A Matter of Life and Def: Poetic Knowledge and the Organic Intellectuals in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided organic intellectuals, through poetry, a space to name the pain of history, demonstrate pleasure amid structural inequality, and to imagine themselves in liberatory ways. The following questions guided this exploration of Def Poetry Jam: from which poetic traditions did Def Poetry Jam originate and thus represent to television audiences; how did the on-screen representation of performers and poetry contribute to the production of cultural consciousnesses; and finally, how did Def Poetry Jam offer an archive of knowledge about the United States, particularly those experiences of African-Americans and people of color, in the early twenty-first century? Following a content analysis of the three hundred ninety-four performances on the series, supplemented by interviews with talent coordinators as well as poets, this research found Def Poetry Jam, as a commercial project, negotiated cultural resistance within the controlling images of Black bodies and people of color on television

From Reynolds v. Sims to City of Mobile v. Bolden: Have the White Suburbs Commandeered the Fifteenth Amendment

In 1964, the United States Supreme Court held that the fourteenth amendment requires state legislatures to apportion themselves by population. The new constitutional rule of one person, one vote set forth in Reynolds v. Sims was derived largely from decisions prohibiting racial discrimination in voting under the fifteenth amendment. In decisions following Reynolds, the Court recognized that the one-person, one-vote standard could be satisfied by creation of multimember districts or at-large voting plans that would be likely to disadvantage racial minorities. This Article traces the development of the problem of minority vote dilution and the Court\u27s attempts to articulate standards governing such cases. Particular attention is given to City of Mobile v. Bolden, where a plurality opinion held that black voters must prove an at-large voting plan was motivated by invidious purpose, and Rogers Y. Lodge, in which a majority of the Court approved the Bolden plurality\u27s intent requirement. The Article concludes that the Court\u27s enunciation of a higher standard of proof in cases involving racial vote dilution than that required to challenge population malapportionment has created an intolerable inversion of historical and constitutional priorities. In addition, the Article concludes that none of the standards proposed by various members of the Court would provide the necessary judicial manageability, and proposes a manageable standard of proof that reconciles the implied constitutional right of majority rule with the explicit constitutional demand for the protection of racial groups

Diffusional and microstructural profiles in metallic-to-UHTC conversion by carbonization

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Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Volume 1 of 2 (Petition with Appendix Pages 1a-563a). Lynch v. Alabama, 135 S. Ct. 53 (2014) (No. 13-1232), 2014 U.S. LEXIS 5672

QUESTIONS PRESENTED (1) The district court found that several provisions of the Alabama Constitution of 1901 were adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would pay for the education of black public school students. The first question presented is: Do black public school children and their parents have standing to challenge the validity under the Equal Protection Clause of state constitutional provisions adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students? (2) In 2004 the District Judge in Knight v. Alabama held that certain aspects of Amendments 325 and 373 to the Alabama Constitution were adopted for racially discriminatory reasons. In 2011 the District Judge in the instant case, applying different legal standards, concluded that the Amendments were enacted for a nondiscriminatory purpose. The second question presented is: Which district judge applied the correct constitutional standard? (3) The district court in the instant case found that prior to 1971 real property in Alabama was assessed far below its fair market value, and that the primar[y] reason for those low assessments was to protect white landowners from paying property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students. After 1971 Alabama adopted two constitutional amendments whose purpose, the court of appeals recognized, was to entrench those race-based pre-1971 assessments. The third question presented is: Is the Equal Protection Clause violated by a state constitutional amendment adopted for the purpose of entrenching pre-existing race-based property tax assessments

The role of motivation and self‐efficacy on the practice of health promotion behaviours in the overweight and obese middle‐aged American women

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107386/1/ijn12155.pd

Understanding lay perspectives on socioeconomic health inequalities in Britain:A meta-ethnography

The links between socioeconomic circumstances and health have been extensively studied in Britain but surprisingly few studies consider lay perspectives. This is problematic given popular efforts to reduce health inequalities appear to be based on assumption that public understanding is limited (this is evident in efforts to raise awareness of both ‘upstream’ causes of health inequalities and health-damaging behaviours). The results of this meta-ethnography, involving 17 qualitative studies, fundamentally challenge this assumption. We show, first, that people who are living with socioeconomic disadvantage already have a good understanding of the links between socioeconomic hardship and ill-health. Indeed, participants’ accounts closely mirror the research consensus that material-structural factors represent ‘upstream’ determinants of health, while ‘psychosocial’ factors provide important explanatory pathways connecting material circumstances to health outcomes. Despite this, people living in disadvantaged circumstances are often reluctant to explicitly acknowledge health inequalities, a finding that we suggest can be understood as an attempt to resist the stigma and shame of poverty and poor health and to (re)assert individual agency and control. This suggests that work to increase public awareness of health inequalities may unintentionally exacerbate experiences of stigma and shame, meaning alternative approaches to engaging communities in health inequalities discussions are required

Social Patterning of Screening Uptake and the Impact of Facilitating Informed Choices: Psychological and Ethical Analyses

Screening for unsuspected disease has both possible benefits and harms for those who participate. Historically the benefits of participation have been emphasized to maximize uptake reflecting a public health approach to policy; currently policy is moving towards an informed choice approach involving giving information about both benefits and harms of participation. However, no research has been conducted to evaluate the impact on health of an informed choice policy. Using psychological models, the first aim of this study was to describe an explanatory framework for variation in screening uptake and to apply this framework to assess the impact of informed choices in screening. The second aim was to evaluate ethically that impact. Data from a general population survey (n = 300) of beliefs and attitudes towards participation in diabetes screening indicated that greater orientation to the present is associated with greater social deprivation and lower expectation of participation in screening. The results inform an explanatory framework of social patterning of screening in which greater orientation to the present focuses attention on the disadvantages of screening, which tend to be immediate, thereby reducing participation. This framework suggests that an informed choice policy, by increasing the salience of possible harms of screening, might reduce uptake of screening more in those who are more deprived and orientated to the present. This possibility gives rise to an apparent dilemma where an ethical decision must be made between greater choice and avoiding health inequality. Philosophical perspectives on choice and inequality are used to point to some of the complexities in assessing whether there really is such a dilemma and if so how it should be resolved. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethics of paternalism