Research on Strategy of Coordinated Development between the City Planning and the Construction of College Town

The purpose of building a community is to seek a better fit between urban development and college city construction, promote resource sharing and complementary advantages between city and college, then better integrate the university into urban planning, so as to better serve regional development. This paper discusses how to plan and transform the college town, how to improve the leading role and radiation driving effect of the college town in serving the local area, further build the brand of smart college town, and provide relevant suggestions for mutual promotion, common prosperity and common development of urban development and college town.

Community-Based Education Practices in Resettlement: Insights from the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership

Education is a key component of the processes refugees undertake to (re)establish their lives in their new communities. In many cases too, displaced individuals have had interruptions in their education paths. In the United States context, nonprofit and community organizations provide essential services to supplement publicly funded resettlement and educational programs. The Blacksburg Refugee Partnership (BRP) has been filling service provision gaps in Southwest Virginia for a group of resettled refugee households since late 2016. BRP provides tutoring, English as a Second Language (ESL) training, and summer supplemental programming. Based upon an interview with BRP’s Education Coordinators and a survey of leaders and volunteers in September 2018, this article explores the organization’s work, connecting it to challenges and opportunities similar education initiatives encounter. I organize research results around three primary themes: the benefits of resettlement in a “college town” and the importance of leveraging university resources; the complexity of volunteer-led programming; and the need for comprehensive services to facilitate students’ education. I conclude by sketching the implications of this case for other educational initiatives serving refugees.

Poems, Routes

In March 2020 when the pandemic began, I found myself walking and scribbling in my notebook around the hills, country roads, and backroads of the Appalachian college town where I live and work. In the absence of human presence, I turned my attention to the nonhuman and the inanimate. Ultimately, my scribbles about these things took poetic form. I present here four poems and some notes on their emergence. They are a voice for the “tiny thoughts” that can occur around profound change or simply in the every day. I share them as my miniscule experience of long and short pandemic days, weeks, and months.

Unique Predictors of Intended Uptake of a COVID-19 Vaccine in Adults Living in a Rural College Town in the United States

Purpose: To explore public confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine. Design: Cross-sectional survey. Setting: A rural college town in central Pennsylvania. Subjects: Adult residents without minor children. Measures: The primary outcome was COVID-19 vaccination intention. Secondary measures included vaccination attitudes, norms, efficacy, past behavior, trust in the vaccination process, and sociodemographic variables of education, financial standing, political viewpoint, and religiosity. Analysis: Descriptive statistics were used to describe quantitative data. Multivariate ordinal regression was used to model predictors of vaccine intention. Results: Of 950 respondents, 55% were “very likely” and 20% “somewhat likely” to take a coronavirus vaccine, even though 70% had taken the flu vaccine since September 2019. The strongest predictors of vaccine acceptance were trust in the system evaluating vaccines and perceptions of local COVID-19 vaccination norms. The strongest predictors of negative vaccine intentions were worries about unknown side-effects and positive attitudes toward natural infection. Sociodemographic factors, political views, and religiosity did not predict vaccine intentions. Conclusion: Fewer adults intend to take a coronavirus vaccine than currently take the flu vaccine. Traditional sociodemographic factors may not be effective predictors of COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Although based on a small sample, the study adds to our limited understanding of COVID-19-specific vaccine confidence among some rural Americans and suggests that traditional public health vaccination campaigns based on sociodemographic characteristics may not be effective.

THE SYSTEMIC ROLE OF A CLASSICAL UNIVERSITY “WITH HISTORY” IN THE COLLEGE TOWN DEVELOPMENT

Рассматривается проблема малоизученности города-университета как социокультурного феномена и роли классического вуза «с историей» в его становлении. Применяется методологический комплекс, включающий теорию социальных аутопоэтических систем Н. Лумана; концепцию классического университета как открытой и одновременно закрытой системы М. Ленартович; социокультурный (Р. Парк), культурологический (Н. Федотова, Т. Ильина, И. Гревс, М. Каган) и историко-культурный (К. Керр) подходы; концепцию региона как социальной системы (Д. Докучаев). Анализируются понятия «город-университет» и «университетский город»; формулируется авторское операциональное определение города-университета; описываются ключевые отличия города-университета от университетского города, а также представляются основные характеристики, присущие городу-университету. Показывается, что город-университет представляет собой сложную социокультурную систему с двойным статусом (открытая/закрытая), основой идентичности которой является классический вуз «с историей», обеспечивающий функционирование культурных кодов города. Обосновывается системообразующая роль классического вуза «с историей» в становлении города-университета как особого социокультурного феномена и сохранении его культурной идентичности. The purpose of the article is justification of the systemic role of a classical university “with history” in the development of a college town as a special sociocultural phenomenon and the preservation of its cultural identity. The methodological complex, applied in the paper, includes the theory of autopoietic social systems (N. Luhmann); the concept of a traditional university as an open and closed system (M. Lenartowicz); sociocultural (R. Park), cultural (N. Fedotova, T. Ilyina, I. Grevs, M. Kagan) and historical-cultural (K. Kerr) approaches; the concept of the region as a social system (D. Dokuchaev). The paper presents an analysis of the “college town” and “a city with a university” concepts. It formulates the authors’ definition of a college town, describes the key differences between a college town and a city with a university, and demonstrates the main college town characteristics. The article demonstrates that a college town is a complex sociocultural system with a dual status (open/closed), whose identity is based on a classical university “with a history” that provides the functioning of the town’s cultural codes. Understanding a classical university “with a history” as a college town’s system-forming element provides an opportunity to understand the essence of this town type and its specific characteristics. It can be further used as a theoretical justification for the strategy of regional development. The ideas presented in this paper can contribute to the search for an authentic identity for some territorial entities, which is still in a “latent state”.

Contact tracing evaluation for COVID-19 transmission in the different movement levels of a rural college town in the USA

Contact tracing can play a key role in controlling human-to-human transmission of a highly contagious disease such as COVID-19. We investigate the benefits and costs of contact tracing in the COVID-19 transmission. We estimate two unknown epidemic model parameters (basic reproductive number $$R_0$$ R 0 and confirmed rate $$\delta _2$$ δ 2 ) by using confirmed case data. We model contact tracing in a two-layer network model. The two-layer network is composed by the contact network in the first layer and the tracing network in the second layer. In terms of benefits, simulation results show that increasing the fraction of traced contacts decreases the size of the epidemic. For example, tracing $$25\%$$ 25 % of the contacts is enough for any reopening scenario to reduce the number of confirmed cases by half. Considering the act of quarantining susceptible households as the contact tracing cost, we have observed an interesting phenomenon. The number of quarantined susceptible people increases with the increase of tracing because each individual confirmed case is mentioning more contacts. However, after reaching a maximum point, the number of quarantined susceptible people starts to decrease with the increase of tracing because the increment of the mentioned contacts is balanced by a reduced number of confirmed cases. The goal of this research is to assess the effectiveness of contact tracing for the containment of COVID-19 spreading in the different movement levels of a rural college town in the USA. Our research model is designed to be flexible and therefore, can be used to other geographic locations.

There’s No Such Thing as a Gay Bar: Co-Sexuality and the Neoliberal Branding of Queer Spaces

Gay bars have historically functioned as communal spaces for the LGBTQ+ community. Because of neoliberalism, LGBTQ+ acceptance continues to rise as “post-gay’’ discourses, coupled with the inclusion of heterosexual audiences, have repositioned gay bars as inclusive spaces. In this study, we explore how the meaning of “gay bar” is communicatively negotiated. Specifically, we employed a co-sexuality lens with spatiality to understand how the “gay bar brand” is constructed and perceived. We used ethnographic methods including observation, 25 semi-structured interviews, and documents at two gay bars in a Midwestern college town. We demonstrate how gay bars, through neoliberal branding, reopened the meaning of gay bars as spaces for “all” sexualities. Three tensions emerged: (1) who gay bars are for (queer or general communities); (2) sexual autonomy (contested meanings around “safety” and “being yourself”); and (3) viable marketing (tension between “community” and “commodification”). This study contributes to the literature on sexuality, space, and branding by moving beyond utopian depictions of gay bars. Instead, it encourages scholars to understand the bars as destabilized and contested queer spaces.