Ten Years After Oak Creek: Federal Policy Recommendations to Protect Communities Targeted by Hate

2022 was a year marked with significant anniversaries of hate against the AAPI community both historic and recent, from the 40th anniversary of the hate-driven murder of Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin to the one-year anniversary of recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis. These commemorations, moreover, came amidst a series of hate crimes targeting Sikh men in Richmond Hill, Queens, and a years-long spike in violence against Asian Americans - particularly Asian American women - ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic. One anniversary in 2022, however, is both important on its own right as a marker in the history of targeted violence and useful for contextualizing recent trends of hate in the US: the 10-year remembrance of the shooting at a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in Oak Creek WI.

A Place for Us: Parks as a Social Justice Issue for Asian Americans

Krishnan and Park's communities of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in New York City - home to a 75,000-strong, rapidly growing Asian American population - were the epicenter of not one, but two pandemics in 2020. As COVID-19 claimed the lives of their elders, trapped in nursing homes and cramped apartments, anti-Asian hate awaited them at every turn, stalking them on subway platforms and sidewalks. As these twin pandemics surged through their communities, their parks saved their lives. Their open spaces allowed them to escape the physical, mental, and social constraints of quarantine into fresh air. They allowed them to exist in community with their neighbors. And today, from daily t'ai chi ch'uan and yoga to annual Diwali, Eid, and Lunar New Year celebrations, their parks have become places of continued healing and growth. Here and across New York City, their public open spaces are essential to meeting the multiple challenges they face, from public health to public safety. They must recognize the extraordinary value of their park system and deepen their investment for all neighborhoods, and for future generations. Every community needs and deserves space to thrive.

No Place for Hate California: A Model for Community-Centered Policymaking

These are just three of more than 11,000 reports of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) shared with the Stop AAPI Hate coalition during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many more acts continue to go unreported, making the actual number much higher-potentially in the millions. Reports of anti-AAPI hate come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, with nearly 40 percent from California. In response to the rise in hate against AAPI communities, Stop AAPI Hate introduced No Place for Hate California, a package of first-in-the-nation, state-level policy proposals. Together, these proposals take a gender-based, public health, and civil rights approach to addressing the racialized and sexualized verbal harassment experienced by AAPIs (especially AAPI women) in public, which comprise a majority of the reports submitted to Stop AAPI Hate. Stop AAPI Hate partnered with state legislators and mobilized a coalition of over fifty community-based organizations.

Critical Orthodoxies and (Re) Imagining Scholarship for a Brave New World

Introduction to the special issue.

When the Home Is Also the Workplace: Women migrant domestic workers' experiences with the 'live-in' policy in Singapore and Hong Kong

This article examines the link between the mandatory live-in policy and the unsafe working and living conditions of women migrant domestic workers. This policy has been rationalised on the principles of the inviolability of the private home and challenges around regulating and enforcing labour protections in the homeworkplace but has, in practice, increased migrant domestic workers' precarity and exploitation. Drawing on empirical research in Singapore and Hong Kong, the article demonstrates how the live-in policy operates in tandem with inadequate labour and migration regulations to produce a situation where poor working and living conditions are an enduring part of workers' employment and everyday lives. It contributes to research that has highlighted the gendered dynamics and exclusionary bordering practices that shape waged domestic labour, and considers the implications this may have for the well-being and security of women migrant domestic workers.

In The Wake: Black Girl Lessons on Collective Care

This article centers Black girl leadership as a survival guide in this unprecedented moment of combating two pandemics, Covid-19 and extrajudicial killings of Black people. I recall lessons learned during my ethnographic research with Black girls in Chicago in which loss and grieving was often and premature. This piece is a response to Christina Sharpe's "wake work” conceptualization that challenges the collective care Black people specifically must engage both with our living and dead.

On the Streets: Deprivation, risk, and communities of care in pandemic times

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, public concerns about 'vulnerable people in street situation' have grown in South American countries. These concerns focus on the risk of sexual violence, exploitation, and human trafficking faced by migrants and women in the sex sector. This article examines these public concerns and the discourses of risk that structure them, taking Ecuador and the border province of El Oro as a case study. It analyses how irregularised migrants and women offering sexual and erotic services talk about 'risk' and 'exploitation', and how they respond to crisis, controls, and restrictions by becoming involved in risky activities and building communities of care. These communities are solidarity alliances that connect and offer mutual support to people confronting deprivation and violence. They are not restricted to the household or the domestic sphere;rather, they constitute different forms of 'family' and 'home' building. The article is based on a participatory research in El Oro, a place with a long history of human trafficking that has not been recognised or studied.

Creating Transformative Leaders of Social Justice in Education

Three colleagues critically reflect on their experiences as educators, curriculum designers, leaders, and activists who set out to apply social justice education and transformative leadership scholarship to the creation of a Leaders of Social Justice in Education course. They begin with their background, the diverse change agents selected to build a movement of leaders, and the educational context. Second, a theoretical framework is presented to explain the overall goals of the project and the development of the course. Third, the course curriculum and website created during the COVID-19 pandemic is described, specifically the culminating Social Justice Action Project. Fourth, outcomes of the project are identified, including lessons learned about transformative leadership in the context of social justice education. At the paper's conclusion, the authors reflect on the course and explain why ongoing learning opportunities, structures, and collaboratives are needed for cultivating and nurturing the next generation of leaders in social justice education.

Did COVID-19 Make Me an Afro-Pessimist? A Conversation in Three Parts

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage and disproportionately affect BIPOC, we keep count of the death toll around the world, in the U.S., in our own communities and in our own families. How can we have a "wish to live,” while so many around us die? Does a space exist between fateful (faithful) optimism present in Aretha Franklin's, "Mary Don't You Weep?” and the ever-present power structure, that as Reverend Al Sharpton noted, has always had its knee on our necks? More concretely, how do we reconcile what Aisha Durham discusses as "weathering and wounded,” as we sit in the space of being both and not wanting to endure much more. This piece articulates some of the conversations that we have stumbled upon, worked through and raged against from the space of our collective homes and fatigued spirits. It addresses notions of Afro-Pessimism and the intersection of Black Feminist Theory, the role that grief plays in Black Feminist praxis, the role of Diaspora in the historical imagination, and asks the question, "Did COVID and the state-sanctioned killings of Black people make us Afro-Pessimists?”

Don't Make Them Martyrs: Empowering Children in the Foster Care & Juvenile Justice Systems Through COVID-19 Vaccine Consenting Rights

Traditionally, the law has created only narrow avenues for children's rights to be recognized and vindicated. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed and reminded adults what it means to be in control, and what rights we should have to live a full, engaged, and productive life. Children in the foster care and juvenile justice systems have such little control, autonomy, and freedom. As it relates to the pandemic, they are at a higher risk of contracting the disease as they are predominately from underrepresented and underserved communities. This Article explores whether COVID-19 might be the turning point for a change in how children's rights to bodily autonomy can be reviewed across areas of constitutional and state law. Ultimately, for novel vaccines, there should be a strong presumption in favor of the child's right to consent to immunizations. Allowing children to engage in such healthcare decisions will make them active participants in a system where things tend to happen to them. It will require a revolution in how the law views these young people, but this Author believes that these children deserve such a revolution.

Confronting the Intersection of COVID-19 and Privacy

When I first proposed this special issue in the spring of 2021, I had hoped the resulting articles would be a retrospective—looking back at how we had met the challenge of COVID-19, conquered it, and taken the lessons that it gave us into the future. Writing this editorial now, it is clear that is not what has happened. COVID-19 and its variants of concern, most recently BQ.1, continue to wreak havoc on our public institutions. This is, of course, most notably felt in the healthcare system, but all public services must grapple with balancing serving their customers with ensuring the safety of their employees—and the privacy of both.

Libraries and Diminished Patron Privacy During the COVID-19 Health Crisis

The COVID-19 health crisis has ushered in an era of great change in the way individuals and institutions function. With the contagious and deadly nature of COVID-19, libraries geared their efforts to increase access to and use of digital collections. With the introduction of stay-home orders, the option of adopting full virtual services became the go-to solution as a way of protecting library staff and users. Collaboration with third-party vendors that provide online library services heightened like never before. As libraries reopened at a later point in the global pandemic, library staff were asked to conduct health screenings for patrons entering the library and actively monitor whether patrons were socially distanced in the library. The drastic change to library operations due to the pandemic resulted in the increased collection of patrons' personal information ranging from health information to location data coupled with library records. Much as librarians are traditionally and professionally committed to protecting their patrons' privacy, undertaking activities like health screening in the absence of data transparency practices can potentially impact library users' privacy. In this study, we investigated whether the 25 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members with the largest number of titles held developed or modified their privacy policies in response to the increase in data collection during the COVID-19 health crisis. Privacy policies are living documents that should evolve with the times and thus should be updated or modified to reflect the current realities. We also examined whether pre-pandemic privacy policies, if any, of the surveyed 25 ARL member libraries are aligned with the privacy requirements outlined in the American Library Association (ALA) Privacy Toolkit (ALA 2014). Our results show that of the surveyed 25 ARL libraries, none of them developed a new library privacy policy or modified an existing one to reflect their data practices with specific regard to the new realities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The disregard for such adjustments to their privacy policies violated the principle of data transparency. Our results also show that, at the time of the survey, 4 of the surveyed 25 ARL members did not have library privacy policies.

Researcher and Academic Library Roles and User Beliefs in the Pandemic: Designing the Open-Access and Library Usage Scale (OALU)

We investigated whether individuals believe they have a right to information during a crisis, and whether attitudes about crisis-related information sharing differ by age and one's role in providing or consuming information. We measured attitudes about aspects of data sharing related to COVID-19: researchers' obligation to share data, publishers' obligation to share information, and libraries' responsibility to provide them. We predicted younger individuals, especially students as consumers of information, would report stronger preference for open access to pandemic-related information. A principal components analysis was performed, and two predicted factors emerged: information-sharing obligations and libraries' responsibility to provide resources. Age was not significantly correlated with attitudes about libraries or information-sharing. Planned analyses comparing students, faculty, and community members unaffiliated with the university revealed no differences in their attitudes regarding library resources or information-sharing. A lack of age and university affiliation-related differences can be explained by universally strong attitudes in favor of both information-sharing and library resources, with a greater desire for information-sharing. Knowing that individuals demonstrate a strong preference for open access to information and that these attitudes do not differ between those who are providing (faculty), and consuming information (students/community) can contribute to funding for these resources. This research is innovative and timely, as attitudes about access when information is urgently and globally needed, as during a pandemic, is likely to differ from those observed under different circumstances.

Privacy of Staff Biometric Data in Vulnerable Population Outreach

In restoring Outreach services following COVID-19, Mobile Servcies staff at King County Library System (KCLS) have encountered a growing concern for staff data privacy. A significant number of facilities have begun replacing paper sign-in logs with automated kiosks that record, store, and share a large amount of staff personal, medical, and biometric data. This article provides an example that demonstrates the widespread implications for outreach staff data privacy, and explores broader considerations related to this trend. It shares principles that may assist other libraries in developing guidelines for staff data privacy during outreach visits.

Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism: By Alex Keena , Michael Later , Anthony J. McGann , and Charles Anthony Smith . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2021 . 189 pp., $29.99 Cloth

In addition to this, the Republican Party has used their manufactured advantage to forward policy that increases the cost of voting and diverts money away from public health initiatives, including COVID-19 preparedness. The authors conclude that the inter-relatedness of American politics, contrary to Justice Scalia’s assertion that gerrymandering’s effects are limited to the district in which they occur, means that gerrymandering is everyone’s problem. The authors relay this assault on the foundation of modern democracy with the gravity it deserves, explaining how, when, and why contemporary redistricting has eroded our democratic institutions and the public’s faith in them.

The Role of Islamic Organizations and the Politics of Pandemic in Indonesia : The Case of Muhammadiyah (2020–2021)

The COVID-19 pandemic occurred in Indonesia in early 2020, but the government (state) did not immediately respond to it through relevant policies. As a consequence, in 2021 there was an explosion of cases. In July 2021, for example, the number of cases and deaths from COVID-19 in Indonesia was the highest compared with India and Brazil. The Indonesian government has limitations in fighting the pandemic, and, therefore, the involvement of nonstate entities is important. This study focuses on the strategic role of Muhammadiyah as a mainstream Islamic organization representing the realm of civil society participating in the response to COVID-19. Muhammadiyah is engaged in health, education, and community empowerment and is actively participating through its many hospitals, educational institutions, and volunteers. The various programs are coordinated by the Muhammadiyah COVID-19 Command Center (MCCC). This study looks at how independent associations in Indonesia assist the state in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Science, Rulemaking, and COVID-19 in the Philippines : Evaluating the Scientific Basis of the Motorcycle Pillion Shield Regulation

This article evaluates the Philippine government’s science-based response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the field of administrative rulemaking. Specifically, it evaluates the effectiveness of the Motorcycle Pillion Shield Regulation (MPSR) to implement social distancing and prevent COVID-19 infections in motorcycle back-riding. Applying Max Weber’s view on the necessity of scientific expertise in rulemaking, and using government and media reports, the article analyzes the scientific foundation of the MPSR rulemaking by the Philippine Inter-agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF-EID) and National Task Force (NTF), the country’s top task forces against COVID-19. It argues that a truly science-based approach to rulemaking must be based on sound scientific evidence and consultation with scientists, experts, interest groups, and motorcycle riding public, before crafting and implementing a regulation. Results showed that use of shield in motorcycle back-riding can cause the spread of the virus instead of preventing it, especially in motorcycle taxis. The use of common helmet and the inevitable physical contact between the driver and the back-rider may cause infection if one rider is positive, as scientific studies indicate that touching contaminated surfaces can cause a transmission. It is also an added expense, unsafe, and prone to accident as the shield obstructs the motorcycle’s aerodynamics and balance. Lastly, no comprehensive scientific study and consultations with experts and riders before the MPSR was crafted and implemented by the NTF. Ultimately, this article contends that the government’s claim to a science-based strategy against COVID-19 can remain elusive if it fails to address the country’s lack of a reliable scientific advisory group and if it fails to amend the new Philippine Administrative Code to require regulators to strictly follow sound science in rulemaking.

Dreaming of a Flat Earth : Disease and Insurrection in a Disconnected Age;The Political Sphere of the Twenty-First Century

Since the turn of the Millennium, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the socio-political landscape using the traditional models. Although this is a global phenomenon, it is particularly evident in the United States, which is where we will focus the majority of this article. The current era is dominated by a series of overlapping phenomena, rooted in a series of what we term “disconnections,” that bring into view a new “spherical” political reality. These disconnections describe situations where the empirical, or observable, world differs from the actual, but often hidden, reality. Deriving from these disconnections, the traditional “flat” understanding of political structures, focused on “traditional” axes of Liberal to Conservative and Libertarian to Authoritarian, ignores an important third dimension that we will examine. This third axis relates to issues of rural / nationalist / science-skeptical versus urban / globalist / science-positive. This article explores how this third axis informs, and is informed, by the three most significant issues facing the world at this moment: climate change, COVID-19, and the attempted coup of January 2021.

Neoliberal National Security : How can MSMEs in Indonesia Survive the Coronavirus Crisis?

The issues caused by diseases can affect a country's policies. One example is COVID-19, which broke out in December 2019. COVID-19 spread quickly across the globe. The purpose of this study is to analyze disease issues that can threaten the security of a country. A second aim is to identify the neoliberal response of countries, especially Indonesia. Third, we seek to explore the strategies conducted by the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. Indonesia’s policymakers recognize the adverse effects of the health crisis on the national agenda. Those must be seriously confronted. The threats to health and national security posed by the effects of the virus have forced policymakers to cooperate with each other. The current research finds that not only Indonesia, but countries around the world are threatened due to the consequent vulnerability to all aspects of security—national, economic, and academic. Through the involvement of institutions that are able to build bridges between nations, neoliberalism emphasizes an international political system that is based more on international cooperation and less on powerful interests.

Possible Challenges to the Welfare State in a Post-COVID-19 Society : An Illustration from a Citizen’s Perspective

The essay aims to clarify possible challenges to the welfare state in a post-COVID-19 society and to illustrate conceptual ideas on how to tackle those challenges from a citizen’s perspective. This is based on interdisciplinary studies, particularly the literature survey in English and Japanese. The direct and indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the global community have been examined from a broader perspective. The article clarifies that the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to be far larger and more complicated than those originally expected. The issues regarding possible challenges to the welfare state in a post-COVID-19 society are discussed in the three contexts of 1) the vulnerability approach, 2) governmental policy priority, and 3) social distancing in a civil society. Then, some ideas are illustrated from a citizen’s perspective. Through the discussion, it can be assumed that the government of each welfare state will make its best endeavors to respond to the requests of citizens but will face challenges that cannot be resolved easily with respect to the national budget, skilled human resources, technology, information, and so on. International cooperation among states would be of paramount importance to cope with a global issue like the COVID-19 pandemic. Another important aspect to bear in mind is that the future will be created by people in civil society embracing universal values and social ethics while maintaining a good relationship with the government. When facing inexperienced challenges, good citizenship in civil society would be a starting point because governments, parliaments, and courts cannot respond to sudden challenges. Individuals may take actions to express their ideas where the information technology of social networking services has developed.