Presidential reflections

Family stories participate in the formation of culture as they imagine and reproduce ethnic identity. This essay examines grandmother (mémère,) stories in Franco American families as the cultural location of a global moment where family, white ethnic identity, and gender intersect. Within a transnational feminism and performative theory of family storytelling which historidze and situate cultural texts, grandmothers become linked with the motherland and mother tongue in the imagination of Franco American identity. The analysis of a corpus of mémère stories identifies both the performative agency and constraints on traditional ethnic women within structures of gender, culture, ana power. The performance of mémère stories enchants the grandmother as a cultural icon and reproduces the Franco American family. However, the formation of cultural identity through family storytelling in mémère stories is a problematic achievement because it is built upon myths of cultural purity and “goodness,“ although narrative strategies complicate these images.     

Visualizing carrier status: fragile X syndrome and genetic diagnosis since the 1940s

What does it look like to be the carrier of a genetic disease? Carrier status may be determined through the visual analysis of both genotypic and phenotypic evidence. Over the past 70 years, clinical geneticists have depended upon multiple strategies for identifying disease carriers within a family. This has included pedigree analysis, which was based upon clinical observations of individual family members and, in recent decades, cytogenetic and molecular methods. Newer techniques have offered novel opportunities to actually see the suspected etiological markers of certain genetic diseases, such as Fragile X syndrome. The visualization of these markers has both clarified and confused previously observed inheritance patterns, in some cases leading to the development of newly distinct diagnostic categories. As a result, what it means to be affected by, or the carrier of, a genetic disease has continuously evolved.     

Evaluating multi-institutional partnership sustainability: a case study of collaborative workforce development in renewable energy assessment

Partnership evaluation typically occurs during the final stages either to assess why a collaborative effort did not work or to identify the indicators of success. Partnerships are rarely evaluated at their incipient stage, which is a critical time to assess their potential for long-term sustainability. In this paper, we present an early-stage evaluative framework for assessing multi-institutional academic partnerships’ sustainability based on 3 dimensions: decision processes, problem orientation, and social capital. We apply the evaluative framework using case study research to the Renewable Energy Assessment (REA) Program, a workforce enhancement academic partnership that focuses on facilities and lands viability assessment. Using the evaluative framework, we identified critical elements present within and missing from the REA Program that could influence the partnership's long-term sustainability. This study demonstrates the need to conduct incipient stage and ongoing evaluations to foster partnership sustainability, and provides a framework for conducting such assessments.     

A comparative study of sustainability management education in China and the USA

This study investigates differences between business schools in different institutional settings, using top-ranked Chinese and US business schools as the bases of analysis. To assess the divergent educational approaches, this study investigates the (1) number of sustainability-related courses per school, (2) design and arrangement of sustainability-related course curricula, (3) content of sustainability-related courses, and (4) teaching methods in sustainability-related courses, across differing institutional settings. The findings reveal differences in the curriculum designs of the two countries, which likely reflect differences in their local institutional settings and their interpretations of sustainability. This study offers several implications and recommendations for further research.