Climate Change Behind Prison Walls: Environmental Justice, Prison Abolition, and Social Welfare

Unbeknownst to many, human rights violations occur on a large scale behind prison walls. This paper examines some of these violations, especially those exacerbated by climate change, through an environmental lense in order to emphasize the need for social welfare-based solutions in the abolition of the prison industrial complex. It also seeks to illustrate the connection between the environmental justice movement and the prison abolition movement so that marginalized peoples may be free from shouldering disproportionate effects of environmental hazards and imprisonment. This paper is introduced with a brief overview of the human rights violations occurring in prisons. Using quantitative and qualitative data, chapter one explains the connections between prison abolition, environmental justice, and climate change. As well as detailing the negative impacts of prisons on ecosystem services. Chapter two explores the evolution of prisons in America, starting with their earliest form – plantations – and concluding with their current state: the industrial prison complex. In so doing, it depicts the longstanding relationship between prisons and the environment and disproves the notion that the criminal justice system is broken, instead showing that the system is working exactly as it is intended. Chapter three defines the environmental justice movement and the prison abolition movement. It ends with an analysis of a case study in which the two movements come together to fight a common enemy, to show that the movements can strengthen each other when they join forces. Chapter four explores the many environmental justice issues within prisons that threaten imprisoned people\u27s basic human rights– such as their placement near superfund sites, their allowance of contaminated water, and their lack of temperature control. The topics covered in previous chapters converge in chapter five, which suggests abolitionist policies to defund the industrial prison complex and redirect the funds into environmentally focused community welfare resources – education, housing, healthcare, and employment

Imperial Fabrication of Ethnic Cleansing: Czarist Through Soviet Russian Practices and Policies Responsibility in The Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia.

This thesis explores the direct correlation and connection between Goergia’s struggles against Russian imperialism and the ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia that resulted from the 1990s Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict. After examining the historical and cultural ties of the Abkhaz as one of the many Georgian nationalities, this thesis examines the concerted effort by Czarist and Soviet Russia to separate the two identities in order to further imperial ambitions in the Caucasus region. This targeted separation over decades, along with direct Russian military support during the conflict, would then result in an ethnic cleansing taking place perpetrated by the Abkhaz against the other Georgian nationalities within Abkhazia. As proven in this thesis, the ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia is a logical conclusion to the imperial practices and policies of Russia

The Years of Blood [EXCERPT]

Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer ISELE MAGAZINE | EDITOR\u27S CHOICE: 25 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025 THE MODACULTURE | 10 ANTICIPATED AFRICAN BOOKS OF 2025 OPEN COUNTRY MAGAZINE | ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025In this unflinching debut collection, Adedayo Agarau confronts the harrowing reality of ritual killings and child abductions that have terrorized Nigeria from the turbulent pre-democratic era to the present day. Set against the backdrop of rural Ibadan, The Years of Blood plunges readers into the depths of collective trauma where memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air. These poems bear witness to unspeakable atrocities through dreamlike landscapes and surreal imagery that resist rational explanation. Memory is as vital as it is ungraspable. As the painful poem the abduction puts it, memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air. Or, in Lilac, where the debris of memory / becomes the fog before you. Agarau\u27s lyrical language—at once rich and broken—captures both the violence witnessed and the guilt of survival through repetitions of words, phrases, and motifs.As both survivor and émigré to the U.S., Agarau explores the weight of disappearance [that] hangs heavy over memory, the ongoing trauma that cannot be shed, and the search for healing across continents. His poems attempt to wrest language out of terror\u27s domain, asking: How many ways can the poet craft an elegy? Above and beyond its art, The Years of Blood is essential reading for those interested in African literature, postcolonial studies, and the intersection of personal and political history and global literature. In its unyielding approach to its subject matter, this volume is a crucial interlocutor to conversations on trauma, grief, loss, absence, migration, loneliness, and African spiritualism.For readers of Ilya Kaminsky, Safia Elhillo, Ocean Vuong, and Claudia Rankine, this collection speaks to both specific cultural realities and universal human experiences through poetry that refuses easy consolation

Breaking Down Black Beauty: Deconstructing Unsustainable Racist Practices Within the Beauty Industry

The glitter of the beauty industry creates an undeniably attractive fantasy. Cosmetics and dermatology allow for finding a new sense of self through beauty. However, is beauty\u27s fantasy world accessible to everyone, specifically the Black dance community? The beauty industry, historically and presently, has disproportionate effects on people of color communities like the Black dance community. The unsustainable practices and toxic products in the beauty industry hinder the health of Black individuals at different rates than other racial counterparts. There is still work to be done in deconstructing the racist practices of the beauty industry and in facilitating environmentally sustainable practices that do not negatively affect Black people, particularly Black dancers, physically or economically. This paper uncovers the racist and unsustainable dispositions of beauty and how it negatively impacts Black bodies, like dancers’ bodies. Chapter 1 examines the data on contemporary, environmentally unsustainable, and unhealthy disparities in the beauty space for Black bodies. Chapter 2 analyzes the historical socio-economic and health discrimination Black bodies, like Black dancers, face when encountering the beauty industry. Chapter 3 discusses the community movement for environmental justice education on beauty consumer advocacy and spotting racially harmful ingredients. Chapter 4 explores the effectiveness of acts like the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act and current state laws in the United States concerning toxic beauty products. Chapter 5 pulls on initiatives in the beauty industry\u27s fight for sustainability and racial equity to develop policy recommendations concerning the implications of toxic beauty products on Black bodies

Tailoring Black Style and its Powerful Pieces: From West Africa to the U.S. West Coast and Everything In-Between

Introduction: On September 19, 2025, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum (MET) with some of the Bronx African American History Project team. The people in attendance were Graduate Assistant, Anthony Rosado, and Undergraduate Assistants, Serena Velasquez and Emma Garr, wonderful people, I tell you. After the tour, we ended up at the American art exhibit and had podcast conversations about history for what felt like both hours and very brief minutes... We went to the MET to see a particular piece that was in the Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibit curated by Barnard professor, Monica L. Miller and Andrew Bolton, the head of the MET’s costume institute

Abdul Qadir Askia

Sixth poll mark of the Kappa Alpha Psi (KAP) Fraternity, Abdul Qadir Askia is an African American man who is an accomplished professional in investment operations. He describes his early life as being nurtured with other cultures as he moved around New York City. His father came to Brooklyn after migrating from California, where he was a member of the Black Panther Party, and where he would meet his mother. Askia lived in Brooklyn until he was seven, when he was sent to a boarding school in Senegal. When he came back, he moved around from place to place, from The Bronx to Brooklyn to Queens to Harlem. His childhood was characterized by experiencing different cultures such as East Asian, Carribean, Latino, and Black culture. His educational journey officially started when he attended Frederick Douglass Academy, an experimental public high school in Harlem. This school would end up pushing Askia to attend Lincoln University, where he pledged to be a member of KAP. His father disapproved of his decision and he ended up walking away from the fraternity since he believed it conflicted with his commitment to Islam. Once he left the fraternity, his financial mentor came to him with an opportunity to work at Citigroup in Delaware but he would need to drop out of school. He took the opportunity and it ended up being the thing that launched his career. Once he was done with Citigroup, he would then become the most senior Black person at the firm, Sculptor Capital, where he controls two-thirds of the firm; around $30 billion. While he was successful in his career, Askia still felt incomplete about the fraternity. In 2012, he went to John Jay College to finish his education and he wanted to rejoin the fraternity but was rejected since they believed he wasn’t a good fit, so they sent him to The Bronx chapter instead. He thought the chapter was a joke since he claimed they were dressed down, when he first met them. Despite this, he stood with the chapter and it flourished. It would become one of the most dominant in NYC. KAP emphasized service for the community, and Askia showed it in his mentoring program he ran. The Bronx is where he gained his grit, encountered a different level of poverty, and showed his growth with the chapter. Through his work in the chapter, he was recognized as a powerhouse there and he was going to be promoted as the vice poll mark, then the poll mark. He has clear goals as the poll mark and where he wants to take it. He wants to find a physical location for the chapter, create more connections for it, make large-scale events for the community, and create more funding to give back to the community; namely, scholarships and meals. Askia, a man who traded his education for his career, managed extraordinary feats to become an accomplished figure in investment operations. Despite this, he came back and helped his community with KAP. Link to Video Recording: https://cdm17265.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/baahp/id/61/rec/

Citizens United, Congress Divided: Examining the Connection Between Independent Expenditures and Polarization in the U.S. House

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC, issued in January of 2010, allowed an unprecedented amount of money to enter federal elections by removing spending limits for corporations on independent expenditure (referred to as ‘IE’, and meaning money spent of the proprietor’s accord, rather than directly by or in coordination with a political party or candidate). This paper addresses the lack of research on the outcomes of this ruling; there are few studies on the impacts of Citizens United on the ideological composition of Congress. To test the theory that this ruling led to significant polarization in Congress, it employs a statistical analysis of public campaign finance records for elections in the U.S. House of Representatives dating back to 2000 that demonstrates a significant correlation between spending on elections by ‘outside groups’ in the form of ‘IE-only committees’, known as ‘Super PACs’, and political polarization as measured by Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE scores, among nonincumbent (that is, newly elected) House members, particularly members of the Republican Party. This analysis is supported by anecdotal evidence of an intent to polarize by certain Super PACs, and lends credence to a theoretical game matrix that the paper proposes to represent the current arrangement of funding incentives for political parties and Super PACs. The paper uses this evidence to argue for further research into campaign finance reform in pursuit of political equality in U.S. federal elections

The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future. Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world. By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature. This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis

An Autoethnographic Account of the Dimensions of Learning to Teach

This is a review of the book Navigating Teacher Education in Complex and Uncertain Times by Carmen I. Mercado. The volume offers an autoethnographic narrative of an innovative learning and teaching process in teacher training including her role as a professor responding to the needs of the urban diverse students and their families served. It is an ethnographic contribution where Mercado’s life and work are intertwined. Through a rich autobiographical account, spanning 40 years, Mercado theorizes from her experiences as a teacher and teacher educator, offering powerful lessons to teachers and teachers’ educators alike

A Tale of Two Chinatowns: Development Projects and Their Effects on Diasporic Communities

Urban change as initiated by a municipality has ramifications on the communities and neighborhoods found in the urban area. Development plans greatly affect vulnerable migrant populations who rely on their neighbors for economic and social support. These development plans in urban areas are widely discussed in academic literature because of pervasive processes such as gentrification. While most people agree that processes such as gentrification are harmful to communities, I am interested in exploring urban development plans on a larger scale and who these projects most benefit in order to better understand why they are commissioned. In this thesis I perform a deep dive into Chinatowns because they are some of the most visible diasporas around the world and are increasingly subject to a municipality\u27s development plans. I am interested in exploring which interest group, whether that be the established Chinese diaspora or new groups moving into the city, benefits the most from a municipality’s current development plans in an attempt to understand why these projects and processes continue to be commissioned. The case studies of the Chinatown in Manhattan and Paris were chosen since they are two of the largest Chinatowns in the world. They also have completely different histories, allowing for a better and more well-rounded understanding of Chinatowns on a global scale. Current development plans in New York City and Paris benefit neither interest group more than the other and instead only align with the agendas of the municipality, making it difficult for any population to truly succeed in the urban area. In this context, cities must take more action to protect their vulnerable populations. Immigrant populations highly contribute to key aspects of their respective cities through contributions to diversity, economic revenue, and culture, and thus, it is in the city’s best interest to protect these communities