Search results

Studies and programming on belonging in higher education tend to focus on college students’ sense of belonging, but the experiences of faculty and staff are equally important. Minoritized faculty and staff disproportionately report lower levels of sense of belonging and experience greater turnover outcomes. A sense of belonging among faculty and staff lessens their intention to quit, facilitates research collaboration and increases organizational commitment.

In this scoping review, we analyzed 24 articles yielded from three databases (Academic Search Complete, JSTOR and Web of Science) that synthesize extant literature on faculty and staff’s sense of belonging.

We found that a sense of belonging for faculty and staff (1) is often examined without being consistently defined; (2) can be hindered by the stigmatization of minoritized identities (e.g. race, gender and class), exclusive organizational policies and the academy’s socio-political structure remain barriers to a sense of belonging and (3) can be fostered through social support, celebrating professional legitimacy and valuing diversity.

This study details the educational landscape of sense of belonging for faculty, and call for more attention to sense of belonging for staff, so that higher education institutions can utilize organizational policies and interventions to help foster a sense of belonging, which can lead to an increase in productivity, retention and job satisfaction.

Immigration-themed children’s literature can be an important resource in the classroom, especially because some U.S. immigrant groups, including French-Canadians, have received limited curricular representation. Using the qualitative method of critical content analysis, this study aims to examine depictions of French-Canadian immigrants to the United States in contemporary children’s books.

Postcolonialism is employed as an analytical lens with special attention given to the ways immigrant characters are constructed as different from the dominant group (i.e., othering), how dominant group values are imposed on immigrant characters, and how immigrant characters resist othering and domination. Three books comprise the sample: “Charlotte Bakeman Has Her Say” by Mary Finger and illustrated by Kimberly Batti, “Other Bells for Us to Ring” by Robert Cormier, and “Red River Girl” by Norma Sommerdorf.

The findings reveal multiple instances in which French-Canadian immigrants are constructed as Other and few instances in which these characters resist this positioning, and these books reflect the real ways French-Canadians were perceived as subalterns during the mass migration from Québec to the United States between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This study is significant because it examines portrayals of a substantial immigrant group that has been overlooked in the immigration history curriculum. This sample of children’s books may be used to teach children the complexities of immigration history and provide a more nuanced understanding of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Citizens’ attitudes toward police (ATP) have declined dramatically in recent years, prompting many agencies to implement police–community relations programs designed to build back the community’s trust. Such programs are often time-intensive, requiring many hours to complete. The current study examined the impact of a brief (approximately 15 minutes) community relations intervention on citizens’ ATP and police use of force (UoF).

A sample of 104 citizens completed three UoF training exercises (i.e., the intervention) inside a video simulator at a municipal police department. Immediately before and after the intervention, citizens’ ATP and police UoF were recorded.

Despite having relatively favorable impressions of police at baseline, many attitudes grew to be more favorable following the intervention, including perceptions of job difficulty and the belief that police are treated too harshly by the media. While global impressions of the police did not change, citizens came to believe that greater UoF levels were warranted in specific types of encounters, such as when a suspect tries to strike an officer.

These findings suggest that providing citizens with an opportunity to experience UoF decision-making first-hand can positively impact certain ATP and police work. Law enforcement agencies may find that such brief, immersive interventions are useful tools for improving police–community relations.

This chapter offers a conceptual framework to explicate the current configurations of temporary art spaces in the United Kingdom and how they seek to support the interests of artists as self-employed individuals. This chapter begins with a review of the literature on artists’ (temporary) spaces. Next, we present a conceptual framework of the dimensions of temporary art spaces and explore how they support or hinder entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative industries to create and sustain their businesses and their wellbeing. The framework questions notions of temporary art space design that are often taken for granted by putting the most fundamental facets of the space (time and use) under a microscope. It can be used as a basis for future research into temporary art spaces and as a way to design better spaces that prioritise artists and their ways of working.

The purpose of this review is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of financial fraud exploiting the elderly by mapping its evolution, identifying major metrics and discussing directions for future research.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted, based on 434 articles retrieved from the Web of Science that represent the academic literature on the topic from 1995 to the first quarter of 2024. This paper analyses the antecedents of financial fraud exploiting the elderly, the publication trends and the most prolific countries, institutions, journals, research areas and authors. Bibliometric analyses based on co-citation and co-words explore the intellectual structure of the topic. A bibliographic coupling analysis reveals the hottest research trends in this field.

A significant increase in the number of publications in recent years shows the importance gained by this research stream. The bibliometric analysis identifies four clusters throughout the literature: differentiation of types of elder abuse; protection of the elderly from fraud; cognitive and decision-making capacity in ageing; and factors influencing fraud victimization of the eldest. The most recent research lines identified through bibliographic coupling focused on the contextual and personal antecedents of financial exploitation of the elderly, as well as the possible impact of interventions. Several key research gaps and additional suggestions for further studies, as well as action lines for the financial authorities and economic agents, are outlined.

This paper contributes to knowledge about financial fraud exploiting the elderly synthesizing the existing literature, stressing that the banking industry has to deal with such financial fraud in the context of a growing relevance of the silver economy.

To investigate the factors that supported inquiry and professional learning for teacher educators in a summer virtual reading retreat.

Positioned within the frame of intimate scholarship, this qualitative interview study was similar to a phenomenological approach (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2009) and designed to foreground the perceptions of the virtual summer reading retreat participants.

This study found that the following factors supported inquiry and professional learning for teacher educators: voluntary participation, an absence of a required end product, grouping participants with similar interests and values who came from different contexts and responsibilities shared among members of the group.

This study provides insight into the benefits of an innovative form of professional learning and the factors that contributed to its success.

This paper aims to explore the accelerations and constraints libraries, archives, museums and heritage organisations (“collections-holding organisations”) face in their role as collection data providers for digital infrastructures. To date, digital infrastructures operate within the cultural heritage domain typically as data aggregation platforms, such as Europeana or Art UK.

Semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals in 8 UK collections-holding organisations and 2 international aggregators.

Discussions about digital infrastructure development often lay great emphasis on questions and problems that are technical and legal in nature. As important as technical and legal matters are, more latent, yet potent challenges exist too. Though less discussed in the literature, collections-holding organisations' capacity to participate in digital infrastructures is dependent on a complex interplay of funding allocation across the sector, divergent traditions of collection description and disciplinaries’ idiosyncrasies. Accordingly, we call for better social-cultural and trans-sectoral (collections-holding organisations, universities and technological providers) understandings of collection data infrastructure development.

The authors recommend developing more understanding of the social-cultural aspects (e.g. disciplinary conventions) and their impact on collection data dissemination. More studies on the impact and opportunities of unified collections for different audiences and collections-holding organisations themselves are required too.

Sustainable financial investment across the heritage sector is required to address the discrepancies between different organisation types in their capacity to deliver collection data. Smaller organisations play a vital role in diversifying the (digital) historical canon, but they often struggle to digitise collections and bring catalogues online in the first place. In addition, investment in existing infrastructures for collection data dissemination and unification is necessary, instead of creating new platforms, with various levels of uptake and longevity. Ongoing investments in collections curation and high-quality cataloguing are prerequisites for a sustainable heritage sector and collection data infrastructures. Investments in the sustainability of infrastructures are not a replacement for research and vice versa.

The authors recommend establishing networks where collections-holding organisations, technology providers and users can communicate their experiences and needs in an ongoing way and influence policy.

To date, the research focus on developing collection data infrastructures has tended to be on the drive to adopt specific technological solutions and copyright licensing practices. This paper offers a critical and holistic analysis of the dispersed experience of collections-holding organisations in their role as data providers for digital infrastructures. The paper contributes to the emerging understanding of the latent factors that make infrastructural endeavours in the heritage sector complex undertakings.

The main purpose of this research was to determine what types of promotions increase Minor League Baseball attendance across all of the official leagues. The secondary purpose was to ascertain the role of other control variables such as win percentage, weather, days of the week, start time and city demographics. The research also includes a grouping of cities through k-means clustering to better understand what types of promotions work in what cities.

Data were gathered on all the Minor League Baseball teams and their respective cities. Regression models were run to test for the role of individual promotions (structured as dummy variables) and other controls. One model specification used city demographic variables, one used city fixed effects rather than city demographics and the final specification used k-means clustering to separate cities into distinct groups.

Promotions generally were found to increase attendance, although there were differences across levels of play. K-means clustering helped with the grouping of cities to ascertain which types of promotions were beneficial when comparing large metropolitan areas to high-income cities.

Promotions were grouped into common categories, although some were difficult to classify (or were infrequent), so a miscellaneous promotions category was included to capture these promotions in Minor League Baseball.

The findings of this research are beneficial to those designing promotional schedules for individual teams. It also is beneficial to the leagues as the findings have implications as it relates to what fans desire to see when attending minor league games.

The originality in this work is the collection of all Minor League Baseball attendance, city information and promotional information across the different levels of play (AAA, AA, High-A and A). Using different model specifications and groupings, including k-means clustering to match similar cities, successful promotions were identified.