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The purpose of this chapter is to describe the climate and practice of undergraduate research in selected Science and Engineering departments at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge (SUBR), Louisiana, from 1994 to 2014. We briefly recall the long tradition of undergraduate research participation and the accompanying mentoring at SUBR. The establishment of the Timbuktu Academy in 1990–1991, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), followed two years of review of the literature in teaching, mentoring, and learning. The paradigm and Ten Strand Systemic Mentoring model of the Academy, with a major funding by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR), have sustained a research-based and practice-verified creation of a highly supportive and challenging research eco-system for selected science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate scholars, one that integrates seamlessly education and research.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper examines the evolution of the core academic leader development course at the United States Air Force Academy. The course serves as a key part of student leadership development integrated into all four years of a student’s education and their roles within the organization. The curriculum focuses on skills, character, and critical thinking in leadership contexts. The desired effect is to engage students where they are in their development and to train them in the practice of effective, professional team leadership within their teams and the larger organization. Assessment strategies such as reflection, journaling, self-assessment, and practiced application of course material are designed to fit into students’ leadership experiences so students apply what they learn in an immediate, relevant context.

For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

Innovation is a key driver of growth in the twenty-first century economy. Organisations of all types are increasingly relying on innovators to create and deliver this key driver in a constantly changing, globally competitive business environment. We need to understand innovation – what it is, how to harness it, why it is important and what frameworks and tools are useful for product, service, experience design and beyond.

The purpose of this chapter to introduce the principles of design thinking and its role in creativity and marketing as well as some of the organisations that are using it in order to spur innovation and how they are using it effectively. The chapter examines some of the results and best practices for how organisations, and their creative leaders, can use design thinking effectively. Last, the chapter provides some insight into the future trends of design thinking.

What insights might attending to the cyclical history of colonially imposed environmental change experienced by Indigenous peoples offer to critical intellectual projects concerned with race? How might our understanding of race shift if we took Indigenous peoples' concerns with the usurpation and transformation of land seriously? Motivated by these broader questions, in this chapter, I deploy an approach to the critical inquiry of race that I have tentatively been calling anticolonial environmental sociology. As a single iteration of the anticolonial environmental sociology of race, this chapter focuses on Native (American) perspectives on land and experiences with colonialism. I argue that thinking with Native conceptualizations of land forces us to confront the ecomateriality of race that so often escapes sight in conventional analyses. The chapter proceeds by first theorizing the ecomateriality of race by thinking with recent critical theorizing on colonial racialization, alongside Native conceptualizations of land. To further explicate this theoretical argument, I then turn to an historical excavation of the relations between settlers, Natives, and the land in Rhode Island that is organized according to spatiotemporal distinctions that punctuate Native land relations in this particular global region: the Reservation, the Plantation, and the Narragansett.

This chapter examines the connections between race and class divisions and examines how they shape racial inequities in the distribution of resources, power and privilege. Throughout history, racial identity has been a key factor in determining a person's position in modern capitalist societies. As such, issues of race and class have preoccupied sociologists and other scholars with diverse ideological orientations. This is highlighted in debates around the nexus of race and class in the production of racial structures, laws and institutions that legitimate and perpetuate the normalisation and centrality of whiteness. This chapter summarises some of the historical and ongoing debates, providing a synthesis of how race and class divisions continue to shape contemporary intergroup relations and social policy. It delves into racial capitalism and how race intersects with other social identities to determine socio-economic hierarchy in many western countries.

This paper aims to contribute to a growing body of work (re)imagining the future for Black girls by calling Western notions of time into question. At its core, this paper argues that all Black girls are imaginative beings and that it is essential that Black girlhood imagination as a mode of future-making praxis be considered an integral component in the pursuit of Black liberation. To do such the author engages Black feminist futurity Campt (2017) and Black Quantum Futurity Phillips (2015) to illuminate ways a reconceptualization of time provides us with an analytical tool to amplify Black girls’ liberatory fantasies.

A literature review was conducted to synthesize Black girls’ freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) across time in an effort to demonstrate that Black girls, despite their conditions, are experts in self-defining their dreams of the future. It also highlights methods that researchers use to elucidate the freedom dreams of Black girls years past.

This paper underscores the urgency in applying future-oriented research practices in the attempt to create a new world for Black girls. It also demonstrates that Black girls have always been and always be, imaginative beings that engaged in future-making dreaming.

The author offers a conceptual framework for researchers committed to witnessing Black girl imaginations and in an effort to work in concert with Black girls to get them freer, faster.

This paper makes the argument that studying the imaginations and freedom dreams of Black girls requires the employment of future-oriented theories that have a racial, gender and age-based analysis.