COVID-19 amplifies urban inequalities

COVID-19 has had asymmetrical spatial impacts across South Africa. New evidence from the National Income Dynamics Study: Coronavirus Rapid Mobile (NIDS-CRAM) survey shows that the pandemic and lockdown reflex have magnified pre-existing divisions within cities. Although COVID-19 has severely impacted the whole country, townships and informal settlements have proved more vulnerable than suburbs. As South Africa was already one of the most unevenly developed countries in the world, COVID-19 has widened the gap between places, which face very different levels of risk and resilience.Significance: We present original evidence that COVID-19 has affected poor urban communities more than it has suburbs in South Africa. This is apparent in terms of employment and hunger. The effect has been to magnify territorial divisions and exacerbate social discontent. Premature withdrawal of government relief will aggravate the hardships facing poor communities that rely on these resources following the slump in jobs

Addressing the Disproportionate Adverse Health Effects Among BIPOC Communities as a Result of Environmental Racism

This article examines factors that contribute to the negative health impacts on Black Americans, other minorities, and low-income communities that are living in areas with high levels of air pollution, toxic waste, and environmental hazards. First, this article assesses the role of historical residential redlining on the segregation of BIPOC neighborhoods. Furthermore, the article addresses gaps in both federal and state environmental laws that allow facilities to keep obtaining permits and polluting in BIPOC and primarily low-income neighborhoods. Moreover, the article explains the higher rates of trauma, stress, and stress-related illnesses among BIPOC communities exposed to high levels of environmental hazards. Lastly, the article evaluates disparities among BIPOC individuals’ access to healthcare. Therefore, BIPOC communities experience adverse health effects, including higher COVID-19 rates, as a result of Environmental Racism and related factors

Remittances and Household Welfare in Nigeria

Remittance represents an injection into an economy and one of the leading recipients of remittances in Africa is Nigeria. Remittance which has evolved into one of Nigeria’s primary external financial sources is particularly important for households in developing countries, as they often lack access to other sources of income and resources. Despite being one of Africa’s top remittance-receiving nations, welfare statistics show that the nation has the worst welfare outcomes across the globe. This is worrying given that achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 is contingent on improving household welfare. Given this background, this study uncovers the influence of remittances on household welfare in Nigeria. To add to the literature, this study employed nationally representative household-level data. Furthermore, the study interacted with remittance with rural and urban residents to ascertain if it amplifies or weakens the effect of remittance on household food and non-food consumption. Additionally, the study introduced an interaction model which seeks to ascertain whether the employment status of the remittance recipient amplifies or weakens the impact of remittance on household earning power. The result obtained showed that diaspora remittance has a significant positive impact on household food consumption. The interactive effect of remittance with spatial locations (urban and rural residency) further increases food consumption. However, the amplifying effect is higher when remittance interacts with rural residency. This indicates that rural dwellers use more remittance for food consumption than urban dwellers. Relatedly, the study revealed that remittance increases non-food consumption. The interaction model highlights the amplifying effect of spatial location on the interaction between remittance and household non-food consumption. However, the amplifying effect is higher when remittance interacts with urban residency suggesting that those in the urban areas will more likely spend their remittance on non-food consumption than those in the rural area. Lastly, the study also found that remittance inflow has a significant positive impact on the earning capabilities of households. When remittances interact with employment status, the study highlighted that both employed and unemployed persons increase their earning power through the receipt of remittance, the impact is higher for persons who are not employed. This is intuitive since the utility of additional money received is higher for low-income persons than the high-income persons. The study suggests that reducing the cost of remittance transfers and enhancing the financial infrastructure in remittance-recipient nations would be crucial tools for increasing remittance inflows through authorized channels

The Intersectional Race and Gender Effects of the Pandemic in Legal Academia

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law faculty were more likely to feel the effects of the financial exigencies that universities and law schools faced during the pandemic because of their disproportionate representation in non-secure, meaning non-tenure-stream, faculty positions. Furthermore, the rapid switch to remote teaching and learning, particularly during spring 2020, had a more detrimental effect on women in part because of the persistent gender bias that women law faculty, who teach a larger percentage of required and survey courses, encounter in student teaching evaluations and in part because women tend to be more engaged in the mental health and emotional caretaking of students, which significantly increased during the pandemic. Even the actions that law schools took during the pandemic to provide relief to faculty, such as automatic extensions to the tenure clock for all faculty, place women more at risk than men for harmful impacts on factors like pay equity. In all, this Essay briefly analyzes how factors such as limited childcare, remote learning, the greater caretaking needs of students, plus other pandemic-related effects, have worked to exacerbate previously existing gender and intersectional gender and race inequities between men and all women in legal academia and between white men and women of color

Uncoupling inequality: Reflections on the ethics of benchmarks for digital media

Our collaboration seeks to demonstrate shared interrogation by exploring the ethics of machine learning benchmarks from a socio-technical management perspective with insight from public health and ethnic studies. Benchmarks, such as ImageNet, are annotated open data sets for training algorithms. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the practical need for ethical information infrastructures to analyze digital and social media, especially related to medicine and race. Social media analysis that obscures Black teen mental health and ignores anti-Asian hate fails as information infrastructure. Despite inadequately handling non-dominant voices, machine learning benchmarks are the basis for analysis in operational systems. Turning to the management literature, we interrogate cross-cutting problems of benchmarks through the lens of coupling, or mutual interdependence between people, technologies, and environments. Uncoupling inequality from machine learning benchmarks may require conceptualizing the social dependencies that build structural barriers to inclusion

What COVID-19 Taught Us About Pedagogy and Social Justice—Pandemic or Not

The COVID-19 pandemic (in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter Movement) exposed pervasive inequities, challenges, and opportunities to explore and implement “best” pedagogical practices to improve how we address social justice issues. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified intergenerational gaps for the already vulnerable, under-resourced, and marginalized in our society. In response, we propose four “best practices” to embrace in our classrooms. These are: (a) fostering flexibility to bridge equity gaps; (b) rethinking the pedagogical panopticon; (c) emphasizing listening to and affirming students’ struggles; and (d) employing student-centered accountability. The authors detail some specific inequalities that were brought to the surface during the Spring and Summer of 2020, offer “best practices” in response to such inequities, and stress the need for a student-centered pedagogy that serves to improve teaching and learning not just during a crisis, but also in semesters and years to come

Rebuild the Academy: Supporting academic mothers during COVID-19 and beyond

The issues facing academic mothers have been discussed for decades. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is further exposing these inequalities as womxn scientists who are parenting while also engaging in a combination of academic related duties are falling behind. These inequities can be solved by investing strategically in solutions. Here we describe strategies that would ensure a more equitable academy for working mothers now and in the future. While the data are clear that mothers are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, many groups could benefit from these strategies. Rather than rebuilding what we once knew, let us be the architects of a new world