North American Context Research Articles

The need for metrics to measure progress on racial equity in global public health and medicine

The need for metrics to measure progress on racial equity in global public health and medicine

Home Literacy Environment and Chinese-Canadian First Graders’ Bilingual Vocabulary Profiles: A Mixed Methods Analysis

Bilingual children in the North American context significantly improve in English language proficiency, but their heritage language learning varies between different linguistic groups. This mixed methods study was designed to explore the developmental patterns in bilingual vocabulary among Chinese-Canadian first-graders’ (N = 75) and to identify home factors that may have contributed to divergent bilingual developmental trajectories. Cluster analyses were conducted to identify underlying discrepancy profiles in bilingual oral lexicon. Four children with contrasting bilingual profiles were selected for qualitative analysis to explore home factors that may have contributed to the discrepancies. Thematic analyses of parental interviews revealed several family factors such as beliefs and attitudes toward bilingualism, quality literacy engagement, and sibling dynamics, that all appearing to contribute to the discrepancies.

Contested densification: Sustainability, place and expectations at the urban fringe

The discourse of sustainability-by-density is dominant in urban policies and climate-friendly urbanism today. Yet, with current failures and disparities in the regulation of dense development and land speculation, the effects of such policies are not exclusively positive. In this article, we address citizen opposition to densification in urban peripheries of the Global North, especially in the North American context, with particular focus on a case at the urban fringe of the Montreal metropolitan area (Canada). We contribute to existing scholarship on a relational approach to urban sustainability with the objective of better understanding the narratives and governance dynamics that unfold in urban peripheries. In the case studied, the gap between residents' subjective experience of the ongoing transformations and the State discourses at different scales is particularly important, yet little understood after several years of public participatory meetings and two lawsuits. We develop the notion of situated expectations to show how actors entertain different expectations of the performance of State and citizen practices in favor of sustainability, which are grounded in their respective relationships to place, scale and the urban boundary. The lack of circulation and mutual recognition between these expectations makes the construction of coalitions and shared participatory governance practices much more problematic.

Facing the future of transit ridership: shifting attitudes towards public transit and auto ownership among transit riders during COVID-19.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11116-022-10344-2.

Theologies of Labor and the Limits of Capital

This essay explores how theological conceptions of the nature of work relate to the material conditions of labor in late-capitalist economies. It identifies within the tradition of Catholic social teaching a tension between normative accounts of dignified human labor and the systematic undermining of this dignity by the social relations of capitalist ownership. Considering one instructive instance of this tension and the productive insights it invites, namely, Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, the essay examines the different receptions of papal teaching on labor in North and South American contexts. After sketching the countours of John Paul’s theology of labor, it turns to the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez’s creative extensions of Laborem Exercens’s key insights, suggesting Guiérrez’s development of John Paul’s theological account of labor within a broader vision of anticapitalist struggle clarifies the concrete social and political transformations necessary for the realization of dignified work for all.

Zoonoses Transfer, Factory Farms and Unsustainable Human–Animal Relations

Infectious diseases are rooted in unsustainable and unjust human–animal relationships. Zoonoses are facilitated by human proximity to animals, epidemiological risk embedded within factory farms, and exploitation of animals and humans in these intensive livestock production systems. The five major categories of epidemiological risk that factory farms propel include: intensification of production for which homogenous populations are congregated, creation of multi-species farms for which different animals are held within the same farm, long and intensive animal transport increases the likelihood of interaction with other wildlife, ecological characteristics of the pathogen lead to altered pathogen dynamics and antibiotic resistance within a human population through the overuse of antibiotics. Layer and broiler operations in the North American context illustrate these linkages. One Health is offered as a concluding conceptual and aspirational frame for pursuing a more sustainable and just world. This article offers two main messages. First, our relationships with animals directly impact the health of human populations through the transmission and creation of Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs). Second, adopting One Health offers a means forward for more just and sustainable human–animal relations and reduction of zoonoses transmission.

A View from the South: Canadian Urban History in North American and Global Context

This essay reflects on the current state of the field in Canadian urban history compared to American urban history and in the context of emerging trends toward global urban history. It suggests that Canadian urban historians have been slower to engage with global frameworks than their counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom.

Adopting An Affordability Approach to Responsible Gambling and Harm Reduction: Considerations for Implementation in a North American Context

The proliferation of gambling opportunities worldwide, including continuous online gambling, has generated concern over how to protect individuals and families from harm caused by excessive spending. In response, researchers and operators have worked with big data to develop risk-identification models to identify indicators of problem gambling. Such models are generally proprietary, non-transparent, and non-generalizable across games, jurisdictions, or player populations, rendering them impractical as regulatory tools. In North America, responsible gambling efforts largely place the onus on players to control their behavior; however, in the UK and elsewhere, regulations have shifted to a model of shared responsibility that targets ‘affordability,’ the amount individual players can afford to lose, instead of indicators of problem gambling. This affordability approach avoids the need for regulators and operators to be clinicians, attempting to identify disorder. Rather, it builds on existing systems to determine creditworthiness and player risk levels. Using affordability as the key benchmark for responsible gambling, we discuss approaches to operationalizing affordability guidelines in a North American context. Such guidelines will aid in promoting the objective identification of players who are spending beyond their means and facilitate the necessary transition to a shared responsibility model for harm reduction.

Toward a Formal Language of Resonance: Diaspora and Place in the Video Works of Jin-me Yoon

Critically reflecting upon immigrant relations with place in North American and East Asian contexts, Jin-me Yoon’s lens-based art investigates the landscape as a site of diasporic emplacement. In her video works the artist uses a number of editing techniques as well as abstract camera work to interrelate sites in Canada and Korea, making visible the unseen impacts of colonialism, militarism, war, and tourism on the production of Asian diasporic subjectivities. This article examines the formal language the artist produces across three videos: Other Hauntings (2016), Long View (2017), and Living Time (2019), arguing that they function through resonance. I conceptualize how resonance operates visually, examining its potential to counter the representative, extractive logic of lens-based media and positing its use in Asian diasporic art.

An economic and global warming impact assessment of common sewage sludge treatment processes in North America

This study details a probabilistic life cycle assessment model to evaluate the environmental (i.e., global warming potential) and economic impact of four common sewage sludge treatment methods (anaerobic digestion, incineration, composting and pyrolysis) coupled with their most common end-of-life scenarios for the North American context. The model is subsequently applied to a realistic case study where each technology is assessed over a 10-year analysis period based on data made available by a Canadian municipality. For the case study, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion coupled with agricultural land application have an expected global warming impact at least 46% and 60% lower, respectively, than the alternative treatment methods. Conversely, composting and pyrolysis have an expected life cycle cost at least 32% and 27% lower, respectively, than the competing treatment alternatives. Composting is able to achieve its relatively low life-cycle costs through the affordability of the required capital investments; conversely, pyrolysis is able to reduce its life-cycle cost through the recovery of valuable resources such as energy, fertilizer, and fuel. These findings and the resulting tool from this work will aid decision-makers as they seek sustainable sewage sludge treatment strategies.

Language variation in a shifting community: Different patterns of noun incorporation in Modern Chukchi

Research questions: This study asks whether an interface phenomenon such as noun incorporation (NI) displays meaningful socially conditioned variation in the endangered polysynthetic language, Chukchi, by investigating whether speakers of all levels of experience or proficiency make use of NI in a consistent, rule-governed way. Design and methodology: This study compares production data from small groups of speakers of a moribund language. Study tasks include a controlled production task in which speakers are asked to construct sentences using provided lexical items. The lexical items were conditioned so as to trigger NI in certain stimuli (on the basis of verbal valency and argument animacy). Data and analysis: The production data was transcribed and coded for the occurrence and structural type of NI (compounding vs. syntactic incorporation). The results were compared across three groups of speakers: conservative older speakers, younger attriting speakers, and new speakers. Findings/conclusions: NI frequency and productivity clearly differ among the three groups. CSs use incorporation frequently and productively in the expected contexts, while ASs use productive incorporation only in familiar contexts, followed by NSs who make little to no use of incorporation. All speaker groups display knowledge of the appropriate circumstances in which to use incorporation. Originality: This study makes use of a novel experimental methodology in studying several under-researched areas: variation in traditional Chukchi, shift-induced variation in a polysynthetic language, and NI as a locus of variation. Significance/implications: This study contributes to our understanding of the behavior of non-normative speakers of endangered languages and demonstrates that they play a role in language preservation. The study shows that the diffuse nature of the Chukchi speech community is different from comparatively well-studied shift settings (especially in the North American and European contexts) in its lack of a community of use or practice, which presents unique challenges in language maintenance.

Supporting Transgender Students and Gender-Expansive Education in Schools: Investigating Policy, Pedagogy, and Curricular Implications

Context/Background:This article provides an introduction to the special issue. It includes an overview of a collection of articles from scholars across the globe who are committed to deepening an understanding of the experiences of trans students and gender-expansive education in schools. The special issue grew out of concerns about the need to investigate a trans studies–informed approach to addressing trans marginalization that attends to questions of both gender and racial justice in K-12 schools—an approach that is much needed in the field. The special issue also emerges, and needs to be contextualized, in response to the current conditions of resurgent far-right extremism, with its accompanying anti-trans and white supremacist rhetoric.Purpose:The purpose of this article is to provide both an introduction to the special issue and a rationale for its conception. It serves as an orientation to reading of the special issue as a whole, functioning as a synthesizing introduction: a point of reference and lens through which to situate the contributing articles in a dialogic relation to mark a distinctive assemblage in the field both within and beyond the North American context.

Competency Versus Proficiency in Pediatric Orthopaedic Training

As pediatric orthopaedics has grown in size and scope, standardization of training is being considered as a way to ensure unform standards. Competency is the knowledge, skill, and judgment to successfully complete a task, but one that the trainee has not yet demonstrated that they can achieve on their own. Proficiency occurs when a task can be accomplished independently. Defining the standards for competency and proficiency are needed to develop such standards. In the North American context, residency is where competency is achieved and fellowship is a time in which pediatric orthopaedists achieve proficiency, although, for some highly specialized tasks, competency is also the goal of fellowship training. Attaining and assessing competency and proficiency can be accomplished using a structured curriculum and assessments. These do not necessarily require simulations, as observations in the clinical setting are useful for assessing proficiency. Defining the competencies and proficiencies required for pediatric orthopaedics and developing standard methods of assessment will ensure that pediatric orthopaedics fellowship trainees have acquired the base knowledge, judgment, and technical skills to be a safe and effective clinician.

Exploratory Analysis of Mobility of Care in Montreal, Canada

“Mobility of care” refers to the daily travel required to complete care labor such as travel to the grocery store, or to escort children. Though past research has examined the distribution of individual types of household-serving travel, little research to date, especially in the North American context, has examined mobility of care which combines all travel required to fulfill a household’s care needs. This paper presents the results of an exploratory analysis of mobility of care drawing on the 2018 Montreal Origin–Destination Survey. Specifically, this paper explores who completes this type of travel and how this mobility is completed. Findings indicate that mobility of care comprises 28% of adults’ daily mobility. Further, women are found to complete more of this type of travel than men, especially women from lower-income households. The presence of children in the household further widens this gendered gap, though the number of children present does not alter this trend greatly. Mobility of care trips are shorter on average than other types of travel and are frequently completed as part of a trip-chain. Further, car use and walking are more frequently used for mobility of care than other types of travel, while the opposite is true for public transport and cycling. The use of public transport for mobility of care trips is greater amongst women than men, especially those living in lower-income households. Taken together, results highlight the importance for practitioners to explicitly address mobility of care in transport planning, and particularly in public transport planning.

Service user involvement in social work education: a scoping review

ABSTRACT Service user involvement in social work education is well-established in some regions and a new developing approach in others. For instance, since policy reform in 2002, it has been customary for service users and carers to be involved in critical aspects of professional social work education in the UK. Yet, expansion in North American contexts has been limited. The scope and extensiveness of service user involvement are increasingly varied, regardless of mandatory or voluntary educational standards. This scoping review mapped and synthesized literature from 2010 to 2018 on service user and carer involvement in social work education to identify innovative approaches and their effectiveness in practice. We used a scoping review protocol to select 35 studies and assessed the studies using a framework for the evaluation of educational programmes. Although most studies were published in the UK, there was greater representation from other regions than previously reported. The findings suggest that social work programs are adopting various approaches to integrate service users in social work education and innovative research methodologies for evaluation. The implications for social work education and practice are discussed.

Media representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants: a meta-analysis of research

ABSTRACT Media representation of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants has emerged as an important area of research. This study offers a systematic overview of the objects and key characteristics of the field. We analyse 119 scholarly articles collected from the EBSCO database. Our results show that research activity has increased dramatically since 2010. However, this increase was not equally distributed; countries that have received the largest numbers of refugees were often among the least studied. Qualitative approaches outnumbered quantitative approaches, and print rather than TV or online outlets remained the preferred media type. Analysis shows an utter lack of research outside the European and North American contexts and highlights the need for more comparative and longitudinal studies.

Religious Literacy as Religion Literacy: A Response from the UK

Abstract This response builds on Wolfart’s observations on the theological underpinnings of the “religious literacy” paradigm in a North American context by reflecting on the situation in the United Kingdom. Here, it is even more apparent that institutional factors are a bigger driver than methodological factors, driven by the neo-liberalisation of the universities and the entrenched institutional dominance of confessional approaches to the study of religion. Yet it also provides a way for social-scientific scholars of religion to explain the instrumental value of the subject to policymakers and funding bodies. I conclude by sketching an approach to religious literacy more in keeping with post-phenomenological Religious Studies.

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

Understanding Factors Associated with Commuter Rail Ridership: A Demand Elasticity Study of the GO Transit Rail Network

Planners have theorized that transitioning commuter rail systems to regional rail networks will increase ridership, balance mode share, and reduce automobile use in North American cities. This process is currently underway in Ontario, Canada, as service is being expanded throughout the GO Transit commuter rail network. Calculating elasticities is a common approach used to identify factors that, if adapted, may significantly influence transit demand. However, few studies have focused on identifying demand elasticities specific to the current case of upgrading commuter rail systems in the North American context. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap. Station-level ridership data were compiled for the GO system from January 2016 to December 2019. Smartcard data were used to estimate station catchment areas for which land use, socioeconomic, and demographic datasets were developed. Data about additional factors related to station access, service quantity, fare price, and availability of substitute transport modes were also compiled. Controlling for trip type (e.g., a.m. peak and evening off-peak), demand models were estimated using a random effect panel data estimator. This study finds that service quantity, population density, fuel price, and unemployment rate were significantly associated with commuter rail ridership, regardless of trip type examined. Employment density and seasonal variation were also significant, although different signs were shown between models. The results suggest that plans for this kind of transition should include other considerations in addition to service quantity improvements. Those directed toward the implementation of transit-oriented developments, transport pricing schemes, and competitive fare price strategies are outlined.

The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form