Refugees: A Very Short Introduction

Refugees: A Very Short Introduction explores the causes and impact of today's refugee crises for receiving states and societies, for global order, and for refugees themselves. Refugees and other forced migrants are one of the great challenges in the world today. All over the globe people leave their home countries to escape war, natural disasters, and cultural and political oppression. Unfortunately, despite many years of experience, the international community struggles to provide an adequate response to this vast population in need. This VSI discusses the need to understand the realities of the contemporary refugee situation in order to best respond to current and future challenges.

Intellectual Property and Cultural Heritage: Towards Interdisciplinarity

The laws governing intellectual property (IP) and cultural heritage, respectively, belong to different parts of the legal order. Intellectual property law, while usually depending on a discourse that either privileges certain types of cultural or innovative outputs or celebrates their importance for our collective life, grants private property rights over certain types of artefacts. Cultural heritage law, on the other hand, is about state, public, and/or community rights and interests over certain types of artefacts. As the positive legal order understands the world, the two sets of law have nothing, or almost nothing, to do with each other. However, the link between the two exists as a consequence of the overlapping application of these two regimes to certain artefacts, such as the heritage of Indigenous Peoples. In this limited context, community struggles allied with innovative legal scholarship and some welcome institutional and judicial activism have opened up a small space in the positivist framework that recognizes a relationship between intellectual property law and the protection of heritage. The use of interdisciplinary perspectives has been critical in this process, as they have also been in the subsequent development of this debate to encompass questions around the relationship between intellectual property rights and cultural heritage more generally. This short chapter examines questions of methodology opened up by this state of affairs. It reflects on a selection of the myriad subquestions and implications opened up by, respectively, the question of legal ordering and that of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.

Usability of saliva collection devices for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics

ABSTRACTThere is an urgent need to expand testing for SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens as the global community struggles to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Current diagnostic methods can be affected by supply chain bottlenecks and require the assistance of medical professionals, impeding the implementation of large-scale testing. Self-collection of saliva may solve these problems because it can be completed without specialized training and uses generic materials. In this study, we observed thirty individuals who self-collected saliva using four different collection devices and analyzed their feedback. These devices enabled the safe collection of saliva that was acceptable for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing.

Struggling with anxiety: demographic statistics and an emotionalised American Jewish public sphere

Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community.The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as ‘the Jewish continuity crisis’ are shaped by an emotionalising feature of anxiety. Anxiety serves, all at once, as a tone-setter, an anchor of communal identity, and an object of debate: it sets an intensified volume, assigns its interlocutors particular emotionalised tags, and has also provoked its own fire as an emotional style. On the one hand, the organised community struggles with – that is, it suffers from – deeply entrenched anxieties about how to secure the future of American Jewry. On the other hand, the organised community struggles with having anxiety as such a defining position from which to work towards continuity and to articulate Jewishness. Ultimately, continuity is often taken as a communal struggle, with demographic and affiliation trends, but anxiety is in itself a source of struggle as well. I analyse this double-edged public dynamic, and argue that emotionality in itself constitutes a key component of involvement in the Jewish community. This component develops not only along and against the grain of anxiety, but also against the grain of indifference.

EDITORIAL NEED OF OUR TIMES: IMPACT OF GENOME EDITING SCIENCES AND REQUISITE PREPAREDNESS FOR MOLECULAR BIOTERRORISM

The pace of human evolution has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in the last couple of decades. Never ever before the mankind could witness a global hostage situation by a tiny invisible RNA creature. While the global community struggles at large finding plausible solutions in the information replete era, there are seriouslessons to be learnt. The tiny RNA monster has exposed the vulnerabilities of one the considered most intelligent creature posing a question mark about how to strike the intricate balance between preventive approaches and acquiring the postexposure immunity. The rapidly improving genome editing methods along with synthetic genomics has emerged as a double-edged weapon where on one side it opens newer therapeutic avenues to cure disease, but also its malicious use could results in disasters of limitless magnitudes.The delicate boundaries nature may face terrorism in newer clothes at the hands of nano technological tools to modify genome and synthesizing newer life forms. Unstoppable if it becomes can create man-made disasters with issues leading to emergence of black markets for cloning, designer humans ethnic-specific nucleotide editing for worse and possibly much more. The fiction we saw yesterday is today’s science and can lead the human race to point of no return. “He Jiankui affair” is still one of the genome editing dilemma widely criticized for ethical concerns emerging from germ line editing two human embryos for HIV using Cluster RegularlyInterspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) Cas technology.

Surviving the Depression

Under the impact of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II, the Urban League's social service agenda moved increasingly from preoccupation with industrial employers toward work with a variety of state agencies charged with helping ordinary working people make ends meet during a moment of extraordinary economic suffering. Pittsburgh's shifting band of urban reformers joined and sometimes spearheaded broad-based community struggles to desegregate the city's social, civic, educational, medical, and economic institutions. By the end of World War II, the organization had increased its impact on social policy and social justice movements across regional and even national boundaries.

Indigeneity

Issues of indigeneity, along with mestizaje—racial and cultural mixtures of African, indigenous, and Spanish ancestries and cultures that came as a result of the European colonization of the Americas—are core aspects of Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino identities, histories, and cultures. For Chicanas and Chicanos, understandings of indigeneity have shifted significantly since the early 1960s. During that time, tropes of cultural nationalism argued that all Mexican-origin people were descendants of the Aztecs, and that Aztlán—what many believed to be the conquered homelands of their Aztec ancestors encompassing the Four Corners region of the United States (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona)—should be reclaimed. Today, a more nuanced understanding of Latinx/Chicanx indigeneity considers, for example, the complex politics of indigenous subjects migrating to settler colonial nation-states such as the United States, and the resulting negotiations of language and identity in this transnational space. Scholars of decolonial studies have added to this nuance by analyzing systems of heteropatriarchy (and the resulting gender binaries and practices of toxic masculinity) imposed through colonization and reinforced by such institutions as the Catholic Church. The editors seek to assemble and summarize key sources that speak to how indigeneity works within the transnational and transborder archives of colonization. This includes the differentiated ways that nation-states in the Americas have engaged with their indigenous pasts (including the sociopolitical and legal definitions of and practices toward indigenous communities and nations within the nation-state), as well as indigenous-led revitalization and sovereignty movements that envision decolonial futures. The goals of this bibliographic overview are to provide scholars interested in indigeneity in the Latinx context with key sources specific to Latinx communities and histories, while also considering important works that are grounded in Latin American, US, and Canadian indigenous contexts and histories. This bibliography thus invites scholars to explore the legal, political, social, and historical differences and similarities of indigeneity across hemispheric geographies. By juxtaposing the radical feminism of Gloria Anzaldúa (writing from the US-Mexico borderlands) with the decolonial visions of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (writing from her Canadian First Nation) the disjunctures and commonalities of indigeneity and decolonial thought are highlighted. The bibliography also include some key texts on indigeneity in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Bolivia that discuss places where the majority populations are mestiza/o and indigenous, and yet most indigenous communities, many whose first language is not Spanish, live in varying degrees of dispossession, poverty, and racial marginalization. The bibliography also invites scholars to consider Afro-Indigenous identities and community struggles in hemispheric frames.

Communication Pedagogy: The Coronavirus Pandemic

In this historical moment defined by the coronavirus, the global community struggles with and against a seemingly invisible foe. Students, faculty, and administrators open the blinds on windows in the morning, witnessing the brightness of the sun and seemingly the clarity of a morning welcome. Yet, there lurks, not in the shadows, but in the brightness of the everyday sunshine, the possibility of sickness and death. This responsive essay weaves together my communicative rejoinders to the coronavirus and its implications for this challenging time in human history. I turn to the autoethnographic insights of Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis (2016) to frame the theoretical rationale for a conversation that rests within the dialectic of fear and tenacious hope.

When Academic Success Is Insufficient

Education scholars have long debated ways to address the marginal status of Latinx students. Academic initiatives, such as “Equity and Excellence” and “Diversity and Inclusion,” arose from community struggles to empower Latinxs and students of color broadly. Jonathan Rosa’s book, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, offers an important critique vis-à-vis academic success. This book review highlights Rosa’s ethnographic work around the way Latinx linguistic and literacy practices are rendered criminal and illegitimate. Rosa’s book pushes us to go beyond existing frameworks to theorize new educational possibilities.