstracting programs throughout the world. Excerpta Medica will also make available to the Center its long experience in the field, as well as its extensive resources of medical information accumulated during the Foundation’s twenty years of existence. These consist of over 1,300,000 English-language _abstract of the world’s biomedical literature, indexes to its abstracting journals, and the microfilm library in which complete original texts of all the 3,000 primary biomedical journals, monitored by Excerpta Medica in Amsterdam are stored since 1960.The objectives of the program of the combined Center include: (1) establishing a firm base of user relevance data; (2) developing improved vocabulary control mechanisms; (3) developing means of determining confidence limits of vocabulary control mechanisms in terms of user relevance data; 4. developing and field testing of new or improved media for providing medical literature to users; 5. developing methods for determining the relationship between learning and relevance in medical information storage and retrieval systems’; and (6) exploring automatic methods for retrospective searching of the specialized indexes of Excerpta Medica.The priority projects to be undertaken by the Center are (1) the investigation of the information needs of medical scientists, and (2) the development of a highly detailed Master List of Biomedical Indexing Terms. Excerpta Medica has already been at work on the latter project for several years.


1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Anderson ◽  
Robert J. Morris

A case study ofa third year course in the Department of Economic and Social History in the University of Edinburgh isusedto considerandhighlightaspects of good practice in the teaching of computer-assisted historical data analysis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
LaNada War Jack

The author reflects on her personal experience as a Native American at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as well as on her activism and important leadership roles in the 1969 Third World Liberation Front student strike, which had as its goal the creation of an interdisciplinary Third World College at the university.


NASPA Journal ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Herdlein

The scholarship of student affairs has neglected to carefully review its contextual past and, in the process, failed to fully integrate historical research into practice. The story of Thyrsa Wealtheow Amos and the history of the Dean of Women’s Program at the University of Pittsburgh,1919–41, helps us to reflect on the true reality of our work in higher education. Although seemingly a time in the distant past, Thyrsa Amos embodied the spirit of student personnel administration that shines ever so bright to thisd ay. The purpose of this research is to provide some of thatcontext and remind us of the values that serve as foundations of the profession.


2020 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita P Courcoulas ◽  
James W Gallagher ◽  
Rebecca H Neiberg ◽  
Emily B Eagleton ◽  
James P DeLany ◽  
...  

Abstract Context Questions remain about bariatric surgery for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) treatment. Objective Compare the remission of T2DM following surgical or nonsurgical treatments. Design, setting, and participants Randomized controlled trial at the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States. Five-year follow-up from February 2015 until June 2016. Interventions 61 participants with obesity and T2DM who were initially randomized to either bariatric surgical treatments (Roux-en-Y gastric bypass [RYGB] or laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding [LAGB]) or an intensive lifestyle weight loss intervention (LWLI) program for 1 year. Lower level lifestyle weight loss interventions (LLLIs) were then delivered for 4 years. Main Outcomes and Measures Diabetes remission assessed at 5 years. Results The mean age of the patients was 47 ± 6.6 years, 82% were women, and 21% African American. Mean hemoglobin A1c level 7.8% ± 1.9%, body mass index (BMI) 35.7 ± 3.1 kg/m2, and 26 participants (43%) had BMI < 35 kg/m2. Partial or complete T2DM remission was achieved by 30% (n = 6) of RYGB, 19% (n = 4) of LAGB, and no LWLI participants (P = .0208). At 5 years those in the RYGB group had the largest percentage of individuals (56%) not requiring any medications for T2DM compared with those in the LAGB (45%) and LWLI (0%) groups (P = .0065). Mean reductions in percent body weight at 5 years was the greatest after RYGB 25.2% ± 2.1%, followed by LAGB 12.7% ± 2.0% and lifestyle treatment 5.1% ± 2.5% (all pairwise P < .01). Conclusions Surgical treatments are more effective than lifestyle intervention alone for T2DM treatment.


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