Rewriting dominant narratives of the academy: women faculty of color and identity management

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.     

Identity and integration: The roles of relationship and retention in nonprofit mergers

Prior research suggests that nonprofits are flexible and possess multiple identities, although we know less about how transformative changes, such as mergers, shape nonprofit identity. This qualitative study draws upon in‐depth interviews from 13 nonprofit merger cases to explore factors that influence postmerger identity and integration. In particular, we focus on the roles of organizational similarity and relationships, program and personnel retention, and rebranding. Ultimately, we derive a typology of postmerger integration in nonprofits and suggest that postmerger identity may be classified in terms of absorption, preservation, or creation. Implications for nonprofit leaders are discussed.     

Ambivalent Spaces—The Emergence of a New Gay Male Norm Situated Between Notions of the Commercial and the Political in the Swedish Gay Press, 1969–1986

Within sexual geographies, sexual struggles over urban public spaces are frequently explored. Less common is research on sexual struggles within sexually shared spaces and gay spaces. The aim of the article is to examine discursive struggles of meanings of gay male identity enacted in discussions of commodification/capitalism, disclosure, and space in Swedish gay press during 1969–1986. We trace the ambivalent feelings or the emergence of a new gay male norm situated between commercialism and non-commercialism within the Swedish gay press back to the 1970s. In the article we show how a monosexualization process was taking place in both the Swedish gay press as well as within sexual spaces. We explore rhetorical struggles between two competing discursive meanings of (ideal homonormative) male homosexuality, gay culture, and space: one wider (inclusive) and one narrower (exclusive).     

Media Disaster Reporting Effects on Public Risk Perception and Response to Escalating Tornado Warnings: A Natural Experiment

Previous research has evaluated public risk perception and response to a natural hazards in various settings; however, most of these studies were conducted either with a single scenario or after a natural disaster struck. To better understand the dynamic relationships among affect, risk perception, and behavioral intentions related to natural disasters, the current study implements a simulation scenario with escalating weather intensity, and includes a natural experiment allowing comparison of public response before and after a severe tornado event with extensive coverage by the national media. The current study also manipulated the display of warning information, and investigated whether the warning system display format influences public response. Results indicate that (1) affect, risk perception, and behavioral intention escalated as weather conditions deteriorated, (2) responses at previous stages predicted responses at subsequent stages of storm progression, and (3) negative affect predicted risk perception. Moreover, risk perception and behavioral intention were heightened after exposure to the media coverage of an actual tornado disaster. However, the display format manipulation did not influence behavioral responses. The current study provides insight regarding public perception of predisaster warnings and the influence of exposure to media coverage of an actual disaster event.     

Developing a Broadly Applicable Measure of Risk Perception

Decades of research identify risk perception as a largely intuitive and affective construct, in contrast to the more deliberative assessments of probability and consequences that form the foundation of risk assessment. However, a review of the literature reveals that many of the risk perception measures employed in survey research with human subjects are either generic in nature, not capturing any particular affective, probabilistic, or consequential dimension of risk; or focused solely on judgments of probability. The goal of this research was to assess a multidimensional measure of risk perception across multiple hazards to identify a measure that will be broadly useful for assessing perceived risk moving forward. Our results support the idea of risk perception being multidimensional, but largely a function of individual affective reactions to the hazard. We also find that our measure of risk perception holds across multiple types of hazards, ranging from those that are behavioral in nature (e.g., health and safety behaviors), to those that are technological (e.g., pollution), or natural (e.g., extreme weather). We suggest that a general, unidimensional measure of risk may accurately capture one's perception of the severity of the consequences, and the discrete emotions that are felt in response to those potential consequences. However, such a measure is not likely to capture the perceived probability of experiencing the outcomes, nor will it be as useful at understanding one's motivation to take mitigation action.     

Efficacy,Action, and Support for Reducing Climate Change Risks

A growing body of research demonstrates that believing action to reduce the risks of climate change is both possible (self‐efficacy) and effective (response efficacy) is essential to motivate and sustain risk mitigation efforts. Despite this potentially critical role of efficacy beliefs, measures and their use vary wildly in climate change risk perception and communication research, making it hard to compare and learn from efficacy studies. To address this problem and advance our understanding of efficacy beliefs, this article makes three contributions. First, we present a theoretically motivated approach to measuring climate change mitigation efficacy, in light of diverse proposed, perceived, and previously researched strategies. Second, we test this in two national survey samples (Amazon's Mechanical Turk N = 405, GfK Knowledge Panel N = 1,820), demonstrating largely coherent beliefs by level of action and discrimination between types of efficacy. Four additive efficacy scales emerge: personal self‐efficacy, personal response efficacy, government and collective self‐efficacy, and government and collective response efficacy. Third, we employ the resulting efficacy scales in mediation models to test how well efficacy beliefs predict climate change policy support, controlling for specific knowledge, risk perceptions, and ideology, and allowing for mediation by concern. Concern fully mediates the relatively strong effects of perceived risk on policy support, but only partly mediates efficacy beliefs. Stronger government and collective response efficacy beliefs and personal self‐efficacy beliefs are both directly and indirectly associated with greater support for reducing the risks of climate change, even after controlling for ideology and causal beliefs about climate change.     

Homosexual Discretion and Good Taste: Two Rules That Govern Homosexual Sociability Space in Santiago de Chile

Homosexual sociability space in Santiago is not socially homogenous. Beyond non-heterosexual identities segmentation (gay, lesbian, queer, BDSM, etc.), the present article proposes a reflection observing certain social distinctions or differences that come into play to create a hierarchy among gay and lesbian individuals within that space. Using a qualitative approximation, we analyze the discourse of homosexual men and women about ways to display homosexuality in different places in the city, as well as some sociability practices used in homosexual venues. The resulting social hierarchy is understood through two central subjective rules: discretion and good taste, dynamic mechanisms that perpetuate the distance among groups within the same sociability space, and to some extent reproduce the city’s class structure. Given that material means to privatize and sophisticate homosexual expression are unequally distributed in Santiago, the resulting differentiated social networks end up configuring the visibility strategies of homosexual identity played out in the city in the last years.     

新媒体影响力对雾霾风险感知的作用机制

基于“2017年中国城市化与新移民调查”随机调查数据，通过已有文献构建新媒体影响力和雾霾风险感知指标，采用中介效应模型验证并探索新媒体影响力对雾霾风险感知的影响及其作用机制。研究发现:提高新媒体影响力，能有效降低雾霾风险感知，而政府环保评价起着显著的中介效应的作用；并且新媒体影响力可划分为官方媒体影响力和非官方媒体影响力；官方媒体影响力不仅直接影响雾霾风险感知，而且通过政府环保评价间接对其产生影响；而非官方媒体影响力仅通过政府环保评价对雾霾风险感知产生间接影响。因此，媒体融合时代下，提升公众对官方媒体使用频率，拓宽官方媒体信息发布喋道，完善公开透明的信任机制，同时加强对非官方媒体的信息监督和信息反馈机制，完善政府风险沟通机制，对现阶段中国环境风险的源头治理具有现实意义。     

孤独个体与向死而生——多元文化社会中《凡人》的身份认同

美国犹太裔作家菲利普·罗斯的《凡人》讲述了一个关于失去与孤独、疾病与死亡的故事。主人公作为一个犹太裔美国人,因其身份的特殊性与美国主流文化格格不入,显得格外孤独与痛苦,这种孤独个体的特性也贯穿了其一生。与此同时,在他的一生中无时无刻不在与疾病和死亡作斗争,体现了向死而生的特点,即在绝望中蕴含着希望。在美国多元文化社会中,主人公追寻的身份认同正是当代美国人普遍的生存状况,表现了普遍的生存困境。     

Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.