Digital Commons Network^™

The Rise Of Hollywood East: Regional Film Offices As Intermediaries In Film And Television Production Clusters, Pacey Foster, Stephan Manning, David Terkla

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

Prior research on project-based organizing in creative industries has emphasized the importance of regionally embedded institutions, creative networks and intermediaries in the development of regional project ecologies. Recently, film and television production in the United States has expanded beyond traditional clusters in Hollywood and New York to new locations in the United States, Canada and overseas, raising important questions about the dynamics of increasingly mobile creative project networks. Using data on the Massachusetts film and television industry between 1998 and 2010, it is argued that regional film offices play an increasingly important role as network intermediaries in connecting mobile creative …

The Dark Side Of The Mooc - A Critical Inquiry On Their Claims And Realities, Markus Deimann

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning

Building on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, this paper utilises critical discourse analysis to examine claims attached to MOOCs in New York Times articles published between 2012 and 2013. Discourse analysis is proposed as a valuable tool enabling the understanding of MOOCs as historically constituted and socially constructed “events” with hidden meanings masked by rhetoric slogans. Noting that language is not just the reflection of social and psychological life but rather constructs social realities, this work posits how both media and commercial MOOC providers have constructed an “education is broken” narrative which states (1) traditional universities are no …

Aging In Place In Marion: A Community Endeavor, Bernard A. Steinman, Hayley Gleason, Maryam Khaniyan, Ceara Somerville, Jan Mutchler

Gerontology Institute Publications

This report describes collaborative efforts undertaken by the Friends of the Marion Council on Aging (FMCOA) and the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging, within the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston). Beginning in Fall 2014, these organizations partnered to conduct a study to investigate the needs, interests, preferences, and opinions of the Town’s older resident population, and the priorities of other stakeholders in the Town, with respect to living and aging in Marion.

In the earliest phase of the project, we met several times with members of the FMCOA to discuss and …

Aging In West County Communities: Coming Together To Age In Place, Bernard A. Steinman, Hayley Gleason, Ceara Somerville, Maryam Khaniyan, Jan Mutchler

Gerontology Institute Publications

This report describes collaborative efforts undertaken by the Towns of Ashfield, Buckland, and Shelburne Consortium of Councils on Aging (hereafter, The Consortium) and the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging, within the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Boston (hereafter, UMass Boston). Beginning in Fall 2014, these organizations partnered to conduct a study to investigate the needs, interests, preferences, and opinions of older residents in communities in West Franklin County (hereafter, West County), and priorities of stakeholders who interact with older adults in various capacities.

Early in the project, researchers from UMass Boston communicated with stakeholders …

Effects Of Video Enhancement In A Stated-Choice Experiment On Medical Decision Making, Susanne Hoffmann, Joachim Winter, Francis G. Caro, Alison Gottlieb

Gerontology Institute Publications

Background. The internet can be useful in administering stated-choice experiments to understand medical decision making and refine the content of patient decision aids. In internet-based stated-choice experiments, video and audio files can be used to provide information to respondents. Quality of data may or may not be affected.

Objectives. In a methodological experiment concerned with administration of a stated-choice experiment on the internet concerned with knee-replacement surgery, we compared the data quality obtained with video-enhanced and conventional text formats.

Methods. Members of the RAND Corporation’s American Life Panel and 50 years of age or older (n=1616) were randomly assigned to …

Understanding The Differences Between Defined Benefit Pension And Defined Contribution, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

In recent years, more and more employers are offering employees defined contribution plans instead of defined benefit plans. Although, there has been a shift away from the defined benefit pension plan, it is important for employees to understand the difference and value of both pension plans.

Each type of pension plan has both advantages and disadvantages. What may appear as an advantage to one person might seem to be a disadvantage to another person. For example, a person who spends all or most of her career with a single employer will have very different concerns from someone who changes jobs …

Understanding The Specialized Language Of Retirement Plans, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

Whether you are a participant in a defined benefit plan or a defined contribution plan, the realm of pension benefits can be tricky and confusing to navigate. Some of the terminology used might be unfamiliar to the average person. This glossary of common terms associated with retirement plans is meant to serve as a helpful resource for plan participants.

It Seemed Like Such A Good Idea: Making Sense Of How Two Schools, A Major Philanthropy, And A Prestigious Teacher Training Program Agreed On A School Reform Strategy That Was Bound To Fail., Brian C. Clark

Instructional Design Capstones Collection

This Capstone project is a reflection on the process through which a major Jewish Philanthropy, two Jewish Day Schools, and a major Teacher Training Program worked together to craft an agenda for school reform and technological progress. That four-month process is carefully narrated in a portion of this document, as is a postscript that explains subsequent events and outcomes. The analytical portion of this document follows, in which concepts drawn from Actor-Network Theory and sensemaking theory are used to make sense of how each institution contributed to the creation of inherently unworkable and impractical plans for school reform.

Fact Sheet: Cohort Differences In Parents’ Illness And Nursing Home Use, Maximiliane E. Szinovacz

Gerontology Institute Publications

Surviving parents of the war baby and baby boom cohorts are now reaching very old age. Given their increased longevity and postponement of morbidity into very old age (see Fact Sheets on parental mortality and care needs), it is essential to estimate whether and to what extent these parents will require informal or formal care. Such care is typically most burdensome and costly if it involves long-lasting illness prior to death. Furthermore, Medicare and especially Medicaid expenditures will depend on whether or not these parents require nursing home care. To obtain some estimates of the prevalence of long-lasting illness and …

Fact Sheet: Cohort Differences In Parental Care Needs, Maximiliane E. Szinovacz, Linda C. Lieber

Gerontology Institute Publications

There has been considerable concern about the availability of informal and especially family care when the baby boom cohorts reach old age (Ryan and Smith et al., 2012). However, as care needs typically arise in late old age (age 70 or later), a more immediate issue is the care burden faced by the baby boomer cohorts themselves as their parents now reach late old age. To assess the potential care burden faced by baby boom adult children one first needs to assess their parents’ care needs. Such assessment is also essential as research shows that parental care needs do not …

Fact Sheet: Cohort Differences In Parental Survival, Maximiliane E. Szinovacz

Gerontology Institute Publications

Increases in longevity and especially increased survival into very old age have implications not only for individuals’ own life course but also for that of their families. For example, if parents survive into very old age they will have more opportunities not only to become grandparents but also great-grandparents and to experience these family roles for a longer time period (the so-called “beanpole family”). From their adult children’s perspective, longer survival of parents also can mean that needs for companionship arising from one parent’s widow(er)hood will be postponed into their adult children’s later years, possibly after the child’s retirement. Similarly, …

Invisible No More: Domestic Workers Organizing In Massachusetts And Beyond, Natalicia Tracy, Tim Sieber, Susan Moir Scd

Labor Studies Faculty Publication Series

Domestic workers across the country are making it clear that, even in a difficult political environment, it is possible to make gains for low-wage workers. For the first time in many, many decades, domestic workers are finding ways to win. They are creat
ing policy change that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers in tangible and substantial ways. The 2014 Massachusetts Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights is the most expansive codification of rights for this long-overlooked part of the labor force ever to be enacted. In one sense, there is nothing new about domestic workers organizing …

Sustaining The Teaching Profession, Ronald Thorpe

New England Journal of Public Policy

Within the United States and across nations, there seems to be consensus that teacher quality is the most important school-based variable in determining how well a child learns. While such an observation hardly sounds like headline news, it is a milestone in the development of teaching as a profession. It suggests where investments should be made if people really are serious about student learning. It also explains why policymakers and the public should care about what it means to be an effective teacher and what it will take to create and sustain a teaching workforce defined by accomplished practice. Teachers, …

Transforming Public Education: The Need For An Educational Justice Movement, Mark R. Warren

New England Journal of Public Policy

Nearly fifteen years after the passage of No Child Left Behind, the failures of our educational system with regard to low-income children of color remain profound. Traditional reform efforts have sought improvements solely within the confines of the school system, failing to realize how deeply educational failure is part of and linked to broader structures of poverty and racism. A social movement that creates political and cultural change is necessary to transform the racial inequities in public education itself and to connect this transformational effort to a larger movement to combat poverty and racism. The seeds of a new educational …

The Challenges Of Rewarding New Forms Of Scholarship: Creating Academic Cultures That Support Community-Engaged Scholarship, A Report On A Bringing Theory To Practice Seminar Held May 15, 2014, John Saltmarsh, John Wooding, Kat Mclellan

New England Resource Center for Higher Education Publications

The need for and value of civic engagement is widely acknowledged and frequently advocated by students and faculty at American universities. Over the last several decades, recognizing the variety of forms of scholarly research and academic achievement has become commonplace on many campuses. The Carnegie Foundation now assesses and validates community engagement as one critical measure of a university’s identity and success. Many faculty stress community involvement, internships, and various forms of experiential learning in their courses and view them as critical components of a university education. Numerous faculty engage in communityengaged research, working with local organizations, local businesses, and …

University Archives & Community Organizations: Ensuring Access Through Collaboration, Jessica R. Holden, Andrew Elder, Joanne Riley

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

In 2011, to further our community-engaged mission, UASC began to focus on working with, promoting, and assisting community archives in the greater Boston area through facilitating cross-organization collaboration and access to informational, educational, and practical resources relevant to archival procedures and best practices.

The guiding tenets behind this continuing commitment emerged, in part, from UASC’s multifaceted collaboration with The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA), a local nonprofit organization established to develop and promote the growth, study, and exchange of ideas among people and organizations interested in Irish genealogical and historical research and education. Our collaboration with TIARA formally began in …

Living And Aging In Newton: Now And In The Future, Bernard A. Steinman, Hayley Gleason, Ceara Somerville, Jan E. Mutchler, Center For Social And Demographic Research On Aging, University Of Massachusetts Boston, Gerontology Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Gerontology Institute Publications

This report describes collaborative efforts undertaken by the City of Newton Department of Senior Services, the Newton Council on Aging, The Senior Citizens Fund of Newton, Inc., and the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging, within the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Beginning in Fall 2013, these organizations partnered to conduct a needs assessment study to investigate the needs, interests, preferences, and opinions of the City’s older resident population, with respect to living and aging in Newton. The focus of this report is on two cohorts of Newton residents—those aged 50 to 59 (referred …

Altered Lives, Altered Environments: Creating Home At Manzanar Relocation Center, 1942-1945, Laura W. Ng

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to understand how individuals exiled from their homes due to racial prejudice cope with institutional confinement. Specifically, this study focuses on the World War II mass incarceration of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States after Japan's attack on the American naval base Pearl Harbor. Under the guise of national security and without due process, the United States government forcibly removed over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and imprisoned them in camps spread throughout the country. This thesis examines institutional confinement at one Japanese American carceral site: an incarceration camp …

University Archives And Community Organizations: Ensuring Access Through Collaboration, Jessica R. Holden, Andrew Elder, Joanne Riley

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

How can a university archives establish a successful ongoing relationship with a community organization? What are the benefits and challenges of such a collaboration? University of Massachusetts Boston’s Archives and Special Collections (UASC) explored these questions while working with The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA) to preserve and provide access to 79,000 mortuary records from the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters. Elements of the collaboration included shifting stewardship of the records from the Foresters to TIARA to UMass Boston, integrating TIARA’s efforts in processing and indexing the records into the Archives’ workflow, providing in-person and electronic access to the records, …

Introduction: Appreciating Difference, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

Are we a narrative nation, imagined and connected mentally, tied by a common history of disruption if not by contiguous geography? Lorick-Wilmot suggests that the stories we tell offer the basis of mutual understanding across distance and cultures and generations. In a reconfigured mental Diasporic cartography, where is our citadel, our castle (not to be confused with what Europeans named as slave castles of Africa)? The remains and monuments built in this hemisphere by iron will and the drive to change yesterday, uprooting it from the ground of inequality, still stand on the highest hill in northern Haiti, reminding us …

Between Two Worlds: Stories Of The Second-Generation Black Caribbean Immigrant, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot

Trotter Review

People have an endless fascination with character information since it helps us to predict the behavior of those we interact with (King, Rumbaugh, and Savage-Rumbaugh 1999). Stories or narratives serve as an extension of this fascination. They help us make better decisions even without supplying immediate information. When we each talk about the past, our stories not only disclose currently relevant social particulars, but also provide tools for reasoning about action—our own and others’. In many instances, the stories we tell offer explanations of an outcome that resulted when we acted upon something—or serve as indirect memories of a place …

Recent African Immigrants’ Fatherhood Experiences In America: The Changing Role Of Fathers, Zacharia N. Nchinda

Trotter Review

This article examines the lived experiences of recent African immigrant fathers in the United States. It focuses specifically on recent African immigrant fathers with African women as wives and children below the age of 18. Its aim is a better understanding of these fathers’ involvement in the life of their children and the changes immigration has forced upon the fathers. Information for the study emanates from interviews carried out with African immigrant fathers in the Milwaukee area, supplemented by my knowledge of African immigrant communities. The categorization of the data uses a construct established by the mid-1990s DADS Project initiative …

Black Is Decidedly Not Just Black: A Case Study On Hiv Among African-Born Populations Living In Massachusetts, Chioma Nnaji, Nzinga Metzger

Trotter Review

Black or African American is a racial category that includes the descendants of enslaved Africans as well as members of foreign-born black communities who migrated to the United States from places abroad, such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Grouping native-born and foreign-born blacks into a single homogeneous racial category may make it easier to track disease and health outcomes; however, it masks the different cultural experiences, histories, languages, social and moral values, and expectations that influence health beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors. It also ignores such factors as migration, which forces foreign-born populations to examine both their traditional …

The Somali Diaspora In Greater Boston, Paul R. Camacho, Abdi Dirshe, Mohamoud Hiray, Mohamed J. Farah

Trotter Review

Our nation was founded on and thrives on immigration. One of the newest immigrant groups in the Boston area are Somalis. They are among the largest of the new populations of African immigrants. While precise numbers are very difficult to determine, there are approximately 8,000 in the Greater Boston area and another 2,000 estimated across the rest of Massachusetts. Very few studies have examined Somalis in the United States, and no studies exist on the community in Boston or Massachusetts.

It is an interesting sociological question to ask how similar the Somali experience has been in the United States (and …

Contributors

Trotter Review

No abstract provided.

Indians Once Roamed This Land…, Mwalim (Morgan James Peters)

Trotter Review

The sun sat high in the cloudless, early summer sky. Jerry held his breath as Ryan punched the gas, jumping onto Route 3 a few feet ahead of an incoming tractor-trailer. Ryan laughed as the angry truck driver blasted his air horn at them as the ’79 Aspen rocketed up the highway. The ramp onto Route 3 didn’t leave much room for traffic to merge; leaving the brave to shoot out onto the highway and the timid to sit and wait for an opening, often to the angry blaring of horns behind them, pushing them to jump onto the highway. …

Panoply: Haitian And Haitian-American Youth Crafting Identities In U.S. Schools, Fabienne Doucet

Trotter Review

In the United States, where race is a powerful factor for social stratification (Appiah & Gutmann, 1998; Glick-Schiller & Fouron, 1990a; Omni & Winant, 1986), foreign-born Blacks find themselves battling the demoralizing impacts of discrimination, racism, and xenophobia on a daily basis. In the school context, racist assumptions have been shown to predispose teachers to have lower expectations of immigrant students and other students of color, to view them more often as behavioral problems, and to assume that their parents do not value education (Doucet, 2008, 2011b; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). At the same time, the powerful influence of …

It’S In The Backbone: Dance From Africa Through The Diaspora, An Interview With Deama Battle, Deama Battle, Kenneth J. Cooper

Trotter Review

Classically trained in dance, DeAma Battle became interested in Africa-rooted dance in the 1960s. She started performing the traditional dances from Africa that spread, via the Atlantic slave trade, to the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. She not only has performed those steps and movements, Battle has studied them, with master dancers from West Africa, Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba. One of her teachers and mentors was Chuck Davis, a leading African American teacher of traditional African dance. Her research has probed deeper, into the field abroad, on dance-study tours to Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and other …

Creative Economies: Using Arts To Revitalize Post-Industrial Cities And Towns In Massachusetts, Anna Price

Honors College Theses

During my senior year in the Honors College at UMass Boston, I became involved in the yearlong Creative and Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship program. During this program, I interned alongside other UMass Boston students at a local creative non-profit organization, providing the staff with assistance as they worked towards achieving their goals. This internship was funded by the Creative Economy Fund (CE Fund) from the University of Massachusetts President’s Office. My involvement in this program sparked an interest in pursuing an Honors thesis investigating the CE Fund and how the awarded projects are benefitted by that fund.

After looking through all …

Service Provider Promising Practice: Job Squad, Inc. (West Virginia) - A Blog That Conveys The Importance Of Community Employment, Thinkwork! At The Institute For Community Inclusion At Umass Boston

ThinkWork! Publications

Job Squad is a medium-sized CRP that provides services to individuals in 13 counties within West Virginia. In 2005, responding to customer demands, executive director Brenda Hellwig and her staff received training from Griffin Hammis Associates to offer community employment services. Once trained, the career counselors at Job Squad found that their most successful jobs were matches between job seekers and small businesses that needed their skills and could provide natural supports. The team then started the Community Economic Development blog at http:// jobsquadinc.blogspot.com/. This is a platform to communicate with employers,