Averett University is a private Baptist university in Danville, Virginia. Founded in 1859 as a women's college, Averett became a 4-year, coeducational institution in 1969. In 2011, the university restored its Baptist affiliation, renewing a relationship that had existed from Averett's founding until 2005.
Educational institutions in the United States systematically silence student trauma survivors through deficit narratives, pathologizing adaptive responses as behavioral problems rather than comprehensible reactions to violence. This qualitative study demonstrates how centering survivor voices as primary knowledge sources “unwrites” institutional claims of neutrality, revealing schools as sites of structural and disciplinary violence where survivor wisdom exposes the failures of dominant educational paradigms. Through collaborative, dialogic research with 15 trauma survivors (ages 19–24) who navigated United States high schools between 2016 and 2023, this investigation positions survivor voices as the epistemological foundation for understanding how schools function as sites of both harm and potential resistance. The study’s interdisciplinary framework integrates psychological trauma theory, educational sociology, critical criminological theory, and critical feminist standpoint and intersectional perspectives on institutional power. Semi-structured interviews created deliberate space for participants to articulate experiences excluded from educational discourse. Participants identified both punitive and neglectful institutional responses as mechanisms of compounded harm, including the systematic invisibility of students whose trauma manifests in compliance rather than disruption. The findings document how schools actively harm traumatized students through disciplinary misrecognition while exposing the institutional failure to recognize suffering concealed beneath academic performance. This collaborative research generates empirical foundations for rewriting trauma-informed educational interventions grounded in survivor-identified needs, with structural implications for policy reform at the intersection of education and juvenile justice.
Economies of the world invest in ICT with the uniform purpose of obtaining socio-economic benefits. Determination of the most appropriate path of success linking ICT to socio-economic benefits is a complex multidimensional problem that is not amenable to methodological approaches based on a single perspective. Policy analysts and researchers are, therefore, in need of adequate tools for modelling and analysing the complex ICT4D investment problem. In this paper, we present a consistent solution-oriented theoretical and methodological approach that focuses on discovering pitfalls and best practices that the experience of travelling "ICT -> outcomes" path may offer. Specifically, we ask: "What are some lessons that 'newer entrants' (represented by the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)) may learn from 'earlier travelers' (represented by Transition Economies (TE))?" Among many findings is the difference in the sources of growth in productivity between the SSA- and TE-dominated groups of economies. Besides practical insights, this study offers several contributions to policy-makers and researchers including: a theoretical framework that allows for conceptually complex inquiries into the matters of ICT4D and a multi-method methodology that can be used to identify (a) important areas suitable for benchmarking and (b) differences requiring a customised context-specific approach.
The awareness of the occurrence of a new disease involves much uncertainty and the search for answers and also appropriate questions. In this paper we focus on the perspective of public health decision-makers. Typically, they would have a standard set of questions and supporting metrics that have been found in previous disease outbreaks to be useful in assessing the effectiveness of various 'solution' methods on the trajectory of the disease. There may be other relevant questions with which such public health domain experts may not be familiar and/or for which they are familiar but are not aware of methods for addressing such questions when there is limited data. Decision Support Systems (DSS) can be used to facilitate the exploration of established questions and some other relevant questions. Given an initial set of questions, the DSS designer should consider which sets of data analytic methods have the capabilities to adequately address. Some of these data analytic methods may also have the capability of addressing questions that could be of interest to the public health decision makers including researchers. In this paper we present a conceptual design for a relevant easy-to-construct DSS and an example of a multi-method DSS that is based on this conceptual design. Using publicly available data on the CoViD-19 pandemic, we illustrate benefits of the multi-method DSS in action.
Saying the 'right thing' is often a motif, a diversion, and a matter of life or death in Arthurian literature. This paper offers an approach to teaching chivalric texts that depict sexual violence by considering two narratives—George Saunders's 'My Chivalric Fiasco' and Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath's Tale'—that shift stylistic registers as they emphasize various levels of unexamined violence muted or altogether missed by the language of justice. (CW)
The health outcomes of men are significantly worse, when compared with their female counterparts, for the top 15 leading causes of death nationwide. At this time, men are not actively engaged in the health care system, creating a challenge for those managing patients in the clinical setting. The premature morbidity and mortality of men financially burdens the health care system and places a financial strain in secondary and tertiary preventive care that is simply not sustainable. Obesity is a catalyst that fuels disease and is directly responsible for the pathogenesis for the disease claiming the lives of men nationwide.
