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Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, two First Nations groups—the Chippewa of the Thames and the Six Nations of the Grand River—attempted to evict two other First Nations groups—the Munsee of the Thames and the Mississauga of the Credit—from the Thames and Grand River reserves in southern Ontario. These land disputes were successfully resolved by the turn of the twentieth century and no evictions did take place, but the 20 years of conflict are revealing of the complexities, contingencies, and evolutions of dispossession in Canada over the nineteenth century. This article presents a narrative of these attempted evictions and proposes the concept of “compound dispossession” as a means of grappling with these complexities. It is argued that compound dispossession not only captures the snowballing complications of historical dispossessions over time, but also captures the imbrication of multiple disparate trajectories of dispossession as the pressures of settler land hunger and encroachments on Indigenous sovereignty in the late nineteenth century bore down on four neighbouring First Nations groups simultaneously. Rather than interpreting these conflicts through a binary of assimilation/resistance, compound dispossession suggests the pervasiveness of dispossession as a discourse and the agency of dispossession as an adaptation to the unfolding settler-colonial paradigm.

As part of a design-based research effort into disrupting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, we have iteratively designed, developed, and evaluated a learning intervention intended for public audiences. In this paper we describe the design principles we created to guide our applied research into education on the topic of online misinformation. The six principles guiding our design are: microlearning; equity; relevance and appeal to learners; interventions that do not inadvertently spread misinformation; effective counter messaging; and engagement on an emotional level. These principles are grounded on equitable design, anti-misinformation design, and emotional design.

As part of a design-based research project, we designed, developed, and evaluated a web-based microlearning intervention in the form of a comic into the problem of COVID-19 online misinformation. In this paper, we report on our formative evaluation efforts. Specifically, we assessed the degree to which the comic was effective and engaging via responses to a questionnaire (

PurposeBecause health misinformation pertaining to COVID-19 is a serious threat to public health, the purpose of this study is to develop a framework to guide an online intervention into some of the drivers of health misinformation online. This framework can be iterated upon through the use of design-based research to continue to develop further interventions as needed.Design/methodology/approachUsing design-based research methods, in this paper, the authors develop a theoretical framework for addressing COVID-19 misinformation. Using a heuristic analysis of research on vaccine misinformation and hesitancy, the authors propose a framework for education interventions that use the narrative effect of transportation as a means to increase knowledge of the drivers of misinformation online.FindingsThis heuristic analysis determined that a key element of narrative transportation includes orientation towards particular audiences. Research indicates that mothers are the most significant household decision-makers with respect to vaccines and family health in general; the authors suggest narrative interventions should be tailored specifically to meet their interests and tastes, and that this may be different for mothers of different backgrounds and cultural communities.Originality/valueWhile there is a significant body of literature on vaccine hesitancy and vaccine misinformation, more research is needed that helps people understand the ways in which misinformation works upon social media users. The framework developed in this research guided the development of an education intervention meant to facilitate this understanding.

As the global COVID-19 pandemic has been concurrently labelled an “infodemic,” researchers have sought to improve how the general public engages with information that is relevant, timely, and accurate. In this study, we provide an overview of the reasons why people engage and disengage with COVID-19 information. We use context-rich semi-structured interviews which invited participants to discuss online COVID-19-related content they encountered. This qualitative approach allows us to uncover subtle but important details of influences that drive online engagement. Participants both engaged and disengaged with content for individual and social reasons, with seven themes emerging connected to their engagement including actions in response to information, reasoning for engagement, content, motivating concerns, frequency of engagement with information, site of exposure, and given reason for not engaging. Many of these themes intersected and informed each other. Our findings suggest that researchers and public health communicators should approach engagement as an ecology of intersecting influences, both human and algorithmic, which change over time. This information could be potentially helpful to public health communicators who are trying to engage the public with the best information to keep them safe during the pandemic.

Scientific uncertainty during pandemic outbreaks poses a challenge for health communicators. Debates continue over the extent to which health officials should be transparent about uncertainty and the extent to which they should suppress uncertainty and risk losing the public’s trust when information changes. The middle ground, the concept of “reasoned transparency,” proposes that communicators focus on interpreting uncertainty to the public in ways informed by risk research. However, little guidance exists for health officials on how to do so in this context. After conducting a series of one-to-one interviews about people’s coronavirus disease 2019 information habits, we identified significant trends in the heuristics that people depended on to process uncertainty. Based on those trends, we propose health communicators use narratives of science as evolving to set expectations for change, and that when changes do occur, health communicators note divergences from the past and avoid simply replacing old information with new information.

British and Afrikaner governments used different types of legal arguments to legitimize their acquisition of African land in the early nineteenth century. Using Pierre Legrand’s concept of legal me...

On 15 May 1879, 60 Xhosa – primarily women and children – were forcibly removed by the Cape government from an indentured labour market in Cape Town called the ‘Kaffir Depot’. The Xhosa interpreter...

My paper presents a comparative analysis of the development of Indigenous reserve systems in British North America and Western Australia across the nineteenth century. The existing historiography seeks to comprehend the relationship between the British metropole and the colonial periphery, and two opposing frameworks of colonial governance have been developed. One holds that the British Empire operated as an interdependent system, in which colonial Indigenous policies were determined by overarching imperial imperatives based upon imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism. The other holds that the explosive growth of settler communities undermined these imperial imperatives and facilitated governance guided by the settlers' need for land, labour, and security. This paper seeks to end the tension between these two frameworks by using Indigenous reserve systems as a case study for understanding colonial governance. Through an analysis of correspondence between local and imperial administrators, this paper argues that the development of Indigenous reserve systems reveals an entrenched conflict between imperial and local administrators lasting throughout the nineteenth century, a conflict in which the local governments of British North America and Western Australia subordinated imperial imperatives of imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism to local concerns of security and sovereignty.

The apparent size of an object can influence how we interact with and perceive the weight of objects in our environment. Little is known, however, about how this cue affects behaviour across the lifespan. Here, in the context of the size–weight illusion, we examined how visual size cues influenced the predictive application of fingertip forces and perceptions of heaviness in a group of older participants. We found that our older sample experienced a robust size–weight illusion, which did not differ from that experienced by younger participants. Older and young participants also experienced a real weight difference to a similar degree. By contrast, compared to younger participants our older group showed no evidence that size cues influenced the way they initially gripped and lifted the objects. These results highlight a unique dissociation between how perception and action diverge across the lifespan, and suggest that deficits in the ability to use prediction to guide actions might underpin some of the manual interaction difficulties experienced by the older adults.

A case of initial resuscitation of a patient with severe burns is described. Such patients can have hypotension and reduced organ perfusion for a number of reasons, and can remain in the emergency department for many hours while awaiting transfer to specialist centres. The case provides a comparison between resuscitation using traditional burns formulae and a relatively new and simple-to-use cardiac output (CO) monitor--the Vigileo monitor (Edwards Lifesciences, Irvine, California, USA). The case demonstrates that relying on fluid regimes alone can lead to insufficient resuscitation. We suggest that using technologies such as those mentioned in this article, which have the potential to be used in the emergency department, could improve the initial resuscitation of patients with burns.