Migrant women farm workers in the occupational health literature

Little attention has been given to the vulnerable populations of migrant women agricultural workers. A systemic review in PubMed was carried out (1990-2008) using terms related to migrant agricultural workers, with specific focus on women. Case studies from Lebanon and California are presented to highlight key physical, psychosocial, and cultural risk factors among these working populations. The review revealed a host of potential problems that span from pesticide exposure and musculoskeletal disorders to socio-cultural barriers. Comprehensive exposure-outcome and intervention studies focusing specifically on migrant women in agriculture are lacking. In depth studies focusing on the work environment of migrant women workers in the agricultural sector are needed. Personal and environmental factors that influence health should be considered in any effective intervention aiming to influence policy making and have a positive impact on these vulnerable working populations.     

Social Change and the Gendered Division of Household Labor in Canada

Housework is asymmetrically distributed by gender. This uneven allocation is an important indicator of inequality between women and men. The imbalance is closing, although exactly why remains uncertain. It is also unclear if the convergence has more to do with women's lives becoming more like men's, or whether it is because men are changing their practices on the home front. Using 30 years of nationally representative time use diary data, we explore three broad theoretical frameworks addressing social change—cultural, structural, and demographic—to examine how and why the gender dynamics around housework are shifting. We find that structural factors, and in particular women's engagement with paid work, have changed most sharply as drivers of greater symmetry in domestic labor, although changing cultural beliefs have contributed as well. Furthermore, there have been significant changes in men's behavior. One focal point for this domestic change is in men's and women's shifting practices around childcare. Intensive parenting, not just intensive mothering, has become more prevalent.     

Episiotomy practice in the Middle East: A Lebanese teaching tertiary care centre experience

Problem

There is lack of data on the rate of episiotomy in Lebanon and the study’s hospital.

Locked down? Speaking from the shadows and silence for survival

I write to speak of silencing and the suffering of survivors of domestic abuse in the family courts of England and Wales and the struggle to find a voice to articulate the hardship faced in this lockdown through court. It has taken the whole period of lockdown to find the words, the courage to keep writing, even as tears stream down my face, even as I sit in a virtual court hearing, even as my voice breaks as I fight to be heard. This text is a glimpse into a world that is hidden in plain view, where I will share fragments of my lived experience. I am scared to write but know I speak or am lost in the silent void that I have known for too long. Domestic abuse and the taboo around it screams at me to remain unseen, hidden, and invisible. I keep returning to find the words, as the very real cost of not naming the violence and reaching out to speak through it is too high. The fragmented account that follows is a raw telling of living life through the court system; it is written to share a voice that was unheard in the family law court and has been minimized, side-lined, ordered, and silenced through 3 years of the court journey and the embodied effects this has had. It moves between space and time to show a journey endured. Can you hear me? Will you bear witness?     

Media exposure and the engaged citizen: How the media shape political participation

Media exposure is widely known to increase institutional forms of political participation such as voting. Less well understood is whether media exposure also affects protest, a less institutional form of engagement. This paper examines the mechanics through which this relationship operates by considering the media's direct and indirect effect on voting and protesting, via political trust, efficacy, and knowledge. We make these comparisons by analyzing the unique Jennings panel dataset that collects information on respondents at three separate points. The results show that media exposure affects voting more than protesting and that these relationships operate through different mechanisms. While media exposure leads to voting because it increases political knowledge, it is associated with protest via external political efficacy. Furthermore, while this relationship is causal for voting it is only correlational for protest. The results illustrate the importance of disentangling forms of political engagement when considering media effects.     

The eIFL.net Initiative: Access and Management of Electronic Resources by Library Consortia in Developing and Transition Countries

eIFL.net is an umbrella organization of library consortia in fifty transition and developing countries. Its main purpose is to negotiate, encourage, and advocate for the wide availability of scholarly electronic information by library users from the education and research sectors, professional communities, governmental organizations, and civil society.The paper presents the beginnings, goals, and development of eIFL.net in its five years of existence. The authors outline what it has achieved so far and provide an overview of the main challenges that developing countries face in accessing quality e-resources. Some success stories will demonstrate concrete accomplishments of the organization and its participating countries.     

Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands,Treaties, and Peoples

At many Canadian universities it is now common to publicly acknowledge Indigenous lands, treaties, and peoples. Yet, this practice has yet to be considered as a subject of scholarly inquiry. How does this practice vary and why? In this paper we describe the content and practice of acknowledgment, linking this content to treaty relationships (or lack thereof). We show that acknowledgment tends to be one of five general types: of land and title (British Columbia), of specific treaties and political relationships (Prairies), of multiculturalism and heterogeneity (Ontario), of no practice (most of Quebec), and of people, territory, and openness to doing more (Atlantic). Based on these results, we conclude that the fluidity of acknowledgment as a practice, including changing meanings depending on the positionality of the acknowledger, need to be taken into account. Plusieurs universités Canadien pratique une reconnaissance des territoires, des traités, et des peoples autochtone en publique. Cette pratique, cependant, n'a jamais été considérée comme une enquête savante. Dans ce projet nous regardons comment les reconnaissances varie par institution et pourquoi. Nous trouvons qu'il y a un lien entre le contenu des reconnaissances et les relations traité. On démontre cinq forme des reconnaissances: territoire et titre (Colombie britannique); traité spécifique and les relations politiques (Prairies); multiculturalisme et hétérogénéité (Ontario); l'absence (la majorité du Québec); et des peoples, territoire et volonté a plus faire (Atlantique). Nous concluons que la fluidité de la reconnaissance, comme pratique, est fluide et doit prendre en considération la position de la personne qui le fait.     

Hypersegregation in the twenty-first century

We used metropolitan-level data from the 2000 U.S. census to analyze the hypersegregation of four groups from whites: blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. While blacks were hypersegregated in 29 metropolitan areas and Hispanics were hypersegregated in 2, Asians and Native Americans were not hypersegregated in any. There were declines in the number of metropolitan areas with black hypersegregation, although levels of segregation experienced by blacks remained significantly higher than those of the other groups, even after a number of factors were controlled. Indeed, although socioeconomic differences among the groups explain some of the difference in residential patterns more generally, they have little association with hypersegregation in particular, indicating the overarching salience of race in shaping residential patterns in these highly divided metropolitan areas.     

Racial and Ethnic Residential Patterns in Canada

The aim of this study is to understand how city factors explain racial and ethnic residential patterns in contemporary multiethnic cities. We examined residential patterns among 17 groups in 12 Canadian cities. The results suggest that we should be cautious in taking factors derived from literature based largely on European experiences at the beginning of the last century and applying them uniformly to different groups in Canadian multiethnic cities. Our results show that the residential segregation of different racial and ethnic groups is affected by different sets of city factors. In addition, most factors suggested in that literature do not relate to the segregation patterns among visible minority groups.