Painting Over Racialized Power Structures: The Environmental Injustice of Lead Poisoning in the City of Baltimore
Lead poisoning has always been one prominent chemical issue in the media and in the minds of people across the country, whether through awareness of lead paint in children’s toys made in China, or through cases of lead paint on walls of many homes across the United States (Barboza & Lipton, 2007; Haupt, 2007). This paper explores the latter issue, focusing specifically on Baltimore City’s history and current events surrounding lead poisoning. Drawing upon statistics in reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Baltimore government’s own studies on lead toxin levels among children, I present the disproportionately high incidence of lead poisoning and lead exposure among African-American children.
by Yuka Sugino
Réduire les attitudes discriminatoires par la pratique de la méditation : le rôle des fonctions exécutives
Le rôle de la psychologie était de trouver des moyens à réduire les tendances discriminatoires, une poursuite qui continue toujours. La recherche sur les préjugés représente un champ grandissant dans la psychologie. Jusqu’à ces dernières années, cette recherche a été principalement concentrée sur les attitudes explicites – celles qui sont accessibles consciemment par leurs croyants (Test d’Associations Implicite). Lorsqu’une personne dit « Les arabes ne sont pas dignes de confiance », on exprime une attitude explicite que la personne maintient et affirme. On dit que ce sont des croyances discriminatoires parce qu’elles mènent à des comportements discriminatoires ; si on ne fait pas confiance aux Maghrébins, on ne va pas les embaucher pour un emploi. Il y a donc la croyance ou stéréotype que les Maghrébins ne sont pas dignes de confiance, l’attitude ou préjugé de méfiance envers les Maghrébins, et le comportement ou discrimination de ne pas les embaucher.
by Zachary Reese
Veiling and Vampirism: Imperialism and Resistance in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Many young women are warned to never walk alone, especially at night, for fear that a monster will grab them and condemn them to a life of depravity and abuse. More so, societies have constructed these monsters, e.g. the ‘stranger in the dark alley,’ in order to create a physical enemy that can be vanquished, all in the pursuit of preserving women’s purity. However, women resist these narratives and constraints that society imposes upon them in favor of agency and personhood, defined as freely choosing one’s own course of life This paper will focus on resistance through film, looking at one film in particular—an “American film set in Iran” entitled A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (VICE). The director, Ana Lily Amirpour, an Iranian-American filmmaker, uses this film, lauded as the first Middle Eastern Vampire Western, to critique the ‘women of Islam’ stereotypes that are propagated within U.S. and often Iranian culture, and reverses these stereotypes to make them sites of resistance.
by Ashley Begley
Read: Veiling and Vampirism: Imperialism and Resistance in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Crossroads of Boulez and Cage: Automatism in Music
The twentieth century is simultaneously and paradoxically the most progressive and regressive era in human history to date. While the accelerated rate of technological growth that occurred in this century provided an unprecedented standard of convenient living, it is also accountable for the swift annihilation of millions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Improvements in communication and transportation shrunk the world to a previously unimaginable size, yet political and provincial conflict on a global scale made different regions seem farther removed from each other than ever before. Likewise, the music of this century is filled with contrast. Like any of an individual’s traits and behavioral patterns, music is a product of its social environment.
by Mark Blair
Sequence, Causality, and Determinism: Anxiety over the Collision of Past and Future in Eliot’s Poetry and Joyce’s Prose
Writing in the 1920s, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce were swept up in the tide of Modernism in which the collision of past and future was an ever-present, threatening reality that put both the identity of the self and the identity of culture as a whole at risk of dissolution. Their writing reflects the anxiety of uncertainty over the future and the belief that perhaps knowledge of the future can be sought by interpretation of the past. Eliot’s poetic speakers and Joyce’s prose characters live in a constant state of uncertainty regarding the future they know is coming but cannot see. While both Eliot and Joyce attempt to use the past—through references to old texts and historical details as well as through characters who affirm their present through memories of their pasts—to illuminate the future, both authors reveal that the past cannot be used as an indicator of future fortune, and the only way to find the future is to keep living through the present.
The
by Jordan Javelet
Los beneficios y los desafíos de la educación bilingüe en los E.E.U.U.
Uno de los temas más polémicos en la política de educación hoy en día es la educación bilingüe. La población de los hispanohablantes en los Estados Unidos está creciendo mucho, y existen muchas opiniones sobre el tema de comunicación intercultural e intralingüística. Aunque mucha gente cree en la asimilación y el monolingüismo en las escuelas, los beneficios de una población bilingüe para el futuro de este país y las vidas personales para los individuos exceden los riesgos y estigmas negativos de la educación bilingüe.
Hay un mito en este país, que nuestra cultura es un crisol, que consta de una mezcla igual de todos los grupos étnicos y culturales. Eso no es realidad, porque todavía existe mucho racismo con la ideología de la supremacía blanca, que muchas veces fuerza a la gente no anglosajona a olvidar su cultura y asimilar.
by Michelle Adamson
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Subsidize Menstruation, Period.
Menstruation is taboo. It’s likely that the etymology of the word ‘taboo’ even stems from the Polynesian word for menstruation, “tupua” (Boosey and Wilson 2013:19). Even though it is “one of the most important physiological changes” for women, it is stigmatized (Garg, Goyal, and Gupta 2011:767). In the United States, advertisements for feminine hygiene products, such as pads and tampons, use blue dye to represent blood (Rutter-Jensen 2012:71). Commercials skirt around this issue because it is considered improper, shameful, and disgusting. Billions of people menstruate, and yet, conversations about menstruation must be done in private. Women internalize this and consequently feel ashamed and disgusting; what’s worse, millions of women cannot afford feminine hygiene products, making them feel just as unclean as how society sees them. The cost of these products is a barrier that results in the violation of women’s rights to health, education, work and economic equality, and privacy, perpetuating inequality.
by Zoe Jacobson
“Вечность и равновесие в классицизме”
Писатели эпоха классицизма интересовались равновесием и логикой вселенной, и вечными законами природы. Оды Г. Р. Державина и М. В. Ломоносова освещают и строго определенные правила классицизма, и высокие классические идеалы. Ломоносов занимался наукой, а Державин больше интересовался искусством, но в их поэзии, и один и другой описывали важность естества и культуры. Кроме того, их оды часто подчеркивали контраст между простотой людей и величеством Бога и природы.
В одах Ломоносова и Державина очень живописные и сильные образы. Но более того, когда они хвалят и природу и науку, и Бога, они пишут об их взаимоотношении и равновесии. Например, в строфе 22 оды к Елисавете Петровне, Ломоносов описывает важность наук. Он пишет не только о полезности наук, но и об их вечности: “Науки пользуют везде,/Среди народов и в пустыне,/В градском шуму и наедине,/В покое сладки и в труде.” По этой строфе, видно что науки необходимы для общества, но они также независимы от людей. Ломоносов тоже пишет о поисках знания в своей оде Вечернее размышление о Божием величестве при случае беликого северного сияния. В второй строфе, он упоминает “премудрых,” которые занимаются “разными множество светами,” и кроме того, в стихотворении есть многие вопросы научных и философских: например, “О вы, которых быстрый зрак/Пронзает в книгу вечных прав,/. . ./Скажите, что наш ум мятет?” или “Скажите ж, коль постранен свет?” Когда поэт думает о красоте и благоговении, он одновреммено думает о схеме вселенной. Поэтому, видно, что поэт интересуется наукой чтобы понимать что-то выше, чем человечество.
by Yve Lepskowski
Read: “Вечность и равновесие в классицизме”
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“‘How much I shall have to tell!’…‘And how much I shall have to conceal’”: The Interpretation
At the end of the British version of the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy do not kiss.1 Although this display (or lack thereof) of romantic love is atypical of modern film, it creates a visual equivalence with the proposal scene of Austen’s novel, in which Mr. Darcy’s exact words are transcribed while Elizabeth only “force[s] herself to speak; and…[gives] him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change…as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances” (263). Like the proposal scene, many conversations in Pride and Prejudice are written not as dialogue, but as description of the tone of a character’s response or their body language.
by Jordan Javelet
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Factors Influencing Microenterprise Survival in the Informal Sector in Uganda
The economic sector of Uganda is divided into two facets, namely the formal and the informal sector. The latter is characterized by the prevalence of self-employment, microenterprises, and political vulnerability. Furthermore, the Boda trade exemplifies the features of this sector, as it acts as a major employer but fails to lead its participants to personal development due to issues of sustainability.
by Natalie Clements
Read: Factors Influencing Microenterprise Survival in the Informal Sector in Uganda
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