Guilty by Association: A Critical Analysis of How Imprisonment Affects the Children of Those Behind Bars

As 2.2 million individuals in the United States are currently incarcerated and an additional 5 million are under some form of correctional surveillance, the push for prison reform has reached new heights. Intimately and inextricably connected to mass incarceration and the push for its reform (and in some cases abolition) are the children have been impacted by incarceration. About half of the individuals currently incarcerated are parents to at least one child under the age of 18. Current estimates suggest that 2.7 million children currently have an incarcerated parent and that 10 million children in the United States have experienced parental incarceration at some point during their lives. Once deemed an “invisible” population, children of incarcerated parents have recently received more attention in academic literature. However, much of the current literature on this population fails to include their voices and presents them at risk for a variety of adverse childhood outcomes, further perpetuating the deeply ingrained negative view of incarcerated individuals and their families. Aiming to join a growing body of inclusive, authentic and asset based research, this study seeks to work in collaboration with children of incarcerated parents to highlight their story and provide insight into the experiences that are important to them and the worlds they occupy

Covid-19 and Racial Justice in Urban Education: NYC Parents Speak Out

The COVID-19 pandemic and global calls for racial justice surfaced tremendous inequities and revitalized the debate about schooling and its purpose. NYC Parents Speak Out is a public engagement project, based on an interactive survey and interviews that records and reflects NYC family educational experiences during the unprecedented school year of 2020-2021. Our research collective, comprised of researchers, parents, advocates, teachers, and school leaders from the Urban Education Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center (CUNY) identified three key recommendations based on research findings: to improve communication through family and community engagement; give greater attention to social-emotional and mental health; and teach about systemic racism and racial justice

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Knowledge transfer: industry, academia, and the global gift market

People often assume that design is an international visual process, understood by everyone involved. When it comes to the global market, however, allowances have to be made for cultural differences. It is often a learning process among the parties concerned: designer, manufacturer, buyer, and consumer. Knowledge is exchanged among all of them. Knowledge transfer in the 1990s became a focus of management theory, as a way of stimulating and creating innovation, particularly in design and product development. The same decade saw the world shrinking because of modern communication technology and as business increasingly traded globally (Machlup, 1980; Naisbitt, 1982). “Knowledge is defined as the meaningful links people make in their minds between information and its application in action in a specific setting. Linking knowledge to action is a useful way to differentiate it from information” (Dixon, 2000: p.13). One sector in which the transmission of knowledge is at the core of its business is higher education. Universities in the United Kingdom offer a range of design and business support services, supplementing the traditional domain of teaching and research. Higher education in the UK trains new blood for industry, a large proportion of which find design- related work both in the UK and abroad. There is a commitment to share research expertise with the business community, and most British universities provide bespoke solutions to industry. Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a government- sponsored program that helps businesses to improve competitiveness and productivity through the better use of the knowledge, technology, and skills that reside within the UK knowledge base. KTP was formerly known as the Teaching Company Scheme (Ktponline, 2007) and has been developing since being set up in 1975, when the scheme focused on engineering projects. From this, the UK government’s scheme has embraced the knowledge transfer approach, focused it on the university research sector, and widened its remit to cover most of UK business. This paper sets out to explore some of the strengths and pitfalls of this academic-based knowledge transfer in the context of the global gift market, using case studies in the design and prototype development of a range of toys and seasonal items. Here the KTP scheme is not used for engineering-based products, but for products that are far more culturally specific. Universities have seen a growth in cultural studies, communications, and creative industries courses