Developmental Assets in South African Adolescents Exposed to Violence: a Qualitative Study on Resilience

Violence exposure is associated with psychological and behavioural maladjustment in adolescents. Yet, not all adolescents exposed to violence experience negative symptoms. Resilience is an outcome that is in part determined by multiple protective factors, or developmental assets, that protect adolescents from the negative influence of encountered stressors and allow them to attain positive developmental outcomes. A qualitative study was conducted to acquire an in-depth understanding of the developmental assets across different layers in the ecological system that promote positive psychological and behavioural functioning in South African adolescents exposed to violence. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with a multi-ethnic group (black, white, and people of mixed heritage) of South African adolescents (boy: n = 17; girl: n = 13; age: 14–19 years) from seven schools in Cape Town. Adolescents reported both internal and external assets that helped them adaptively cope with violence exposure. The internal assets entailed individual characteristics and skills, including commitment to learning, positive values, positive identity, social competencies, and emotional insight. The external assets were boundaries and expectations, social support from adolescents’ peers, family, school, and community, and adolescents’ constructive use of time. The findings of the study may inform strengths-based interventions to enhance emotional and behavioural skills in adolescents at risk for violence exposure. Moreover, involving key stakeholders in the interventions from major developmental domains can be particularly helpful to optimise the social support that are needed for adolescents to be resilient.

Examining the Efficacy and Results of a Short-Form Alzheimer's Survey With College Students

College students are important stakeholders in addressing the significant costs of Alzheimer’s disease in their future roles as caretakers, health care consumers, taxpayers, and as individuals in the workforce whose careers may interact with and impact those with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers. To assess their knowledge of Alzheimer’s, a 10-item True/False on-line quiz was presented to 912 students in Introductory Psychology classes. Participants were 61% white, 13% Asian/Asian American, and 10% Latinx, with 14% reporting other racial and ethnic groups, including that of mixed heritage; 59% of the sample self-reported as female. The quiz was counterbalanced such that items appearing in one format (e.g., True) appeared in the other format (e.g., False) across the two forms of the quiz. A significant difference was found for percent correct in Form A (61.4%) versus Form B (59.3%). In order to prompt participants to consider the ways the disease may impact their own lives, additional questions examined students’ own experience with Alzheimer’s, their interest and willingness to take action towards supporting Alzheimer’s research, and their perceptions about how Alzheimer’s would impact their lives personally, financially, and in their career pursuits. The research extends the findings of earlier research on student knowledge of Alzheimer’s (e.g., Bailey, 2000; Eshbaugh, 2014) by allowing the results to be broken down by gender, race/ethnicity, and student major. It also expands upon those findings by identifying how college students project the societal effects and costs of Alzheimer’s to their own lives and livelihoods.

SCENE: A novel model for engaging underserved and under-represented audiences in informal science learning activities

Inequitable access to science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) has been explored by multiple studies which have shown that some publics are underserved by existing informal educational and cultural provision, and under-represented in related study choices and careers. Informal science learning (ISL) and public engagement with research activities (such as science festivals) tend to attract audiences which are largely white, middle class and already engaged with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This article describes the development of an engagement approach and model through a story-based festival (SMASHfestUK) which was specifically designed to attract new and diverse audiences, including Black and mixed-heritage families, and families living with socio-economic disadvantage. The festival was delivered on five annual occasions, each co-designed with a wide selection of stakeholders, including audiences, researchers, performers, institutions and organizations, and considered as an iterative prototype.

Genetic differentiation between inshore and offshore populations of northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis)

Many marine organisms have a permanent presence both inshore and offshore and spawn in multiple areas, yet their status as separate populations or stocks remain unclear. This is the situation for the northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) around the Arctic Ocean, which in northern Norway represents an important income for a small-scale coastal fishery and a large-vessel offshore fleet. In Norwegian waters, we uncovered two distinct genetic clusters, viz. a Norwegian coastal and a Barents Sea cluster. Shrimps with a mixed heritage from the Norwegian coastal and the Barents Sea clusters, and genetically different from both, inhabit the fjords at the northernmost coast (Finnmark). Genetic structure between fjords did not display any general trend, and only the Varangerfjord in eastern Finnmark displayed significant genetic structure within the fjord. Shrimps in the Finnmark fjords differed in some degree from shrimps both in the adjacent Barents Sea and along the rest of the coast and should probably be considered a separate management unit.

Mixed-Heritage Individuals’ Encounters with Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Mixed-heritage individuals (MHIs) are known to face high levels of social exclusion. Here, we investigate how raciolinguistic ideologies related to one’s heritage language abilities add to these exclusionary experiences. The results from 293 MHIs reveal frequent experiences of marginalization from members of each of their heritage communities because their racial appearance and language practices are perceived as deviant and outside imagined ‘monoracial’ norms. Specifically, over half of respondents described experiences of exclusion for not speaking their minority heritage languages with the same accent or manner or fluency associated with ‘monoracial’ native speakers of their heritage languages or dialects. Another subset described high pressure to speak ‘proper English’ in White dominant work environments. These results extend past MHI work by empirically documenting the ‘monoracial-only’, monoglossic, and ‘Standard English’ ideologies that contribute to the continued social exclusion of MHIs.

Caballeros and Indians

Chapter 1 examines Latina/o encounters with and reclamations of indigeneity from the eighteenth century to the present. Deploying violentologies as a heuristic device and hermeneutic prism, it focuses on established and emergent Latina/o autobiographical literary genres, cinematic texts, performative popular culture spectacles, and recently recovered archival materials and unique oral histories. These texts cumulatively reveal the wide spectrum of Latina/o antipathies toward, and affiliations with, Native nations and indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad. This chapter thus foregrounds the ideological diversity of supra-Latina/o violentologies by examining the myriad Latina/o involvements in the US Indian Wars vis-à-vis ambidextrous, albeit ambivalent, Latina/o neoindigenous, as well as problematic indigenist, performances of XicanIndia/o and LatIndia/o modalities, in addition to mixed-heritage, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and nonbinary (LGBTQI+), as well as Two-Spirit warrior paradigms in Indian Country and elsewhere.

{ Conclusion }

The conclusion assesses the 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton: An American Musical by mixed-heritage (Puerto Rican, Mexican, black, and white) Lin-Manuel Miranda, which emerges as the quintessential violentological text and supra-Latina/o chronotope. This sui generis phenomenon models all the conceits and contradictions explicated throughout this book, while also consolidating the vexed and vexing Latina/o move from the margins to the center. My assessment of this spectacle as part of the ever-more discrepant Latina/o archive, which consists of widely diverging supra-Latina/o and even post-Latina/o violentologies, underscores the need for a paradigm shift in our understanding of the ontological and epistemological pasts, presents, and futures of Latina/o Studies.

Leisure in the British Atlantic World

Play and recreation are sometimes considered to be less significant elements of culture in general and of individual societies than aspects such as work, politics, religion, the arts, and domestic life, but archaeological excavations and textual sources alike indicate that leisure pastimes have been and remain ubiquitous in past and present human societies. Because the very term “play” implies an activity that is the province of children, or which, when applied to adults, is inherently frivolous, or, within some religious or cultural contexts, even sinful, the historical and sociological study of this concept is not as developed as those that relate to what are widely believed to be more important subjects in the study of individual or communal life of the past. Yet even societies as regimented with respect to daily life and as concerned with the proper use of time as that of Puritan New England have been revealed to have included forms of recreation for children and adults alike. The historiography of the early modern Atlantic world includes numerous monographs, journal articles, and other types of scholarly works that depict practices of play and recreation throughout the colonial Americas, and among people of European, African, Native American, and mixed heritage in rural and urban contexts alike. The sources that are listed in this article describe activities and sites of leisure that range from wrestling matches between enslaved men on Southern plantations to fishing trips undertaken by elite Philadelphia clubmen to civic festivities in colonial Peru, and they depict the importance of such activities both among those whose lives centered on labor (free or unfree) and among those who were able to dedicate themselves to the enjoyment of leisure.