From Lived Experiences to Social Activism: Latino Fraternity Brothers Critical Service to the Latinx Community

It is widely acknowledged among all echelons of global organizations and governments alike, that the Internet is a critical global infrastructure to the information society. This critical global infrastructure offers much to the twenty-first century; however, it has already become synonymous with misuse, abuse and the emergence of a new vocabulary that includes cyber terrorism, cyber trust, cyber fraud and identity theft, to mention a few. Furthermore, these vulnerabilities of the information society (information infrastructure) have become more prevalent in recent times. Whilst this is not a desirable state for the information society, it has focused attention on internet identities. In particular, there is a growing body of opinion that shares the view that it is the cloak of anonymity that fuels such undesirable and sometimes illegal use of our information infrastructure (internet). In short, this all adds up to a general mistrust of the internet, especially where it concerns the exchange of sensitive or confidential information. If the internet is to mature into a trustworthy utility-like infrastructure and a medium in which both consumers and producers of information can have implicit faith, then we must look to other trusted utility infrastructures and services and the way they operate. In general, these same producers and consumers use electricity, water and gas, for example, and rarely question the integrity of those infrastructures that provide the lifesupport to economic and social activity. These critical services are regulated because of the potential risk to public safety, and the consumers and producers of such services are not anonymous. In contrast, cyber trust is now considered by many observers to be a risk to public safety because of our increasing dependence on the internet. Yet we really cannot be sure about the genuineness of the identities that participate in information exchanges on the internet. In addition, we cannot be confident that a person claiming to be a doctor, lawyer or police officer, for example, is their genuine role at any given time. There is also general agreement emerging that some form of regulation is now required in order to restore confidence and trust in the internet as a safe environment in which we can exchange information. This leads us to many challenges, not least of which is, how can we regulate anonymity? This article will offer a view that it is the registration business processes, employed to bind real-world personal and professional data to a digital certificate that is crucial. These registration business processes are critical because they have a direct bearing on the probative value of a digital certificate. These registration business processes will need to enable each information society individual to declare his or her (or the organizations’) genuine digital identities (digital certificates) and contribute to a safer information infrastructure by removing the opportunity for identity theft and identity plagiarism that exists on the internet today. Such registration business processes will need to consider carefully regulation and legislation, digital identity (certificate) lifecycle management and information assurance. The registration business processes will need to scale and be available to all real-world custodians of trust: those organizations and employees engaged in the exchange of sensitive medical, legal, scientific and commercial information over the internet. Control of registration would be done as part of a Certification Authorities policy or certification practice. In the United Kingdom, tScheme is the industryled, self-regulatory, not-for-profit organisation that was set up to create strict service criteria and to approve electronic trust services, including qualified certificate services. tScheme plays an important A r t i c l e

ABSTRACTThis article describes how comparative politics specialists can adopt community-engaged strategies and other innovative pedagogies to emphasize local–global connections. It discusses a comparative course on urban social movements that requires sustained, community-based learning. Students are placed in organizations advocating for refugee families, Latinx communities, and people in situations of homelessness. Engagement with community partners supports student learning in meaningful ways. Students apply social-movement theory to real-world situations, develop an understanding of activists and the communities they seek to empower, and gain intercultural competency by working with diverse groups. They also grapple with different modes of social action and models of citizenship. Most important, students learn to investigate activism comparatively through analysis of overseas cases. Bridging the local and the global in a single semester can be an arduous task, but undergraduates have embraced this challenge.

Historically, mainstream LGBTQ+ activism in the United States has excluded the voices of multiple marginalized people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of color and immigrants. Despite increasing scholarly attention to formerly subordinated voices contesting conventional approaches to activism, little is known about how these groups utilize technology to forge influential activist spaces. Through a content analysis of 10 queer Latinx activist websites and 273 distinct webpages, we utilized the concept of expressive activism to demonstrate how these organizations are forging engaging modes of intersectional virtual activism that promote social equity across race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and immigration status. First, the websites emphasized the importance of immigrant rights and identities in working toward intersectional social justice. Second, health promotion and disease prevention as social justice appeared as prominent motifs. Third, all the websites promoted the embodiment of social activism through artistic endeavors. Finally, the websites endorsed a strengths-based approach highlighting the importance of advocacy through resilient personal and collective values. Our findings highlight how LGBTQ+ Latinx online organizations can shape more intersectionally-focused discourse surrounding social inequalities. This research can enhance awareness of the social concerns, political aims, and health needs of LGBTQ+ Latinx communities among local, regional, and national service providers and policymakers.

COVID-19 threatens hard-won gains in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) through compromising the ability of services to meet needs. Youth are particularly threatened due to existing barriers to their access to services. CHIEDZA is a community-based integrated SRH intervention for youth being trialled in Zimbabwe. CHIEDZA closed in March 2020, in response to national lockdown, and reopened in May 2020, categorised as an essential service. We aimed to understand the impact of CHIEDZA’s closure and its reopening, with adaptations to reduce COVID-19 transmission, on provider and youth experiences. Qualitative methods included interviews with service providers (n = 22) and youth (n = 26), and observations of CHIEDZA sites (n = 10) and intervention team meetings (n = 7). Analysis was iterative and inductive. The sudden closure of CHIEDZA impeded youth access to SRH services. The reopening of CHIEDZA was welcomed, but the necessary adaptations impacted the intervention and engagement with it. Adaptations restricted time with healthcare providers, heightening the tension between numbers of youths accessing the service and quality of service provision. The removal of social activities, which had particularly appealed to young men, impacted youth engagement and access to services, particularly for males. This paper demonstrates how a community-based youth-centred SRH intervention has been affected by and adapted to COVID-19. We demonstrate how critical ongoing service provision is, but how adaptations negatively impact service provision and youth engagement. The impact of adaptations additionally emphasises how time with non-judgemental providers, social activities, and integrated services are core components of youth-friendly services, not added extras.

Quality of life: changing the face of outcome measurements in critical care.

Access Denied

The establishment of ecological security patterns (ESPs) represents a significant paradigm shift in the approach to sustainable development. ESPs aim to reconcile the typically conflicting interests of ecological conservation and economic growth by guaranteeing the sustainability of critical ecosystem services and preserving the ecological integrity of the region while promoting socio-economic development. The primary objective of ESPs is to achieve a balanced and harmonious relationship between human society and the natural environment. The Qiandongnan Ecotourism Area (QEA) located in Southwest China is renowned for its high biodiversity; however, the ecological environment in the region is highly fragile. In light of this, there is an urgent need to establish ESPs for QEA that can promote ecological protection and sustainable economic development. In this study, we used land-use and land-cover change data and human disturbance factors to identify the ESPs of the Qiandongnan Ecotourism Area (QEA), employing the InVEST model and Circuit Theory. Our results revealed that (1) the ecological quality of the study area is relatively high, with high-quality habitat areas covering 19,554.76 km2, which account for approximately 64.57% of the study area and the overall ecological environment is in a healthy condition; (2) the total area of ecological sources covers approximately 17,616.27 km2, accounting for approximately 58.17% of the study area, primarily distributed in Liping, Rongjiang, and Congjiang, which respectively account for 16.28%, 12.44%, and 11.86% of the total ecological source area; (3) the ESPs are composed of 13 key ecological nodes, 17 ecological corridors (with a length of approximately 1474.47 km), and 21 ecological source clusters. The ecological corridors are distributed in a ring shape, connecting various ecological nodes and sources along mountains, forests, rivers, and valleys. These findings provide a theoretical foundation for the protection of the ecological system’s integrity and the development of social and economic activities in the QEA.

Redistributive land reform policy and women nutritional status in Zimbabwe

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly heralded as an innovative policy intervention in the context of critical urban infrastructure services where outright privatization and loss of control are considered unacceptable. This paper assesses a proposed PPP for the management of water services in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Although the city of Beirut and its suburbs are considered as the center of social, economic, and political activities in the country, safe drinking water is not accessible to all the population of the city in view of the current economic crisis and the high level of urbanisation. A PPP is viewed as a promising solution to the water supply problem, especially in poor and suburban areas. After introducing PPPs and the rationale behind invoking private sector participation, this paper assesses the potential promise of different forms of PPPs in the context of the economic and institutional framework of water management in the Greater Beirut Area (GBA).

“Waking Justice”: An @cto on Education Daniel Morales Morales (bio) “Waking Justice” is inspired by the work of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino as well as Augusto Boal work around Theatre of the Oppressed. Actos that are part of El Teatro Campesino, like the ones in Valdez’s Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (1990), are not only art but social activism, and a key tool to challenge the status quo and advocate for change. According to Valdez (1971), the acto has five goals: “inspire the audience to social action, illuminate specific points about social problems, satirize the opposition, show or hint at a solution, and express what people are thinking” (6). This @cto was created during a series of workshops with middle and high schoolers who were part of an after-school theater class that collaborated with undergraduates, a graduate student, and a faculty member in creating and performing art. I refer to this piece as an @cto instead of an acto since its multiple versions were created online after receiving feedback from the students who authored part of the script and those who performed the @ cto on stage. This collective aspect helped the intergenerational artists of this @cto create work that included multiple experiences in educational spaces. The Latinx Theatre Project The Latinx Theatre Project was a collaborative theater experience that brought together undergraduates in the Spanish and Portuguese Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and students involved in the First Generation Youth Program in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Dr. Kristie Soares, the instructor for the class, created a collaboration in the Fall of 2017 to immerse the undergraduates and the young performers in Latinx art pedagogies, divided into three units: Theatre of the Oppressed, the Nuyorican Poetry Movement, and El Teatro Campesino. The first third of the semester was spent mostly building community among the undergraduates and understanding the sociohistorical context of the Latinx community in western Massachusetts. During the second third of the semester, we started to collaborate with the young performers from First Generation. In the last third of the semester, we worked together with the youth as an ensemble to create and stage [End Page 232] performance pieces in the style of the Latinx art pedagogies that were centered in the partnership. For the whole semester, we not only trained to facilitate Latinx theater exercises as part of our social justice practice but also learned and practiced concrete skills in theater arts, such as writing, performing, and set design. For our final performance at Teatro Vida, in Springfield, we shared with the audience our Nuyorican-style spoken word collage, a rhythm poem combining Nuyorican poetry and Theatre of the Oppressed, a video of our creative process, and “Waking Justice,” our @cto written in the style of El Teatro Campesino. The first element used in our process of creation was Theatre of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal’s work offered us an embodiment of Freirean concepts that can be deployed in the classroom in a novel, engaging, and empowering way. Central to Boal’s ideas is what he terms a “spect-actor” (2002, 243), which means there is not a distinction between actors and spectators; we all have the ability to observe critically and act upon our analysis. As a result, the spectator becomes “spect-actor”—an element of the theatrical performance that both views and actively participates in and co-constructs the course of events, its actions, and outcomes. Boal’s concept of a spectactor is very closely related to Paulo Freire’s concept of “praxis”—the unification of theory and practice and “generative terms”—topics that participants generate which are used as centerpieces of student-centered curriculum (Freire 1970). Rather than talking about the issues affecting Latinx students in schools, the spectactors interacted and manipulated dramatized representations of codified generative themes. In the case of “Waking Justice,” the characters illuminated the disproportionate punishment of students of color in schools, the lack of caring from a predominantly white teacher population, and the focus on a Eurocentric curriculum and standardized testing. The solutions are for the audience to decide, but there is a clear indication for teachers to learn from students, to listen to them...

Latinx theology has addressed the idea of ecclesial unity, among the diverse expressions of the Christian tradition, by offering cultural interpretations of the ecumenical documents and statements of the Church. Nevertheless, a more deliberate engagement with ecumenism has privileged inter-ecclesial relationships in the context of scholarly production, social activism, and shared theological projects embodied in Latinx organizations. The author argues that theologizing about ecumenical relations in the context of the Latinx community requires a more systematic attention to the cultural meanings of home, language, and belonging.

A Higher Calling: Toward a More Spacious Role for Academic Advisors

This critical service learning (CSL) model has youth voice as the cornerstone and places it at the center of the approach. The term youth voice describes a strategy in which young people are authentically engaged in working toward changing the systems that directly affect their lives. Instead of their input remaining at the discussion level, youth conceptualize, research, and develop action plans to make recommendations to policymakers. This places youth in a unique position to advocate for their communities, which provides a real- world opportunity for them to learn components of the change process. Practitioners must create a safe and supportive environment to encourage youth voice. The practice environment, including the culture, structure, and group climate, must be intentionally created and sustained to make youth feel safe and supported enough to raise their voices. The youth’s voices, strengths, talents, actions, and achievements are continuously integrated into the CSL approach and are infused throughout all components of every activity, including brainstorming ideas (community web mapping), research, planning, evaluation, decision- making, advocacy, and reflections. In this model, the community web mapping (Lantieri, 1999) is central to the develop¬ment of the students’ voice. The practitioner facilitates the brainstorming for community web mapping. This activity may span three to five sessions and encourages youth to brainstorm about what they would like to change within their communities (or within their schools). The brainstorming session is youth centered and involves little to no adult redirection. This provides a chance for youth to verbalize their ideas without adult censorship. It allows youth to engage in active construction and integration of problem-solving, decision-making, and conflict resolution and may enable them to explore and confront social injustices on behalf of themselves or others. The literature suggests that when youth have authentic CSL experiences, academic achievement and civic competence increase (Howard, 2006; Kielsmeier, Scales, Roehlkepartain, & Neal, 2004). Youth who have these experiences develop a stronger sense of community, improve their prosocial attitudes and behaviors, and learn powerful lessons through social action.

Third Anaesthesia and Critical Care Symposium

The burgeoning Latinx communities in the U.S. South provide rich case studies for examining the identity formation and group consciousness of children of Latin American immigrants. This paper explores the identities and sense of belonging of 1.5- and second-generation Latinxs who have come of age in Tennessee, a Southern state that has experienced a surge in immigration from Latin America in recent decades. In-depth interviews with Latinxs who have grown up in Tennessee reveal how these individuals contemplate their identities in relation to questions of belonging to (and within) U.S. society. A shift toward developing a reactive ethnicity is evident as Latinxs convey how perceived interpersonal discrimination coupled with recent national and local anti-immigrant policies drive ethnic group solidarity. These factors influence individual life choices and encourage participation in social and political activism. Such reactions will have long-term ramifications for local Southern societies.