Community Shifts (Asynchronous Session)
Psyching Runners Up - the Chicago Psyching Team’s Response to Pandemic-era Online Marathons: Understanding Community Partnerships to Address Population-specialized Needs View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michele Kerulis, Bridget Montgomery
The Chicago Psyching Team share their strategies for successfully launching public education lessons into the homes of over 26,000 runners worldwide during the first ever Bank of America Chicago Marathon Virtual Experience. In May 2020, the United Nations recognized the contributions of sport to empower women, young people, individuals, and communities. Given the impact of COVID-19 on runners, 2020 was the time to launch a Psyching Team in Chicago to bolster the spirit and motivation of runners worldwide. Historically, the Chicago Marathon has offered runners physical training tips and marathon training schedules but the event has not incorporated mental skills training or mental health education into its communications or event infrastructure. The Chicago Psyching Team worked closely with event organizers to provide digital resources to runners, including a pre-recorded skills video, a live online panel discussion, social media live videos, and a free workbook. The innovation of the online experience allowed more inclusive participation in one of the world’s most prestigious running events and allowed the Chicago Psyching Team to honor APA’s 1969 President George A. Miller’s value of “giving away” brief mental wellness interventions through public education (Hays & Katchen, 2006; Meijen et al., 2017). The pandemic resulted in countless disappointments, tragedies, and deaths, yet a silver lining of embracing technology during this time allowed the Chicago Psyching Team to deliver messages of mental wellness and hope to new and seasoned runners with the aim of educating people about the benefits of a sense of community mental health.
Black Listed: The Implementation of Racist Institutions For the Continuation of White Supremacy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Vandal
This paper examines the falsification of equal opportunity for people of color in the United States and looks at how systemic racism affects black lives today. In explicating Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel, Invisible Man, and comparing the fictional protagonist’s life to the non-fictional lives of McIlwain’s 2020, Black Software, I point out the flaws in the ‘potential’ acquisition of equality due to white’s implementation of systemic, racial barriers. As seen recently in towns like Atlanta and Minneapolis, systemic racism, especially from positions of power, has not provided Black individuals access to an equal system despite the apparent success of The Civil Rights Movement. By looking at these two pieces of literature, despite being written half a century apart, I compare and contrast the lives of the individuals within them. I look at the systems of (white) power put into place as a means of perpetually holding back people of color so their white counterparts do not have to willingly (and most times knowingly) give up their positions within the dominant, white, hegemonic system that governs the United States. Shedding light on these systemic, racial issues through the use of fictional and non-fictional characters and texts, will allow readers to realize the seemingly unbreakable barriers of racial identity that hold back black Americans in the United States from ever gaining a fully equal existence. The future of our society depends heavily on the way we positively utilize various forms of technology to drive, not hinder, equality.
Beyond Critical Realism: “Self-generation” of Social Reality and Social Ontology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Farhad Bayani
This study critiques the ontological perspective of Margaret Archer and Andrew Sayer’s epistemology on social reality. To explain the social world dynamism, Archer introduces morphogenetic social theory. Accordingly, she explains the social world by an interaction between culture, agency, and structure. Also, Andrew Sayer besides paying attention to the existing complexities in the nature of social reality struggles to introduce a specific model upon which one can come up with a new formulation of the process of social knowledge. His model is based on the dialectical relation between the researcher (subject), research topic (object) and other subjects who work in a common linguistic community. The article criticizes both approaches because they do not pay attention to the self-generation of social reality. Self-generation is referring to the role of social reality (object) in changing and reproducing itself. Bothe Archer’s morphogenesis and Sayer’s epistemology neglect the effective role of social reality in self-reproduction.
Social-emotional Learning and Peer Support through Social Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Heidi Stevenson, Carrie Davenport-Kellogg
This case study analyzes the experiences of an anonymous teenage-facilitator of a peer support system that fosters Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) for high school students via Facebook. Data include four one-on-one interviews with the creator of the support system discussing her facilitation, anonymous notes to students, and interactions on the group’s Facebook page. These data are submitted to Constant Comparative Analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), and viewed through the theoretical lens of CASEL’s SEL Core Competencies. The four major themes (Responding to a Need for Support, Developing Peer Support, Exploring Mediums for Peer Support and Valuing an Anonymous Moderator in Nurturing Peer Support) are discussed in relationship to developing CASEL competencies. Implications for educational policies and practices are also discussed.
