Purpose of Review
Epidemiological studies of short- and long-term health impacts of ambient air pollutants require accurate exposure estimates. We describe the evolution in exposure assessment and ...assignment in air pollution epidemiology, with a focus on spatiotemporal techniques first developed to meet the needs of the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Air Pollution (MESA Air). Initially designed to capture the substantial variation in pollutant levels and potential health impacts that can occur over small spatial and temporal scales in metropolitan areas, these methods have now matured to permit fine-scale exposure characterization across the contiguous USA and can be used for understanding long- and short-term health effects of exposure across the lifespan. For context, we highlight how the MESA Air models compare to other available exposure models.
Recent Findings
Newer model-based exposure assessment techniques provide predictions of pollutant concentrations with fine spatial and temporal resolution. These validated models can predict concentrations of several pollutants, including particulate matter less than 2.5 μm in diameter (PM
2.5
), oxides of nitrogen, and ozone, at specific locations (such as at residential addresses) over short time intervals (such as 2 weeks) across the contiguous USA between 1980 and the present. Advances in statistical methods, incorporation of supplemental pollutant monitoring campaigns, improved geographic information systems, and integration of more complete satellite and chemical transport model outputs have contributed to the increasing validity and refined spatiotemporal spans of available models.
Summary
Modern models for predicting levels of outdoor concentrations of air pollutants can explain a substantial amount of the spatiotemporal variation in observations and are being used to provide critical insights into effects of air pollutants on the prevalence, incidence, progression, and prognosis of diseases across the lifespan. Additional enhancements in model inputs and model design, such as incorporation of better traffic data, novel monitoring platforms, and deployment of machine learning techniques, will allow even further improvements in the performance of pollutant prediction models.
This volume brings together prominent international scholars involved in both Western and indigenous social work across the globe - including James Midgley, Linda Briskman, Alean Al-Krenawi and John ...R. Graham - to discuss some of the most significant global trends and issues relating to indigenous and cross-cultural social work.
Belief in divine privilege or God's creation of a volk is fundamental a motif in the propulsion of the superiority of one race against another in the world, ipso facto, the continuous management of ...systems of knowledge, authority, economics, and a 'world civilization' now quintessentially fundamentalist and racially fascist are effects of this deeply hidden and coded belief. Apartheid simply, is a zenith of this supersessionist (replacement of Israel from the Bible with European white) world enunciated since the justification of the commodification and dispensability of black lives. To elucidate this thesis, this article first offers a presentation of Cone's theological grammar. Second, we punctuate the value of self-criticality as an indispensable criterion by demonstrating that Cone was engaged critically in Black Theology of Liberation's (BTL) internal discourses not only to clarify the relationship between Sunday and Saturday religiosities, but to distinguish and distance BTL from idolatrous imaginations of knowledge and history. Black faith oozes from the volcanic, rapturous explosion that dismantles the divide between Sunday and Saturday religions. Third, we make the point about the ghettoization of Cone's theology at its gestation and by this we seek to demonstrate this continuous relegation of the school to residential alienation and nihilism in the battle of ideas. For this reason, the article argues, cracking the "Western code," to break the coalition of black experience with the white power structure, is the space where BTL might have to dwell in the battle of 'New Blood Rivers.'
What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them?   The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate ...American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people.  Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal–Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land. At the same time, they pursued actions to strengthen and bolster tribes, to foster healing, to fight the many injustices Indians face, and to restore the Indian land base. This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.
Being Together in Placeexplores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests and concerns. Grounded in ...three sites-the Cheslatta-Carrier traditional territory in British Columbia; the Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas; and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in Aotearoa/New Zealand-this book highlights the challenging, tentative, and provisional work of coexistence around such contested spaces as wetlands, treaty grounds, fishing spots, recreation areas, cemeteries, heritage trails, and traditional village sites. At these sites, activists learn how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being, particularly to those who are intent on damaging or destroying these places.
Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson show how the communities in these regions challenge the power relations that structure the ongoing (post)colonial encounter in liberal democratic settler-states. Emerging from their conversations with activists was a distinctive sense that the places for which they cared had agency, a "call" that pulled them into dialogue, relationships, and action with human and nonhuman others. This being-together-in-place, they find, speaks in a powerful way to the vitalities of coexistence: where humans and nonhumans are working to decolonize their relationships; where reciprocal guardianship is being stitched back together in new and unanticipated ways; and where a new kind of "place thinking" is emerging on the borders of colonial power.
The paper analyses the transfer of South African literature to the German Democratic Republic. In its historiographic/methodological dimension it presents findings on the statistics of (South) ...African literature(s) translations in the Verlag Volk und Welt (the major East German publisher in the area of contemporary world literature), and on the place of literary translations in the East German foreign cultural policy, as well as in the socialist solidarity discourse of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the antiapartheid movement. Furthermore, findings are presented on the publisher-internal selection criteria applied to South African literature, based on the archival data from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (i.e. applications for a print permit and internal/external reviews), on issues around the transformation and adaptation of literature translated in the realm of the East German Weltliteratur, and on the transfer of South African literature from the GDR, based on the English language series Seven Seas Books. Lastly, the function of this alternative canon, framed within the so-called ‘minor transnationalism’, is spelled out.
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