En frente de la batalla: centering the voices of Latine frontline workers in defining, understanding, and addressing community needs and solutions in tourist regions in Colorado during the COVID-19 pandemic

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.Latine workers make up a significant proportion of the U.S. frontline workforce, with disproportionate representation in lower-earning positions that offer less job security. Throughout the pandemic, Latine frontline workers have faced disparate rates of COVID-19 illness, severe health impacts, death of loved ones, and economic losses. These circumstances have increased mental health difficulties, including chronic stress, depression, and anxiety. During the pandemic, Latine frontline workers in tourist communities in Colorado have suffered severe economic losses and ongoing health risks associated with frequent COVID-19 exposure and inequitable healthcare access. The present qualitative study used liberation psychology and Latino critical race theory to center the stories of Latine frontline workers in a tourist community in Colorado. Interviews were conducted with eight Latine frontline workers or spouses of frontline workers and five agency workers from nonprofits or the public sector in a tourist community in Colorado. Latine frontline community members were asked to share their stories of how their communities had experienced the pandemic, their definitions of the community's needs, and their ideas for solutions. Agency workers were asked to provide their perspectives and context. Analysis was conducted using critical qualitative inquiry and an interpretive analysis based on the theoretical frameworks. The resulting themes included community member's experiences and definitions of strengths, problems, and solutions. The results were shared in the community and recommendations were given to local agencies. This study advocates for employers, landlords, nonprofit and local government agencies, schools, and healthcare organizations to engage in equity-based structural and operational change and to assume an advocacy role in addressing underlying causes of health, mental health, educational, housing, and economic inequities

“Bacanora for Bats”: a Multispecies Ethnography in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands

This dissertation presents a multispecies ethnography that explores the relationships among agaves, bats and humans in the border region shared by Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, USA. The work follows the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae); Agave angustifolia, which is the species of agave used to make bacanora; and the human stakeholders who have become increasingly entangled in these bat-agave relationships. This ethnography de-centers the human actor bringing bats and agaves into the center of the story to provide alternative ways to understand human relationships with other species. In doing so, the ethnography challenges dominant assumptions about the human-nature divide. The first part of the dissertation explores these bat-agave-human relationships more generally. Part two takes a closer look at how the bacanora industry, along with binational conservation efforts, are shaping these human-nonhuman entanglements in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. Nectar-feeding bats and agaves have co-evolved for millions of years. Lesser long-nosed bats forage for agave nectar, passing pollen from plant to plant, during their migration from southern Mexico to southern Arizona. This mutualistic relationship is threatened by habitat loss and climate change. Additionally, the growing bacanora industry in the state of Sonora is now one of the primary threats to the agave-bat relationship. Bacanora is a type of mezcal originating from the mountains in eastern Sonora. It is a culturally significant beverage that supports local livelihoods in the most marginalized region of the state. As demand for the agave distillate grows, wild agave stocks are disappearing at an unsustainable rate due to overharvesting. This multispecies ethnography follows the entanglements of the lesser long-nosed bat, Agave angustifolia and several human stakeholder groups—bacanora producers, the bacanora regulatory council and binational conservation organizations—at this time of rapid change. Qualitative data gathered from the Sonora-Arizona borderlands provides a depth and richness to these interspecies interlinkages at the local level. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews yield a diversity of stories that illustrate the complexity of changing interspecies connections within a transboundary region. This ethnographic illustration of bat-agave-human entanglements intentionally avoids oversimplified, reductionist interpretations, offering instead a valuable, nuanced understanding of these multispecies relationships that may help local stakeholders and policy makers on both sides of the border consider equitable and sustainable policy relating to the bacanora industry and conservation efforts

Artificial Light at Night (ALAN): An Anthropogenic Challenge for Urban Lizard Behavior and Physiology

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is a byproduct of anthropogenic illumination that disrupts the behaviors and physiologies of organisms as diverse as mammals, birds, non-avian reptiles, fishes, and insects. In a time of increasing urbanization, discovering the impacts of ALAN on urban organisms is crucial to conservation efforts. In this study, we investigated the impacts of ALAN on the behaviors and physiology of the green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis). Two groups of 24 urban wild-caught adult green anoles (12 males, 12 females per group) were exposed to two different light-dark cycles in a controlled lab setting for six weeks. One group was exposed to a light-dark cycle that simulated the natural light-dark cycle of a summer day in San Antonio, Texas, and the other group was exposed, in addition to the natural light-dark cycle, to an ALAN source that simulated the light intensity of the streetlights on an urban university campus. After an acclimation period, we conducted a series of behavioral trials. Three trials were repeated during mid-day and mid-night: open field tests, to examine exploratory behavior; foraging trials, to examine prey consumption; and conspecific trials, to examine same-sex interactions. The fourth trial examined behavioral time allocation over two 24 h periods. At the conclusion of behavioral trials, we measured each lizard’s body mass and snout-vent length (SVL) and the mass of its abdominal fat pads, liver, and reproductive tissues. Our data demonstrate that lizards exposed to ALAN were more likely to be awake at night. While they were awake, lizards exposed to ALAN used the light to explore, forage, and display to conspecifics. However, during the day, lizards exposed to ALAN were more likely to be asleep, were slower to move and forage, and females displayed less frequently than females not exposed to ALAN. Lizards exposed to ALAN had heavier fat pads and males had heavier testes, but ALAN did not impact liver mass, overall body mass, or female reproductive tissue mass. In sum, ALAN appears to cause behavioral trade-offs between diurnal and nocturnal activity and alters metabolic and reproductive processes within green anoles. These behavioral and physiological changes could cause the lizards to be exposed to novel situations and impact higher-level organization within the urban environment

Digital Youth in Digital Schools: Literacy, Learning, and all That Noise

Educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers face increasing pressure to determine the role of new media in America\u27s schools. Despite widespread agreement that digital media are transforming how young people learn and communicate, little evidence exists that digital media have markedly changed how we do school. In the last decade, extensive research focused on increasing access to and integrating technology in schools, suggesting that digital media support new contexts for knowledge development. Yet little empirical research examined how adolescents actually engage digital media in their everyday lives in schools. In a two-year study in a Philadelphia public high school, I researched what it means for literacy learning when youth attend a digitally comprehensive school, and what happens when we shift our focus away from new media as discrete tools, and instead consider them as part of the social and cultural fabric of doing school. I followed and learned from tenth-graders in English and History classes taught by the same teacher. Through the theoretical frames of socio-cultural constructions of literacy, youth culture, and media ecologies, I examine three interrelated dimensions significant to adolescents\u27 experiences as students in what I call a new culture of literacy learning: (1) Noise, (2) Navigation, and (3) Negotiation. Noise refers to the intense, multilayered, and highly saturated nature of this context. Navigation represents the range of moves, tools, and roles that adolescents engaged to accomplish their intellectual work in these classrooms. Negotiation illustrates how adolescents leveraged digital media to participate with others. The findings can support the work of teachers to redesign classrooms that harness digital media to cultivate adolescents\u27 literacies and foster meaningful participation. This study raises questions for educators, researchers, and policymakers about how to assess literacies that are multimodal, fluid, and collaborative. My results also can contribute to conversations about designing new ways to study adolescents\u27 literacies within and across the dynamic contexts associated with digital media. Finally, this study suggests that we will need new theoretical frameworks to understand adolescents\u27 literacy work in schools

Invasive Life: Illegal Immigrants and Invasive Species on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

This dissertation is an ethnography of out-of-place human and more-than-human presences. Focusing on the highlands of the archipelago’s four inhabited islands, it examines how illegal farmers and invasive species have encroached on both the Galapagos National Park, where no one can officially reside, and the areas outside of the park, which are designated for contained human settlement. As a result of concerns about island conservation, the Ecuadorian state has required a permit to reside on the Galapagos since 1998. Yet, due to tourism’s exponential growth, mainland Ecuadorians have continued to migrate to the islands, though largely lacking official residency. Illegal residents concentrate in the highlands to work as farmers, while invasive plants coming from the continent have covered large swaths of farmland and park areas alike. Excluded from the protections of Ecuadorian citizenship, these migrant farmers cope with new plants and insects that invade the crops. Yet they also find ways to procure a livelihood in these changed landscapes. Accounting for the unexpected thriving of illegal farmers and invasive species, I treat them as both a symptom of a conservation paradigm in crisis and actors that enact new forms of nature-culture. I move past a critique of conservation and contends that the emerging multispecies entanglements in the highlands are suggestive of ways to live in today’s world of ecological ruins, beyond modern promises of recuperation and betterment.Doctor of Philosoph

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 45 Number 4, Spring 2004

8 - TOP TEACHERS By Elizabeth Kelley Gillogly \u2793-Meet three SCU professors who received University awards for teaching excellence and curriculum innovations. 10 - BLAZING THE TRAIL By Victoria Hendel De La O. There are many unique challenges and rewards for the hundreds of first-generation college students at SCU. 14 - THE SCU DIFFERENCE By Margaret Avritt. The value of an SCU education goes beyond statistics and scores. Students at this university have experiences that engage and transform them. 18 - MIND OVER MONEY By Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman. Two SCU professors of finance explore how psychology can help us understand how people behave when they make financial decisions.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1109/thumbnail.jp

The Loyolan 1982

https://ecommons.luc.edu/loyolan/1044/thumbnail.jp

Bringing up good babies : an ethnography of moral apprenticeship in Saraguro

ix, 211 leaves ; 29 cmThis thesis is based on an ethnographic investigation of indigenous childrearing theories of the Saraguros of southern Ecuador, with particular emphasis on the effect they believe their childrearing practices to have on infants’ and toddlers’ moral apprenticeship. To understand this learning process, I focused on children from newborn to age three and their caregivers, using everyday decisions involving babywearing and sleep practices as a window onto the ways apprenticeship is practiced among Saraguros and their particular moral standards. The moral apprenticeship of Saraguro babies is therefore considered as a product of local learning styles, constructions of childhood, and infant care practices, which create cultural self-fulfilling prophecies regarding young children’s development and capabilities. Their experiential learning system is being challenged by national children’s rights programs, which are informed by universalized visions of proper childhoods, rendering early childhood in Saraguro an interesting site from which to view the process of cultural change