People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement: Taking Stock of the Place Initiative

This report serves as a point of entry into creative placemaking as defined and supported by the Tucson Pima Arts Council's PLACE Initiative. To assess how and to what degree the PLACE projects were helping to transform communities, TPAC was asked by the Kresge Foundation to undertake a comprehensive evaluation. This involved discussion with stakeholders about support mechanisms, professional development, investment, and impact of the PLACE Initiative in Tucson, Arizona, and the Southwest regionally and the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data to develop indicators and method for evaluating the social impact of the arts in TPAC's grantmaking. The report documents one year of observations and research by the PLACE research team, outside researchers and reviewers, local and regional working groups, TPAC staff, and TPAC constituency. It considers data from the first four years of PLACE Initiative funding, including learning exchanges, focus groups, individual interviews, grantmaking, and all reporting. It is also informed by evaluation and assessment that occurred in the development of the PLACE Initiative, in particular, Maribel Alvarez's Two-Way Mirror: Ethnography as a Way to Assess Civic Impact of Arts-Based Engagement in Tucson, Arizona (2009), and Mark Stern and Susan Seifert's Documenting Civic Engagement: A Plan for the Tucson Pima Arts Council (2009). Both of these publications were supported by Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, that promotes arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change. Both publications describe how TPAC approaches evaluation strategies associated with social impact of the arts in Tucson and Pima County. This report outlines the local context and historical antecedents of the PLACE Initiative in the region with an emphasis on the concept of "belonging" as a primary characteristic of PLACE projects and policy. It describes PLACE projects as well as the role of TPAC in creating and facilitating the Initiative. Based on the collective understanding of the research team, impacts of the PLACE Initiative are organized into three main realms -- institutions, artists, and communities. These realms are further addressed in case studies from select grantees, whose narratives offer rich, detailed perspectives about PLACE projects in context, with all their successes, rewards, and challenges for artists, communities, and institutions. Lastly, the report offers preliminary research findings on PLACE by TPAC in collaboration with Dr. James Roebuck, codirector of the University of Arizona's ERAD (Evaluation Research and Development) Program

Jenyffer Nascimento’s Epic Poetry of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: a Poesia Épica de Empoderamento da Mulher Negra

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, and ritual, stages of grief to empowerment in a poetic ritual of carnivalesque journey from the heart of the Northeast of Brazil in Pernambuco to the underbelly of Sao Paulo. In We are Rooted Here and They Can’t Pulls Us Up, Bristow et al. demonstrate the multi-generational presence and intellectual production of Black women in Canada. Nascimento’s epic poetry undoes 500 years of policies that have attempted to silence Black women as invisible, unemployed, objectified, infertile (Cidinha DA SILVA, 2014, 113). Black women’s voices echo out of a literary canyon that extends all the way to Canada, a neoliberal rift that keeps Black women out. Each poem analyzed in this article directs conveys challenges relating to Black affect and desire, heteronormativity in the Black Brazilian Movement, and Black women in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in the Americas

The immersive internet: New models and lead users in Australia

The move to develop new visualisation tools for online activities is a response to the complex systems of our expanding, informationalised world and the realisation that graphical representation improves our ability to navigate and make sense of it. But when such tools are combined with social networking and gaming principles, the impact is multiplied, the sum becoming bigger than its parts (Battelle and O\u27Reilly 2009). Real time communication within persistent 3-D environments (worlds), enable users to engage more deeply with one another and with content. With this, new modes of knowledge building, service delivery, interaction and collaboration are being borne

Convivial Making: Power in Public Library Creative Places

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature nor explored in previous studies. This study fills the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of power, as described by the stakeholders, including staff, trustees, and users of the library. Potentially, library creative places could be what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: tools that manifest social relations involving equitable distributions of power and decision-making. A convivial tool ensures that users may decide to which end they would like to apply the tool, and thus are constitutive of human capabilities and social justice. However, the characterization of library makerspaces in the literature evokes a technologically deterministic entrepreneurialism that marginalizes many types of making, and reduces the power of individuals to choose the ends to which they put this tool. This multi-site ethnographic study seeks to unravel the currents of power within three public library creative places. Through participant observation, document analysis, and interviews, the study traces the mechanisms and processes by which power is distributed, as enacted by institutional practices—the spaces, policies, tools, and programs—or through individual practices. The study finds seven key tensions that coalesce around the concept of conviviality, and also reveals seven capabilities of convivial tools that the users and providers of these spaces identify as crucial to their successful and satisfying implementation. As a user-centered exploration of the interactions of power in a public institution, this study can benefit a range of organizations that aim to further inclusion, equity, and social justice

The Boston Opportunity Agenda: Ninth Annual Report Card

Our annual report card is a key vehicle for reporting on our success and challenges at the system and student level across the educational pipeline, and we are pleased to share with you this Ninth Annual Report Card. Due to the pandemic, we did not issue a report card last year in 2020 and many of the indicators that we traditionally track, including MCAS, are not available this year. As students return to school and our systems work to close the learning gaps created by more than a year of disrupted learning, it is critical that all stakeholders understand previous trends and baselines for each of our measures of success. It is equally critical that we report on measures that focus on where the systemic shortfalls are as, together, we seek to create the necessary prerequisites for students to experience success. This year's report card is designed to do just that.  As Boston students return to in-person learning across all settings, it is more important than ever to ensure we highlight the gaps that need to be addressed so that all students regardless of their race, ethnicity or socio-economic status are able to participate fully in our world-class city and economy

Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

Looks at the practices of food and beverage industry marketers in reaching youth via digital videos, cell phones, interactive games and social networking sites. Recommends imposing governmental regulations on marketing to children and adolescents

Making waves in education

Making Waves in Education is a book of a collaborative nature, being a collection of chapters written by undergraduates studying B.A. Hons in Education at the Universities of Plymouth and York. Thirteen chapters, each from a different student, cover topics from learning theories to sex education, home education and autism. The chapters are well-organised and written, and they cover key topics in an accessible and thoughtful way. The chapters are generally well - referenced and present critical and balanced arguments. Many use hard statistics in an effective way to back up their points and all include bibliographies as indeed one expects from a serious publication. The collection therefore addresses itself to a wide readership of anyone interested in education, and students and teachers/trainers in HE in particula