Embedding Anti-Racism in the Community Development and Youth Work Programme (CDYW) 2020/2021

The overall aim of the Le Chéile journey of the Community Development and Youth Work programme team was to embed anti-racism in the teaching, learning and assessment of the programme. Changes were introduced to modules in terms of new content, students were exposed to different perspectives and voices, and new workshops were designed for placement preparation around identifying and responding to racism. With regard to assessment, case studies were used to develop responses to the lived experiences of racism in community development, youth work and higher education settings. Lecturing staff increased their racial literacy through participation in anti-racism training and attending webinars. They developed their reflective practice with regard to anti-racism during a staff workshop and through the changes subsequently introduced in various modules. Students were supported to identify and respond to racism through the space created for discussion around race, racism, racial inequalities and responses with lectures in their modules, through engaging in anti-racism training and attending and participating in events such as the Le Chéile project anti-racism seminar. Lecturers and students co-created the knowledge and outputs - workshops, events, government submissions, and an anti-racism charter are some of the numerous examples of proactive anti-racism emanating from this project. The project was informed by a piece of research which identified that CDYW students encountered racism on placement and felt ill-equipped to deal with it. In keeping with the programme values, a partnership approach was adopted for the Le Chéile project, with lecturers and students co-creating the knowledge and outputs. Staff and students learnt from each other during these webinars. At the Afri Hedge School Human Rights conference organised by Year 3 students they informed us about Direct Provision, the Black Lives Matter Movement and racism. Students and lecturers co-created an anti-racism charter and as part of the Le Chéile anti-racism webinar, year 4 students took Year 1 and 2 students and staff on a guided journey of their learning on racism and racial inequalities. During the COIL-VE exchange with Canada, lecturers and students had an opportunity to develop their intercultural competency through exchange with the Canadian counterparts and debate local topics from different perspectives. The impact of this project was not just restricted to the programme itself. The CDYW programme team partnered with the EDI Directorate on the project and staff and students critiqued and gave feedback regarding the TU Dublin Draft Action Plan for an Intercultural University with an initial focus on Race Equity. Outcomes have informed specific actions in the Strategy and Action Plan. An iterative process was used throughout with students’ lived experiences informing the scenarios that were used for lecturing staff and student workshops. Students gave feedback on and evaluated the actions of the programme and this work is ongoing.There is an overt and visible message in the programme, throughout the four years that we (the CDYW programme team and students) are actively and vocally anti-racist. This is reflected in modules, new workshops designed around pre-placement to identify and respond to racism and an anti-racism Charter co-created by lecturing staff and students. Space has been created though a programme anti-racism webinar and through changes at individual module level to discuss and respond to issues around race and racism where staff and students can learn from each other. Minority voices have been heard in the webinars, workshops and through texts and videos used in modules. Through the various actions on the project, including the two consultations, lecturing staff and students have proactively engaged in anti-racism at the programme level, in TU Dublin with our placement partners and beyond

Embedding Anti-Racism in the Community Development and Youth Work Programme (CDYW) 2020/2021

The Community Development and Youth Work (CDYW) programme team received funding from the IMPACT project as part of the Le Chéile award application during the academic year 2020/2021. The overall aim of the CDYW Le Chéile journey was to embed anti-racism in the teaching, learning and assessment of the programme. Changes were introduced to modules in terms of new content, students were exposed to different perspectives and voices, and new workshops were designed for placement preparation around identifying and responding to racism. With regard to assessment, case studies were used to develop responses to the lived experiences of racism in community development, youth work and higher education settings. Lecturing staff increased their racial literacy through participation in anti-racism training and attending webinars. They developed their reflective practice with regard to anti-racism during a staff workshop and through the changes subsequently introduced in various modules. Students were supported to identify and respond to racism through the space created for discussion around race, racism, racial inequalities and responses with lectures in their modules, through engaging in anti-racism training and attending and participating in events such as the Le Chéile project anti-racism seminar. Lecturers and students co-created the knowledge and outputs - workshops, events, government submissions, and an anti-racism charter are some of the numerous examples of proactive anti-racism emanating from this project. The team partnered with the EDI Directorate on the project to inform TU Dublin strategy on race equity. A summary can be viewed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbVdEMNjGn

Embedding anti-racism in the teaching, learning and assessment of the Community Development and Youth Work programme: Lessons learned to date.

The Black Lives Matter movement has placed a spotlight on racism, not just as a global phenomenon but as a feature of Irish society. Research conducted with Community Development and Youth Work students on the TU Dublin Blanchardstown campus found that some had encountered racism on placement and felt ill-equipped to deal with it. As a group of white lecturers working with diverse students, we sought and received funding to conduct a project during the academic year 2020/21 which aimed to embed anti-racism in the teaching, learning and assessment of that programme. An action-research methodology using a mixed-methods approach was employed, and focus groups, surveys and reflections were used to gather the evidence base. Following an overview of the theoretical framework underpinning the work, this article charts the journey to achieve the proposed objectives: namely, to change the programme content/delivery, to increase the racial literacy and reflective practice of lecturers in terms of anti-racism, and to enable students to identify racism and empower them to respond to it. The article concludes with an analysis of some lessons learned and emerging issues from the ongoing work

From Large N Nonplanar Anomalous Dimensions to Open Spring Theory

In this note we compute the non-planar one loop anomalous dimension of restricted Schur polynomials that have a bare dimension of O(N). This is achieved by mapping the restricted Schur polynomials into states of a specific U(N) irreducible representation. In this way the dilatation operator is mapped into a u(n) valued operator and, as a result, can easily be diagonalized. The resulting spectrum is reproduced by a classical model of springs between masses.Comment: 13+1 pages, 3 figure

Nonplanar integrability at two loops

In this article we compute the action of the two loop dilatation operator on restricted Schur polynomials that belong to the su(2) sector, in the displaced corners approximation. In this non-planar large N limit, operators that diagonalize the one loop dilatation operator are not corrected at two loops. The resulting spectrum of anomalous dimensions is related to a set of decoupled harmonic oscillators, indicating integrability in this sector of the theory at two loops. The anomalous dimensions are a non-trivial function of the 't Hooft coupling, with a spectrum that is continuous and starting at zero at large N, but discrete at finite N.Comment: version to appear in JHE

Judicial Review, Irrationality, and the Limits of Intervention by the Courts

When exercising judicial review, the courts, on occasions, have intervened in circumstances where administrative decisions were not irrational. However, these low standards of judicial intervention are arguably constitutional, especially since the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). To this end, this article seeks to establish a zone of executive decision-making, for reasons of democracy, where the courts are clearly excluded. But it is unable to do so. Does this mean, therefore, that judicial intervention on the grounds of irrationality exists without limit? Assuming this to be the case, it is suggested that the courts should show greater respect to the administrative branch of the state where it has genuinely sought to engage with the legal process in arriving at its decisions

The Ultraviolet Luminosity Function at 0.6 < z < 1 from UVCANDELS

© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. This work is licensed under the terms of under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/UVCANDELS is a Hubble Space Telescope Cycle-26 Treasury Program awarded 164 orbits of primary ultraviolet (UV) F275W imaging and coordinated parallel optical F435W imaging in four CANDELS fields—GOODS-N, GOODS-S, EGS, and COSMOS—covering a total area of ∼426 arcmin2. This is ∼2.7 times larger than the area covered by previous deep-field space UV data combined, reaching a depth of about 27 and 28 ABmag (5σ in 0.”2 apertures) for F275W and F435W, respectively. Along with new photometric catalogs, we present an analysis of the rest-frame UV luminosity function (LF), relying on our UV-optimized aperture photometry method, yielding a factor of 1.5 increase over H-isophot aperture photometry in the signal-to-noise ratios of galaxies in our F275W imaging. Using well-tested photometric redshift measurements, we identify 5810 galaxies at redshifts 0.6 < z < 1, down to an absolute magnitude of M UV = −14.2. In order to minimize the effect of uncertainties in estimating the completeness function, especially at the faint end, we restrict our analysis to sources above 30% completeness, which provides a final sample of 4726 galaxies at −21.5 < M UV < −15.5. We performed a maximum likelihood estimate to derive the best-fit parameters of the UV LF. We report a best-fit faint-end slope of α=−1.359−0.041+0.041 at z ∼ 0.8. Creating subsamples at z ∼ 0.7 and z ∼ 0.9, we observe a possible evolution of α with redshift. The unobscured UV luminosity density at M UV < −10 is derived as ρUV=1.339−0.030+0.027(×1026ergs−1Hz−1Mpc−3) using our best-fit LF parameters. The new F275W and F435 photometric catalogs from UVCANDELS have been made publicly available on the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.Peer reviewe

The Lyman Continuum Escape Fraction of Star-forming Galaxies at 2.4≲z≲3.72.4\lesssim z\lesssim3.7 from UVCANDELS

The UltraViolet Imaging of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey Fields (UVCANDELS) survey is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Cycle-26 Treasury Program, allocated in total 164 orbits of primary Wide-Field Camera 3 Ultraviolet and Visible light F275W imaging with coordinated parallel Advanced Camera for Surveys F435W imaging, on four of the five premier extragalactic survey fields: GOODS-N, GOODS-S, EGS, and COSMOS. We introduce this survey by presenting a thorough search for galaxies at $z\gtrsim2.4$ that leak significant Lyman continuum (LyC) radiation, as well as a stringent constraint on the LyC escape fraction ($f_{\rm esc}$) from stacking the UV images of a population of star-forming galaxies with secure redshifts. Our extensive search for LyC emission and stacking analysis benefit from the catalogs of high-quality spectroscopic redshifts compiled from archival ground-based data and HST slitless spectroscopy, carefully vetted by dedicated visual inspection efforts. We report a sample of five galaxies as individual LyC leaker candidates, showing $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm rel}\gtrsim60\%$ estimated using detailed Monte Carlo analysis of intergalactic medium attenuation. We develop a robust stacking method to apply to five samples of in total 85 non-detection galaxies in the redshift range of $z\in[2.4,3.7]$. Most stacks give tight 2-$\sigma$ upper limits below $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm rel}<6\%$. A stack for a subset of 32 emission-line galaxies shows tentative LyC leakage detected at 2.9-$\sigma$, indicating $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm rel}=5.7\%$ at $z\sim2.65$, supporting the key role of such galaxies in contributing to the cosmic reionization and maintaining the UV ionization background. These new F275W and F435W imaging mosaics from UVCANDELS have been made publicly available on the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.Comment: 33 pages, 21 figures, and 5 tables. Resubmitted after addressing the referee repor

The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) Mission Concept Study Final Report

The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, has been designed to be the Great Observatory of the 2030s. For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable an affordable space-based telescope mission capable of discovering and characterizing Earthlike planets orbiting nearby bright sunlike stars in order to search for signs of habitability and biosignatures. Such a mission can also be equipped with instrumentation that will enable broad and exciting general astrophysics and planetary science not possible from current or planned facilities. HabEx is a space telescope with unique imaging and multi-object spectroscopic capabilities at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet (UV) to near-IR. These capabilities allow for a broad suite of compelling science that cuts across the entire NASA astrophysics portfolio. HabEx has three primary science goals: (1) Seek out nearby worlds and explore their habitability; (2) Map out nearby planetary systems and understand the diversity of the worlds they contain; (3) Enable new explorations of astrophysical systems from our own solar system to external galaxies by extending our reach in the UV through near-IR. This Great Observatory science will be selected through a competed GO program, and will account for about 50% of the HabEx primary mission. The preferred HabEx architecture is a 4m, monolithic, off-axis telescope that is diffraction-limited at 0.4 microns and is in an L2 orbit. HabEx employs two starlight suppression systems: a coronagraph and a starshade, each with their own dedicated instrument