Spheres of Influence: How National Systems and Journalistic Culture Influence Content on Climate Change Coverage Around the World

This multi-method qualitative study sets out to explore the influence of the social system upon newsroom practice and content among climate newspapers and journalists by conducting a cross-national comparison of countries diverse in geographical location and economic status, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Mexico, Montenegro, Germany, Poland, India, the Philippines, Guyana, France, and China. Grounded in Reese and Shoemaker&rsquo;s Hierarchy of Influences, the research sought to expand upon our theoretical and operational understanding of Gatekeeping Theory while making space for normative critiques of the field by exploring how journalists in different parts of the world are conducting boundary work and how such (re)negotiation of the profession&rsquo;s tenets resemble Post-normal Journalism. To do so, the study was broken into three parts. In the first, this study relied on in-depth, semi-structured interviews to elicit journalists&rsquo; tacit knowledge of the roles, norms, and practices that guide their coverage of climate change. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants whose responses demonstrated both similarities and differences indicating that while the social system is implicated in journalists&rsquo; understanding of their jobs, interpretation and enactment of the profession was also dependent upon identity within a beat. In other words, the presence of an interpretive community built upon shared interpretations and discourse was found at the national level as well as among science journalists and environmental journalists.The second part of this study relied on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of print news outlets from France, the United States, United Kingdom, China, and India. The use of CDA as a methodological approach not only takes into account textual characteristics, but also makes space for conversations on the locus of power by working at the contextual level. This analysis found that while all of the news outlets included (biophysical, critical, integrative) and excluded (dismissive) the same climate change discourses identified by Leichenko and O&rsquo;Brien (2019) the way in which they were used, and the presence of textual and contextual elements combined to form a unique dominant cultural narrative of climate change that was related to the social and organizational setting. Evidence of differences between national contexts was more clearly found in textual analysis of news articles than from the interviews indicating that there may be a discrepancy between what is said and what is performed in the newsroom. Framing analysis was also performed to identify how journalist frames align with media frames to assess the level of journalistic autonomy in different locations around the world. Autonomy was found to be more of a function of organization rather than the social system, with journalists from online news magazines demonstrating greater alignment between journalist and media frames. The final part of this study explored the boundary work, if any, that was occurring within different journalistic communities by comparing interpretation of norms, roles, and practices identified by journalists to the characteristics of post-normal journalism, which is more interpretive, more subjective, multiperspective, and more contextual than traditional journalism. While this study did not find that any one culture exemplifies the qualities of post-normal journalism in total, it was clear that boundary work is happening among journalistic communities around the world especially in the redefinition of objectivity and the reconceptualization of professional roles. Although subjectivity, or the inclination to infuse stories with personal perspectives, was generally avoided, climate reporters from the United Kingdom pointed to a separation between subjective and objective identities that were contextually enacted.</p

Household food security is associated with infant feeding practices in rural Bangladesh.

Although household food security (HHFS) has been shown to affect diet, nutrition, and health of adults and also learning in children, no study has examined associations with infant feeding practices (IFP). We studied 1343 infants born between May 2002 and December 2003 in the Maternal and Infant Nutrition Intervention in Matlab study to investigate the effect of HHFS on IFP in rural Bangladesh. We measured HHFS using a previously developed 11-item scale. Cumulative and current infant feeding scales were created from monthly infant feeding data for the age groups of 1-3, 1-6, 1-9, and 1-12 mo based on comparison to infant feeding recommendations. We used lagged, dynamic, and difference longitudinal regression models adjusting for various infant and maternal variables to examine the association between HHFS and changes in IFP, and Cox proportional hazards models to examine the influence of HHFS on the duration of breast-feeding and the time of introduction of complementary foods. Better HHFS status was associated with poor IFP during 3-6 mo but was associated with better IFP during 6-9 and 9-12 mo of age. Although better HHFS was not associated with the time of introduction of complementary foods, it was associated with the type of complementary foods given to the infants. Intervention programs to support proper IFP should target mothers in food-secure households when their babies are 3-6 mo old and also mothers in food-insecure households during the 2nd half of infancy. Our results provide strong evidence that HHFS influences IFP in rural Bangladesh

Creating an Equal Opportunity High School

: Target audience to include any administrators, teachers, guidance counselors who work directly with at risk/minority students. The objective will be to demonstrate tools, strategies and programs that build positive relationships, reduce suspension rates, and assist students in meeting challenging academic goals to become college and career read

Back to the Future: "The New Nature Writing," Ecological Boredom, and the Recall of the Wild

The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its continuing class and gender biases, and its paradoxical adherence to the very categories – particularly wildness – it wishes to confront. This article does not set out to dismiss the “new nature writing” or to assess which writers might be the best fit with it; instead, it looks at its indebtedness to the earlier literary and cultural traditions it claims to interrogate and deconstruct. This debt is often expressed in terms of belatedness, whether acknowledged or not, in relation to earlier notions of wilderness and wildness – inherently slippery categories that multiply and ramify in the “new nature writing,” which has neither managed to dissociate itself from wildness nor to redefine it for our ecologically troubled times