Thesis advisor: Mariela Páez / In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated persistent educational inequities and added exponentially to the existing “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Public schools’ sudden shift to remote learning marginalized a large population of students, including young bilingual children from immigrant backgrounds. These students are among the most vulnerable when it comes to remote learning not only because of accessibility issues, but also because many of these students’ families live in underserved and under-resourced communities that were negatively affected by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and persistent systemic racism (Fortuna et al., 2020; Schmit et al., 2020). Hence, there is an urgent need to understand pandemic-related experiences of immigrant families with young bilingual children and to respond with educational strategies that strive to mitigate the negative effects of this educational crisis. This dissertation study comprised of three papers addresses this need through a collaborative project with 20 immigrant families with 42 young bilingual children and two community organizations from the Metro and Greater Boston Area. Paper 1 used sequential mixed methods to provide an in-depth account of immigrant families' remote learning experiences and investigate structural barriers such as lack of support and oppressive practices that hindered the establishment of home-school connections during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paper 2 employed transformative mixed methods to document the development, implementation, and evaluation of a family engagement and remote learning program—the Home Connection. This program was firmly grounded in the equitable collaboration framework of family engagement to build a strong partnership with the family participants and to recognize the crucial roles of the families as co-designers, co-educators, co-researchers, and co-evaluators. Paper 3 is a practitioner inquiry reflecting on what I have learned as a teacher-researcher implementing culturally sustaining pedagogy to partner with immigrant families and teach young bilingual children from diverse backgrounds during pandemic remote learning. Findings from this dissertation documenting the struggles, resistance, and solidarity of these immigrant families will help inform educators, administrators, and policymakers in their planning and delivering of learning experiences and family engagement initiatives that center on the motivation, needs, and assets of diverse students and their families. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The current study aims to validate and apply an instrument to assess the relationship between communication overload, social overload, technostress, exhaustion and academic performance. We performed a cross-sectional, analytical study of 2286 university medical students to assess the influence of technostress as a mediator of social media overload, communication overload and mental exhaustion and its detrimental effect on the academic performance of university students in Peru during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research model was validated using partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to establish the influence of variables on the model. Communication and social overload were found to positively influence technostress by correlations of 0.284 and 0.557, respectively. Technostress positively influenced exhaustion by 0.898, while exhaustion negatively influenced academic performance by-0.439. Bootstrapping demonstrated that the path coefficients of the research model were statistically significant. The research outcomes may help university managers understand students’ technostress and develop strategies to improve the balanced use of technology for their daily academic activities. / Revisión por pares

Using the quarterly and monthly data of ten representative cities in China from December 2000 to June 2021, this thesis describes the impact of COVID-19 on the urban economy, import and export, and quantifies the impact degree by panel data regression analysis. To explore the relationship between the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and urban categories, we distinguished different types of cities. The results show that COVID-19 has the most profound impact on coastal towns, followed by megacities. It is mainly due to the excessive dependence of coastal towns on import and export trade. We also understand the lagging effect of the pandemic on the economy by adding dummy variables representing the SARS pandemic. Facts have proved that while formulating related policies, the government has to consider the lagging effects of the impact of the pandemic on the economy. JEL Classification C51, I18, O47 Keywords COVID-19, pandemic, China, economy, import, export, government policies Title The Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chinese Cities What Can We Learn from the SARS Pandemic

CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Master of International Security Systems Anastasiya Neskoromna/Rieger Impact of COVID 19 on Security Policies of States in the Area of Cyber Security Abstract Prague 2022 Author: Ms. Anastasiya Neskoromna/Rieger Supervisor: prof. David Erkomashvile, Ph.D. Academic Year: 2021/2022 Abstract The SARS-Cov-19 or in different wording the global Covid pandemic outburst have created an unprecedented scenario for various organizations, agencies and structures. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has become an extraordinary and shocking event for the world community and the global economy. On the part of the authorities, the COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by sometimes harsh and ambiguous decisions, the consequences of which are felt by people in many countries of the world: movement between countries was stopped, businesses and enterprises were closed, the restriction was created, those who were sick or at risk of infection were isolated. There was also no possible assumption regarding how long such a mode of life will last. Many factors as a consequential chain of reactions from the pandemic in the aggregate have created a pleasant environment for altering and modifying the cybercrime landscape. This work aims to analyze the factorial presence of modification in the sphere...

The following essay explores the connection between pandemic dystopian fiction and a pedagogy of discomfort through a critical reading of The White Plague by Frank Herbert. It is advocated in this essay that a critical reading of the novel can give rise to uncomfortable topics related to living in a pandemic reality, which in turn can be incorporated in an ESL setting to encourage critical inquiry and action. Grounded in a thematic analysis of the novel, it is demonstrated that The White Plague can be used to discuss uncomfortable topics such as fear of biogenetic engineering, fear of others, nationalism, national identity, deglobalisation, violence against women, patriarchy, and traditional gender roles. Contextualised withincontemporary history, tradition, ideology, and recontextualised with the current COVID-19 pandemic, the essay confirms that a critical reading of The White Plague carries the potential to promote a pedagogy of discomfort inside an ESL classroom.

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In early 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. As of March 2023, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has reported over 829 thousand cases and over 9 thousand deaths. Due to the public health emergency, the wild-type SARS-CoV-2 genome was fully sequenced early on the pandemic course. Afterward, different viral variants emerged around the world. The variant prevalence fluctuates over time, with some strains presenting increased transmissibility, changes in disease severity, and decreased efficacy of containment measures. In this respect, genomic surveillance and timely data sharing to public repositories represent a tool to track and detect emerging changes that require addressing with public health measurements. However, the Kingdom's genome contribution to the GISAID database represents merely 0.27% of the reported cases. To address this gap, we incorporated whole genome sequencing and the available metadata, to track the circulating viral lineages and identify the variants of concern (VOC) and variants of interest (VOI) over 14 months, from December 2021 to January 2023. We sequenced 581 genomes using the MinION MK1C platform of Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and assigned the viral lineages, the data primarily derived from COVID-19-positive patients from the city of Jeddah. The VOC Omicron was the principal circulating variant in the country (~99%), which aligns with the global trend. Our report included the sublineages BA.2.75, BQ.1, CH.1.1, XBB, and XBB.1.5, which are under WHO monitoring. We also reported the VOC Delta and the recombinant strains XF, XZ, and XPB. Finally, to validate the use of ONT for genomic surveillance, we compared the data quality of 93 samples sequenced in both ONT MinION and Illumina NaovaSeq platforms. There was 90% correspondence in the Nextstrain clade assignment (84/93) and 78% correspondence in the Pangolin sublineage assignment (73/93). MinION offered a shorter turnaround time, while Illumina produced a consistently higher breadth of genome coverage. In conclusion, the continued viral evolution patterns are reflected in the Kingdom's variant prevalence, where only Omicron circulated by January 2023. Likewise, current Variants Under Monitoring (VUM) were already identified in KSA, highlighting the need for increased genomic surveillance.

Flashbulb memories are formed through widely shared events that have affected the culture and community. The “flash” in flashbulb memories refers to the specific details that individuals have developed in their memories. The presented research focuses on the specific event of college students at the University of Central Florida (UCF) hearing about university closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This research study sought to identify the variables that have affected the accuracy of flashbulb memories formation regarding the event of college students hearing about university closure because of the pandemic. The variables of the students’ relevance to the university, location, source of hearing about the university’s closure, and political group they belong to were investigated to determine if they affected the accuracy of the memories that were developed. An online survey was sent to students inquiring about the specifics and details that they remembered when finding out that the university was closed and was going to move to remote instruction. Participants included 226 college students who filled out the survey between February 3, 2021, and July 21, 2021. The survey included questions regarding the experiences of students when they learned about COVID-19 and university closure. Data revealed that a greater relevance to the event can cause a greater amount of rehearsal and recall of memories. The rehearsal and recall of memories are crucial variables to developing accurate flashbulb memories. This study contributes to the lack of research in flashbulb memories associated with pandemics. The study will be an addition to determining variables that have affected the accuracy of flashbulb memories.

Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda throughout the story, acting as correctives to Miranda's (and Porter's) desire to isolate herself from the familial and regional heritage that burdens her with unwanted and often conflicting ideologies. Ultimately, in using magical realism to explore her sense of self and to articulate the alienating effects of her near-death experience, Porter is able to embrace her complicated heritage and her fractured past, reclaiming interconnectedness while maintaining her individuality.

The purpose of this study was to explore the resiliency of Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study explored the role social support (as an external factor of resilience) and self-efficacy (as an internal factor of resilience) played in the resilience of Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study employed a sequential explanatory mixed methods design involving two phases: a quantitative and a qualitative phase. Participants in this study were 99 teachers in rural eastern Tennessee and some rural parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and New Mexico, who were Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three survey instruments were used to collect quantitative data. The Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale was used to measure self-efficacy, the Comprehensive Evaluation of Social Support (CESS) was used to measure the level of social support, and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) was used to measure resilience. The survey was followed by qualitative interviews with 6 participants randomly selected from 23 participants in phase 1 of the study who agreed to participate in the interview. The results showed that social support (p = .036) and self-efficacy (p ≤ .001) impacted resilience in Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, self-efficacy was a better predictor of resilience in Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic than social support. There was no interaction effect of social support and self-efficacy on the resilience of Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic (p = .078). Also, none of the six dimensions of social support used in this study (supervisor emotional, supervisor instrumental, coworker emotional, coworker instrumental, organizational emotional, and organizational instrumental) significantly predicted resilience in Head Start teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The themes that emerged from the teacher interview were acquisition of skills, families of children, increase in children’s challenging behavior, within-school support, outside-school support, and increase in confidence as a teacher. The limitations of the study and recommendations for practice and future research are included.