Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message came out in the fall of 2024. It had been ten years since The Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” had propelled him into the national spotlight. Nine years since, his Between the World and Me won a National Book Award and began to be read in many U.S. high schools. Both of these works examined the history and realities of African Americans in the United States. The pillars of Coates’s journalism include examining historical documents, invoking African American intellectual traditions, and travelling to meet with people — frequently elderly — who personally experienced the travails about which he is writing. In The Message, Coates maintains his focus on race within the U.S. with a trip to South Carolina to attend a school board meeting on book banning and also widens the frame of his journalism to include travels abroad to Senegal and Israel-Palestine. Coates often repeats that the year he published “The Case for Reparations” was the year he applied for his first adult passport. Readers familiar with Between the World and Me will recall that Coates is an eager adult learner of French, and other languages. In many ways, The Message can be understood as Coates’s journalistic entry into the world beyond the United States

Collective Memory of Partition: A Study of Trauma, Martyrdom, and Survival in Women’s Post-Partition Fiction

Gender and the distortion of memory are two important aspects of Partition literature about the division of the Indian subcontinent into two nations, India and Pakistan. Women writers, such as Geetanjali Shree in Tomb of Sand (2022) and Anjali Enjeti in The Parted Earth (2021), delineate the collective trauma of the 1947 Partition of India through the theme of memory. This article will demonstrate two types of violence experienced by women during the time - political violence (perpetrated by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs) and patriarchal violence and uncover how their memories haunt and shape their present, constructing and reconstructing their historical and psychological trauma. Through the framework of Maurice Halbwachs’ “collective memory,” this article focuses on three forms of gendered narratives found in select fictional works: physically wounded and abducted women, martyred women, and unwed mothers. These traumatic memories transcend subjective experience to become expressions of solidarity with the unheard voices of the subcontinent’s women

Whose Rules, Whose Rights?: Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and Legal Protections in Wartime

This article critically analyzes conflict-related systematic sexual violence (CRSV) within the frameworks of international humanitarian law, particularly the Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols. Moving beyond viewing CRSV as an isolated atrocity, it situates sexual violence within the historical and political roots of conflict, using case studies from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Syrian Arab Republic. The analysis demonstrates how sexual violence operates as a weapon within exploitative wartime economies, where institutional collapse and illicit resource networks enable the commodification and control of women’s bodies. Furthermore, the article introduces a sectarian lens to the study of CRSV, disputing its portrayal as a uniform wartime practice. The research interrogates limitations within international legal frameworks that often prioritize state and military interests over civilian protection. Centering gender as a power relation, this article demonstrates how CRSV is deployed as a deliberate tactic of war that is rooted in patriarchal systems of dominance. Importantly, the article highlights the critical role of feminist advocacy in redefining CRSV as a crime against humanity and a tactic of genocide, documenting how sustained efforts by feminist organizations have pushed international legal systems to address sexual violence in conflict. Their advocacy has contributed to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), setting precedents for accountability and justice. By integrating intersectional feminist analysis, this research article argues for a transformative vision of justice that recognizes women not only as victims but as political subjects central to sustainable peace

Art and the Good Neighbor Policy: Grace Morley’s Role in the Office of Inter-American Affairs Art Committee during World War II

This article examines the pivotal role of Grace McCann Morley in promoting Latin American art in the United States during the era of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933). As director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a key figure in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), Morley challenged Eurocentric perspectives and advocated for Latin American art’s unique identity. The article focuses on her organization of itinerant exhibitions, highlighting the cultural diversity of Latin American art while navigating political and institutional obstacles. Using archives and correspondence, I reassess Morley’s contributions to the cultural diplomacy efforts of the 1940s and her influence on the recognition of Latin American modernism in U.S. museums. Este artículo examina el papel fundamental de Grace McCann Morley en la promoción del arte latinoamericano en los Estados Unidos durante la era de la Política del Buen Vecino. Como directora del Museo de Arte Moderno de San Francisco y figura clave en la Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), Morley desafió las perspectivas eurocéntricas y defendió la identidad única del arte latinoamericano. El artículo se centra en su organización de exposiciones itinerantes, que destacaron la diversidad cultural del arte latinoamericano mientras sorteaban obstáculos políticos e institucionales. A partir del análisis de archivos y correspondencia, se reevalúa la contribución de Morley a los esfuerzos de diplomacia cultural de la década de 1940 y su influencia en el reconocimiento del modernismo latinoamericano en los museos estadounidenses

The Epidemic of Unsheltered Men in the United States and its Public Health Consequences: A National Public Health Priority

People experiencing homelessness refers to an individual or family lacking a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence and affects a diverse group of people in the United States (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2025). This may include living on the streets, in cars, parks, or abandoned buildings as well as shelters, transitional housing, or people facing an imminent loss of housing without another identified residence (CDC, 2024). Homelessness affects all demographics ranging from age (youth and elderly) and ethnicity to gender and even class. Secondary to experiencing a lack of stable housing, individuals also face food scarcity, employment instability, and lack of financial support, which has increased drastically post-COVID (Berglund, et al., 2024)

Operationalizing Cyber-Routine Activities Theory for Senior Cybercrime Prevention: An Evaluation of the SHIELD Training-the-Trainer Program

Older adults face growing risks of cyber-enabled fraud, yet scalable, evidence-based prevention programs remain limited. Guided by Cyber-Routine Activities Theory (Cyber-RAT), this study evaluates the pilot implementation of the Seniors Harnessing Internet Education for Lasting Defense (SHIELD) Training-the-Trainer program, designed to prepare law enforcement officers and community leaders to deliver cybercrime prevention education to older adults. A key innovation of SHIELD is its integration of interactive game-based simulations, which allow participants to practice verification, refusal, and reporting behaviors in realistic cybercrime scenarios. Following the December 2025 pilot session in Boston, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 participants from law enforcement, community organizations, and program staff. Thematic analysis examined perceptions of training quality, instructional design, technology use, and preparedness to implement the curriculum. Participants reported strong alignment between SHIELD and community needs and viewed the curriculum’s practical guidance and real-world examples as immediately usable. The gaming component was perceived as innovative and potentially effective for increasing engagement and experiential learning, though participants noted that initial technical complexity and navigation demands could increase cognitive load and require additional onboarding and support for senior learners. Overall, findings suggest SHIELD represents a promising, theory-driven, community-based model for strengthening digital guardianship among older adults. The study highlights both the potential and implementation requirements of game-based experiential learning in cybercrime prevention and identifies priorities for future community-level evaluation

On Water Closets and Gender Equality: What Bathrooms Reveal About Social Life

Imagine walking into a public bathroom without needing to check the sign on the door. You do what you came to do, wash your hands, and leave. The experience barely registers because nothing about the space asks you to think about who you are or whether you belong there

Greenwich Village

Short story written by a Bridgewater State University faculty member from the Theater Department, Thomas Rhett Kee