Writing the Self: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Autobiographical Novel Second Class Citizen

Life-writing, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, is a general term for the writing of diverse kinds that takes life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer. As autobiographies, as well as autobiographical novels, can be considered as self-referential modes of writing, a notion of the terms in which the subject preconceives himself/herself becomes pervasive for understanding autobiographies as well as autobiographical novels. Susan Stanford Friedman, in her essay “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (1988) opens a critique of a seminal essay by Georges Gusdorf where he states that the cultural precondition for autobiography is a pervasive concept of individualism, a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (Qtd in Friedman 72). Friedman argues that the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self that pervades Gusdorf’s work raises serious problems for critics who recognise that the “self, self-creation, and self-consciousness are profoundly different for women, minorities, and many non-western peoples” (Friedman 73). While taking into account the differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender identity, Friedman refers to Regina Blackburn in her “In Search of the Black Female Self” and says that the “black women autobiographers use the genre to redefine ‘the black female self in black terms from a black perspective’” (Qtd in Freidman 78). Moreover, in the postcolonial context, C.L. Innes in The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007) considers the use of the self-referential mode as a tool by postcolonial writers to represent his/her culture and also to capture and address contemporary concerns. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to explore the use of the self-referential mode by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in her autobiographical novel Second-Class Citizen (1974)

A Study of Black Female Principals Leading through Twin Pandemics

In 2020, the United States experienced twin pandemics disproportionately impacting BIPOC communities and their schools and school systems—one new, COVID-19, and one longstanding, that of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. This phenomenological study of 20 Black female principals in two states provides insights into how these leaders, who so often center racial justice and caring for BIPOC children and communities in their leadership practice, grappled with these pandemics and how doing so impacted their leadership and work. Findings suggest that leading through these twin pandemics further cemented these women’s commitments to engage in advocacy and justice work on behalf of their communities and students. They also reported, regarding racial inequity and white supremacy, feeling both a cautious optimism stemming from seeing the work they had long engaged in being taken up at scale, and by white colleagues in particular, and frustration, experiencing this engagement often as “performative” and thus unlikely to lead to real change. And yet they also spoke of their deep commitment to advocacy and social justice moving forward and their role in ensuring that all their students receive the education, opportunities, and outcomes they deserve.

Disproportionality of Sanctions for Illegal and Unethical Teacher Behavior

We use data from Texas spanning 2007–2017 to explore the frequency of teacher sanctions for illegal and unethical behavior and their disproportionality by teacher characteristics. Analyses reveal that the overall incidence of teacher sanctioning is low, with teachers most frequently sanctioned for sexually related offenses. Consistent with documented disproportionalities in student discipline, we find key disproportionalities in teacher sanctions by gender and race: Overall, male, Black, and Hispanic teachers are overrepresented among sanctioned teachers. However, we also observe important interactions between race and gender. Notably, for example, Black female teachers are particularly likely to be sanctioned for contract and financial violations, while Black male teachers are particularly likely to be sanctioned for drugs and violence. We conclude with implications for policy.

The reduction of race and gender bias in clinical treatment recommendations using clinician peer networks in an experimental setting

Bias in clinical practice, in particular in relation to race and gender, is a persistent cause of healthcare disparities. We investigated the potential of a peer-network approach to reduce bias in medical treatment decisions within an experimental setting. We created “egalitarian” information exchange networks among practicing clinicians who provided recommendations for the clinical management of patient scenarios, presented via standardized patient videos of actors portraying patients with cardiac chest pain. The videos, which were standardized for relevant clinical factors, presented either a white male actor or Black female actor of similar age, wearing the same attire and in the same clinical setting, portraying a patient with clinically significant chest pain symptoms. We found significant disparities in the treatment recommendations given to the white male patient-actor and Black female patient-actor, which when translated into real clinical scenarios would result in the Black female patient being significantly more likely to receive unsafe undertreatment, rather than the guideline-recommended treatment. In the experimental control group, clinicians who were asked to independently reflect on the standardized patient videos did not show any significant reduction in bias. However, clinicians who exchanged real-time information in structured peer networks significantly improved their clinical accuracy and showed no bias in their final recommendations. The findings indicate that clinician network interventions might be used in healthcare settings to reduce significant disparities in patient treatment.

Comparison of State-Of-The-Art Neural Network Survival Models With The Pooled Cohort Equations for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Prediction

Background: The Pooled Cohort Equations (PCEs) are race- and sex-specific Cox PH-based models used for 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk prediction with acceptable discrimination. In recent years, neural network models have gained increasing popularity with their success in image recognition and text classification. Various survival neural network models have been proposed by combining survival analysis and neural network architecture to take advantage of the strengths from both. However, the performance of these survival neural network models compared to each other and to PCEs in ASCVD prediction is unknown. Methods: In this study, we used 6 cohorts from the Lifetime Risk Pooling Project and compared the performance of the PCEs in 10-year ASCVD risk prediction with an all two-way interactions Cox PH model (Cox PH-TWI) and three state-of-the-art neural network survival models including Nnet-survival, Deepsurv, and Cox-nnet. For all the models, we used the same 7 covariates as used in the PCEs. We fitted each of the aforementioned models in white females, white males, black females, and black males, respectively. We evaluated models’ internal and external discrimination power and calibration.Results: The training/internal validation sample comprised 23246 individuals. The average age at baseline was 57.8 years old (SD = 9.6); 16% developed ASCVD during average follow-up of 10.50 (SD = 3.02) years. Based on 10x10 cross-validation, the method that had the highest C-statistics was Cox PH-TWI (0.7372) for white males, PCE (0.7973) for white females, Cox PH-TWI (0.6989) for black males, and Deepsurv (0.7874) for black females. In the external validation dataset, PCE (0.7102), Deepsurv (0.7293), PCE (0.6907), and Nnet-survival (0.7243) had the highest C-statistics for white male, white female, black male, and black female population, respectively. Calibration plots showed that in 10x10 validation, PCE had good calibration in white male, white female, black male but was outperformed by Deepsurv in black female. In external validation, all models overestimated the risk for 10-year ASCVD except for Deepsurv in black female.Conclusions We demonstrated the use of the state-of-the-art neural network survival models in ASCVD risk prediction. Neural network survival models and PCEs have generally comparable discrimination and calibration.

Feminist/queer/diasporic temporality in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

Claiming that individuals and communities get their choices, rhythms and practices biopolitically choreographed by temporal mechanisms that dictate which human experiences are included or excluded, Elizabeth Freeman states that those ‘whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer’ (2005). The narrative subject of Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other ( 2019 ) is black, female and (mostly) queer in her design of a polyphonic text featuring twelve black women moving through the world in different decades and occupying a temporal dimension that deviates from the linear and teleological modes. I draw on Edelman (2004) ; Freeman (2010) and Ahmed (2010 , 2017 ) to analyse Evaristo's novel as a text informed by feminist queer temporality and thus explore these characters’ resistance to chrononormative assumptions like ‘the straight time of domesticated gender, capital accumulation, and national coherence’ ( Ramberg, 2016 ). In this light, I address her cast of ‘time abjects’ –lesbians, transgender women, feminist killjoys and menopausal females—as characterized ‘chronotopically’ as their racialized and gendered subjectivities coalesce temporally and spatially seeing their pasts and futures interact in a typically transpositional, queer and diasporic continuum. By invoking Freeman's notion of ‘erotohistoriography’ ( 2010 ) as a distinctive mode of queer time that not only recognizes non-linear chronopolitics, but decidedly prioritizes bodies and pleasures in self-representation, I contend that Evaristo depicts bodies as likewise performing this encounter between past and present in hybrid, carnal and trans-temporal terms. I conclude that in her joining temporality and corporeality, memory and desire, she suggests alternative ways of representing contemporary black British womanhood