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People have been giving away their money, property, and time to others for millennia. What's novel about the contemporary practice of philanthropy is the availability of tax incentives to give money away. Such incentives are built into tax systems in nearly all developed and many developing democracies. In this sense, philanthropy is not an invention of the state but ought to be viewed today as an artifact of the state. This paper specifies and assesses three possible justifications for the existence of tax incentives for charitable giving, identifies a distinctive role for philanthropy in democracies, and argues for a fundamental redesign of the current legal framework governing philanthropy. Empirically, giving to assist the needy and care for strangers is an uncommon form of giving in the United States. Normatively, it is but one potential justification for philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrea Lawlor's (2017) historical picaresque novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tracks the ephemeral embodiments and identifications of Paul Polydoris, a gender-fluid, shape-shifting anti-hero who adapts to queer environments across the United States during 1993–1995, a time when gay hedonism, lesbian feminism, punk anti-homonormativity, and LGBTQ responses to AIDS combined to make a complex heyday of queer culture. Paul exemplifies "organic" transitioning in that his gender processes complicate the culture/nature binary, resist anthropocentrism, emphasize empathetic interrelation with other organisms, and privilege understanding of the complex involvement of biology, culture, and individual will in transition. Paul's body is an enchanted site of meaning that is created in situ and in which he is then positioned to participate in local culture, moving the concept "sense of place" from green trope to queer fantasy of limitless engendering. Approaching the novel from a queer ecological/ecofeminist perspective, this paper argues that as a magical, marginal bricoleur who assembles performative selves from biological forms and cultural references via passionate liminal engagement with queer spaces, Paul inhabits a self-directed transness that challenges conventional understandings of the "natural" and the "human," modeling a dynamic, queer topophilia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study demonstrates the application of an unsupervised topic modeling algorithm to 7,773 English-language articles published in the Library Quarterly from 1931 to 2015. The analysis of 85 years of the journal's output follows an exploratory data analysis framework to generate novel hypotheses about the history of LIS using topic modeling, a method for identifying clusters of co-occurring words within large collections of text. The paper closely examines two topics that suggest differences in gender representation in the journal to propose and support a new hypothesis regarding the historical inclusion of gendered objects of study in LIS literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, feminists within mainstream rape crisis advocacy have been working to address rape by advocating to end the DNA backlog and therefore, the expansion of DNA databases, locally and nationally. Despite criticisms from radical abolition feminists for practicing carceral feminism that incarcerates more Black and Brown people, rape crisis advocates have been continuing their entanglements with criminal justice, fully recognizing the contradictory ends of such investments. In this paper, I explore their continued carceral investments, through underlying logics and justifications based in science and law and the impacts of doing so, as it relates to the problem of racialized policing. Relying on Black feminist epistemologies and interdisciplinary methodologies, my analysis draws upon archived documents, reports, legislations, and ethnographically driven interviews and observations with and amongst state and non-state actors, who are stakeholders in DNA biosurveillance. I argue that carceral feminists continue their carceral investments through two justifications—materiality and recidivism—that results in intensification of policing in communities of color by expanding genome based racialized biosurveillance. The implications of their justifications further harm survivors of violence, and produce a multifaceted recidivism, that is unbounded spacio-temporally, deepening and furthering state reach within communities of color in perpetuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of a dedicated study area due to the transition to remote instruction during COVID-19 disproportionately affected students who had no place for academic work within the home that was free of distraction. This paper describes the creation of an online guide designed to help students re-create the library experience from home to better focus on schoolwork. It also outlines how other librarians can similarly support distance or commuter students with materials already on hand. These resources include library photographs for use as background images or screen savers on students' devices, audio that can be played as ambient noise, and stress reduction and mindfulness aids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]