Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance

When Indigenous-led resistance to land- and water-killing projects threatens extraction, settler-colonial state and corporate institutions use security mechanisms to eliminate such “threats.” Using as case studies the pipeline conflicts of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s (especially Unist’ot’en Camp’s) resistance to Coastal GasLink (CGL) in British Columbia (BC), Canada, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota, United States (US), this paper explores how fossil-fuel extraction interacts with critical infrastructure (CI) securitization to further Indigenous land dispossession. I argue that although the Wet’suwet’en and Standing Rock cases both involved the state and corporations criminalizing Indigenous resistance to extraction—to uphold fossil-fuel capital interests—the Wet’suwet’en case is unique because Canadian actors attempted to pacify resistance through symbolic appeals to Indigenous rights. Indigenous communities across the world are violently oppressed for peacefully defending their water, land, and communities. However, the motives and strategies of violence are unique for every colonial jurisdiction exercising violence, and for every Indigenous community impacted. I compare and contrast the rationales and strategiesof both cases through an in-depth content analysis of passages from TigerSwan surveillance and BC Supreme Court injunction documents. I discuss my findings within theoretical debates on dispossession and securitization.

Religion and Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence: A Cross-National Study

In a world where violence against women remains pervasive and serious, intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of the most common and harmful forms of violence against women. Since religion and religiosity have been found to be influential in shaping people’s attitudes toward IPV, this global-scale study investigates the net effects of religion and religiosity on attitudes toward IPV with country-specific influences controlled. Using the data from the World Values Survey conducted between 2017 and 2020 that had 69,578 respondents with Ordinary Least Square regression (OLS) models, this study finds that being religious is related to less accepting attitudes toward IPV, while the frequency of attending religious activities does not have a statistically significant relationship with attitudes toward IPV. Variations in attitudes are found among different religious denominations as well. People belonging to some religious denominations show more acceptance of IPV, so the nuanced differences among specific religions are crucial in creating discrepancies in attitudes across religious people. The results call for more future interdisciplinary and mix-method research to further our understanding of the religious impact on attitudes toward IPV and to promote gender equality globally.

The Queen of Propaganda: Boudica’s Representation in Empire

Boudica was an Iceni queen c. 60 CE in Roman-occupied Britain who revolted against the Roman empire. While there is a scarcity of primary sources that document her life, Boudica has remained a dominant figure in conceptualisations of British national identity. This paper examines the works of the Roman historians, the archaeological record, and the depictions of Boudica in different periods and analyses the ability of historians to record events without being influenced by the ideology of their contemporary periods. Through a comparative examination of sources, this paper argues that Boudica should not be approached as a verifiable historical figure but as a tool to understand imperial propaganda.

The Impact of COVID-19 Psychological Distress on Students' Academic Challenges in University

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced significant disruptions in the learning environment for many post-secondary students with many shifting entirely to remote online learning, which can compound existing academic challenges. While emerging evidence has suggested that COVID-19 impacts students’ well-being and stress, little is known about how the pandemic has affected students academically. This study investigates how different types of academic challenges mediate the relationship between students’ COVID-19 psychological distress and their academic performance. Participants (n=496) completed an online survey that measured COVID-19 psychological distress, self-reported grade point average (GPA), and academic challenges. Mediational analyses estimating indirect pathways were conducted using structural equation modelling on Mplus. Our results showed that all challenges increased along with COVID-19 distress, but specific challenges had a significant relationship with the expected GPA. We found that out of the five academic challenge areas, metacognitive, motivational, and social and emotional challenges emerged as the salient challenge areas that fully mediated the relationship between COVID-19 distress and GPA. Contrary to our prediction, while more significant COVID-19 distress predicted more social and emotional challenges, these challenges were associated to higher GPA. Future research is invited to help students manage and cope with their academic challenges.

“Heroic Hearts”: Masculinity and Imperialism in “Ulysses” and “The White Man’s Burden”

This essay aims to uncover how Victorian poetry aided in the construction of a hegemonic masculinity that is ruthless, adversarial, and deemed integral to the success of British imperial work. In promoting this new paradigm, Victorian writers aimed to appeal to men’s egos and spirits, albeit in differing ways: Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842) professes that embodying a masculine—and therefore colonial—role serves to support personal fulfilment, while Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) claims that the purpose of adopting such a role lies in the prosperity it brings humanity as a whole. Together, Tennyson and Kipling exemplify not only the fluidity and volatility of Victorian gender roles but showcase the ways in which masculinity became bound to tenets of violence, individuality, and to British colonialism.

Mindfulness-Based Interventions For Successful Aging: Benefits, Barriers, and the Future

A growing body of research supports the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to address a wide range of health concerns. This narrative literature review recognizes the important role these interventions play in response to public health challenges prompted by an aging demographic. Moreover, this review identifies opportunities to deliver cost-effective, community-based interventions tailored to older adults that promote successful aging. Complementary to this diverse demographic, MBIs allow participants to access naturally developed abilities that support overall well-being and resiliency later in life. The intersecting and beneficial effects of these interventions offer a well-suited, proactive, and holistic avenue to enhance quality of life for older adults.

Behind the Scenes of COVID-19: The "Hidden Pandemic" of Anti-Asian Racism

Alongside COVID-19 came a renewed onslaught of xenophobia and anti-Asian racism, marking people who are or appear to be Chinese as a target for hate-fuelled verbal and physical assaults, some resulting in serious injury or proving fatal for the victims. Using news articles published in Canada to collect data, this research explores the impact of anti-Asian racism within Canada. The findings from this research suggest an uptick in activism throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Roughly a year after the pandemic, social movements and organizations focused on supporting those with lived experiences of anti-Asian racism and tracking and preventing anti-Asian racism have garnered large followings and support. The resurgence of anti-Asian racism due to the fear associated with COVID-19 is a testament to how we can and should do better in the future to act collectively against racism and xenophobia, by understanding why and how it emerges in order to prevent it.

Health Programs as Social Programs: Navigating Difficult Healthcare Policy Decisions

Apart from public health and preventive medicine campaigns, a health authority funds healthcare programs primarily for the purpose of immediately improving clinical patient out­ comes. For individual health treatments, funding decisions by Canadian provincial govern­ ments incorporate some equivalent of a cost­benefit calculation,such as the cost­effectiveness analysis (CEA). This research is important to health policy makers because it considers the effects of expanding a CEA to analyze societal impacts that are already of importance to the government when the appropriateness or accuracy of the cost­benefit calculation is unclear. I use the example of in vitro fertilization funding programs to demonstrate the argument that health programs may also address other relevant issues related to the social determinants of health.

Detecting Fake Users on Social Media with a Graph Database

Social media has become a major part of people’s daily lives as it provides users with the convenience to connect with people, interact with friends, share personal content with others, and gather information. However, it also creates opportunities for fake users. Fake users on social media may be perceived as popular and influential if not detected. They might spread false information or fake news by making it look real, manipulating real users into making certain decisions. In computer science, a social network can be treated as a graph, which is a data structure consisting of nodes being the social media users, and edges being the connections between users. Graph data can be stored in a graph database for efficient data analysis. In this paper, we propose using a graph database to achieve an increased scalability to accommodate larger graphs. Centrality measures as features were extracted for the random forest classifier to successfully detect fake users with high precision, recall, and accuracy. We have achieved promising results especially when compared with previous studies.

Decision Making Under Chronic Stress and Anxiety: State and Trait Anxiety Impact Contextual Updating but not Feedback Learning

Stress may alter executive functioning by causing structural and functional changes to the brain. Sub-optimal decisions made under high levels of stress and anxiety may act as a mediator for stress-related health effects. We examined the effect of three personality traits–chronic stress, state anxiety, and trait anxiety–on updating working memory and feedback learning across 330 participants, using electroencephalography (EEG). We hypothesized a decrease in P300 (updating working memory) and reward positivity (feedback learning) amplitudes with increasing chronic stress and anxiety scores. The three personality traits were not correlated with reward positivity amplitudes. Additionally, chronic stress had no effect on P300 amplitudes. However, state and trait anxiety were negatively correlated with P300 amplitudes. Anxiety appears to impact working memory processes, and this effect was amplified with decreasing anxiety score quantiles to reflect the tails of the distribution. Our results are evidence of the beginnings of a correlation between anxiety and the neural correlates of decision-making, offering insight into anxiety-related adverse health outcomes.