Creative Placemaking Case Study: Brookland-Edgewood

This case study illustrates how Creative Placemaking, the deliberate integration of arts and culture into comprehensive community development, can serve as a critical catalyst in forming equitable living and working solutions for all the social, economic, and racial constituencies of a neighborhood. It also shows how Creative Placemaking depends on collaboration across several different sectors, each with different goals, mind-sets, work styles, and skills. In the Brookland-Edgewood case, the multi-sector network of stakeholders included a forward-thinking government agency, a visionary nonprofit, a private developer, and the existing residents of a disadvantaged neighborhood

Re-telling, Re-cognition, Re-stitution: Sikh Heritagization in Canada

In Canada, the language and techniques of museums and heritage sites have been adopted and adapted by some immigrant communities to make sense of their place within their new country. For some groups, “heritagization” is a new value, mobilized for diverse purposes. New museums and heritage sites serve as a form of ethnic media, becoming community gathering points, taking on pedagogical roles, enacting citizenship, and enabling strategic assertion of identity in the public sphere. This article explores this enactment of heritage and citizen-membership through a case study, the Sikh Heritage Museum, developed in Abbotsford by Indo-Canadians. Established in 2011 in an historic and still-functioning gurdwara, the museum is an example of a community’s desire to balance inward-looking historical consciousness and community belonging, with outward-looking voice, recognition and acceptance by mainstream Canadian society. The museum has also become a site of tension between top-down and bottom-up initiatives, where amateur and local expressions butt up against professionalized government activities such as the Canadian Historical Recognition Program that seek to insert formal recognition and social inclusion policies. The article considers the effects of this resource and power differential on the museum’s development, and on the sensibilities and practices of immigrant “heritage” and “citizenship” in Canada

Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience

Armed groups of civilians known as "self-defense forces" have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoacan. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the "VXM" ("Valor por Michoacan," Spanish for "Courage for Michoacan") Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM's inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM's most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM's online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies.Comment: Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience. Saiph Savage, Andres Monroy-Hernandez. CSCW: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 201

Re-telling, Re-cognition, Re-stitution: Sikh Heritagization in Canada

In Canada, the language and techniques of museums and heritage sites have been adopted and adapted by some immigrant communities to make sense of their place within their new country. For some groups, “heritagization” is a new value, mobilized for diverse purposes. New museums and heritage sites serve as a form of ethnic media, becoming community gathering points, taking on pedagogical roles, enacting citizenship, and enabling strategic assertion of identity in the public sphere. This article explores this enactment of heritage and citizen-membership through a case study, the Sikh Heritage Museum, developed in Abbotsford by Indo-Canadians. Established in 2011 in an historic and still-functioning gurdwara, the museum is an example of a community’s desire to balance inward-looking historical consciousness and community belonging, with outward-looking voice, recognition and acceptance by mainstream Canadian society. The museum has also become a site of tension between top-down and bottom-up initiatives, where amateur and local expressions butt up against professionalized government activities such as the Canadian Historical Recognition Program that seek to insert formal recognition and social inclusion policies. The article considers the effects of this resource and power differential on the museum’s development, and on the sensibilities and practices of immigrant “heritage” and “citizenship” in Canada

Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice: Problems with Multilingualism and Possibilities via Hybridity

In much writing center theory and practice, conversations about multilingual writers have tended to involve L2 writers. Often international students, these writers speak at least one language other than English, but they perhaps speak more than just one other language despite their L2 designation. They do not speak English as their first language, and when they come to English-language-based institutions of higher education, they find themselves needing to learn and learning English. More recently, however, the field of writing center scholarship has recognized complexity in the category of multilingualism. Especially following the publication of Terese Thonus’s “Serving Generation 1.5 Learners in the University Writing Center,” Generation 1.5 or L1.5 writers have emerged as part and parcel of writing center practitioners’ and scholars’ conversations. Neither L1 speakers and writers nor L2 necessarily, Generation 1.5 writers exist in a linguistic liminal space. Although much variation exists among Generation 1.5 writers and although Generation 1.5 writers do not inherently represent a single, transitional generation in a family’s immigrant history,1 Linda Harklau, K. M. Losey, and Meryl Seigal define them as writers with “backgrounds in US culture and schooling” who sustain identities that are “distinct from international students or other newcomers who have been the subject of most ESL writing literature” (vii). They differ from English as a Second Language (ESL) students in that they “are primarily ear learners,” and they may “have lost, or are in the process of losing, their home language(s) without having learned their writing systems or academic registers” (Thonus 18). They are neither here nor there in terms of their linguistic identities. Or, perhaps, they are both here and there.University Writing Cente

Towards a conceptualization of casual protest participation: Parsing a case from the Save Roşia Montană campaign

There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental campaign in Romania. By contrast to its Western counterparts, Romania has seen markedly lower levels of involvement in voluntary organizations that are a key setting for mobilization into collective action. Concurrently, experience with participation in physical protests is limited amongst Romanians. Specifically, the article probes recent indications that social network sites provide new impetus to protest participation as an instrumental means of mobilization. Dwelling on a distinction between experienced and newcomers to protest, results indicate that social network site usage may make possible the casual participation of individuals with prior protest experience who are not activists in a voluntary organization. Whilst this finding may signal a new participatory mode hinging on digitally networked communication which is beginning to be theorized, it confounds expectations pertaining to a net contribution of social network site usage to the participation of newcomers to protest

Becoming an Interprofessional Community of Practice: A Qualitative Study of an Interprofessional Fellowship

Background: The social learning model, Communities of Practice (CoP), serves as an organizing framework for this study of interprofessional learning. The author, a nurse, completed the study while a doctoral student in a school of education. The objective of the study was to understand the phenomenon of participation in interprofessional learning experiences among a group of graduate students, faculty, and administrators, and the extent to which the markers of the communities of practice model were present in those experiences.Methods and Findings: This qualitative study used principles of constructivist grounded theory methodology. The objective was to seek out participants’ expressed experience as data to guide theory development. The participants were graduate students, faculty, and administrators from an interprofessional fellowship in developmental disabilities. Processes of building community and making meaning of the experience were themes that related to the Wenger CoP model. Feeling respected was a theme that was identified in this study and that is not found in the CoP model.Conclusions: The findings indicated that participants were able to form an interprofessional community of practice based on the markers of Wenger’s model. This initial study moves toward the development of an organizing theory of an effective interprofessional community of practice (EICoP).&nbsp

Understanding diversity and interculturalism between Aboriginal peoples and Newcomers in Winnipeg

Indigeneity plays a central role in planning for diversity and creating inclusive cities in Canada. In the public domain, racism remains prominent in cities and presents challenges to the realization by urban Aboriginal peoples and Newcomers of their aspirations in urban society. In Winnipeg, an Aboriginal-led organisation has initiated partnerships with Newcomer settlement organisations to bring both groups together to build intercultural relationships. A case study of the United Against Racism/Aboriginal Youth Circle component of Ka Ni Kanichihk (KNK) provides the opportunity to examine the effects of its partnerships on the following matters: promoting cross-cultural understanding and friendships, changing negative perceptions and building confidence among Aboriginal peoples and Newcomers vis-a-vis each other, and help indirectly to facilitate Newcomer integration into neighbourhoods predominantly occupied by Aboriginal peoples in Winnipeg. An analysis of the data gathered on the partnership programs revealed that prior to participating in these programs there were negative preconceptions about one another based on false impressions. The programming has facilitated the sharing of cultures and ideas. This has also helped members of both groups to value their cultural differences and similar history of colonialism where they exist, develop a shared understanding of the racism that confronts Aboriginal peoples and racialized Newcomers, break down stereotypes, and build friendships. This thesis reveals that in the short term, the programs and partnerships of KNK are contributing to better cross-cultural understanding and relations within a multiculturalism framework, and that in the long term they have the potential to contribute to better cross-cultural understanding and relations within an intercultural framework. The cross-cultural networks being developed bode well for the potential of developing instrumental policy and advocacy partnerships in addressing common issues faced by Aboriginals and Newcomers through progressive urban policy in Canadian cities