Oberlin College

In Black Voices in the Halls of Power, authors Jennifer R. Garcia, Christopher T. Stout, and Katherine Tate explore how US lawmakers use racial rhetoric to elevate the voice of Black communities, influence policy, and shape voter trust. Through a combination of data-driven research and accessible storytelling, the book uncovers the strategic ways politicians speak about race, revealing how rhetoric impacts policymaking and representation and offering fresh insights into race and power in American politics. The book explores how politicians craft messages to appeal to diverse audiences and use political communication to advance legislative priorities. It also examines how legislators' engagement in racial outreach affects voter attitudes. Given the increasingly important role of race on the national political stage in the US, the book provides a critical yet engaging examination of race, rhetoric, and representation in Congress.

Most literature on research ethics originates from the perspectives of international researchers and, to a lesser extent, research subjects. This article goes beyond the prevailing understanding of ethical misconduct as a failure to secure informed consent, data breaches, coercion, or misuse of data. Instead, it seeks to develop the notion of ‘mundane ethical harms’ in conflict- and disaster-affected research, which are rooted in and shaped by the systemic power inequalities between researchers across global Northern and global Southern institutions. This article centres on mundane ethical harms from the perspective of local researchers. Drawing on interviews and workshops from the Balkans, Colombia, and Nepal, we show that local researchers are caught between formal ethical frameworks – often biomedical in origin or defined in the global North – and local understandings of, and demands for, ethical practice. Acknowledging that regional and contextual experiences and understanding of ethics matter and may differ, we highlight commonalities of ethical harms that were consistent across the three regions to inform more context-sensitive procedural ethics across global North–South research collaborations. We argue that mundane ethical harms highlight the limits of procedural ethics that may be unintentional but tend to obscure the harms experienced by those caught in the middle of an unequal research environment.

Comprehensive chart documentation is a key competency in dental hygiene education. Providers spend a significant portion of their day on record-keeping, over 12% in primary care settings [1]. Accurate charting supports decisions, billing, and legal protection, but excessive documentation reduces time for patient education. It also limits communication, leadership, and collaboration by restricting feedback and team interaction. At the same time, dental education must adapt to emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to improve efficiency and support learning. AI-assisted charting and automated note generation show promise in reducing documentation time [2, 3]. Despite the growing interest in AI, little is known about how such systems can be effectively integrated into dental hygiene training to enhance both perceived efficiency and patient communication [4]. Students continue to learn traditional, manual charting methods. AI-based documentation tools can help create record periodontal charts, clinical notes, analyze data, and improve record accuracy [5]. The lack of such training limits students’ and teachers’ awareness and readiness to use AI systems. To address these challenges, a dental hygiene program piloted DentalBee, an AI-powered tool that converts clinical speech into structured dental notes. The project aimed to determine whether AI-assisted documentation could improve workflow efficiency and patient engagement while integrating digital tools into dental hygiene education. The pilot involved 2nd-year students during clinical rotations and included faculty training, AI-assisted modules, and integration with the patient management system (PMS) (Table 1). Launched in Spring 2025, the initiative received administrative and IT support. Outcome measures focused on students’ perceived efficiency and patient interaction, assessed through a structured survey. Faculty also observed reduced documentation time, though exact times were not recorded because implementation occurred alongside student training, conditions that would have artificially inflated time data and misrepresented tool performance. This pilot established baseline perceptions of efficiency and engagement, providing a foundation for future studies to measure objective time savings once system use becomes routine. Institutional review board exemption was granted for this educational quality-improvement project. A quantitative survey assessed student perceptions of documentation efficiency and patient communication at three timepoints: pre-implementation (n = 23), mid-rotation (1 month; n = 23), and post-rotation (3 months; n = 20). At baseline, 74% of participants reported that documentation significantly impacted their perceived appointment efficiency (Figure 1). Following AI integration, 12.5% of students reported noticeable improvement at mid-rotation, increasing to 50% by post-rotation—suggesting a gradual adaptation and perceived benefit over time. In terms of patient communication, 50% of students initially indicated that note-taking limited their ability to connect with patients, while 27% reported a moderate burden and 23.5% a high burden (Figure 2). After using the AI system, 15.6% reported high improvement in patient connection at mid-rotation, increasing to 41.9% by post-rotation. Although self-reported, these findings suggest that with continued use, AI-assisted documentation may improve perceived workflow efficiency and facilitate more meaningful patient engagement. Future studies should include objective measurement of documentation time and direct assessment of patient outcomes to strengthen these preliminary results. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Catherine Ford, Dean of Owens Community College School of Nursing and Health Professions. Acknowledgment to Kanza Javed for the logistic support.

The unique synthetic potential of acylboron species has long attracted attention from the synthetic chemistry community, but their broader application has been limited by challenges associated with their preparation. In this work, we report a mechanistically distinct radical-based C(acyl)–B cross-coupling strategy that enables a “formal condensation” between readily available carboxylic acids and easily accessible ligated boranes. The success of this transformation relies on the distinctive use of a phosphonite ligand, which achieves an optimal balance between the stability and reactivity of the borane moiety. This method demonstrates a broad substrate scope with high practical utility, and its strategic value has been further highlighted through diverse downstream derivatizations of the resulting acylborane compounds.

This article proposes the concept of age-centered racism as an intersectional framework for better capturing the nuances characterizing how racism and ageism in the United States operate and interlock. I argue that age-centered racism occurs when people draw upon stereotypes and assumptions rooted in ageist ideologies without acknowledging how race is entrenched in and central to problematic, prejudicial statements about racial minorities. The effectiveness of naming Black feminism and gendered racism as conceptual and analytical approaches for framing intersectional oppression demonstrates the potential and urgency in explicitly identifying intersectional oppressions. This article aims to push conversations forward by responding to the following questions: How can we better study perceived age of people of color in the US and its role in how oppression is experienced, rather than focusing solely on chronological age? What are the applications of age-centered racism in studying lived experiences within institutional contexts throughout the United States and other countries with similar stratification systems?