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Stitched together, Grandmother’s Garden is an experimental documentary that examines women who quilt as well as quilting’s history in the United States. Questioning representations of the American woman, Grandmother’s Garden looks at how quilting practices work against and fit into traditional narratives of race, gender, and class. From quilts produced by enslaved individuals to feed sack quilts in the Great Depression, to newly retired baby boomers quilting in the present, this film considers America’s history and economy as it runs adjacent to quilting.

There is evidence that practitioners applying quality improvements often adapt the improvement method or the change they are implementing, either unknowingly, or intentionally to fit their service or situation. This has been observed especially in programs seeking to spread or scale up an improvement change to other services. Sometimes their adaptations result in improved outcomes, sometimes they do not, and sometimes they do not have data make this assessment or to describe the adaptation. The purpose of this paper is to summarize key points about adaptation and context discussed at the Salzburg Global Seminar in order to help improvers judge when and how to adapt an improvement change. It aims also to encourage more research into such adaptations to develop our understanding of the when, why and how of effective adaptation and to provide more research informed guidance to improvers.The paper gives examples to illustrate key issues in adaptation and to consider more systematic and purposeful adaptation of improvements so as to increase the chances of achieving improvements in different settings for different participants. We describe methods for assessing whether adaptation is necessary or likely to reduce the effectiveness of an improvement intervention, which adaptations might be required, and methods for collecting data to assess whether the adaptations are successful. We also note areas where research is most needed in order to enable more effective scale up of quality improvements changes and wider take up and use of the methods.

Spreading Community Accelerators Through Learning and Evaluation (SCALE) was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded initiative from 2015 to 2017 to build capability of 24 community coalitions to advance health, well-being, and equity. The SCALE theory of change had three components: develop leadership capability, build relationships within and between communities, and create an intercommunity system to spread promising ideas. The theory was operationalized through training academies, coaching, and peer-to-peer learning that explicitly addressed equity and systems change. In this article, we describe how SCALE facilitated community transformation related to Collaborating for Equity and Justice Principles 1, 3, 4, and 6. We conducted a multiple-case study approach with two community coalitions including site visits, interviews, and observation to illuminate underlying mechanisms of change by exploring how and why change occurs. Skid Row Women worked with women experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles to address diabetes and food systems. Healthy Livable Communities of Cattaraugus County used a portfolio of projects in order to create system changes to improve population health and increase access to services for people with disabilities in rural New York State. Through our analysis, we describe how two coalitions used SCALE tools for collaborative coalition processes such as aim setting, relationship building, and shared decision making with community residents. Our findings suggest that advancing Collaborating for Equity and Justice principles requires self-reflection and courage; new ways of being in relationship; learning from failure; productive conflict to explicitly address power, racism, and other forms of oppression; and methods to test systems improvement ideas.

In 2020, border politics in Cyprus were brought into sharp focus. Since 2003, Cypriots have been able to cross the Green Line, which has separated Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots into the north and south of the island since 1974. However, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of the crossing points between the two communities in February 2020. This had a significant impact on mobility across the island. Furthermore, in October 2020, the partial opening of Varosha, a city abandoned following the Turkish intervention in 1974 resulted in protests across Cyprus. Both events demonstrate the fragility of peace on an island marked by violence. This article aims to investigate the emotional impact of living in a society marred by rising tensions over territory and restrictions on mobility. Whilst the political narratives and dynamics of the Cyprus problem tend to dominate, I use qualitative methodologies (interviews and site visits) to pay particular attention to the lived experiences of the everyday people on both sides of the Green Line who are affected by the division. Finally, through an emotional geography lens, I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent border closure and reopening of Varosha's beachfront have brought forth feelings of frustration, betrayal, fear, and anxiety in terms of how people conceptualize division on the island. Public Significance Statement: This article contributes to an important body of work on emotional geographies in postconflict societies. Focusing on two significant events that occurred in Cyprus during a period of uncertainty and transition, I highlight the personal accounts of those on the island affected by changing border policies. This research argues that emotion is often overlooked yet plays a crucial role in how people conceptualize both the division on the island, and the ongoing "Cyprus Problem." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helene Cixous. Hyperdream. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity P, 2009. x + 168 pp. The cover of this English translation of Helene Cixous's recent book [...]

GILBERT, PAULA RUTH, and ROSEANNA L. DUFAULT, eds. Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, Associated University Presses, 2001. Pp. 396. Although this collection [...]