Calls for Change: Seeing Cancel Culture from a Multi-Level Perspective

Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend.  Transition Design ofrece un marco y emplea una variedad de herramientas para abordar la complejidad. “Cancelar la cultura” es un fenómeno complejo que presenta una oportunidad para que los administradores de la educación superior se basen en el enfoque del Diseño de Transición para enmarcar y responder a esta tendencia. O Transition Design oferece uma estrutura e emprega uma variedade de ferramentas para lidar com a complexidade. A “cultura do cancelamento” é um fenômeno complexo que apresenta uma oportunidade para os administradores do ensino superior se basearem na abordagem do Design de Transição para enquadrar e responder a essa tendência

A Black Women’s Health Agenda: Applying an Intersectional Systems Approach and Reproductive Justice Lens

The Reproductive Justice (RJ) framework states that it is a “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent children in safe and sustainable communities.” RJ is critical in addressing the glaring racial, ethnic, social and economic inequities that exist in Allegheny County and surrounding areas. Black women and femmes carry the disproportionate burden of health inequities in Allegheny County, but their lives and experiences are not centered in the development and execution of solutions. Black women/femmes throughout the county lead critical work to address a multitude of inequities, often with limited support and resources. Concurrently, they deal with multiple systems of oppression designed to devalue and derail their work. This Pitt Teaming Grant proposal is designed to: A) Uplift the ongoing work led by Black women and femmes; B) Interrogate systems that exacerbate inequities in health C) Develop plans for dismantling systems of oppression specifically in Allegheny County that have a disproportionate impact on the health and well-being of Black women/femmes. The specific aims of this proposal are: Aim 1. Investigate if and how systems (health and social) may or may not address the health and well-being of Black women and femmes in Allegheny County and surrounding areas. This will include an environmental scan of existing programs, policies and local funding resulting in Black Paper and compendium of equity assessment tools and frameworks for further use by the team and others in the larger community. Aim 2. Develop a strategic plan and health agenda focused on centering the health and well-being of Black women and femmes in Allegheny County that includes actions related to research, practice and policy. The Black Women’s Health Agenda for Allegheny County will be developed through continuous community engagement and facilitation from Black-women led experts in strategic development

Calls for Change: Seeing Cancel Culture from a Multi-Level Perspective

Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend. Faculty accused of or caught using racist, sexist, or homophobic speech are increasingly met with calls to lose their positions, titles, or other professional opportunities. Such calls for cancellation arise from discreet social networks organized around an identified lack of accountability for social transgressions carried out in the professional school environment. Much of the existing discourse on cancel culture involves whether the phenomenon represents a net positive or negative. This narrow, foror-against cancel culture frame is reductive, preempting inquiry into where the phenomenon is situated in the dynamics that facilitate and inhibit change. Exploring cancel culture from a Transition Design perspective broadens the range of potential administrative responses from either resistance or acquiescence to experimentation and co-creation. This paper uses a multi-level perspective (MLP), one of the tools of Transition Design, to define call-outs and cancellations of faculty as niche-level innovations in access to institutional accountability and collective empowerment. From this perspective, the rise of cancel calls signals: (1) deficits in the regime-level norm of academic freedom; and (2) shifts involving identity politics at the landscape level. Recasting these calls as “innovations” creates an opportunity for higher education administrators to experiment by proactively piloting structural, co-created changes to accountability systems. Embracing the MLP framework centers the context from which cancel calls emerge, orients solutions toward concerns at the root of these calls, and contributes to the recognition of Transition Design as a practical field of study

(Systems) Thinking Like a Lawyer

This Article discusses systems thinking as an innovative approach to contextualizing legal advocacy. Systems thinking, a paradigm that emphasizes universal interconnectivity, provides a theoretical basis for parsing the structural environment in which law-related problems emerge and are addressed. From the array of conceptions about what it means to engage in systems thinking, this Article identifies four key tenets to this perspective: (1) every outcome is the product of some structure; (2) these structures are embedded within and connected to one another; (3) the structure producing an outcome can be discerned; and (4) these structures are resilient, but not fixed. This four-part framework provides a foundation for understanding systems as the contextual environment in which law is practiced. This Article defines surfacing and mapping as tools for engaging in systems thinking that, when incorporated into law school coursework, encourage students to address the presenting needs of a client in tandem with an assessment of the social and institutional systems that the client is a part of and affected by. Further, these tools promote reflection on the roles that attorneys play as both system participants and system architects. Learning objectives rooted in systems thinking promote understanding of organizational behavior, systemic functioning, and how these factors relate to effective advocacy. Systems thinking disrupts the tendency to screen out considerations of what is facilitated or hindered by the pressures and incentives that legal rules and social institutions create. Finally, this Article offers insights concerning the benefits of naming systems thinking as the theoretical core of efforts to recognize the broad social and political interdisciplinarities embedded in legal needs and tethered to the practice of law. Instruction in both the practice and paradigm of systems thinking equips law students to perceive and articulate these connections, as well as critique the role of attorneys in maintaining or disrupting them. Acknowledging systems thinking in legal education contributes to the evolving conception of what it means to “think like a lawyer”

Setting the Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice in the Post-pandemic Clinic

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked to structural causes like subordination, discrimination, and poverty. This Article suggests six maxims for law school clinics to advance health justice, centering on themes of transdisciplinary collaboration, upstream interventions, adaptability, racial justice, systemic advocacy, and community-based strategies. The discussion draws on analyses of the scholarly literature on medical-legal partnerships and examples from the authors’ clinics. These maxims for health justice are particularly relevant during a global public health emergency, but they also transcend the current moment by contributing to the long-running cross-clinic dialogue about teaching and designing clinics for social justice

Setting the Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity and Injustice in the Post-Pandemic Clinic

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked to structural causes like subordination, discrimination, and poverty. This Article suggests six maxims for law school clinics to advance health justice, centering on themes of transdisciplinary collaboration, upstream interventions, adaptability, racial justice, systemic advocacy, and community-based strategies. The discussion draws on analyses of the scholarly literature on medical-legal partnerships and examples from the authors’ clinics. These maxims for health justice are particularly relevant during a global public health emergency, but they also transcend the current moment by contributing to the long-running cross-clinic dialogue about teaching and designing clinics for social justice

Developing a Holistic Measurement Plan for Transition to Adulthood

Transition to adulthood is a process faced by all adolescents, which includes the domains of health, education, employment, finance and community, and encompasses legal, social, and emotional components. Significant structural barriers and social injustices and inequities exist on this pathway and are often ignored. Multidisciplinary experts are all invested in a “successful” transition, but are siloed and have historically created strategies to measure transition that are specific to their field and narrow in focus. Such data collection approaches reinforce fragmented practices and are a significant barrier to collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches to providing transition care. Through collaboration between the Schools of Medicine, Law, Education, and Social Work, this project will develop an innovative holistic measurement plan for evaluating the quality of care received during the transition from pediatric to adult services. First, through partnership with the Carnegie Mellon University Transition Design Institute, we will engage young adults and their families and key stakeholders in medicine, education, law, and the community in visually mapping the comprehensive journey to adulthood. Second, we will use these results to create an objective and holistic outcomes assessment strategy that accurately reflects and positively reinforces the benefits of multi-systemic care. The strategy developed in this grant will be concretely used in future research proposals to evaluate the impact of systems-level changes and interventions in adolescent transition care across the medical, legal, financial, social and educational realms. It is our intention to break apart the existing silos and support adolescents’ transition to adulthood holistically and equitably

Using a Transition Design Approach to Explore the Adolescent Shift to Adulthood

Transition to adulthood is a multi-faceted, complex process that affects all areas of an adolescent’s internal and external world. Prior methodologies to assess the medical facet of this transformative time have focused on objective, quantitative analysis of transition practices to facilitate a productive transfer to an adult care provider, without considering the more nuanced context. Transition Design (TD) is an under-utilized, novel methodology that can holistically investigate transition to adulthood by generating insight into the current framework for transition both within and outside of the medical field, and by conceptualizing possible interventions for a more sustainable and equitable future -- all from the perspective of constituent groups who have expertise and a vested interest in transition. Participants within four such constituent groups (young adults, young adult caregivers, healthcare providers, and social services providers) completed a day-long workshop consisting of the six-activity sequence of TD, including 1) Mapping the Problem, 2) Mapping Constituent Relations, 3) Mapping the Evolution of the Problem, 4) Co-Creating Long-Term Future Visions, 5) Designing for the Transition, and 6) Designing Systems Interventions. TD is a promising approach for evaluating complex problems such as the transition to adulthood that thrive on the engagement of specific constituent groups. This methodology allows these groups to engage with and subsequently help solve wicked problems using their own experience