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Web-based courses are a practical way to engage in meaningful discussions with learners from a diverse set of communities. By gathering online to learn about a topic, learners can form communities that transcend geographic and political boundaries. This paper aims to investigate a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and Wisconsin Library Services, which brought open access online learning to thousands of lifelong learners around the state of Wisconsin. “Changing Weather and Climate in the Great Lakes Region”, a massive open online course the UW-Madison launched in 2015, paired a regional focus with face-to-face discussions at 21 public libraries to deepen learners’ personal connections to the subject matter. Through strategic partnership, targeted course development and marketing of events, intimate local discussion sessions and statewide events provided fora in which Wisconsin residents would explore changing weather and climate with university faculty, staff and students.

This paper uses a case study approach and firsthand interview feedback from librarians, library staff and university faculty and staff who were leading the effort.

This paper explores the lessons learned and practical implications from the project and offers insight into libraries and universities looking to engage specific communities in non-credit online learning projects into the future.

This effort was a first of its kind partnership for the University and the State of Wisconsin.

The purpose of this paper is to examine The Chronicle of Higher Education, a leading site for higher education news and politics, and its representation of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Frames are strong discursive tools that can help social actors achieve the following: define and solve problems, shape public opinion, increase the productivity of interpersonal negotiations and “serve as a foundation of public discourse, such as negotiation, on a mass-communication level”. As such, this research is guided by both higher education literature of HBCUs and media framing theories and methods in an attempt to identify potential problems and opportunities for improvement of the presentation of HBCUs nationally in the USA.

This study reveals that when the frames are viewed in concert-funding challenges at HBCUs, status differential between predominantly white institutions vs HBCUs, questionable leadership practices at HBCUs and achievement success, what one sees is an unflattering picture depicted in the Chronicle of Higher Education of HBCUs, as second-hand universities that are poorly managed, outdated and are a drain on the economy. Any one of these themes, alone, is not problematic, but when taken as a whole, their entirety represents a troubling picture – one that is inaccurate because HBCUs have and continue to serve an important role in society: educating African Americans.

This paper concludes with pragmatic implications of the negative findings about HBCUs as well as discusses tactics proponents HBCUs should use to combat the negative depictions.

Profit is often moralized by activists, but scant research has carefully examined what profit is for these activists or how they use it to create a more just world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social movements use counter accounts of profit as tools of resistance.

A multiple case study design, informed by framing theory, is used to trace the framing of profit from activists’ counter accounts to actions they precipitated. Specifically, the study examines counter accounts of profit from the UK abolition movement, Médecines Sans Frontières access to essential medicines campaign and Brigitte Bardot Foundation’s opposition to the Canadian seal hunt, and how their framings of profit influenced change.

Activists reframe profit to create visibilities and bridges to the suffering of distant others. Reframing the calculation and boundary of profit is a strategy to elicit moral outrage, hope and ultimately a more just world. Through these reframings, activists in three different social movements were able to change the possibilities of who and what can be profitable, and how.

The inherently incomplete nature of accounting frames give rise to accounting’s vulnerability to non-accountants to assert their views of a moral profit. Accounting therefore is both a means of control at a distance but also “emancipation at a distance.”

Scholars have asserted that accounting can be used for resistance, few studies have examined how. By examining how activists assert what profit is – and should be – the paper documents and theorizes profit as contested and highlights accounting’s emancipatory potential.