Borough of Manhattan Community College

Abstract In New York City, more than 50,000 asylum seekers arrived between 2022 and 2023, and K‐12 public schools saw a dramatic increase in the enrollment of students in need of English language instruction. While multilingual newcomers—defined as students who have been in the U.S. for fewer than three years, come from all grade levels, and often are at earlier stages of English proficiency than other groups learning English—were already a common presence in New York City schools, this most recent group of students possessed a set of different learning needs because of the often traumatic circumstances leading to their migration to the U.S. In this Forum article, I share my experiences as a volunteer language teacher for recently arrived asylees in a New York City elementary school, including interviews with teachers who were working directly with students who had recently experienced trauma. I argue for a more thorough understanding of how forced migration can impact language acquisition as well as greater support for teachers at all levels to view language instruction through a trauma‐informed lens, thus ensuring that curriculum and pedagogy can best meet the unique needs of their students.

This volume showcases the research, teaching, and community engagement of fellows from the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship program, which from 2018 to 2025 supported 110 faculty across 61 institutions. Edited by Carmen Carrasquillo (San Diego Miramar College) and Brian Stipelman (Frederick Community College), the collection highlights the challenges and opportunities faced by two-year-college scholars, documenting how they integrate research into the classroom and serve diverse student communities. More than a record of individual projects, the publication celebrates the vital role of community college faculty as teacher-scholars whose contributions enrich the humanities and higher education at large.

Abstract As the long eighteenth century brought forth a new wave of secular ethics, Daniel Defoe expressed serious concern about a particular figure who was losing status among the intellectual elite: the Devil. In his Political History of the Devil, Defoe insists that waning belief in the Devil was a slippery slope toward atheism. How Defoe chose to represent the Devil in his novels could potentially have serious cultural ramifications, helping to shape the modern concept of the Tempter as well as social discourses about the origin of evil. And yet, in Roxana, the ontological status of the Devil remains uncertain: is he there, or not there? This question is not one we would ask of earlier portrayals, such as Milton's Satan, but one we must ask of Defoe's Devil, who never physically appears in person, but seems to operate as an unseen, internal force, tempting Roxana from within her own mind. No more than an eerie absent-presence, Defoe's Devil is far more strange and subtle than earlier representations. In this essay, I examine the generic concerns surrounding the Devil's complicated ontological status in the novel—how Defoe depicted the form of the Devil in a genre dedicated to empirical realism. Most scholars have cast the Devil as a mere metaphor for Roxana's evil impulses, thus denying satanic presence altogether. But given Defoe's professed anxiety about the Devil's erasure from modern culture, I argue that Roxana may be tempted by a very real and literal Devil, one that is more metaphysical than metaphorical, and that marks a distinct shift in literary representation from the age of Milton to that of Defoe.

Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop’s embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi’s underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya’s sociopolitical landscape.

ABSTRACT This Practice Note is an interview with leading Circle‐keepers Kay Pranis and Becky McCammon about their experiences facilitating Talking Circles virtually during COVID. They describe their respective leaps into the unknown of online Circle to meet peoples' need for community at a time when we could not gather together in person and how they each managed during that time of uncertainty. The conversation was edited for length and clarity in which they discussed the needs of restorative justice practitioners and others for relational support and how they worked to meet the need. What they both learned is that while there were some challenges, there were also many unanticipated opportunities and benefits discovered in the process of adapting to virtual Circles. This retrospective interview documents how practitioners adapted quickly during a pandemic in response to the need to be in the community when we could not meet in person.

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are a promising source of the binary black hole (BBH) mergers observed in gravitational waves with LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK). Constraining the AGN channel allows us to limit AGN parameter space (disk density, size, average lifetime) and nuclear star cluster (NSC) parameter space. Constraints on AGN and NSCs have implications for $\Lambda$CDM models of AGN feedback and models of AGN-driven SMBH merger and growth. Here we present several qualitative studies of the AGN channel using new public, open-source, fast, reproducible code \texttt{McFACTS}\footnote{https://github.com/mcfacts/mcfacts}:Monte Carlo for AGN channel Testing \& Simulation. We demonstrate several important features for testing the AGN channel, including: i) growth to large mass IMBH is helped by the presence of migration traps or swamps, ii) flat BH initial mass functions highlight hierarchical merger features in the mass spectrum, iii) the ($q,\chi_{\rm eff}$) anti-correlation is a strong test of the bias to prograde mergers in the AGN channel, iv) spheroid encounters can drive a fraction of mergers with high in-plane spin components ($\chi_{\rm p}$), v) a high rate of extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are driven by an initial population of embedded retrograde BH, vi) Both LVK and LISA are powerful probes of models of AGN disks and their embedded populations.

ABSTRACT The research paper is an investigation of student withdrawal in an urban community college that primarily serves working-class students, students of color, and first-generation college-goers. Community college students face a myriad of challenges that are not always obvious to faculty and often invisible to the institutions that serve them. At the same time, community colleges and the students they educate are often unfairly characterized as “less than,” suggesting how little they are understood. Nationally, community college students are nearly half of all undergraduates before the COVID-19 pandemic, but less than 40% of them graduate within six years. Additionally, the community college enrollment decline in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic is causing alarm. As attempts to increase enrollment get underway, this research aims to demonstrate how previous obstacles collided with new complications brought by the pandemic and made college-going beyond challenging for many students. It is the author’s hope that these findings can shed new and much-needed light on recognizing these hardships and that higher education institutions can respond in ways that better support community college students.

The notions of function growth and sharp global integral estimates in p-harmonic geometry in Wei (Contemp Math 756:247–269, 2020) and Wei et al. (Sharp estimates on A\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\mathcal {A}$$\\end{document}-harmonic functions with applications in biharmonic maps) naturally lead to a generalized uniformization theorem and a generalized Bochner’s method. These tools enable one to explore various geometric and variational problems in complete noncompact manifolds of arbitrary dimensions. In particular, we find the first set of nontrivial geometric quantities that are p-subharmonic and p-superharmonic functions (cf. Sect. 4.2). As further applications, we establish Liouville theorems for nonnegative A\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$${\\mathcal {A}}$$\\end{document}-superharmonic functions (cf. Theorem 2.1) and for p-harmonic morphisms (cf. Theorem 4.3), Picard type theorems (cf. Sect. 4.3), existence theorems of harmonic maps (cf. Theorem 4.6), and a solution of the generalized Bernstein problem under p-parabolicity condition (without any volume growth condition, cf. Theorem 5.1) or under p-moderate volume growth (2.4) (cf. Corollary 5.1). These findings generalize and extend the work of Schoen–Simon–Yau under volume growth condition (0.1) which is due to (i)\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$({\ ext {i}})$$\\end{document} Corollary 2.1(iv), which states that a manifold with p-moderate volume growth (2.4) must be p-parabolic (generalizing a result of Cheng and Yau (Commun Pure Appl 28(3):333–354, 1975) for the case p=2\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$p=2$$\\end{document}, F(r)≡1\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$F(r)\\equiv 1$$\\end{document}), (ii)\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$({\ ext {ii}})$$\\end{document} Example 2.1 of a p-parabolic manifold with exponential volume growth, and (iii)\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$({\ ext {iii}})$$\\end{document} volume growth condition (0.1) ⟹(implies)\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\overset{(\ ext {implies})}{\\Longrightarrow }$$\\end{document}p-moderate volume growth (2.4). Furthermore, we offer applications to p-harmonic maps and stable p-harmonic maps. Notably, these outcomes address an intriguing question posed by Kobayashi if p-subharmonic functions are valuable tools for studying p-harmonic maps or related topics (cf. in: Kobayashi, Midwest Geometry Conference, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, 2006. Private Communication, 1996), and answer in the affirmative. Other applications of the notions and estimates to biharmonic maps, isometric immersions, holomorphic functions on Kähler manifolds, generalized harmonic forms, and Yang–Mills fields on complete noncompact manifolds can be found in Wei et al. (Sharp estimates on A\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\mathcal A$$\\end{document}-harmonic functions with applications in biharmonic maps), Chen and Wei (Glasg Math J 51(3):579–592, 2009), Wei (Bull Transilv Univ Brasov Ser III 1(50):415–453, 2008), Wei (Growth estimates for generalized harmonic forms on noncompact manifolds with geometric applications, Contemp Math 756 American Mathematical Society, Providence, 247–269, 2020), Wei (Sci China Math 64(7):1649–1702, 2021) and Wei (Isolation phenomena for Yang–Mills fields on complete manifolds). We generate the work of Schoen–Simon–Yau under p-parabolic condition, in which the result can be used in other types of new manifolds we found, by an extrinsic average variational method we proposed (cf. Wei in Rom J Math Comput Sci 13(2):100–124, 2023; in: Wei, Connecting Poincare inequality with Sobolev inequality on Riemannian manifolds, Int Electron J Geom 17(1):290–305, 2024).