Heritage, health and place:The legacies of local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing

Geographies of health challenge researchers to attend to the positive effects of occupying, creating and using all kinds of spaces, including 'green space' and more recently 'blue space'. Attention to the spaces of community-based heritage conservation has largely gone unexplored within the health geography literature. This paper examines the personal motivations and impacts associated with people's growing interest in local heritage groups. It draws on questionnaires and interviews from a recent study with such groups and a conceptual mapping of their routes and flows. The findings reveal a rich array of positive benefits on the participants' social wellbeing with/in the community. These include personal enrichment, social learning, satisfaction from sharing the heritage products with others, and less anxiety about the present. These positive effects were tempered by needing to face and overcome challenging effects associated with running the projects thus opening up an extension to health-enabling spaces debates

Holding Out For a Hero(ine): A Postfeminist Analysis of Superhero Stories from the 1980s

This research thesis focuses on the 1980s and how postfeminism in media was established during this period. Postfeminism as an ideology believes that feminism "died," or at minimum completed and no longer functions as necessary, as women seem to have legal equality now. This thesis looks at postfeminism through the lens of superhero stories from the 1980s. Ultimately, the stories presented show how the overall rejection of the ideology of feminism in favor of postfeminism after the "success" of the second wave affected superhero comic culture in America. Additionally, this thesis looks at the inclusion of this ideology around women\u27s rights in the 1980s in a part of pop culture traditionally produced for men. Superhero stories as a medium were more gender-biased toward men in the 1980s because men were the primary consumers of this type of media, so the inclusion of feminism (or the lack thereof) demonstrated how second-wave feminism and postfeminism impacted the presentation to several groups, including those that were not necessarily affected by these movements

Children and teachers engaging together with digital technology in early childhood education and care institutions: a literature review

The purpose of this literature review is to identify patterns and discuss key perspectives from empirical studies published during the last decade that explore how young children (birth to six years old) and teachers together engage with digital technologies in early childhood education and care institutions. An inductive thematic analysis results in five key perspectives: 1) digital play is real play; 2) disconnected contexts; 3) teachers’ knowledge and beliefs; 4) learning with and from technology; and 5) children as creators. The findings demonstrate the importance of defining digital technology in a broad way. Further, several of the articles highlight teachers’ reflections and judgements regarding how they can implement and embed digital technology into their pedagogical practice. Based on the findings, I suggest that a more explicit focus on digital technology be embedded into pedagogical practice in national ECEC curricula, as well as in national guidelines for EC teacher education.publishedVersio

Field Museum of Natural History bulletin.

v. 61:1-3 (1990

I Belong to the Band: The Music of Reverend Gary Davis

“I Belong to the Band” is the first extensive analytical examination of the music of guitarist/singer Reverend Gary Davis (1896-1972), whose vast repertoire and instrumental virtuosity made him a favorite performer and teacher during the folk and blues revival. Discussed in detail are his songs and aspects of musical technique as well as larger issues such as appropriation in traditional song, the interplay of sacred and secular content and style in African American song, the role(s) of blindness in musical culture, and contrastive and associative symmetries in blues performances. To better glean Davis’s music and the world in which he lived, numerous methodologies were called on including the use of musicological, structuralist, and Jungian interpretative models, textual linguistics in my examination of visual and violent imagery and inference in Davis’s songs, and contextual and biographical analysis. This dissertation also contains the most complete and accurate discography of Davis to date, plus analysis and classification of songs and performances through a number of data-driven as well as hermeneutic approaches including key choice, sacred or secular content, stanzaic structures, and lyric tropes. In the process, I have debunked certain well-established generalizations about Davis, pointing out the extent to which he cultivated a secular repertoire later in his life despite frequent claims by writers that he did not, and I have shown the overreaching influence blindness had on his music and his life. At the same time, this examination of a “folk” figure suggests avenues of research beyond typical folkloric and biographic models, notably through a kind of musicological rigor rarely applied to the performances of such artists. Much can still be culled from this rich swath of musical history simply by revisiting the songs themselves with a more pointed, analytical pen. Ultimately, “I Belong to the Band” demonstrates how one traditional musician forged a highly personalized style from layers of “belonging” and foundation building, from his rural Carolina and African American regional and cultural roots to the rootless solidarity of the Piedmont blues scene to his Christian faith and its expression through gospel music and finally to the “discipleship” he engendered in others who continue to perform his music

Information Sharing as Embodied Practice in a Context of Conversion to Islam

This article works to extend two emerging areas in information scholarship: religious practice and embodiment. By reporting on completed research about information practices among Muslim converts in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area (Guzik 2017), this article reveals how information is shared in the context of religious transitions that take place within a contentious political landscape. Research was guided by ethnography and involved participant observation, semistructured interviews, and timeline drawings (Bagnoli 2009; Sheridan, Chamberlain, and Dupuis 2011). While additional themes related to navigation and authority were identified through the use of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006), this article focuses specifically on how research participants express and exchange information through nonwritten sources such as clothing items, spoken words, and creative products. The article considers the visibility of information when it is carried on the body as religious symbols, and the implications that this visibility has for accessing expertise, places of worship, and secular public spaces. It also highlights how creative pursuits allow Muslim converts to become information producers and publishers, rather than mere consumers. These roles of production may involve written documents (e.g. sacred texts, scholarly articles, blog posts), but they are primarily expressed through physical actions and spoken words

Safeguarding Play in Virtual Worlds: Designs and Perspectives on Tween Player Participation in Community Management

Managing problematic interactions in online communities has been a challenge since the days of early text-based, multi-user environments. Research in this area has mostly focused on adults and older teens. In this article, we examine the interactions and commentaries of tween players in Whyville.net, a virtual world with (at the time of the study) more than 1.5 million registered players ages 8–16. To understand how tween players define problematic behavior and what they observe in their own community, we draw from an archive of online postings to Whyville’s newspaper. The postings cover the period from 2000 to 2009 and consist almost entirely of player-generated content. Complementing these tween writings are observations of an after school gaming club in which, over a period of three months, about 20 youth players ages 9–12 met almost daily to play for an hour on Whyville.net. We highlight one particular incident observed in the gaming club because it illustrates how club members dealt with problematic behavior experienced online. Finally, we address the challenges and opportunities that tween player participation in community management presents for managing online behavior and player safety

Spartan Daily, October 10, 2005

Volume 125, Issue 25https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10168/thumbnail.jp