From 1978 to 1995, tens of thousands of Haitians fled to the United States to escape the brutal dictatorships of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the violence that ensued after the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Hoping for safety and refuge, most Haitian refugees were instead punished and barred from receiving asylum and entrance by the American government. Many African Americans critiqued the mistreatment of the Haitian refugees as anti-Black and demonstrated solidarity in an array of ways. Drawing from a series of Black newspapers from this era, I present this history of solidarity, arguing that African Americans were motivated to stand with the thousands of Black Haitians because of their own dealings with anti-Blackness in the United States.

A sample of women congregation members from oldest church on Long Island, Old First Presbyterian of Huntington, New York compiled as a senior project through interviews, oral histories, and research. The stories presented here represent the denominational church in microcosm as being representative of the role of the women in the church. Oral History audio recordings can be accessed on New York Heritage Digital Collections for SUNY Old Westbury, Senior Projects and Research.

Rodent models are the primary species for pre-clinical study and experimentation for biomedical translational research. However, subsequent testing on a variety of behavioral tests as a "battery" can often result in an extraneous variable of confounding carryover effects if not carefully considered. For example, if a more stressful test is used prior to a less stressful test, inflated and artifactual increases in the latter test may be considered real. Thus, care behavioral test sequences are critical to avoid these pre-clinical testing errors that may forestall promising drug candidates for clinical phase trials. In the present study, we examined the NeuwirthTM Hole board test, which is designed to overcome these testing sequence confounds, by using the same testing apparatus over 2 days. In day 1, a 10 minute exploration trial is used to assess fear/escape behaviors. Then, 24 hrs later, 4 Petri Dishes with 4 different odors are placed below the apparatus to increase the rat's cognitive/exploratory behaviors and overcome both the prior day's anxiety-like behaviors and habituation over 2 days. We explored this testing procedure to evaluate the effects of neurodevelopmental lead exposure and how it may be a useful tool in parsing very subtle brain deficits through such a simple testing procedure. This is a pilot study that currently shows that the test can be used to determine both sex-dependent and developmental time-period differences in the rats behaviors. This testing procedure may have greater advantages for pre-clinical study that may further accelerate drug advancement to clinical phase trials.

A list of Quaker women from the Jericho and Westbury communities compiled as a senior project through interviews, oral histories, and research. Oral History audio recordings can be accessed on New York Heritage Digital Collections for SUNY Old Westbury, Senior Projects and Research.

Cultural identity is an individual and collective process of rooting members in a shared sense of community based on commonalities of experience, history, tradition, and memory. African American choreographers, Alvin Ailey and Chuck Davis created concert dance traditions that significantly influenced African American cultural identity in concert performance. For Ailey, Davis, and other African Americans, the ring-shout and negative racial stereotypes were pivotal in reshaping cultural identity by impacting artistic choices and cultural representations in performance. At the point of the ring-shout and Africanized Christian practices, a class division developed that placed aesthetics deemed too African in folk and traditional performance. As a resistance against negative racial stereotypes in performance, African American concert dance artists sought to establish appreciation for their cultural heritage by blending their vernacular with Western styles and or presenting African aesthetics in performance. Dance works that visually reflected an American experience, a syncretism of ballet, jazz, and codified modern forms were received as modern dances and those that fulfilled social expectations of African dance aesthetics were classified as folk and traditional. However, classifications of traditional or modern dance should be determined by the characteristics of the creative process, by how the theme, function, and purpose align with the cultural identity, individual and collective memories of the creators and practitioners, and not how visual aesthetics or movement vocabularies are perceived to connect to certain cultural traditions. This study will use a historical analysis, including oral histories, audience and critic reception, ethnographic interpretation from extensive experience in traditional and modern dance, and a semiotic analysis of archival video footage of two concert dance works, Alvin Ailey’s Revelations and Chuck Davis’ Memorial. Revelations, is recognized as an American modern dance masterpiece and Memorial as an African dance tradition by dance historians, dance critics, and audiences largely based on visual analysis of the aesthetic values and not on the creative characteristics. Although the two bear some semblance, I propose as an alternative interpretation that Revelations functions as a traditional dance and Memorial, as a modern dance in African American concert performance. The significance of this intervention is to highlight the characteristics of traditional African dance beyond socially expected movement vocabularies of aesthetics markers and detail their structure to root cultural identity through individual and collective memory. This is important to broaden the incorporation of African dance aesthetics in modern creative processes, and to broaden the inclusivity of innovation in traditional creative practices. Secondly, in focusing on the creative framework, theme, function, and purpose, over the visual aesthetic of African American concert dance, this intervention examines African cultural retentions in African American performance whereby syncretic movement vocabularies were translated into a traditional framework with a creative process and structure that preserved Pan African cultural identity in concert performance. Lastly, this intervention is to identity the impact of the ring shout and negative stereotypes towards African Americans in determining artistic choices that departed from African American traditions for American or African aesthetics to refocus cultural identity. This study proposes a comprehensive approach that combines traditional and modern methods.

The following is a study that focuses on how Salvadoran writer Roque Dalton used satire throughout his work to denounce the injustices committed by the military governments that ran the country from the 1930s through the 1970s. The way this is accomplished is by first writing a brief history of El Salvador and a brief biography of Roque Dalton, followed by a brief history of the satiric genre, starting from the Roman Classical period ending with how satire came about in Latin America. Finally, I dedicate a chapter to analyzing three of Roque Dalton’s poems, giving examples of the instances when he used satire to condemn the many atrocities done to the Salvadoran people.

Lead is well-established neurotoxin that causes brain damage to the developing brain with persistent effects that remain across the lifespan. Dependent upon the developmental time-period of exposure (e.g., gestation, perinatal, or postnatal), lead may cause selective disruption of either the excitatory NMDAR-dependent or inhibitory GABAR-dependent neural circuitry. This suggests that lead exposure may cause very different developmental neuropathologies, that in turn, produce altered neuroadaptations to sensory and other contextual stimuli. In order to test this theory, rats that were treated with lead (150 ppm lead acetate perinatally) and compared to control rats (0 ppm) and subjected to an Open Field test (OF), an Elevated Plus Maze test (EPM), and an Active Avoidance Test (AAT). The OF data showed that lead treatment reduced locomotor activity and speed irrespective of sex when compared to control rats. The EPM data showed that selective anxiety-like behaviors induced by lead in female rats, but not male rats when compared to control rats. The AAT revealed that lead induced enhanced learning across both sexes, but the female rat’s avoidance and escape behaviors were greater than the lead male rats. The lead treated rats learned the AAT better than the control rats, not due to intellectual capacity but rather due to an altered and enhanced sensitivity to the aversive stimulus (i.e., foot shock). This suggests that perinatal lead exposure disrupts the early programming of the emotional regulatory neural systems within the limbic system (i.e., consistent with the GABA-shift), and as a result, causes sensory enhancement to aversive/noxious stimuli similar to a model of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with anxiety-like symptoms.

Lead poisoning is a well-established neurotoxicant that produces developmental neuropathologies that persist across the lifespan. However, how these early neurodeveloprnental insults impair sensorimotor, emotional, and cognitive behavioral systems later on in life remain to be elucidated. The present study examined Long Evans hooded rats that were exposed to 1,000 ppm lead acetate perinatally or Control rats that were not exposed to lead (i.e., 0 ppm). The male offspring from at least 5 different litters were randomly selected to form the treatment conditions. The perinatal group was exposed to lead 1-month prior to pairing, throughout gestation, birth, and ceased exposure at postnatal day (PND) 22. At PND 22 rats were subjected to a two-day hole board test whereby Day 1 served as an anxiogenic assessment and Day 2 served as a habituated and odor evoked novel exploration test within the identical apparatus. The only difference was that on Day 2 four novel odor extracts were positioned under the apparatus. The total time mobile, number of head pokes, and duration of head poking were recorded across both test days. The hole board test revealed that male Perinatal lead-exposed rats on Day I froze more and exhibited elevated emotional fear responses, when compared to the Control rats. Interestingly, on Day 2 Control rats engaged in significantly more head poking than they did on Day 1. Thus, evidencing the ability to emotionally habituate to t.he prior anxiogenic stimulus and engage in sensorimotor dependent exploratory behaviors. However, the Perinatal lead-exposed rats exhibited difficulty in shifting from their anxiogenic responses, showed little habituation, and a delayed on-set to sensorimotor dependent exploration of the novel odors. The data suggest that perinatal lead poisoning impairs sensory processes required for contextual adaptations, efficiency, and ongoing environmental changes directed by the prefrontal cortical through goal directed behaviors.

Individuals with disabilities often require accommodative technologies in order to help facilitate their leaning during their undergraduate college years. However, dependent upon the type of disability that an individual might experience, their accommodative needs may he rather unique. However, despite the individual differences that people exhibit, visual eye tracking has been shown to be rather sensitive in detecting similar eye movement behavioral signatures that can be used to group/categories people without knowing their underlying individual disability with fairly good accuracy. Our , neuropsychology research team has been evaluating over the last 4-years, how accurate and sensitive a Flanker eye tracking task is when combined with visual eye tracking technology (VETT) to characterize differences in a diverse subset of individuals with . disabilities, when compared to non-disabled individuals. The present study evaluates the eye movement behavioral differences in the participant's reaction time (RT) and their cumulative responses (CR) across the Flanker task as a function of gender and type of disability (i.e., 1) learning disabilities [LD], 2) emotional/psychiatric conditions [EPC], 3) orthopedic/mobility impairments [EMI], 4) attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders [AD/HD] and 5) health impairments [HI]. However, most national data lacks the inclusion of students with multiple disabilities [MD]). The study was conducted through our OSSD office and the researchers were triple blinded from the individuals ensuring anonymity and all participant data were coded. The preliminary results obtained suggest that the VETT can be used to characterize individual and group difference between gender and disability type reasonably well. This suggests that the Flanker task combined with VETT can be used to assess and perhaps effectively prescribe a match-to-sample set of accommodations for undergraduate college students that have disabilities. The VETT assessment can help to justify more accommodative technology needs within a given college and will directly benefit students with disabilities along their undergraduate education.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2011-2012, reported that 11% of undergraduate students are identified as having a disability. Nearly, 38% of students with disabilities are enrolled in 2-year institutions as compared to 9.8% at 4-year institutions. Students with disabilities require support services some of which are accommodative technologies. However, scant data exist on whether or not such technologies are sensitive to accommodating individual needs, that is tailored to support people with a specific or having multiple disabilities. There are five main categories describing students with disabilities: 1) learning disabilities (LD), 2) emotional/psychiatric conditions (EPC), 3) orthopedic/mobility impairments (EMI), 4) attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders (AD/HD) and 5) health impairments (HI). However, most national data lacks the inclusion of students with multiple disabilities (MD), which while being the most frequent category is by far the most underserved. The aim of the current project was to determine whether assessing student's visual attentional processing abilities (i.e., eye gaze) through a 10-minute Flanker Task could be used as a predictive and prescriptive diagnostic tool to screen students with disabilities that would benefit most from visual accommodative technologies. The research protocol employed a triple blind procedure. The results indicated that visual eye gaze technology is sensitive in detecting individuals with differing disabilities and therefore can be used to further characterize visual trial-by-trial learning differences to simple visual stimuli in populations with LD, EPC, EMI, AD/HD, HI, and MD. Thus, through such evidence based study a “true” prescriptive accommodative technology “match-to-sample” can be provided to students with disabilities to further support their undergraduate education based upon their unique individual needs (SUNY-OW Faculty Development Grant).