State concussion laws and sport-league policies are important tools for protecting public health, but also present implementation challenges. Both state laws and league policies often require athletes provide written acknowledgement of having received concussion-related information and/or of their responsibility to report concussion-related symptoms. This paper examines these requirements in two ways: an analysis of the variation in state laws and sport-league policies and a study of their effects in a cohort of collegiate football players.

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

This study examined the extent to which concussion management plans at National Collegiate Athletic Association member schools were in line with NCAA Concussion Policy and best practice recommendations in absence of any process to ensure compliance. Most schools' concussion management plans were in compliance with 3 or 4 of the NCAA's 4 required components. Annual athlete education and acknowledgement was the requirement least often included, representing an area for improvement. Further, schools tended to more often include best practices that were (...) more medically-oriented, compared to best practices that were less medical in nature. (shrink)

By imperial design, the Caribbean region was created as uneven yet interconnected archipelagos of Black dispossession, devaluation and dehumanisation. On this basis, Caribbean leaders have initiated calls for reparatory justice, demanding restitution for longstanding systemic inequalities stemming largely from plantation slavery, colonialism and native genocide. This paper interrogates the Caribbean program for reparatory justice drawing out its political strategies and ideological underpinnings. This analysis shows that the current eliteled “reparations-for-development” project reproduces a narrow modernizing form of economic reparations that is (...) premised on redress by accumulation and the continuation of the postcolonial liberal state despite its limited sovereignties, ongoing exclusions of marginalized Caribbean peoples, and racially and class oppressive dispositions. With limited community rootedness and consideration of increased marginalization of Caribbean communities in the face of climate hazards, this narrow approach critically ignores the ways in which Caribbean communities build solidarities and mutual care, or reparative ecologies, in response to external capitalist and socio-ecological pressures. This paper argues for an anti-systemic approach that considers the borderless nature of climate change, yet its specific oppressions and effects on Caribbean communities, which includes anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal climate justice agenda that expands collective “freedom” spaces and recognizes reparative ecologies may contribute a more emancipatory approach. (shrink)