Korea and the Dominican Republic: A transnational case study-analysis

The study of transnational movement and the lives of individuals who cross nation-state boundaries has grown in recent decades. Transnational study regarding the Dominican Republic has continued since migrations to the U.S. in the 1960s and has primarily focused on “transnationalism from below” (Smith & Guarnizo, 2002) narratives, while study of South Korean transnationalism has focused on movement motivated by access to English in order to assure access to the competitive job market and opportunities for social mobility. This pair of case studies examines the lives of two relatively privileged Korean students who lived transnationally between Korea and the Dominican Republic over a prolonged period of years. The purpose of the study is to examine how transnational movement has influenced the lives of these students and their identities

Antipsychotic Drugs: Comparison in Animal Models of Efficacy, Neurotransmitter Regulation, and Neuroprotection

Various lines of evidence indicate the presence of progressive pathophysiological processes occurring within the brains of patients with schizophrenia. By modulating chemical neurotransmission, anti-psychotic drugs may influence a variety of functions regulating neuronal resilience and viability and have the potential for neuroprotection. This article reviews the current literature describing preclinical and clinical studies that evaluate the efficacy of antipsychotic drugs, their mechanism of action and the potential of first- and second-generation antipsychotic drugs to exert effects on cellular processes that may be neuroprotective in schizophrenia. The evidence to date suggests that although all antipsychotic drugs have the ability to reduce psychotic symptoms via D2 receptor antagonism, some antipsychotics may differ in other pharmacological properties and their capacities to mitigate and possibly reverse cellular processes that may underlie the pathophysiology of schizophrenia

When policy is practice: SDE effort to help/transform/label low-performing schools

Policymakers have long been infatuated with education reform (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Stein, 2004), including at the state level (Lusi, 1997). Consistent with this longer tradition, the Nebraska State Legislature (a.k.a. the ‘Unicameral’) passed Legislative Bill 438 (LB 438) in 2014, providing a statutory outline for a new education accountability system for the state that authorized the State Board of Education (SBOE) to intervene priority schools through the work of an intervention. This ethnographically informed, exploratory policy implementation study (Creswell, 2013; Hamann & Rosen, 2011; Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Patton, 2002; Schwandt, 2001; Shore & Wright, 1997; Stake, 1978) examines the intersections of democracy and education through the lens of a complex school reform effort developed and implemented in Nebraska. Data for the study were collected between December 2013 and August 2016 and included legislative floor transcripts, education committee hearings, SBOE observations and transcriptions, and an array of documents and video-clips. While school reforms are often conceived in official spaces of democracy, such as the legislative floor, or a state or local board room (as was the case here), the processes put in place to realize reforms have at times been detrimental to democracy (Gutmann, 1999; Pearl & Pryor, 2005). From an authorized insider vantage point (the author helped NDE implement AQuESTT), the study considers (1) the role of the state in the implementation and in complex school reform, extending and updating Lusi’s (1997) study. (2) It illuminates AQuESTT’s policy culture (Stein, 2004), the emergent understandings and patterns of action that shaped its development and initial implementation including how equity was and was not invoked and pursued. Ultimately (3), while asserting that Nader’s (1972) notion of “studying up” is more necessary than ever before, the study considers the intersection of the SDEs role and culture with Freire’s (1998) notion of “serious democracy” and worries that politically created and shaped hierarchies (like SDEs) cannot create the necessary horizontality of power that would enable so-called turnaround schools to build the knowledge, skill, and praxis that would actually sustain a successful turnaround. Adviser: Edmund T. Haman

The Lady from North Carolina : The Perils and Limitations of External Expertise

This paper examines a state department of education’s (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to “turnaround” schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to rent competencies, under a neoliberal guise of efficiency, but at the expense of system capacity or learning