The Proverb and the Western-Educated African: Use or Neglect?

Paper

Leadership Skills for Success of Home Health Care Agencies

Small business managers often lack the leadership skills necessary to sustain their businesses beyond 5 years. The United States Small Business Administration reported that more than 65% of small business owners, including home health care agency managers, fail within the first 5 years of operation. Guided by Burns and Bass\u27s transformational leadership theory, this multiple case study explored leadership skills that managers in home health care agencies need to sustain their new businesses beyond 5 years. The purposeful sample comprised of 3 managers from 3 different home health care agencies within a 75-mile radius of Baltimore, Maryland, that had demonstrated success in surviving past 5 years. Semistructured interviews, agencies\u27 quality assurance plans and policies were reviewed, and procedural documents related to leadership skills were gathered as data. Yin\u27s 5-step data analysis technique was used to identify key themes. Member checking enhanced the credibility of data interpretation. Themes that emerged from data analysis were business management, knowledge and performance, and transformational leadership. Study findings may contribute to positive social change by providing practical guidance to home health care managers, which may improve their agencies\u27 viability and delivery of patient care. Business implications include the provision of long-term employment to workers and safety assurance to patients\u27 families

Compulsory Voting and Black Citizenship

Protesting Black votes is part of our history of rejecting Black Americans as legitimate wielders of political power and contesting the fullness of Black citizenship. Obviously, hostility toward viewing Black Americans as deserving of the rights owed to other Americans is present in nearly every aspect of American life. But, among the oldest and most contentious hostilities—from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to contemporary voter suppression efforts—has been the resistance against Black votes. Any opportunity to quell this locus of racial animus calls for urgent address. Particularly, at this moment, when long-standing prophylactic measures such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) are being dismantled, a permanent solution to Black disenfranchisement, its material costs, and its symbolic harm, should be pressing. One simple, if not (politically) easy, solution beckons. Notwithstanding sporadic academic attention, compulsory voting and its connection to Black citizenship has not, to my knowledge, been explored in legal literature. The possible effects of compulsory voting on political inequality, particularly across wealth and class, have been intermittently examined. Scholars who have argued for compulsory voting have also noted the potential material effects of compulsory voting on minority communities, in passing. But, the important symbolic antidote that compulsory voting offers to the history of racist attacks on Black voting remains unexplored

Empirical Relationships among Trauma Exposure, Anxiety Sensitivity, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

This review synthesized and critically reviewed empirical studies that assessed relationships among trauma exposure, anxiety sensitivity (AS), and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Across the literature, the prominent theory conceptualized anxiety sensitivity as a causal risk factor within two competing models. One model posited that individuals with dispositionally high AS prior to experiencing a potentially traumatizing event (PTE) have a greater likelihood of developing PTSD after trauma exposure. The second model theorized that the introduction of a PTE raises an individual’s baseline level of AS, leading to the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Emerging research highlighted the possibility of reciprocal relationships, as well as moderating and mediating variables (e.g., age, gender) that cause differential relationships among the variables of interest. The majority of studies to date used a cross-sectional study design, and primarily relied on a descriptive approach that solely highlighted correlations between AS and PTSD. Consequently, the current state of the literature is still unable to authoritatively discern whether AS causes PTSD, PTSD increases AS, or if the two variables have a bidirectional relationship. Accordingly, extant evidence has only demonstrated that AS is a variable risk factor for the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Current limitations within the literature, clinical implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1063/thumbnail.jp

Police Killings as Felony Murder

The widely applauded conviction of officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd employedthe widely criticized felony murder rule. Should we use felony murder as a tool to check discriminatory and violent policing? The authors object that felony murder—although perhaps the only murder charge available for this killing under Minnesota law—understated Chauvin’s culpability and thereby inadequately denounced his crime. They show that further opportunities to prosecute police for felony murder are quite limited. Further, a substantial minority of states impose felony murder liability for any death proximately caused by a felony, even if the actual killer was a police officer, not an “agent” of the felony. In these “proximate cause” jurisdictions, felony murder is far more often used to prosecute the (often Black) targets of police violence, than to prosecute culpable police. Previous scholarship on prosecution of felons for killings by police criticized such proximate cause rules as departures from the “agency” rules required by precedent. But today’s proximate cause felony murder rules were enacted legislatively during the War on Crime and are thus immune to this traditional argument. The authors instead offer a racial justice critique of proximate cause felony murder rules as discriminatory in effect, and as unjustly shifting blame for reckless policing onto its victims. Noting racially disparate patterns of charging felony murder, and particularly in cases where police have killed, the authors call on legislatures to reimpose “agency” limits on felony murder as a prophylactic against discrimination. Finally, the authors widen this racial justice critique to encompass felony murder as a whole, urging legislatures to abolish felony murder wherever racially disparate patterns of charging can be demonstrated

Inside the Professor\u27s Studio

https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/event-invitations-2017/1069/thumbnail.jp