The Women Keep Dancing

Background Line dancing is a popular form of exercise shown to affect balance and mood positively. However, few studies examine its effectiveness in multiple sclerosis (MS). The study aims to investigate the effects of line dancing on balance, mood, and health-related quality of life in MS. Methods Participants were randomized into the line dance (n =15) and the control groups (n =16). Outcomes were measured using the Berg Balance Scale, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life-54 (MSQoL-54) at baseline and post intervention. Results Post-intervention in the line dancing group, significant improvements were observed in balance, anxiety status, and health-related quality of life. When the groups were compared, significant differences were found in balance, anxiety, and the mental health composite of the MSQoL-54. Conclusion This study recommends the use of line dancing as a therapeutic intervention in MS. Nevertheless, comparisons with different intervention approaches and follow-up studies are needed.

My research highlights little-known aspects of African American participation in the mobilization on behalf of women’s suffrage in California, an issue of vital importance to African Americans. The history of suffrage in the United States is marked by varying degrees of denial of voting rights to African Americans. In California, African Americans were pivotal participants in three major suffrage campaigns. Based on black women’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, black men and women formed a critical political alliance, one in which black men almost universally supported black women’s suffrage. Black women began and continued their activism on behalf of male and female voting rights, not as an extension of white-led suffrage campaigns, but as an expression of African American political culture. African Americans—including black women suffragists—developed their own political culture, in part, to associate with those of similar culture and life experiences, but also because white-led suffrage organizations excluded black members. Black politics in California reflected African Americans’ confidence in black women as political actors and their faith in their own independent efforts to secure the franchise for both black men and women.

This study examines the influence of line dancing on the welfare and interdisciplinary education of university students, taking into account demographic variables such as age, gender, and academic fields. The survey includes a wide range of participants, with a majority of females (79%) between the ages of 18 and 20 (96%). These participants come from numerous academic disciplines, with Science Education being the most prevalent (22%). Utilizing a meticulous survey approach, the assessment of line dancing demonstrates its positive impact on the physical health, cognitive capacities, social connections, cultural comprehension, psychological welfare, and personal growth of college students. Furthermore, the Tukey post-hoc analysis indicates notable disparities in the perceived advantages of line dancing among other academic areas. Students studying sports economy and administration have reported experiencing significant personal benefits, indicating the possible incorporation of line dancing into relevant curricula. The results underscore the significance of customizing interdisciplinary learning approaches to suit the varied characteristics of students and their corresponding academic disciplines. This study offers significant insights into the diverse effects of line dancing and emphasizes its potential as an inclusive instructional instrument.

This paper examines how positive social media representations of aging Black female bodies problematize existing notions of aging as an almost uniformly negative phenomenon. Using the social media platform Tumblr, this study reveals that the framing of age, race, and gender is both complex and nuanced. Images which challenge deeply set historical notions of female beauty include those of celebrities, noncelebrities and comparisons between aging Black women and historically standardized representations of physical attractiveness. Findings illustrate that managing impressions vis-à-vis social media is a complex, sometimes messy performance in which images both challenge and substantiate problematic assumptions. Some images that framed Black women positively but did so at the expense of other women. This paper adds to the body of work that explores how social media is used as a vehicle for counter narrative messaging. These findings offer additional insight into how impression management theory is used to analyze social media content.

Background/Context The current era of educational reform targets teacher education and aims to improve the performance of children who have traditionally underperformed and are underserved in public schools. Although educational policy has tried to address the ways in which “good teaching” contributes to improved student educational outcomes, research that examines such teaching must develop ways to make the tacit explicit. In doing so, the research and scholarship on teachers mask, ignore, and overlook the unique experiences of African American women teachers who bring a unique angle of vision to their work among historically underserved populations. The researchers argue that the pedagogy of Black women teachers provides much-needed insights that can inform the practices of all teachers. Focus of Study This article integrates findings from two separate studies on Black women teachers. It examines reasons underlying the professional entry of Black women into teaching and uses a Black feminist/womanist framework to examine how the nexus of race, gender, and class impacts Black women's decisions to enter teaching while also informing their teaching missions. The article is situated in novelist Alice Walker's metaphorical gardens to examine the intergenerational connections of Black women teachers to teaching. Setting Participants hailed from different geographic regions, including Southern California and the Midwest. All were teachers in urban districts serving primarily African American, Latino/Latina, and Asian American students. Participants The participants were 5 Black women teachers from two separate studies. All participants were elementary teachers: a novice; experienced veteran teachers; and a semiretired teacher. Three of the teachers were members of the same family, representing three generations of Black women teachers. The remaining two teachers live, teach, and attend the same church in a medium-sized midwestern city. Research Design The data for this article come from two separate qualitative studies on Black women teachers. Data Collection and Analysis Both studies used ethnographic interviews. Dixson interviewed two participating teachers, the teachers’ colleagues, principals, and parents of students. Dixson also conducted weekly classroom observations over 10 months. Dingus conducted two to three individual interviews with the participating family. She also conducted a group conversation with the family. Participants provided written reflections on their entry into teaching using metaphors of teaching. Dingus also collected documents including email correspondence, newsletters, and print articles featuring the participants. Findings Three convergent themes emerged that represent the teachers’ views of why Black women enter teaching. The first finding, that teaching is tending our mothers’ gardens, highlights the intergenerational encouragement of Black women, including mothers and community othermothers, as influential factors on their professional entry. Participants cited the teaching legacies of Black women in schools, families, and communities as inspirations to become teachers. The second finding, teaching as community work, highlights the ways in which the decision to enter teaching allowed them to remain connected to Black communities and students, function as cultural workers, and act as community othermothers. The third finding, that teaching is nurturing our mothers’ spiritual gardens, illuminates how participants connected their professional entry to a larger spiritual mission. Participants perceived their teaching as a moral, communal, and ethical endeavor incorporating humanistic pedagogical approaches. Conclusions/Recommendations The researchers argue that educational research, in keeping with a policy focus on quality instruction, must continue to examine the practices of Black women teachers, who have effective pedagogical practices with underserved populations. In doing so, we caution against operationalizing such pedagogical practices in ways that trivialize their teaching practices and render them invisible. Furthermore, we encourage researchers to examine how teacher education can make explicit the experiences, knowledge, wisdom and spiritual aspects of Black women's pedagogical practices. Research must also consider the ways in which Black women teachers draw on intergenerational networks in their teaching practices and how these relate to their conceptualizations of their roles as teachers.

Alaska Native (AN) peoples have resided in rural, collectivist systems for time immemorial. However, AN history has been punctuated by manifold and often generational changes to these systems. Family structures, expressions of culture, land-based identities, and AN cosmology and ontology have been directly impinged upon by colonisation. Evidence of this exists in outward migration, climate change, health disparities and Western systems of health, learning and knowledge. Resilience, successful ageing, and quality of life are evident in community resources, inward migration, and the cultural and contextual factors that compose tribal group identity. All are firmly grounded within place, community strengths, and cultural revitalisation, and are embedded in land and nature. A sample of adults within rural Alaska were recruited to share their collective and lived realities related to their quality of life. Focus groups consisted of interactive tasks and thematic analyses. Nine salient themes were revealed: family; subsistence; access to resources; health and happiness; traditional knowledge and values; acts of self; providing; sobriety; and healing. All emphasised the cyclical and grounded nature of collective resilience and reclamation of Indigenous ways. Further, research demonstrates how AN Elder knowledge, intergenerational connection and generativity, and indigenised tenets of successful ageing are how rural AN communities become well, stay well, and pass on healing and wellness to future generations. Indigenous ageing provides a lens to understand AN quality of life and the symbiosis of rurality. An analysis of the historical changes to the AN cultural system, successful ageing, and an Indigenous, holistic framework of AN quality of life will be provided.

The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society. (Carmichael and Hamilton 44) Written during height of Black Power Movement, Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) offers a woman-centered vision of an impoverished, besieged black community finally closing ranks in order to combat systemic and individualized racism that seeks to destroy whatever community it cannot control. Set on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1930, Wright's novel implicitly draws a parallel between nationalist, back-to-Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey in 1920s and Black Power movement gaining strength in late 1960s. Wright's novel is informed by dual influences of Black Power and women's rights, asserting as it does black women's self-respect as a necessary, foundation for the coming black nations of world (Wright, This Child 179). A forerunner of texts such as Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Wright's novel is a powerful rejoinder to male-gender-specific notions of race reform. When Stokely Carmichael assumed leadership of SNCC in 1966, the civil rights phase of black liberation struggle was drawing to a stalemated conclusion.... traditional southern-based nonviolent civil rights movement had largely ground to a halt and was in its death throes (Allen 27). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been passed into law through direct nonviolent actions led by Martin Luther King, Jr., but effectiveness of these laws for poor and working-class black Americans was undermined by inconsistency with which they were enforced. In his critique of these laws, historian Robert L. Allen writes: Perhaps most significant indication of middle-class nature of civil rights movement was fact that it did absolutely nothing to alleviate grim plight of poorest segments of black population. As late as 1968, a group of six doctors found evidence of widespread and long-standing malnutrition and starvation in rural south. (27) For Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton, and other leaders of Black Power, solution to problems wrought by systemic, institutionalized racism was economic and cultural expressions of group solidarity that would strengthen standing of black communities politically, economically, and psychologically. Sarah Wright's This Child's Gonna Live interrogates male-oriented perspective articulated by Black Power spokesmen.(1) Like her contemporary Ralph Ellison, Wright wrote only one novel. But unlike Invisible Man, now regarded as among most important African-American novels, Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, named the most important book of 1969 by New York Times (29 June 1970), is mentioned only sporadically in bibliographies of African-American literature, even those whose exclusive focus is African-American women writers.(2) I hope this essay will serve both as an introduction to Sarah E. Wright's work for readers not yet familiar with her and as a spark to rekindle interest of those who are. Her novel is not an easy one to read, but for anyone interested in African-American literature, in modernist novel, in American history, or in relationships between men and women, Wright's novel can be richly rewarding. This Child's Gonna Live needs to be restored to its place in tradition of African-American women's writing because it bridges movements for Black Power and for women's rights. While careful in her own creative work to create positive portrayals of African-American men, Wright nonetheless criticizes all American men, including African-American men, for for a popular recognition of what is fictitiously called `manhood,' a begging which takes form of attacks on women launched from many different directions (Negro 8). …

Contents: Introduction Part I Feminist Epistemology: Researching girls and violence: facing the dilemmas of fieldwork, Michele J. Burman, Susan A. Batchelor and Jane A. Brown Producing feminist knowledge: lessons from women in trouble, Elizabeth Comack Women's violence to men in intimate relationships: working on a puzzle, Russell P. Dobash and R. Emerson Dobash. Part II Patriarchy, Crime and Justice: Women in the street-level drug economy: continuity or change?, Lisa Maher and Kathleen Daly The risks of street prostitution: punters, police and protesters, Teela Sanders Theorizing about violence: observations from the Economic and Social Research Council's violence research program, Elizabeth A. Stanko. Part III Masculinities and Femininities: Accomplishing femininity among the girls in the gang, Karen Joe Laidler and Geoffrey Hunt Girls' violence: beyond dangerous masculinity, Katherine Irwin and Meda Chesney-Lind Missing gender in cases of infamous school violence: investigating research and media explanations, Mona J.E. Danner and Dianne Cyr Carmody Immigration, masculinity, and intimate partner violence from the standpoint of domestic violence service providers and Vietnamese-origin women, Hoan Bui and Merry Morash. Part IV Intersections: An argument for Black feminist criminology: understanding African American women's experiences with intimate partner abuse using an integrated approach, Hillary Potter 'It's not where you live, it's how you live': how young women negotiate conflict and violence in the inner city, Nikki Jones Walking a tightrope: the many faces of violence in the lives of racialized immigrant girls and young women, Yasmin Jiwani Intersections of immigration and domestic violence: voices of battered immigrant women, Edna Erez, Madelaine Adelman and Carol Gregory. Part V Feminist Assessments of the Criminal Justice Enterprise: Gender bias and juvenile justice revisited: a multiyear analysis, John M. Macdonald and Meda Chesney-Lind Criers, liars and manipulators: probation officers' views of girls, Emily Gaarder, Nancy Rodriguez and Marjorie S. Zatz The words change but the melody lingers: the persistence of battered woman syndrome in criminal cases involving battered women, Kathleen J. Ferraro Moral agent or actuarial subject: risk and Canadian women's imprisonment, Kelly Hannah-Moffat Embodied surveillance and the gendering of punishment, Jill A. McCorkel Celling Black bodies: Black women in the global prison industrial complex, Julia Sudbury. Part VI Feminist Perspectives on the Law and on Justice: Predators: the social construction of 'stranger-danger' in Washington state as a form of patriarchal ideology, Neal S. Websdale Feminist engagement with restorative justice, Kathleen Daly and Julie Stubbs Gendered war and gendered peace: truth commissions and postconflict gender violence: lessons from South Africa, Tristan Anne Borer Name index.

In this interview, Alzira Rufino describes her involvement in the feminist movement and what caused her to found the Black Women's House of Culture in Brazil in 1990. Rufino located the center in Santos because it is a port city which sees a great deal of violence and is very sexist and racist. The center, which exists to assist all women, grew out of a Rufino's realization that Black women needed a group to support their rights. The name for the center came from the fact that women have been the keepers of African culture in Brazil. In Brazil, White men dominate the culture, even the cultural expressions produced by Black people such as the Carnival. The center has had to overcome the criticism directed at it because it was created for women and for Black women in particular, and Black feminists are beginning to understand that Black women make up 25% of the population of Brazil and must celebrate their heritage. Increasing the self-esteem of Black women can be instrumental in helping women undergo training for better jobs and to take the initiative to become entrepreneurs. Black women in Brazil are beginning to occupy positions formerly denied them and to denounce the racism and sexism directed toward them.

This paper is both a personal reflection and critical analysis of the circulation of the poem “Rotundamente negra” by Afro-Costa Rican poet and cultural activist Shirley Campbell among Afro-descendant women in Latin America. As I heard various recitations and interpretations of the poem at several meetings of Afro-descendant social movements across the Americas, I was also bearing witness to the process by which creative cultural expressions become politicized and popularized by their audiences, especially Afro-descendant women, to reflect a collective desire, goal, and identity. When the poem was first published in 1994, its circulation was limited among literary circles in Costa Rica and the local Afro-Costa Rican women's movement. Now a quick search on Google reveals hundreds of “hits” on social media sites and electronic magazines, revealing not only the impact of technology, but also of the physical transnational flows of Afro-descendant women and their ideas at conferences, meeting one another, and finding common ground through political activism and poetry. Most significant is the meaning women attach to the poem and the places where it is interpreted, recited, or posted. The circulation and the appeal of the poem signals that Black women in various parts of the Americas are collectively using it not only as a tool of self-expression, but also as a point of departure for consciousness-raising, identity formation, and collective action. In a region where Black women live doubly-invisible lives amongst the most marginalized of the hemisphere, the poem is both a self-affirmation and a battle cry. The poem relates to the “everyday” of Black women's lives and reveals itself to be a seemingly “innocent” but influential tool of empowerment. Black women recognize themselves in the verses and they “recognize the array of forces controlling their lives” (Bobo 1995, 6). “Rotundamente negra” politicizes as it circulates through the Americas with its message of racial identification and pride that defies the homogenizing tendencies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento. The poem has become an affirming instrument to support, but also a meaningful platform for Black women's organizations, activists, and individuals.

BackgroundNational data do not account for race differences in health risks resulting from racial segregation or the correlation between race and socioeconomic status. Therefore, these data may inaccurately attribute differences...

This chapter focuses on the experiences and perspectives of six state-licensed Black women family childcare providers, who served in an urban midwestern community during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The purpose of this study was to describe the cultural knowledge and cultural capitals of Black women early childhood educators as they supported young learners and their families in conditions of community hardship. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the historical role of Black women educators and childcare providers as they have helped Black families overcome various racialized and gendered oppressions throughout American history. Through the lens of Black feminist thought, the author analyzes narratives shared through a focus group and individual interviews to understand the women’s unique epistemologies and cultural knowledge. The analysis illuminates how the women: (1) activated a take-charge attitude and willingness to act as autonomous agents within their businesses and communities, (2) used their drive, networks, and social capital to meet community needs, and (3) interpreted their roles as community mothers to extend well beyond the scope of a childcare business. The findings underscore the need for policymakers to examine the structures in place to support and protect those who care for our youngest citizens and a critical review of the way Black women epistemologies are represented in education reform and policy.

Glymph’s breathtaking history focuses on the home in order to highlight the centrality of women to the physical and ideological battles of the American Civil War. Although both northerners and southerners defined the home as separate from politics and war, Glymph shows how households became enveloped in war regardless of location. The Confederacy rallied to the defense of white homes, but both white and black women had to take to the road as refugees, heading away from or toward Union lines. Northern women repurposed their homes to support the war effort and sustain their families; some of them also moved south to contribute directly to the war and emancipation. At a moment when many historians prioritize narrative, Glymph’s book is a sustained argument, confronting previous scholarship that divided women into abolitionists, Unionists, and southerners, and separated enslaved and freedwomen into their own category. Her book offers an inclusive history of women’s experiences during the Civil War, and ultimately the ways in which it brought women into conflict.Glymph includes powerful stories based on original research to support her many historiographical insights. She divides the book into three sections (“Southern Women,” “Northern Women,” and “The Hard Hand of War”), beginning each chapter with a discussion of an individual or family to show how the Civil War exploded the idealized image of the home as a sanctuary, and exposed women and children to danger and suffering. The war also magnified the gender, class, and racial hierarchies among women and underscored women’s clashing views of home and freedom. As slaveholding women fled from the advance of the U.S. army, they tried to bring as much of their households with them as possible. Enslaved men and women had a different idea of what the presence of Union troops, and the absence of slaveholders, meant for their families and future. Slaveholding families often migrated to communities, including those in the mountains of North Carolina, that had little stake in the Confederacy and viewed the newcomers as competitors for scarce resources.Glymph also traces the northern wealth generated by slavery that enabled elite white women to devote themselves to organizations such as the Sanitary Commission. As white northern women went south as freedmen’s agents or teachers, they adapted easily to the role of mistress, marshaling the labor and children of freedwomen in support of their own newfound independence. African-American women forged an alternative politics of freedom as they forced the U.S. army to contend with their presence. In refugee camps, freedwomen reconstructed their families and communities in the face of brutal violence and death.The Women’s Fight considers how much life changed for women during the Civil War, and how much it did not. Other scholars portray the Civil War as unleashing something new. Glymph contextualizes women’s experiences, particularly their memory of other wars, even as she observes the disruptions in their lives. As some women fought for freedom, others fought to return to their pre-war status. In this creative and comprehensive study, Glymph concludes that the Civil War left racial and class divisions among women mostly intact.

Seeking to meet Freire’s (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, South End Press, Boston, 1989, Sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, Routledge, New York, 2015) calls self-recovery. Set in an elective class for young women in a Los Angeles middle school, I examine my process as teacher/researcher to understand the experiences of a student named Chelsea, and develop curriculum to serve her arising needs. I integrate critical pedagogy with embodied pedagogies and women of color feminist epistemology to critique dominant ways of knowing and teaching in urban schools. Then, I use auto-ethnography and portraiture to craft three blended portraits: exploring how Chelsea’s sense of self is influenced by her life experiences; how interventions like meditation, dialogue and vulnerability, or what I call pedagogies of bodymindspirit, helped Chelsea to unpack her distrust of others and a longing for wholeness; and how a final project supported Chelsea’s path towards self-recovery. I conclude with ways to cultivate love in the face of material and epistemological violence in schools, and offer implications and tensions for teachers seeking to utilize a bodymindspirit praxis to serve all marginalized students.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic disproportionately affects Black and African American women in the United States. This study examined the extent of HIV related knowledge, HIV testing decision-making, and perceptions of alcohol use as a risk factor for HIV among Black and African American women in urban and suburban communities. Seven focus groups were conducted with 37 women aged 18 to 49 residing in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Women participating in focus groups had a wide breadth of HIV related knowledge. Findings suggest the influence of interpersonal relationships and provider–patient interactions on HIV testing, the need for building community capacity and leveraging community resources towards HIV prevention, and the influence of alcohol outlet density on HIV vulnerability and exposure in communities of color. Comprehensive multifaceted evidence informed interventions that are culturally relevant and gender responsive are needed to reduce HIV/AIDS disparities.