Creative Writing through the Arts. Final full report.

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Creative Writing through the Arts. Final summary report

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Resisting the Coloniality and Colonialism of a Westernized Community Psychology: Toward a Critical Racial Justice Praxis

The institutional violence we are now experiencing, coupled with historical and ongoing waves of oppression, is a result and continuation of the legacy of colonialism. The outward eruptions that we are seeing over the last years are a result of American and Canadian settler nation-states that have taken hold in North America but are now in decline. Yet, the perpetuation of imperialism and white supremacist ideologies via the academe and other noneducational entities reproduced through curricula, pedagogy, and institutional policies and practices must still be addressed. The discipline of community psychology (CP) is no exception. As a part of the imperialist empire, CP, a mainstream academic discipline born at the heart of the empire of the colonial ruling class, continuously asks: What can we do? We, the authors of this paper, are troubled by this question and respond with a question of our own: Can community psychology really be part of the solution if it does not acknowledge that it is part of the problem? Through the lens of five Indigenous, Black, and racialized scholar-activists, educators, and practitioners, we identify three community psychology principles and argue that in practice within Black and Indigenous communities, they are not sufficient. Further, we illustrate that, related to these principles, community psychology is situated within what is termed the industrial complex, and we elucidate the implications of this situating. Lastly, we offer a proposal for how we, as part of the academe and practice, can decolonize community psychology and move it forward to align with current liberation movements and Indigenous sovereignty

Resisting the Coloniality and Colonialism of a Westernized Community Psychology: Toward a Critical Racial Justice Praxis

The institutional violence we are now experiencing, coupled with historical and ongoing waves of oppression, is a result and continuation of the legacy of colonialism. The outward eruptions that we are seeing over the last years are a result of American and Canadian settler nation-states that have taken hold in North America but are now in decline. Yet, the perpetuation of imperialism and white supremacist ideologies via the academe and other noneducational entities reproduced through curricula, pedagogy, and institutional policies and practices must still be addressed. The discipline of community psychology (CP) is no exception. As a part of the imperialist empire, CP, a mainstream academic discipline born at the heart of the empire of the colonial ruling class, continuously asks: What can we do? We, the authors of this paper, are troubled by this question and respond with a question of our own: Can community psychology really be part of the solution if it does not acknowledge that it is part of the problem? Through the lens of five Indigenous, Black, and racialized scholar-activists, educators, and practitioners, we identify three community psychology principles and argue that in practice within Black and Indigenous communities, they are not sufficient. Further, we illustrate that, related to these principles, community psychology is situated within what is termed the industrial complex, and we elucidate the implications of this situating. Lastly, we offer a proposal for how we, as part of the academe and practice, can decolonize community psychology and move it forward to align with current liberation movements and Indigenous sovereignty

Resisting the Coloniality and Colonialism of a Westernized Community Psychology: Toward a Critical Racial Justice Praxis

The institutional violence we are now experiencing, coupled with historical and ongoing waves of oppression, is a result and continuation of the legacy of colonialism. The outward eruptions that we are seeing over the last years are a result of American and Canadian settler nation-states that have taken hold in North America but are now in decline. Yet, the perpetuation of imperialism and white supremacist ideologies via the academe and other noneducational entities reproduced through curricula, pedagogy, and institutional policies and practices must still be addressed. The discipline of community psychology (CP) is no exception. As a part of the imperialist empire, CP, a mainstream academic discipline born at the heart of the empire of the colonial ruling class, continuously asks: What can we do? We, the authors of this paper, are troubled by this question and respond with a question of our own: Can community psychology really be part of the solution if it does not acknowledge that it is part of the problem? Through the lens of five Indigenous, Black, and racialized scholar-activists, educators, and practitioners, we identify three community psychology principles and argue that in practice within Black and Indigenous communities, they are not sufficient. Further, we illustrate that, related to these principles, community psychology is situated within what is termed the industrial complex, and we elucidate the implications of this situating. Lastly, we offer a proposal for how we, as part of the academe and practice, can decolonize community psychology and move it forward to align with current liberation movements and Indigenous sovereignty

Measuring pregnancy planning: An assessment of the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy among urban, south Indian women

Copyright © 2010 Corinne H. Rocca et al. This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/.We evaluated the psychometric properties of the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy among Indian women using classical methods and Item Response Modeling. The scale exhibited good internal consistency and internal structure, with overall scores correlating well with each item’s response categories. Items performed similarly for pregnant and non-pregnant women, and scores decreased with increasing parity, providing evidence for validity. Analyses detected small disadvantages, including low endorsement of middle response categories and some evidence of differential item functioning by parity. We conclude that the LMUP is suitable for use in India and recommend steps for improving scale performance for this cultural context.National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Levis Strauss Foundation

Early neurodevelopmental outcome of low birth weight infants surviving neonatal intraventricular hemorrhage

Peer Reviewe

Practice guidelines for clinical microbiology laboratories: Mycobacteria

Mycobacteria are the causative organisms for diseases such as tuberculosis (TB), leprosy, Buruli ulcer, and pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial disease, to name the most important ones. In 2015, globally, almost 10 million people developed TB, and almost half a million patients suffered from its multidrug-resistant form. In 2016, a total of 9,287 new TB cases were reported in the United States. In 2015, there were 174,608 new case of leprosy worldwide. India, Brazil, and Indonesia reported the most leprosy cases. In 2015, the World Health Organization reported 2,037 new cases of Buruli ulcer, with most cases being reported in Africa. Pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial disease is an emerging public health challenge. The U.S. National Institutes of Health reported an increase from 20 to 47 cases/100,000 persons (or 8.2% per year) of pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial disease among adults aged 65 years or older throughout the United States, with 181,037 national annual cases estimated in 2014. This review describes contemporary methods for the laboratory diagnosis of mycobacterial diseases. Furthermore, the review considers the ever-changing health care delivery system and stresses the laboratory’s need to adjust and embrace molecular technologies to provide shorter turnaround times and a higher quality of care for the patients who we serve

Epigenetic and transcriptome profiling identifies a population of visceral adipose-derived progenitor cells with potential to differentiate into an endocrine pancreatic lineage

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is characterized by the loss of insulin-producing β-cells in the pancreas. T1D can be treated using cadaveric islet transplantation, but this therapy is severely limited by a lack of pancreas donors. To develop an alternative cell source for transplantation therapy, we carried out the epigenetic characterization in nine different adult mouse tissues and identified visceral adipose-derived progenitors as a candidate cell population. Chromatin conformation, assessed using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) sequencing and validated by ChIP-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at key endocrine pancreatic gene promoters, revealed similarities between visceral fat and endocrine pancreas. Multiple techniques involving quantitative PCR, in-situ PCR, confocal microscopy, and flow cytometry confirmed the presence of measurable (2–1000-fold over detectable limits) pancreatic gene transcripts and mesenchymal progenitor cell markers (CD73, CD90 and CD105; >98%) in visceral adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal cells (AMCs). The differentiation potential of AMCs was explored in transgenic reporter mice expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) under the regulation of the Pdx1 (pancreatic and duodenal homeobox-1) gene promoter. GFP expression was measured as an index of Pdx1 promoter activity to optimize culture conditions for endocrine pancreatic differentiation. Differentiated AMCs demonstrated their capacity to induce pancreatic endocrine genes as evidenced by increased GFP expression and validated using TaqMan real-time PCR (at least 2–200-fold relative to undifferentiated AMCs). Human AMCs differentiated using optimized protocols continued to produce insulin following transplantation in NOD/SCID mice. Our studies provide a systematic analysis of potential islet progenitor populations using genome-wide profiling studies and characterize visceral adipose-derived cells for replacement therapy in diabetes