Write Your Roots Disrupted: Community Writing in Performance in the Time of COVID

This article presents a profile of the community writing and performance project Write Your Roots, organized by the author, which was disrupted by the impact of COVID-19 in early 2020. The project narrative is framed by the theoretical basis for the project, rooted in the concept of making space, which borrows from Michel de Certeau\u27s concepts of space and Sidney Dobrin\u27s definition of occupation. The article then offers a narrative of the Write Your Roots project in Providence, RI in 2020 leading up to and beyond the effects of COVID-19. Following the narrative, the author reflects on the project, reading its disruption through its theoretical framework to draw conclusions about the importance of liveness and publicness toward the project goals of making space

The organ music of Ethel Smyth: a guide to its history and performance practice

This document provides a thorough biography of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) in reference to her organ works and an analysis of the works themselves. A performance practice guide concludes the document, with the aim of making her works more accessible. The performance practice guidelines address articulation, phrasing, tempo, ornamentation, and registration, based on the performance practice of the day and organs she may have known

Exploring the effect of language concordance between nurses and Limited English Proficient patients on their health outcomes.

Communication is essential to the medical field. Approximately 350 different languages are spoken in the USA. The commonality of language discordance between patients and health care providers causes poor communication, limited understanding of their condition, and a decrease in the patient’s satisfaction with their care. This literature review explored the effect that a language concurrent healthcare provider has on the health outcomes of LEP patients. LEP is defined as limited English proficiency. METHODS: CINHAL and Pubmed were used. The key terms used were communication barriers, language barriers, nurse, nurses, nursing, and health outcomes. The search revealed 719 articles. Seven articles were included from this search. Two were included from the recommendation function of the literature software Mendeley. Nine articles were included in total. The following filters were used: written in English, research articles, published between 2010-2020, full text, and peer-reviewed and available pdf. Inclusion factors were health outcomes of LEP patients, Health outcomes for patients who used interpreters, language concordance, and patient satisfaction based on language concordance. Seven articles were included based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Articles were excluded due to improper patient population, exclusion of language concordance, improper picot question, lack of professional hospital interpretation, or topics not exploring health outcomes of LEP patients. Nine articles were included in the literature review. RESULTS: Three common themes were identified, decreased patient satisfaction, missed points in care, and declining health outcomes. LEP patients had higher chances of being transferred to the ICU, death, and to be misassigned to lower acuity. Absence of crucial discharge information and dis-satisfaction with care were more likely to occur without language concordant care. CONCLUSION: For patients who are LEP, communication is impaired resulting in declining health outcomes, missed points in care, and decreased patient satisfaction. There was some contradiction in health outcomes for patients. Limitations were that interpreter presence and training level were not always known. Research should focus on health outcomes for LEP patients

Creole Citizens of France: The Trans-Atlantic Politics of Antillean Education and the Creole Movement since 1945.

This dissertation explores the debates about Creole’s place in the French nation and public education in late twentieth-century France. In 1946, Antilleans became French citizens when the French government decided to change Guadeloupe and Martinique’s political status from colonies to overseas departments (DOM). Republican education and the dissemination of French was the means through which DOM and education officials sought to protect France’s national culture and assimilate Antilleans’ Creole culture and language into the nation. In contrast, Antillean Creole activists envisioned a culturally diverse France. They struggled to reshape the national curriculum, and ultimately the French nation, so that it included their Creole culture and language. Through an examination of Antilleans’ specific case and how they used the Creole debates to argue for the right to difference, this dissertation explores the complexities of the discussions about diversity in France. Recently, historians have challenged the myth of a colorblind Republic, arguing that questions of race and ethnicity have shaped the French nation. While one group of scholars argues that exclusion occurred from the failure of state officials to live up to the lofty ideals of republican equality, the other group claims that inequality and exclusion developed as a part of republicanism. This dissertation argues that republican assimilation was not a monolithic policy that either entirely included or excluded difference from the nation. Rather, Antillean activists and the Ministries of the DOM and Education negotiated the terms of Antilleans’ assimilation and the extent to which the Creole culture and language was included in public classrooms and the nation. Antilleans’ demands for cultural inclusion forced DOM and education officials to carve out a space for difference, and more specifically, Creole, in the nation. I argue that it was these debates about the “Creole question” that challenged the republican definition of a French citizen as an individual divested of all particular and group affiliations. In highlighting Antilleans’ struggle to be both French and Creole, I contend that government policies concerning the right to difference were not only shaped by state ministries, but also by the actions of Antilleans on both sides of the Atlantic.Ph.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91374/1/smmcderm_1.pd

Spanning tree methods for sampling graph partitions

In the last decade, computational approaches to graph partitioning have made a major impact in the analysis of political redistricting, including in U.S. courts of law. Mathematically, a districting plan can be viewed as a balanced partition of a graph into connected subsets. Examining a large sample of valid alternative districting plans can help us recognize gerrymandering against an appropriate neutral baseline. One algorithm that is widely used to produce random samples of districting plans is a Markov chain called recombination (or ReCom), which repeatedly fuses adjacent districts, forms a spanning tree of their union, and splits that spanning tree with a balanced cut to form new districts. One drawback is that this chain's stationary distribution has no known closed form when there are three or more districts. In this paper, we modify ReCom slightly to give it a property called reversibility, resulting in a new Markov chain, RevReCom. This new chain converges to the simple, natural distribution that ReCom was originally designed to approximate: a plan's stationary probability is proportional to the product of the number of spanning trees of each district. This spanning tree score is a measure of district "compactness" (or shape) that is also aligned with notions of community structure from network science. After deriving the steady state formally, we present diagnostic evidence that the convergence is efficient enough for the method to be practically useful, giving high-quality samples for full-sized problems within several hours. In addition to the primary application of benchmarking of redistricting plans (i.e., describing a normal range for statistics), this chain can also be used to validate other methods that target the spanning tree distribution