History Of Inequality Research Articles

BARRIERS TO VACCINE UPTAKE IDENTIFIED BY COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS FOR INSITUTIONALLY UNDERSERVED GROUPS

Abstract Through a competitive proposal process for a recent funding opportunity, 38 community based organizations submitted proposals that addressed vaccine hesitancy among adults who are members of racial or ethnic minority communities. Proposals were required to include discussion of barriers identified in the community of focus and evidence to support all assertions. Submissions ranged from single employee projects to large collaborative networks, and were submitted from all regions of the US, including both tribal and territorial areas, including more than 45 ethnic and language groups. Barriers were coded by two reviewers and six (6) primary themes were identified: access related to transportation, distance, or time; lack of culturally responsive materials or sensitivity of providers; structural issues such as poor data collection, historical inequity, mistrust, or systemic racism; messages coming from untrusted sources; misinformation or no information available; and differing cultural perspectives. The most commonly identified issues were related to mistrust, historical structural issues or fear and racism (n=23), and lack of access due to transportation, distance, or time (n=17). This group of proposals for funding represent a small cross-section of communities who continue to have significant pockets of unvaccinated persons. While it is possible to see themes for barriers that are encountered in increasing vaccination rates among adults, communities demonstrate extremely nuanced realities, filtered through a range of culturally and paradigmatically different ways of knowing. Success in public health initiatives requires intensive focus on the variance across these different perspectives and careful attention to appropriately focus outreach and messaging.

Corporate Form and Modernism: A Response to My Commentators

This article addresses four threads of analysis that emerged in the forum on my book Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. First, the book’s method, context, and framing are discussed. Second, the article explores why corporate single-mindedness, while a critical component of the corporate form, should not be conceptualized as its intention but as the cause or basic condition of a corporation. Third, the article responds to several commentators’ raising the possibilities of (and problems with) expanding corporate personhood to monsters, fetuses, and Nazis. Fourth, and finally, the article briefly considers the proposal that the book supports corporate responsibility to specific groups, and particularly a responsibility to redress racial inequality and longstanding historical inequities.

“Is it just a little flu”? Producing a news-based counter account on Covid-19 discursive crises in Brazil

ABSTRACT We aim to produce a counter account regarding a discursive crisis in media outlets that, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, already pointed to the intersection of inequalities with a profound impact on vulnerable and marginalised groups. We draw upon the Sociologies of Absences and Emergences and intersectionality to challenge the truth regime associated with hegemonic accounts by “accounting for” news to contrast hegemonic discourse with a hidden side of socio-political reality. Methodologically, we retrieved 235 news – from March 11th to April 16th, 2020 – from seven Brazilian media vehicles to reveal, through thematic analysis, a discursive crisis with four opposing quadrants. We argue that alternative media had a critical role in highlighting the impacts of what we understand as necropolitical policies by (i) exposing the suffering of those doomed to non-existence in the hegemonic discourse; (ii) amplifying voices undertaken by vulnerable and marginalised people and activities of social groups aiming to resist. Exploring the discursive crisis allowed us to amplify the (re)emergence attempts that fought necropolitics with implications for rethinking the role of accounting in unequal contexts. In conclusion, our counter account revealed how historical inequalities and the growth of neoliberal conservatism sustained a flagrant loss of rights during the pandemic as a gendered and racialised crisis in Brazil. We contribute to the existing literature by connecting accounting’s potential of communicating/constructing realities and the need for alternative accounts based on the Sociologies of Absences and Emergences.

From "noble" to "ugly" but "well-worked" fish-food morals in the Breton fish landings.

Fishing and fish consumption have historically been marked by criteria of social distinction. The historical inequalities between those who consume noble fish and those who consume other more popular fish tend to revolve around the question of the freshness of the product and the quality of the fisherman's work, considered as a singular kind of artisan. The economic and ecological injunctions tend to still be linked to a capitalist grid of vision of the world, and this article aims at deconstructing them. I use ethnography to understand how food morals and food justice are at stake along the fish supply chain.

Coalition-In-Progress

For institutional survivors and their younger peers labelled/with intellectual disability, the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns carry over past experiences under government-directed isolation and mandatory medical interventions. The sudden convergence of past and present necropolitical ableism in labeled persons' lives colours this crisis, as we—a group of survivors, younger labeled people (who have not lived in institutions), and researcher/allies—attempt to simply stay in touch amid digital divides that cut off our once vibrant, interdependent in-person activities. No longer able to gather, and with limited Internet (or no) access, we resist social abandonment through phone calls. During phone conversations we discuss the affective contours of this time: grief over the past, loss of agency, restrictive rules in group homes, the dynamics of protest, fear sparked by public health orders, and a mix of anxiety and hope about the future. Taking this telephone-based dialogue as evidence of our lives in these times, we present a brief body of collectively written found poetry, a form of poetic inquiry composed of phone call snippets. This piece, coauthored by twenty members of the 'DiStory: Disability Then and Now' project in Toronto, Canada, offers a snapshot of coalition-in-process, keeping in touch amid a crisis that threatens our togetherness and—for some more than others—our lives. Following Braidotti, we couch this found poetry in a brief commentary on our slow, in-progress attempt to 'co-construct a different platform of becoming' with one another amid a divergence of historical and contemporary inequities.

Income inequality in an industrial city during the great levelling: micro level evidence from malmö, 1900–1950

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate on historical income inequality, and especially on the decrease in inequality found in industrialised countries during the first half of the twentieth century. We use new archival individual – and household-level data for taxpayers in Sweden's third-largest city, Malmö, from 1900 to 1950. Previous research has established that Sweden had a distinctive downturn in income inequality during the first half of the twentieth century, and explanations have not the least focused on capital incomes and taxes. With our original data we shed light on what happened to working-class and middle-class incomes, and show the importance of job upgrading of the working-class, the decline of domestic service and women's enhanced position on the labour market, and declining market incomes for top income earners in changing Malmö’s income distribution. We compare pre-tax and post-tax distributions, and the distribution on the individual level and the household level. With the new micro data, a richer account of income growth and income distribution in twentieth century Sweden is provided.

A Call to Disrupt Heteronormativity and Cisnormativity in Physical Therapy: Perspectives of 2SLGBTQIPA+ Participants on Future Directions for PT Curricula.

To explore the perspectives of individuals with self-reported expertise and/or lived experiences regarding aspects of 2SLGBTQIPA+ health that should be included in pre-licensure physical therapy (PT) curricula across Canada, including how, when, and by whom this content should be delivered. We conducted a critical qualitative, cross-sectional study with semi-structured virtual interviews. We analyzed participants' perspectives thematically using the DEPICT method. Thirteen participants across Canada with a variety of gender identities and sexual orientations were interviewed. Participants described how transformative change on 2SLGBTQIPA+ issues in PT requires an approach that is based on interrupting heteronormativity and cisnormativity in PT curricula. Participants explained how this could be achieved by (1) emphasizing both historical inequities and present-day considerations for safe and inclusive practice, (2) introducing the content early and integrating it throughout the programme using a variety of large- and small-group sessions, and (3) including 2SLGBTQIPA+ individuals in content delivery and creation. This study brings attention to the need for the PT profession to understand how the pervasive social structures of heteronormativity and cisnormativity shape education and practice, and offer strategies for disrupting complicity with these systems of inequality.

TikTok and the translingual practices of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong

Recognizing the immense popularity of TikTok among the over 200,000 Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, this paper examines the translingual practices of these migrants from the Global South on a social media platform known for its act out memes, dance and lip-synch videos. Drawing on data from interviews and the multimodal discourse analysis of TikTok profiles, videos and captions, it pays particular attention to how recognizing these practices not as exotic or creative transgressions but as ordinary or normative (Agha, 2007) can enable a critical understanding of the lived experiences of these transnationals. Findings show that as they move across social media platforms and make linguistic and semiotic choices involving practical and material considerations, they perform moments of interaction or “small things” (Blommaert, 2019) online that are not unlike their mundane, offline counterparts. Moving across languages online is a way for users to negotiate multiple identities, position others, address diverse audiences, and signal group affiliations. By examining translingual interactions on social media as normative but negotiated across different orders of indexicality, this paper asserts that such reframing can draw attention to historical and material inequalities and modes of exclusion online.

Unpacking COVID-19 and conspiracy theories in the UK black community.

Conspiracy theories are associated with significant COVID-19 health consequences including lower engagement with protective behaviours. This study uses sensemaking theory, a process of constructing meanings through interpersonal exchanges that enable people to interpret their world to explain the theoretical process underlying the development of conspiratorial beliefs around COVID-19 within Black African and Caribbean communities in the UK. Qualitative, in-depth interviews were used. Twenty-eight members of the communities were recruited: semi-structured interviews were analysed using grounded theory. Our findings provide an explanation of how an environment of crisis combined with current and historical mistrust, perceived injustice and inequality provided a context in which alternative conspiracy narratives could thrive. The nature of these conspiratorial beliefs made more sense to many of our respondent's than institutional sources (such as the UK Government). Critically, these alternative beliefs helped respondents shape their decision-making, leading to non-engagement with COVID protective behaviours. We conclude that the uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with historical and contemporary perceived injustice and mistrust, and a lack of specific identity-aligned messaging, created a perfect environment for conspiratorial sense-making to thrive. This alternative sensemaking was inconsistent with the health-protection messaging espoused by the Government. To ensure all groups in society are protected, and for health promotion messages to take purchase, the experiences of different target audiences must be taken into account, with sensemaking anchored in lived experience.

Understanding subjective inequality in China

Abstract Rising income inequality is a critical global problem that has rapidly accelerated over the past two decades. Yet most people in China are misinformed about inequality because of the government’s control over media via propaganda and censorship. This paper examines how rising inequality is perceived, publicized, and interpreted in contemporary China, where reporting on inequality is actively framed and consumed in the interests of political stability. Combining automated text analysis of millions of news articles and social media data and metric methods for survey questions on individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, and opinions, I test the formation of public misperception of inequality through two interlocking processes. First, during the production of news, Chinese media suppresses and selectively covers some topics related to inequality. Specifically, media outlets under tighter government control tend to cover more news on Chinese political, rural–urban, and historical inequality, and they focus less on educational and economic inequality and western politics. Second, Chinese media also affects individuals’ perceptions about inequality during the consumption of news. Users of state-owned media tend to underestimate the level of inequality compared with users of marketized or social media. These findings call attention to the political roots of the gap between real and perceived inequality.

THE LEGALITIES OF MANDATORY COVID-19 VACCINATION AT UNIVERSITIES: LESSONS TO BE LEARNT FROM Klaassen v Trustees of Indiana University (No. 1:21-CV-238 DRL, N.D. Ind.)

The Covid-19 pandemic, which started in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has continued to wreak havoc and has changed humanity forever. The Higher Education sector, like many others, has not been spared. In an effort to save the academic year and ensure that some teaching and learning could take place in a safe and secure environment, many tertiary institutions in South Africa and other parts of the world transitioned to online education. There is no doubt that online learning promotes rich learning and understanding, and it is an effective modality for teaching both concepts and skills in most disciplines. Online education has enabled many tertiary institutions to become innovative in the way students learn and academics teach, while also overcoming the constraints of space, time and distance. However, the shift to remote learning has also unmasked historical, geospatial and economic inequalities that permeate the world in which students live. Challenges include the digital divide, lack of technical support, poor learning environments, conditions at home, and lack of assets (among others), resulting in many student organisations in Africa and South Africa rejecting online teaching, with some viewing it as “an unaffordable, impractical and an elitist solution” to COVID-19. With the realisation that COVID-19 is here to stay for a while, and many students complaining about the difficulties posed by online learning from home, it seems inevitable that many universities in South Africa have already or may in future consider expediting the return of students to campus. However, to open fully, universities (like other sectors) may deem it necessary, as part of their planning process, to make it mandatory for all staff and students to be vaccinated. The question that arises then is whether mandatory vaccination in a tertiary setting will pass constitutional muster in a court of law. Students, if required to vaccinate or produce a vaccination card upon entry to campus, may argue that their legal rights, such as their right to bodily integrity, religious freedom and possibly their choice to choose or refuse their medical treatment, may be infringed. South Africa has not yet had to deal with such challenges. However, the US case of Klaassen v Trustees of Indiana University (No 1:21-CV-238 DRL ND IND) (Klaassen) 1–101, was one of the first cases from a global perspective to deal with such challenges and can provide valuable assistance for South Africa going forward. This case note critically examines the case of Klaassen, which is a landmark case dealing with the issue of mandatory vaccinations for students within a university setting. It is hoped that the case will provide guidance to universities in drafting policy documents surrounding mandatory vaccination, as well as in dealing with possible legal challenges in future.

Traditional capoeira street circles in Florianópolis (Southern Brazil): impacts of the covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Capoeira is a cultural manifestation of Afro-Brazilian origin, born during the slavery period in Brazil. Its practice developed historically on the street, on the margins of Brazilian society, giving new meaning to spaces almost always understood only as places of passage or transition. Capoeira has manifested itself in traditional capoeira street circles in Florianópolis (Southern Brazil) for over 30 years, representing possibilities of playful and leisure moments for practitioners, resistant to established historical inequalities. With the covid-19 pandemic and indications for social distancing, the configurations of social life needed to be reinvented. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on traditional capoeira street circles in Florianópolis. This is a descriptive, exploratory field research with a qualitative approach to the data. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants, whose contents were organised in NVivo-12 software and analysed using content analysis, considering the framework of leisure studies and Southern Epistemologies. This study confirmed the impossibility of carrying out the circles in person, resulting in difficulties faced by participants, with different reverberations in their lives. The research highlights the importance of turning to the manifestations and social actors made invisible throughout history, doubly disadvantaged during the current scenario.

From the Editor

The Fall 2022 issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies brings together a series of articles investigating historical and contemporary inequalities in Appalachia. We open with a historical account of how specific forms of anti-Blackness through industrialization and de-industrialization have influenced the contemporary impression of Appalachia as a primarily white space. Drawing on the scholarly traditions of Black geographies and Black Studies, Gabe Schwartzman traces the impact of residential and labor segregation, unequal exposures to environmental hazards, and the pull of more promising places on the construction of Appalachia as a white space, and the discounting of Black space-making in dominant accounts of the region.Next, Meike Schleiff and David Peters explore the historical trajectories of health policy and the community health workers who have in various iterations been deployed as key personnel in public health initiatives in Appalachia and other rural spaces. Due to a lack of access to physicians in rural areas, community health workers have been needed to fill the gap and address the complex determinants of ill health in rural and low-income communities. This article concentrates on lessons that can be gleaned from federally led programs, ranging from the New Deal era to the Affordable Care Act, to improve policy and address persistent health inequalities in rural spaces.Julia M. Miller, Julie N. Zimmerman, Kathryn Engle, and Cameron McAlister conduct a comparative study of rural and urban food prices in Appalachia and how changes over an eleven-year period have impacted people's access to food. Contrary to the popular idea that prices are lower in rural areas, they find that food prices in selected rural Appalachian counties have risen more rapidly than they have in selected urban counties. Economic distress, de-industrialization, and population loss are factors to consider in food policy that specifically meets the complex needs of rural communities.The last article, by Marjorie Darrah, Kimberly Cowley, Christopher Wheatley, Leah McJilton, and Roxann Humbert, evaluates the growth and impact of a National Science Foundation funded project, the First2 Network, in its efforts to encourage persistence in STEM fields in West Virginia higher education. The authors note that although the number of STEM majors in West Virginia has increased, the number actually graduating with a degree or certificate has remained flat. The network has a goal of increasing the number of students who choose a STEM major, and then providing them with the support they need to persist and graduate.The articles are followed by a research note by Julie Tritz, Daniel Eades, Doug Arbogast, Allison Tomlinson, and Lorrie Wright. Their note explores the impact of quilt trails—a form of cultural heritage tourism—on the communities where they are located. Quilt trails consist of barns or outbuildings adorned with square quilts of various traditional patterns that decorate the building and honor a traditional Appalachian art form. The authors present an exploratory qualitative study of how this form of heritage tourism has impacted participating farmers in West Virginia.This issue of JAS also includes a wide range of book and media reviews. Carson E. Benn reviews Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, edited by Aaron D. Purcell; Ladetra Morgan reviews an exhibit honoring the life and work of the late bell hooks; Crystal Good reviews the film Homegrown Foodways in West Virginia: Foraging and Relations with Jonathan Hall, filmed and produced by Mike Costello and Amy Dawson for the American Folklife Center, with support from the West Virginia Folklife Program; Mai Perkins reviews a performance by Sparky and Rhonda Rucker; Amanda Page and Cassie Rosita Patterson review the multi-media site BLACK BY GOD | The West Virginian; Yair Golan reviews Episode 3 of the Smoky Mountain Air podcast mini-series Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music; and Roy Andrade reviews the complete recorded works of the musician Blind Alfred Reed.Finally, I would like to thank everyone involved in the work of producing this issue of JAS: the University of Illinois Press staff; the editorial board of the Journal of Appalachian Studies; the JAS production team: Christopher L. Leadingham, Mary K. Thomas, Ann E. Bryant, Carson E. Benn; and our new media review editor, Matthew Sparks; all the reviewers who generously shared their time and labor with us; and the entire Appalachian studies community.

2.125 A Needs Assessment of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Postgraduate Training in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Principles

The current social climate has brought attention to historic and systemic inequities impacting child and youth mental health. Despite this, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) principles have not been a major component of Canadian child and adolescent psychiatry training. This study reports the results of a needs assessment conducted to examine the state of national child and adolescent psychiatry EDI curricula as part of a larger project grounded in Kern’s framework for curriculum development, with the ultimate goal of co-designing an evidence-informed educational intervention focused on EDI themes relevant to child and adolescent psychiatry.

The Consortium Institutional Archive: A Model for Preserving Memory at a Historically Black Seminary

Institutional archives remain largely a product of affluent, predominately white colleges and universities in the United States. Many schools with limited resources cannot support an archive. The historical structural inequities faced by many HBCUs only compound the difficulty of establishing and maintaining these repositories of institutional memory. The field of archival studies has largely told its history through the lens of white institutions; scholarship engaging historically black archives, especially at HBCUs, remains limited. This paper examines the history of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) and its archives and the ways in which institutional history has been preserved by the ITC over time. The ITC is a federally recognized HBCU consortium of seminaries in Atlanta established in the late 1950s as way to make accredited graduate theological education available to clergy in predominately black Protestant denominations. Informed by research at ITC’s archive, this paper considers the consortium model both as a means of attaining accreditation and a vehicle for facilitating the establishment of institutional archives. The ITC offers an example of collaborative archiving to preserve multiple voices and histories of historically underrepresented institutions and a model of institutional self-publication to preserve and share institutional memory.

Human trafficking and the growing malady of disinformation.

Disinformation has endangered the most vulnerable communities within our world. The anti-trafficking movement in particular has been adversely impacted by disinformation tactics advanced through the QAnon campaign. QAnon's extremist messaging exacerbates gendered, racist, and xenophobic manifestations of trafficking victimization as well as problematic responses to trafficking that underpin historic structural inequities built into the United States' response to trafficking. We describe an overview of mechanisms used by the QAnon campaign to spread disinformation and illustrate how these mechanisms adversely affect the anti-trafficking movement. Given the critical role of healthcare providers in both the identification and connection to care for trafficked persons, as well as their susceptibility to disinformation, we provide several recommendations for the health sector to leverage their educational and advocacy power to combat trafficking disinformation while addressing the root causes of human trafficking.

Restoring trust in research among historically underrepresented communities: A call to action for antiracism research in nursing

Background: Health disparities and inequities among historically underrepresented populations represent a public health crisis. Purpose: This manuscript describes how use of an antiracism framework, an evidence-based approach to addressing systemic barriers, can assist with restoring trust in historically underrepresented communities that have experienced harm by researchers. Methods: We also discuss the necessity of inclusive research teams and provide exemplars of how antiracism research principles and inclusive research teams can be used to mitigate harm and restore trust in historically underrepresented communities. Discussion: Historical trauma and research misconduct have resulted in the mistrust of healthcare providers and health care systems among historically underrepresented individuals and communities. Conclusion: Nurse scientists are positioned to appreciate historical inequities and trauma and to intervene by developing culturally relevant interventions. This work, however, will only happen if communities that have suffered harm trust nurse scientists.

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Freedom As and Against Democracy

In the eyes of the beholder: Race, place and health.

Racial and ethnic health disparities are fundamentally connected to neighborhood quality. For example, as a result of historical systemic inequities, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in neighborhoods with signs of physical disorder (e.g., graffiti, vandalism), and physically disordered environments have been noted to associate with increased risk for chronic illness. Degree of exposure to neighborhood disorder may alter peoples' perception of their neighborhoods, however, with those most exposed (e.g., historically marginalized racial/ethnic groups) perhaps perceiving less threat from signs of neighborhood disorder. The purpose of the present study was to examine the complex interrelationships between people and place by investigating whether exposure to neighborhood physical disorder relates to residents' (1) perceptions of neighborhood safety and (2) perceptions of their health, and (3) examining whether these links vary by race/ethnicity. Using 2016–2018 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data, a representative sample of US adults aged 51 years and older (n = 9,080, mean age 68 years), we conducted a series of weighted linear regressions to examine the role of neighborhood disorder in relation to both perceived neighborhood safety and self-rated health. Results indicated that greater neighborhood physical disorder was statistically significantly related to feeling less safe among non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanics, but not non-Hispanic Blacks. Regarding self-rated health, neighborhood physical disorder was statistically significantly related to poorer health among all racial/ethnic groups. These findings suggest that, despite differential interpretation of neighborhood disorder as a threat to safety, this modifiable aspect of peoples' environment is related to poor health regardless of one's race/ethnicity.

Frontiers of Bio-Decolonization: Indigenous Data Sovereignty as a Possible Model for Community-Based Participatory Genomic Health Research for Racialized Peoples in Postgenomic Canada

This paper explores the manners in which Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous researchers, medical directors, and knowledge-keepers (among others) extend the ethical precepts and social justice commitments that are inherent in community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to genomics. By means of a genealogical analysis of bioethical discourses, I examine the problem in which genomic science claims to offer potentially beneficial genetic screening tools to Indigenous and racialized peoples who have and continue to struggle with historical health inequity, exploitation, and exclusion by the very biomedical institutions which would be charged with the task of ethically introducing these biomedical tools. This investigation focuses on Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) as an approach established by Indigenous communities and scientists to gain access to the benefits of genomic health which, if the field’s promises are true, aims to counter the historical neglect or exploitation by biomedical researchers and institutions. I chart the role of CBPR principals as it pertains to collective efforts by both Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous allies to create the social, biomedical, and institutional conditions to improve Indigenous health equity in the context of genomic science in two specific studies: the Silent Genome initiative (British Columbia) and the Aotearoa Variome (Aotearoa/New Zealand). This investigation contributes insights to social science literatures in health equity for racialized communities, biomedical ethics, Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, and decolonial biomedical and technoscience histories.