Shaw University

Abstract In 2022, 2023 and 2024, flash droughts in the U.S. Midwest caused the lower Mississippi River to drop to record low levels during corn and soybean harvest season. Grain barges that move the crops downriver to New Orleans for export were forced to reduce their loads to avoid grounding. The load reductions and by extension the low river levels have been attributed as the causes for significant spikes in barge spot prices during the droughts, which for the transit from St. Louis, MO to New Orleans, LA climbed from an average pre‐drought maximum of $27/ton to as high as >$105/ton in 2022. A dynamic regression model was developed to test whether the barge rate highs might also be the result of high fuel costs over the same period. Results produced by the model not only support this hypothesis but indicate that the increases in fuel costs were the dominant reason barge rates spiked. The influence of the flash droughts on the other hand was estimated to account for ≤16% of the peak rates. These results are supported by the fact that the rates did not surge during past events when barge loads had to be reduced and shipping was delayed, including during flash droughts in 2012 and 2013.

Abstract Federal monies to remediate lead in drinking water support utilities companies to upgrade infrastructure. There is little upgrade support for private property owners on public or private sources of water, and sparse data available on the remaining locations of lead plumbing in homes. Crowd the Tap is a participatory science project focused on opportunistically identifying household plumbing and lead contamination in drinking water in the United States and mostly in North Carolina. Households (n=3,121) provided data on plumbing materials and home age. A subset of households (n=493) provided tap water samples for laboratory testing. Adult participants (n=99, 4.0% response rate) responded to a survey about their trust in tap water. We found 15% of homes had no detectable lead, 63% had trace levels (0.1-1ppb), about 20% had detectable lead (between 1.0-15ppb), and 5 households were at or above the action level of 15ppb. Lead in water was more likely to be detected in households that reported any type of metal plumbing material and use of well water. Households served by private wells instead of municipal systems were about four times more likely to have detectable levels of lead. Nevertheless, survey respondents served by private wells were more likely to trust the safety of their drinking water than those served by municipal systems. Without lower action levels and/or broadening support for infrastructure upgrades, minimizing lead in water will remain at the discretion and capacity of households. Our results highlight the limitations of current drinking water regulations which do not eliminate lead in water, hindering access to safe drinking water.

Problematic metaphors about New Orleans jazz occur rampantly in jazz history.Comparing the music to a melting pot, mosaic, and even gumbo attempts to capture its multicultural influences.Caroline Vzina challenges these romanticized ideas by demonstrating the profound impact of Creole culture on jazz's formation.In Jazz La Creole: French Creole Music & The Birth of Jazz, Vzina dispels the myth that only Creole habaneras and quadrilles shaped jazz's development.Rather this culture's contributions span over a century beginning with the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana.Drawing extensively on primary sources, this book is divided into two sections, "The Precursors of Jazz," which include folk, religious, and dance music, and "Early Jazz."With these, Vzina provides a necessary, if imperfect, revision to the narrative surrounding the music of a complex ethnic group in New Orleans.First, Vzina explores the meaning of the word "creole," taking the reader through its Portuguese and Spanish origins during the seventeenth century to its use in Louisiana to describe both white and Black people born in the New World during the nineteenth century.Vzina uses creolization, despite the theory's complicated history, to describe jazz's creation, "for it better represents the intricate multilayered, and dynamic aspect of the process during which various elements of diverse cultures get intertwined as people adapt to new or changing environments in which creolized products or practices can themselves be part of a new process of creolization" (9). 1 Vzina elaborates on creolization's complex history and its prior uses in a section in the appendix, but commits to the theory anyway because of its ability to represent cultural interactions.In her work, creolization is combined with Mark Slobin's work on micromusics and those musics' involvement with subcultures.The chapter closes with insight from firsthand accounts of white and Black creoles to explain their experience 1 Anthropologist Richard Price has warned scholars about the implications of using such theories because of its entanglement with crolisation and globalization.

Rezaeikhonakdar, Delaram SJD; Wrigley, Jordan MSLS, MA; Shaw, Ryan J. PhD, RN, FAANEditor(s): Carter-Templeton, Heather PhD, RN-BC, FAAN Author Information

Institutions and scholars working in the area of community-based education are keenly attuned to the ethics of engaging those communities and their members. The concern is that the local community not be exploited but be treated with respect and understood as a mutual partner in the program. Yet continually, as we argue in this essay, such programs tend to repeat the very instrumentalization they are hoping to avoid because their design focuses more on student-centered experiences of individual growth and enrichment constructed upon a relational geography that privileges the ends of the learning institution. Such a dynamic shapes community-based theological education too, the institutional location we focus on in this essay. Hence, we propose that our institutions of learning need to be (re)located within local communities if we are going to shift this structural dynamic. To develop more just and transformative learning institutions, we argue, requires a new geography of education by developing community-centered modes of knowledge production through action-research practices that foster collaboration, solidarity, and collective action to forge a shared ethic. Moving in this direction will require a new geography of education for community-based learning. As an example, we offer a sketch from our own work at The Black Mountain School of Theology & Community.

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