Category: Cover to Cover

Welcome to the July 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. While this series doesn’t always feature a theme, this month, we have some articles related to community support and cultural relevance. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Grace Pai (Elementary and Early Childhood Education), in her article “Creating a Culturally Relevant Statistics Assignment on z-scores,” stresses that cultural relevance, if it is to be more than a mere buzzword, must be based on a specific understanding of the students in question. She describes the process of creating a culturally relevant statistics assignment, which starts by approaching the subject matter as a meaningful way to address problems that the students care about. In this case, students used statistics to interpret the response to a question about safety on the 2017 NYC School Survey, in the wake of a recent killing in a New York City school. Students worked with survey responses describing how safe the respondents felt, clearly connecting the statistical analysis they were doing to the process of decision-making. Further, this work led to a conversation about school safety in which students considered how they could be agents of change.  Pai provides thoughtful pedagogical recommendations for developing similar assignments.

The article “Development and Modification of a Culturally Tailored Education Program to Prevent Breast Cancer in Korean Immigrant Women in New York City,” was a collaborative effort by several authors, including Sung Eun Choi (Fitness, Nutrition, and Exercise Science) as well as Jin Young Seo (Hunter College), So-Hyun Park (Hunter College), Minkyung Lee (Santa Clara Valley Medical Center), and Shiela M. Strauss (Hunter College, New York University). To address the rising rates of breast cancer among Korean-American women and the underutilization of healthcare services among that population, the authors developed the Korean Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Program, a community-based and culturally-tailored educational program. They did a pilot study at Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York, which is in Queens. They worked with participants on changing their diets and increasing physical activity; additionally, they created brochures and offered free trainings. The participants responded positively and made suggestions to improve the cultural relevance of the program (for instance, by developing meal suggestions compatible with a traditional Korean diet).

The article “Expanding the Conceptualization of Support in Low-Wage Carework: The Case of Home Care Aides and Client Death” has many authors; one of them is QC’s Sherry Baron (Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment). The other authors are Emma K. Tsui (CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy), Marita LaMonica (CUNY Graduate School of Public Heath & Health Policy), Maryam Hyder (Barnard College), Paul Landsbergis (SUNY School of Public Health), and Jennifer Zelnick (Touro College).  The authors of the study interviewed home healthcare workers in New York City about the support structures they access to deal with client death.  Agencies offered some forms of support via coordinators, training programs, other types of programmatic support, and the union. However, this support was often inadequate and not all workers knew they could access it.  Instead, many relied on personal support from family and friends or their religious communities, or blended support from co-workers or the deceased’s family and friends. Blended support, however, was often discouraged by the agencies for privacy reasons and to maintain boundaries. The authors propose a model of work stress that takes these different types of support into account. Further, they point out that healthcare workers are very often women from marginalized communities, thus, they may be seeking support from communities that are already strained. The authors have some recommendations for worker- and community-focused solutions.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the June 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

The article “Cosmogenic Ages Indicate No MIS 2 Refugia in the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska” was the work of a group of authors, including Alia Lesnek (Earth and Environmental Science), along with Caleb K. Walcott (University at Buffalo), Jason P. Briner (University at Buffalo), James F. Baichtal (Tongass National Forest), and Joseph M. Licciardi (University of New Hampshire, Durham). The article is about the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, one of several ice sheets covering North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. The researchers were interested in improving the mapping of the ice sheet by studying when deglaciation occurred in the Alexander Archipelago, in southeastern Alaska. They sampled bedrock and boulders in the area for beryllium surface exposure dating in University at Buffalo’s Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory. Looking at the northern areas of the region, which had previously been mapped as free of ice during the time period in question, this study found evidence that at least some of these areas were actually covered in ice and didn’t experience deglaciation until later. The article also discusses the implications of this for plants and humans.

Amy Hsin (Sociology) and co-author Sofya Aptekar (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) wrote “The Violence of Asylum: The Case of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the US.” Chinese undocumented migrants are an understudied group, so the researchers wanted to see how the legal violence of immigration law affects this population specifically. While US asylum policies make Chinese migrants more often eligible for asylum than migrants from Central America or Mexico, the asylum system is very expensive and can take years to navigate. Thus, a network of migrant legal services has arisen in the Chinese community, but raids on these services have led to increased scrutiny and a decline in asylum approval rates. The authors of the article interviewed many participants in the system, including undocumented/formerly undocumented Chinese migrants and those who work with them, such as legal workers, teachers, community organizers, and more. The article examines what has been called the “architectures of repulsion,” barriers put in place to make migration more difficult. The experiences of the participants demonstrate how the legal structure creates widely varying levels of difficulty based on differing socioeconomic statuses, as well as favoring certain types of migration over others.

The article, “The Rise and Fall of Dopamine: A Two-Stage Model of the Development and Entrenchment of Anorexia Nervosa,” by Jeff Beeler (Psychology) and co-author Nesha S. Burghart (Hunter College), proposes a model for the role of dopamine in eating disorders. So far, research has shown a link between anorexia and dopamine, but it’s not yet clear whether dopamine is increased or decreased, nor whether abnormal dopamine levels are a risk for anorexia or a result of it. The authors suggest that there are two stages; in the first stage, weight loss triggers an increase in dopamine production, while in the second stage, as anorexia becomes more entrenched, repeated exposure causes dopamine to decrease, much like it does in the case of addiction. If correct, this model has important implications for treatment, as the first and second stages could be treated differently. The authors recommend further studies to test this hypothesis.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the May 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!

This month, we’re featuring the following works by faculty authors, on many different subjects! Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks to the authors who have contributed their works.

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Dan Lee (Mathematics) researches geometrical analysis and is particularly interested in mass in general relativity. He and coauthor Lan-Hsuan Huang (University of Connecticut) have an article, “Trapped Surfaces, Topology of Black Holes, and the Positive Mass Theorem,”  in which they build on Roger Penrose’s work analyzing black holes with geometrical and topological approaches. One of the things that’s interesting about Huang and Lee’s article is that it shows how mathematics and physics work together. This article deals with trapped surfaces (regions from which light cannot escape; that is, they are inside black holes), but focuses more specifically on marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS), which lie at the intersection of the trapped region and its horizon. The article lays out the theorems that have been used to understand the topology of black holes, including Hawking’s theorem that under certain conditions, a MOTS must be a topological sphere, and the positive mass theorem, which has several implications, including that the sources for Einstein’s equations should not behave as if they were traveling faster than light. The authors have shown that this works differently at higher spatial dimensions.

Jeffrey Halperin (Psychology) specializes in the treatment of children with ADHD. He is one of the authors of the article “Distinct Thalamic and Frontal Neuroanatomical Substrates in Children with Familial vs. Non-Familial Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),” along with four coauthors: Rahman Baboli and Meng Cao (both from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University) and Xiaobo Li (New Jersey Institute of Technology). This article is about the relationship between ADHD and the physical structures of the brain; specifically, it examines the differences between children with ADHD whose parents have also been diagnosed with it (familial), and other children with ADHD (nonfamilial). The researchers recruited a large group of participants and use MRI imaging to study their brains. Compared to the neurotypical subjects, the subjects with ADHD (both familial and non-familial) tended to have a smaller cuneus – a region of the brain associated with processing visual information.  Between the two groups that had ADHD, the familial group tended to have a larger thalamus than the non-familial group. This is a part of the brain involved in the circuit of brain areas that manage attention and cognitive processing. With this and a few other differences, the study suggests that familial ADHD may be more severe than non-familial.

For this first time, this column would also like to feature a work that wasn’t written in English! That is, “Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón,” an interview conducted by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario (English), whose specialty is nineteenth through twenty-first century US Latinx and Caribbean literature and culture. She is also the editor of the journal Small Axe. This interview, conducted in Spanish, is with Nancy Morejón, a well-known Cuban poet, essayist, and critic. In this interview, they discuss Morejón’s life and writings. She began publishing poetry at the age of seventeen, and when El Puente, a group that published new writers, published her work along with that of several other writers of note. She studied French at the University of Havana and wrote her thesis about Aimé Césaire, whom she ended up meeting many years later. Morejón’s work was influenced by Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. The interview goes on to discuss Morejón’s work and philosophy, including the importance of multilingualism.

Finally, Kevin Birth (Anthropology), who studies the relationship between time and culture, has an article on the pedagogy he uses to help students think of time as culturally contingent: “Teaching Time; Disrupting Common Sense.” His course considers the difference between conventional expressions of time (calendars, clocks, and so on) and the experience of time. He asks students to think creatively about concepts and representations of time. He uses several fascinating strategies to encourage students to think more critically about time and highlight how time is constructed in a cultural context. His assignments use creative due dates based on obscure historical calendars, leap days, natural astronomical cycles, and the lives of plants, as well as relative time measures (“two weeks from now”). Among other things, he asks students to consider the clock both as a cultural artifact and a machine that can be manipulated, and demonstrates the differences between the length of the hour at different historical times with the “world’s worst drum solo.” The class considers capitalist metaphors for time, scientific paradoxes involving time, and more. In any case, as we draw toward the end of the semester, it may be useful to remember that all our measures of time are arbitrary and culturally contingent.

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.