An official website of the United States government
An often-underacknowledged component of racial ethnic identity development concerns youth's multiple social identities, which affect how and when youth receive racial ethnic socialization (RES) from parents and caregivers. Here, we review how a child's or adolescent's gender, immigration status, skin tone, and socioeconomic status can influence the RES they receive. Additionally, we use the social psychology model of social complexity theory to demonstrate how these social identities may present themselves in distinct ways within a single individual (whether identities are intersected, compartmentalized, etc.) using a developmental lens. Understanding how a person's multiple social identities can hold differential salience allows us to more accurately measure RES by considering the factors that may influence its presentation and prevalence. Examples and implications for how multiple identities may converge and influence RES are discussed.
more »
« less
Who Knows What a Microbe is?: The Variable Texture of Microbial Identity in Agricultural Products, Regulations, and Fields
Microbial products are becoming common alternatives for pesticides and fertilizers in light of the unsustainability of chemical products. What the microbes in these products are, though—that is, how they are enacted—varies across regulatory, research and development, and growing spaces, and that variation matters to how they are regulated. From document analyses, interviews, and ethnographic work with scientists, growers, and policy actors, we find that these microbes are epistemically uneven, sometimes with pinned-down identities, and sometimes with loosely woven textures with holes. Amid calls to tailor regulations specifically for these products, we suggest that regulations predicated on discrete identities and predictable and controllable functions will fail to account for all users’ experiences, and that regulation may need to learn to live with the lacy texture of microbes across contexts.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2042475
- PAR ID:
- 10523235
- Publisher / Repository:
- Science and Technology Studies
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science & Technology Studies
- ISSN:
- 2243-4690
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Increases in the representation of Black and Latiné students in doctoral engineering programs over the past decades have not yet led to long-term success in achieving parity with the population's demographics. Although graduation rates show such students are recruited to such programs, they remain underrepresented due to their early departure due to unreconcilable differences in institutional cultures being exclusive of their identities. Although the socialization experiences of first-year doctoral students can predetermine their success or failure, scant research has looked at Black and Latiné students in engineering programs. This longitudinal qualitative case study explores the first-year program experiences of such students and how their minority identities influenced theirsocialization. We present the experiences of sixteen engineering graduate students from variousinstitutions who met in virtual focus groups throughout their first year. We found that Black and Latiné students' racial-ethnic identities influence how they experience the first year of their doctorate.This influence extends from how they perceive their sense of belonging and qualification to be in such programs to how and where they seek support when facing racialized experiences. Moreover, participants shared how their programs were not equipped to support their identities and potential contributions to their fields. These findings are key to the engineering context, where representation is starkly limited for these students. Our implications for institutions focus on the needed cultural shifts to ultimately diminish the barriers that Black and Latiné students face while pursuing doctoraldegrees.more » « less
-
The polyketide synthases (PKSs) in microbes and the cytoplasmic fatty acid synthases in humans (FASs) are related enzymes that have been well studied. As a result, there is a paradigm explaining in general terms how FASs repeatedly use a set of enzymatic domains to produce simple fats, while PKSs use the domains in a much more complex manner to produce pharmaceuticals and other elaborate molecules. However, most animals also have PKSs that do not conform to the rules described in microbes, including a large family of enzymes that bridge fatty acid and polyketide metabolism, the animal FAS-like PKSs (AFPKs). Here, we present the cryoelectron microscopy structures of two AFPKs from sea slugs. While the AFPK resemble mammalian FASs, their chemical products mimic those of PKSs in complexity. How then does the architecture of AFPKs facilitate this structural complexity? Unexpectedly, chemical complexity is controlled not solely by the enzymatic domains but is aided by the dynamics of the acyl carrier protein (ACP), a shuttle that moves intermediates between these domains. We observed interactions between enzyme domains and the linker-ACP domain, which, when manipulated, altered the kinetic properties of the enzyme to change the resulting chemical products. This unveils elaborate mechanisms and enzyme motions underlying lipid and polyketide biochemistry across the domains of life.more » « less
-
Abstract Global invasive species introductions are rising, necessitating coordinated regulatory strategies within and across national borders. Although states and nations address their unique priorities using plant regulations, these regulations are most likely to reduce invasive plant introduction and spread if they are consistently enacted across political borders and proactively restrict spread early in the invasion process. Further, a unified regulatory landscape is particularly important given the imminent range infilling and large‐scale climate‐driven range shifts of invasive species.In the United States, federal and state regulations restrict the introduction and spread of several hundred invasive and noxious plant taxa in an effort to reduce their negative impacts. Using plant regulations for the lower 48 United States, we assessed consistency among regulated taxa based on similarities in adjacent states’ regulatory lists. We assessed proactivity by comparing regulatory lists to plants’ current and potential distributions given occurrence records and species distribution models under climate change.States regulate from 0 to 162 plant taxa, with an average of only 16.8% overlap of regulated taxa between adjacent states. Up to 137 plants may be present but unregulated in a state, and only 110 of 553 listed taxa were regulated in one or more states where they were not yet present. However, 36 states listed at least one taxon proactively (regulated but not present in the state). Of the 48 proactively listed taxa with species distribution models, we identified 41 cases (38 species in 21 states) where listing was ‘climate proactive’ (regulated, not present and where climate could be suitable for establishment by mid‐century).Policy implications. US plant regulatory lists were inconsistent across borders and reactive to climate change. However, most states regulate at least one plant taxa prior to its introduction, suggesting that a more proactive approach is possible under existing regulations. Coordination across borders is imperative given gaps in regional defences against invasion and projected invasive plant range shifts under climate change. We suggest that subnational, national and international governing bodies evaluate their plant regulatory lists for consistency and proactivity, as it is paramount for preventing the next wave of plant invasions.more » « less
-
Males, Jamie (Ed.)Understanding the responses of plants, microbes, and their interactions to long-term climate change is essential to identifying the traits, genes, and functions of organisms that maintain ecosystem stability and function of the biosphere. However, many studies investigating organismal responses to climate change are limited in their scope along several key ecological, evolutionary, and environmental axes, creating barriers to broader inference. Broad inference, or the ability to apply and validate findings across these axes, is a vital component of achieving climate preparedness in the future. Breaking barriers to broad inference requires accurate cross-ecosystem interpretability and the identification of reliable frameworks for how these responses will manifest. Current approaches have generated a valuable, yet sometimes contradictory or context dependent, understanding of responses to climate change factors from the organismal- to ecosystem-level. In this synthesis, we use plants, soil microbial communities, and their interactions as examples to identify five major barriers to broad inference and resultant target research areas. We also explain risks associated with disregarding these barriers to broad inference and potential approaches to overcoming them. Developing and funding experimental frameworks that integrate basic ecological and evolutionary principles and are designed to capture broad inference across levels of organization is necessary to further our understanding of climate change on large scales.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.129544
