From the Heart to the Brain: Building Bridges to a Better Future

This Presidential Address was delivered at the International Stroke Conference in March 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic. Dr Elkind, the President of the American Heart Association (AHA) at the time, is a vascular neurologist with a research focus on stroke epidemiology. This address interweaves personal reflections on a career in clinical neurology, stroke research, and public health with a discussion of the role of the AHA in improving cardiovascular health at multiple levels. Throughout its history, the AHA has had leaders representing many different areas of cardiovascular science and medicine, including stroke. More recently, its focus has expanded from a traditional emphasis on cardiovascular events illness and events, like heart disease and stroke, to an appreciation of the role of the vascular system in brain health, healthy aging, cognitive decline, and dementia. During the pandemic, as the bidirectional effects of the coronavirus on cardiovascular disease has been elucidated, the benefits of a broad and multidisciplinary approach to cardiovascular disease and public health have become more apparent than ever. In addition, with growing awareness of the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on communities of color in the United States and globally, the AHA has redoubled its focus on addressing the social determinants of health, including structural racism. Central to these efforts is the construction of bridges between the generation of scientific knowledge and action for the public good. Our success will depend on the combination of basic, translational, clinical and population research with programs of public and professional education, advocacy, and social action.

Mexican-American Parents Using Critical Literacy to Address Climate Change

This chapter is an in-depth examination of a critical literacy project implemented by immigrant Mexican-American parent leaders that employed culturally relevant Latina/o and Native American children's literature to create dialogue and promote social action focused on environmental concerns. The Good Heart Chicana/o and Native Science after-school enrichment project was held weekly in elementary schools in the San Fernando Valley. Critical pedagogy served as the conceptual framework and informed the critical literacy strategies. Creative dialogue questions based on the children's literature promoted social action among children and families. Hands-on activities deepened the families' connection to environmental science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (E-STEAM) content and careers. Children's interest in science and nature increased. Parent leaders grew in their leadership and ability to address environmental issues in communities.

Reflections of Anxiety Narratives

This narrative discusses a research study using both qualitative and quantitative methods to illustrate the connections between writing and healing. College students who answered survey questions about their health reported anxiety as a concern. Writing in journals became a method of coping with anxiety, which led the research to evolve into a social action project of managing stress and eliminating the stigma surrounding anxiety. Resources to help anxiety include exercise, nutrition, and belonging to a supportive community.

Teaching Collective Action: Strategies for Fostering Racial and Social Justice

Universities teach students about social problems but provide few concrete tools for acting to promote social change. Teaching about challenges but not about possible solutions can be potentially disempowering and may reduce civic agency. This chapter discusses the development of a required class on community organizing and civil resistance that provides students with specific strategies for engaging in collective action. The author explores a range of tensions involved in teaching this class: making it experiential without forcing students to work on issues or take steps they might not agree with, providing multiple traditions of social action so they do not get the sense that there is one “right” way, working with students whose perspectives might differ from ones he sees as legitimate, and teaching a class that some outside the institution might see as beyond the purview of a university. Ultimately, he argues that it is incumbent upon universities to provide concrete skills for social action, because failing to do so restricts their capacity to become effective civic actors in our democracy.

Integrated and sustainable agroecological production for medicinal plants: a proposal based on strategic management

A management plan based on Integrated and Sustainable Agroecological Production (Pais) technology for the cultivation of medicinal plants, through a case study. The Swot-AHP technique was adopted to evaluateproblems to agroecological cultivation, indicating stages of the implementation work, before the physical structuring of the project, integrated with a participative social action with employees of the institution who revealed the use of 64 medicinal plants, highlighting boldo, lemongrass, and lemon balm, while 174 plant species were identified in official Brazilian documents. The lack of electricity and funding delays by funders are the most significant problems, while the space for work and gardening courses are the best potential. The integration of these data has proposed the implementation of teams for fundraising and project implementation, based on a list of medicinal species to compose the future structure made with Pais social technology.

Meaning and Discourse of Oral Tradition “Basan” of Helong Language

This research examined the meaning and discourse of a tradition named Basan. Halliday‘s approaches of discourse analysis was used in this research, and was organized around three generalized semiotic meanings that relate to social action (field), roles of people (tenor), and organization of the text or sign (mode). Carrying out the maintenance and revitalization of oral literature was done objectively. “Basan” is a rhythmic traditional speech that is uttered with different intonations in order to convey the main points of speech that is spoken according to the context in order to see the meaning contained in each speech and the context associated with the text spoken. The context in oral tradition “Basan” includes place, time, results and message, which begins with an opening and ends with closing, while the meaning that can be applied in the oral tradition “Basan” are lexical and contextual meanings. “Basan” consists of context and flow, those are opening, main utterance, and closing. For its discourse, “Basan” is done verbally (mode), done by the leaders of the village to the guests in social occasion and by the priest to the assembly in religion occasion (tenor), and done in a social interaction and spiritual activities (field).