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This project examines risk and protective factors for preterm birth (PTB) among Black women in Oakland, California. Women with singleton births in 2011-2017 (n = 6199) were included. Risk and protective factors for PTB and independent risk groups were identified using logistic regression and recursive partitioning. Having less than 3 prenatal care visits was associated with highest PTB risk. Hypertension (preexisting, gestational), previous PTB, and unknown Women, Infant, Children (WIC) program participation were associated with a two-fold increased risk for PTB. Maternal birth outside of the USA and participation in WIC were protective. Broad differences in rates, risks, and protective factors for PTB were observed.

This transcript shares a May 2019 conversation with Josh Healey, an Oakland-based writer, artist, and filmmaker, about his work with the independent web series The North Pole. The interview was conducted with several members of the Ethnic Studies faculty from Saint Mary's College of California. Healey explains the connections he sees between politics, humor, and storytelling, and delves into the strategies and struggles of the creative process, including the value of personal relationships, collaboration, and representing real people and real life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The baseline data of the intervention project for African American transgender women living with HIV showed that more than one-third of the participants having ever enrolled in HIV care had not received ART and that among those in ART, more than half reported their adherence to ART was poor. Those who had engaged in sex work, sold drugs, or experienced higher levels of transphobia were less likely to have enrolled in care. The qualitative interviews with participants who had completed the intervention or dropped out revealed barriers to enroll in care, such as community stigma and transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use a framework of urban political ecology to explore the rise of urban agriculture (UA) in Oakland, California. As part of a growing effort to reduce its “ecological footprint” and to guarantee access to nutritious food for the urban poor, the City of Oakland has recently embraced a goal of sourcing 30 percent of its food locally, a modest amount of which should come from UA. Many of these small gardens and farms are to be located in so-called “food deserts,” low-income areas far from supermarkets, in the Oakland flatlands in order to provide access to fresh food as well as ecological and culinary knowledge to participants and customers. Recent critiques of some food justice initiatives, including urban garden programs, have argued that such projects are neoliberal in nature, emphasizing entrepreneurialism and self-betterment while filling in gaps left by the rolling back of the state. In this paper, I argue that a macro-level structural analysis of Oakland’s history reveals the emancipatory role of UA. I demonstrate how flows of industrial capital and racialized urban planning throughout the 20th century concentrated the devaluation of capital to the flatlands, ultimately giving rise to food deserts. Following the logic of what Karl Polanyi referred to as capitalism’s “double movement,” food justice activists are mobilizing through UA to counter capital’s uneven transformation of the flatlands.

In April 2003, residents of fifty units of affordable housing were evicted from their low-income units in downtown Oakland, California’s Chinatown. The ensuing community struggle demonstrated the challenges of organizing and mobilizing in immigrant and refugee communities who have been subjected to the collective trauma of the last century’s wars and displacements in China and throughout Asia. Young people’s organizing in Oakland’s Chinatown was simultaneously an attempt to heal rifts within the community and between generations, and to articulate a normal and central space for a progressive and radical politics that is grounded in the migration stories of elders.

Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low‐income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire to serve long‐term residents, activists embody a hip green aesthetic that is palatable to affluent whites and can be appropriated by urban boosters to promote the neighborhood. We use this process as a lens to theorize links between food and green gentrification, highlighting the importance of food to cities' efforts to brand themselves as ripe for redevelopment, and understand green gentrification as a racialized process tied to cultural foodways. We also attend to the practical stakes for food justice activism, arguing that a clear understanding of green gentrification and food justice activists' unwitting role in it can help the latter to attempt to mitigate their culpability and seek to develop broad inclusive strategies for locally led development without displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oakland, California is a destination for many youth migrants traveling alone, without papers, from Central America and Mexico. This paper describes a multiple systems approach to offering support to the children at a health center on school grounds in Oakland. Named Youth Uprising/Castlemont Health Center the clinic opened its doors in 2005 making services accessible to the most vulnerable and under-served youth. It currently helps around 125 new immigrant students using a multiple systems approach that offers psychotherapy, primary medical and dental care, legal and housing referrals, group therapy, family therapy, and collaboration with the students' teachers. A detailed case example traces a child's history from her village in Guatemala, through her voyage alone to the United States and detention at the border, and then through the course of her treatment at the school Health Center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Oakland Redevelopment Agency's efforts (from the late 1950s through early 1980s) to revitalize the downtown core - the City Center project that leveled more than a score of older blocks and buildings, constructed a hotel and close to a dozen office buildings, yet failed to realize a regional shopping mall. City Center was premised on the idea that urban renewal, combined with Oakland's emerging centrality within the Bay Area's freeway and mass transit networks, would enable downtown to compete successfully with both San Francisco and the burgeoning suburbs. Yet unlike contemporaneous mega-projects that seemingly established Oakland as a key regional commercial attractor (e.g., the new container port and major-league sports complex), head-on competition with San Francisco (and the suburbs) for office, retail and hotel development proved a more difficult endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article applies Richard Iton's concept of the “the Black Fantastic” to the Oakland, CA rap music scene from 1994–2010. I argue that the political content from this scene was part of an evolutionary colonial discourse and a reaction to the commercialization of rap music. In particular, my finding is that this local discourse was in response to hyper-militarization during the 1970s and 1980s and the co-optation of local rap's subaltern discourse elements in the 1990s and early 2000s. This produced a “black fanatic”—both the population making the music and the population participating in the shows, consumption of goods, and the subversive street activities. This finding, however, adds complexities to the conception of a “post-colonial” and “post-racial” discourse in Iton's analysis. In addition, my investigation uses deep description of the political content of the hyphy subculture to correct the existing research location of the subculture in identity formation studies and disabilities studies. Instead, I hold that the political power exhibited by hyphy rappers was the power to “act” crazy and should be considered in the same vein as Malcolm X's attempt to thwart the military draft and other cases of “liberal disillusionment” by black representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]