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Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a Swiss university course called “Psychology and Migration” had to move online over the Spring semester 2021. In this course, Psychology and Education students learn about the sociocultural considerations of migration, through a theoretical, personal and artistic exploration of the subjective experience of migration, based on performing arts. As part of the main pedagogical strategies, students are invited to collectively create a short theatre play based on some selected literary texts. Under the conditions imposed by the pandemic, puppetry arts were chosen as a new tool for distance-learning. Collaborating with theatre professionals, the students created a short play, and performed it online using sock puppets, image theatre or object theatre. Using data collected during the course (video recordings of online sessions and students’ diaries), this article explores the critical process of reduction and expansion, and the (potentially) productive tensions that the course creates. It analyses two main appropriation modes for course students: in adaptative appropriation, students aim to reduce these tensions by adapting to the perceived expectations of teachers; in transformative appropriation, students creatively use possibilities offered by the course to conduct a personal exploration, integrating theories with their own experiences and questions.

The Green Energy and Green Economy Act (2009) was an omnibus bill that affected a number of other acts. Due to the breadth of its effects, it should have seen a rigorous consultation and review process; this is especially true given how it would impact First Nations and its explicit mention in the Bill. However, it took less than three months for it to receive Royal Assent and become an act. This timeline is extremely short, even among similar bills within the same context. One of the core reasons for this swift transition is due to its labeling as green energy, which has benign connotations. This effectively allowed the bill to be expedited through the consultation process. The consultation process had many hurdles of its own that inhibited meaningful consultation including its timeframe, location of hearings, accessibility, and other factors. The term green energy was also never defined within the Act, meaning it only served as a form of signaling. This raises many questions with respect to the Government of Ontario’s conduct in the situation and how they handled their legal duty to consult with Indigenous people of Ontario, Canada. There are many voices that have raised issues with this process. If nothing else, this example serves the purpose of demonstrating the dangers of green-labelling, especially to Indigenous people of Canada and other Indigenous groups worldwide.

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Public safety personnel (PSP) are known to experience difficult and demanding occupational environments, an environment that has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Firefighters, paramedics, and public safety communicators were among the front-line workers that continued to serve the public throughout the course of the pandemic. The present study considered the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-reported symptoms of mental health challenges in Canadian firefighters, paramedics, and public safety communicators. Participants were firefighters (n = 123), paramedics (n = 246), and public safety communicators (n = 48), who completed an online survey, including demographics, questions related to COVID-19 exposure and worry, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, the Social Interaction Phobia Scale, and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-5. Results revealed that risk factors for increased mental health symptom reporting were paramedic occupation, self-identified female, younger in age, COVID-19 personal contact, requirement to self-isolate, and self-perception of COVID-19 contraction (without confirmation through testing). The COVID-19 pandemic should be considered a risk factor for increased mental health symptom reporting in PSP. This research was partially funded by Anderson’s CIHR Mental Wellness in Public Safety Team Grant (MWP: 172806) and WorkSafe British Columbia grant (RS2019-SP13). Faculty yes

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the public health measures implemented in Manitoba and Ontario during waves 1 and 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted allied health professionals working in primary care settings. This study used a case study methodology to develop four cases, two allied health professionals from Manitoba and two allied health professionals of the same professions from Ontario. Two methods of data collection were used, diary entry and interview. Diary entry data was collected between March 2020 and August 2020. Interviews were conducted in December 2020. This study’s approach to data analysis was to use the framework analysis to apply a conceptual framework, specifically the Roy Adaptation Model. The Roy Adaptation Model encompasses four adaptive modes: role function, interdependence, group identity, and physiological. The results section presents how each of these modes were operationalized for each case. The public health measures affected the role function mode more significantly than the other modes. All participants experienced role disruptions with redeployment and role change with the transition to remote and virtual care. The allied health providers in both provinces experienced role reductions with limitations in their ability to practice their primary role. The implemented COVID-19 public health measures led providers to work within their roles in an adapted capacity during the length of the pandemic. The greatest differences between the experiences of providers in Ontario versus Manitoba was the timeline of events and the response of the provincial governments. This study highlights how macro policies influence the day-to-day of healthcare workers.

The number of IoT devices in healthcare is expected to rise sharply due to significantly increased demand since the COVID-19 pandemic. Deep learning and IoT devices are being employed to monitor body vitals and automate anomaly detection in clinical and non-clinical settings. Most of the current technology requires the transmission of raw data to a remote server, which is not efficient for resource-constrained IoT devices and embedded systems. In this work, we have developed machine learning models to be deployed on Raspberry Pi. We present an evaluation of our TensorFlow Model with various classification classes. We also present the evaluation of the corresponding TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffers to demonstrate their minimal run-time requirements while maintaining acceptable accuracy. Additionally, to address the problem of sensor and data integration when using multiple devices, we propose a unified server on our Edge Node.

Natalie Grant is a freelance series producer primarily working in entertainment and reality television and codirector of Share My Telly Job (SMTJ), an organisation that exists to promote job-sharing and the normalisation of other forms of flexible working in the UK television and film industry, such as condensed hours and part-time work, in order to encourage better equality, diversity and inclusion. In this interview by Helen Kennedy and Jack Newsinger, held via email in December 2021, Grant talks about her experiences as a mother working in television, what led to her becoming a campaigner, and how more flexible kinds of work can promote greater equality and diversity in the television industry workforce.

Social inequities such as poverty and homelessness are intersectional and complex; they are persistent, wicked and their solutions are elusive. Building capacity for innovation in the social sector, i.e., encouraging the adoption of practices and processes designed for radical solutions to social problems, is an increasingly widespread strategy. Because innovation and change in the social sector are driven by knowledge processes, universities as anchor institutions would seem to have a natural role to play in the social impact ecosystem. Campus-community knowledge collaborations and innovation partnerships can be a vector of impact and, if the conditions are right, academic engagement can increase capacity in the social impact ecosystem. We wanted to better understand the needs of social sector organizations (SSO) in relation to their capacity, interests and experience with innovation and, along the way, assess how these needs had been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team collected input through a survey from 180 social service organizations across Canada and analyzed responses for trends, themes, and sentiments. Mitacs

For decades, farming has been recognized as a highly stressful occupation globally. In 2016, a national survey investigating mental health outcomes among farmers in Canada found increased levels of mental distress among this population compared to the general public. Farmers are known to face a unique host of occupational stressors, and the COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges for farmers in Canada. Hence, the second wave of the national, online, cross-sectional survey of mental health outcomes among farmers in Canada was conducted early 2021. The survey results showed increased levels of anxiety, depression, perceived stress, emotional exhaustion, and cynicism among farmers compared to the Canadian public, particularly among farming women. This justified action towards identifying opportunities to reduce stress and increase well-being in this population. A mixed-methods investigation provided a comprehensive understanding of chronic and episodic farming stressors in Canada and identified promising areas for stress-reduction and well-being promotion efforts. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

While the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way parents partition tasks between one another, it is not clear how these division of labour arrangements affect well-being. Pre-pandemic research offers two hypotheses: economic theory argues optimal outcomes result from partners specialising in different tasks, whereas psychological theory argues for a more equitable division of labour. The question of which approach optimizes well-being is more pressing in recent times, with COVID-19 school closures leaving many couples with the burden of homeschooling. It is unknown whether specialisation or equity confer more benefits for mandated homeschoolers, relative to non-homeschoolers or voluntary homeschoolers. Couples (n = 962) with children in grades 1–5 completed measures of workload division and parental well-being. A linear mixed modelling in the total sample revealed that specialisation, but not equity, promoted increased parental emotional and relationship well-being. These relations were moderated by schooling status: voluntary homeschoolers’ well-being benefitted from specialisation, whereas mandated homeschoolers’ well-being did not benefit from either strategy; non-homeschoolers well-being benefitted from both strategies. Across the mixed-gender couples, mothers’ and fathers’ well-being both benefitted from specialisation; equity was only beneficial for mothers’ well-being. Overall, couples might be advised to adopt highly equitable and specialised arrangements to promote both parents’ well-being.

Low-cost diagnostic tools for point-of-care immunoassays, such as the paper-based enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA), have become increasingly important, especially so in the recent COVID-19 pandemic. ELISA is the gold-standard antibody/antigen sensing method. This paper reports an easy-to-fabricate nitrocellulose (NC) paper plate, coupled with a desktop scanner for ELISA, which provides a higher protein immobilization efficiency than the conventional cellulose paper-based ELISA platforms. The experiments were performed using spiked samples for the direct ELISA of rabbit IgG with a limit of detection (LOD) of 1.016 μg/mL, in a measurement range of 10 ng/mL to 1 mg/mL, and for the sandwich ELISA of sperm protein (SP-10) with an LOD of 88.8 ng/mL, in a measurement range of 1 ng/mL to 100 μg/mL. The described fabrication method, based on laser-cutting, is a highly flexible one-step laser micromachining process, which enables the rapid production of low-cost NC paper-based multi-well plates with different sizes for the ELISA measurements.