Publications by authors named "Karen Foster"

This article explores the labour behind local food in the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. Based on surveys and interviews with farmers, migrant farmworkers, and farmers' market consumers in the province, we suggest that the celebration of local food by government and industry is a form of "local washing." Local washing hides key aspects of the social relations of production: in this case, it hides insufficient financial and policy supports for Nova Scotian farms and the increased reliance on migrant farmworkers via the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

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Introduction: Poor diet is a leading preventable risk for the global burden of non-communicable disease. Robust measurement is needed to determine the effect of COVID-19 on dietary intakes and consumer purchasing, given the widespread changes to consumer food environments and economic precarity. The research objectives are as follows: (1) describe dietary intakes of foods, beverages and nutrients of concern during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) quantify change in diet during COVID-19 as compared with prepandemic, previously captured in the provincial samples of the population-representative 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey-Nutrition and (3) examine how household purchasing practices predict dietary intakes during COVID-19.

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Objective: Analyze reflection essays written by one graduating class of students after an initial experience in a clinic for adults with special health care needs (SHCN) and intellectual and developmental disabilities, to draw insights from the patterns of observations expressed.

Methods: Essays were written by students from the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine during the 2016-2017 academic year after completing a 1-day clinical experience treating this patient population. Readers identified 18 primary themes (PTs) previously identified in essays written during 2012-2013.

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The historic influence of interannual weather and climate variability on total mercury concentrations (THg) in the eggs of two species of Arctic seabird in the Canadian High Arctic was investigated. Time series of THg in the eggs of northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) and thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia) from Prince Leopold Island span 40 years (1975-2014), making these among the longest time series available for contaminants in Arctic wildlife and uniquely suitable for evaluation of long-term climate and weather influence. We compiled a suite of weather and climate time series reflecting atmospheric (air temperature, wind speed, sea level pressure) and oceanic (sea surface temperature, sea ice cover) conditions, atmosphere-ocean transfer (snow and rain), as well as broad-scale teleconnection indices such as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

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Changing climate can influence the transport of chemical pollutants into Arctic regions and their fate once there. However, the influence of weather or climate variables on organochlorine accumulation in Arctic wildlife, including seabirds, and associated time scale are poorly understood. We assessed the interannual relationships between a suite of weather/climate variables for time lags of 0 to 10 yr and organochlorine pollutant concentrations spanning 1975-2014 in eggs of two seabird species (northern fulmar Fulmarus glacialis, thick-billed murre Uria lomvia) that breed in the Canadian High Arctic.

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Inspired by Jane Jacobs's writing on "habitat maintenance," this paper seeks to identify the ethics that sometimes compel rural residents to act in ways that preserve their communities in the long run, despite short-term incentives to do otherwise. Data from focus groups in four rural Atlantic Canadian communities suggest shared ethics around entrepreneurship, market competition, buying local, and subsistence, some of which underlie the rural practices and perspectives that appear, to some outsiders, as irrational and "backwards." Understanding these ethics and the practices they incite as components of habitat maintenance-and judging them by their situated pragmatism rather than their fit with the placeless ideologies of growth-centric global capitalism and competitiveness-highlights their rationality and utility.

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Hospitalisation of a parent with acute mental health problems impacts the consumer, their extended family/carers and children. Mental health nurses are at the forefront of promoting recovery for consumers in an acute inpatient setting. Recovery-oriented care can include provision of family-focused care which supports recovery of the parent-consumer and their family members and contributes to prevention of intergenerational mental illness.

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Zooplankton play a central role in marine food webs, dictating the quantity and quality of energy available to upper trophic levels. They act as "keystone" species in transfer of mercury (Hg) up through the marine food chain. Here, we present the first Pan-Arctic overview of total and monomethylmercury concentrations (THg and MMHg) and stable isotope ratios of carbon (δ(13)C) and nitrogen (δ(15)N) in selected zooplankton species by assembling data collected between 1998 and 2012 from six arctic regions (Laptev Sea, Chukchi Sea, southeastern Beaufort Sea, Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Hudson Bay and northern Baffin Bay).

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With declining sea ice conditions in Arctic regions owing to changing climate, the large prospective reservoirs of oil and gas in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait are increasingly accessible, and the interest in offshore exploration and shipping through these regions has increased. Both of these activities are associated with the risk of hydrocarbon releases into the marine ecosystem. However, hydrocarbons are also present naturally in marine environments, in some cases deriving from oil seeps.

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Background: Little is known about factors influencing applicants' choice of medical school, yet it is important that both the academic and non-academic needs of medical students are satisfied, and that medical schools attract students suited to the courses provided. Relevant evidence suggests that there are five main factors influencing choice: curriculum; reputation of the school; personal contact; location; and facilities. Aberdeen has the particular challenge of being the most northern medical school in the UK.

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Following Mannheim's (1970) Problem of Generations, many scholars have warned of the analytical and political risks of conflating generation with cohort. Yet the temptation persists, as relying on cohort is a convenient method of dividing a population to study it. This article proposes that cohort is only convenient if the objective is understanding generations as definitive groups of people.

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This article joins a growing chorus of researchers who doubt the utility of the concept of peer pressure for explaining young people's initiation to and use of drugs. Drawing on interview data with 45 patrons of a youth drop-in centre in Ottawa, Canada, we argue that drug use is more intricately woven into friendship - affective relationships of trust and intimacy, belonging and sharing - rather than simply part of the unidirectional pressures some young people put on others to fit in to a subculture. Marginalized young people's narratives show that drugs and alcohol furnish them with a relatively inexpensive pastime to share with friends, introducing opportunities for intimacy that are otherwise difficult to attain at the individualistic and isolating margins of neoliberal cities.

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While much research has been carried out on mercury in large marine mammals and associated food webs in northern regions, comparatively less has been conducted on lower trophic levels including zooplankton and the subsequent transfer to predators, which marks the entry of mercury into northern marine food webs. We present here the first database for mercury uptake and transfer exclusively within zooplankton food webs in northern marine waters. We have investigated both total (THg) and monomethylmercury (MMHg) concentrations, and isotopic signatures (δ(15)N and δ(13)C) in individual zooplankton taxa collected over a period of eight years (2003-2010) from across Hudson Bay (including Hudson Strait and Foxe Basin) as part of research icebreaker cruises.

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Seabirds bioaccumulate contaminants from prey, transport them to their nesting sites, and deposit them in their excreta and carcasses, thereby focusing marine-derived contaminants into remote, terrestrial receptor sites. In the case of organochlorine chemicals transported by northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) to a High Arctic seabird colony on Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada (76°13'N, 89°14'W), this contaminant pathway dominates all others. In freshwater ponds below the nesting cliffs, concentrations of organochlorine contaminants characteristic of fulmar input were 2- to 45-fold higher in sediments and water (depending on seabird input to the particular pond) than in ponds remote from the colony.

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Organochlorine contaminant concentrations, associated fugacities, and stable isotopes of nitrogen (δ(15) N) are reported for liver, whole body homogenate, and opportunistically collected samples of prey (amphipods), stomach oils, digestive tract contents, and guano for northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) collected at Cape Vera, Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Liver concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (ΣPCB) and ΣDDT were on average 49.9 ± 35.

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Bird species from the order Procellariiformes or petrels, including the northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), produce high lipid and high energy content stomach oils from the prey they consume, which enables them to exploit distant marine food sources. Stomach oils are also used as a food source for chicks and for defensive purposes. Samples of stomach oils from two Arctic colonies, St.

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The role of northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) was investigated for the transport of nutrients and trace elements to a series of 10 ponds located along a gradient of seabird influence below a fulmar colony in the high Arctic (Cape Vera, Devon Island, Canada). Phosphorus, Cd, K, Zn, and As were identified as seabird-derived elements, having both a high concentration in fulmar guano and a low concentration in background pond sediments (i.e.

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Background: Davide Calamari and his colleagues were among the first to appreciate that vegetation could play a key role in determining the fate and effects of organic contaminants. They conducted pioneering experiments to investigate the uptake of contaminants by plants from the atmosphere and they sought to model the observed phenomena. In the nearly two decades since there has been a marked increase in understanding of these phenomena as a result of both experimental and modelling studies.

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The authors wished to assess medical students' attitudes towards communication skills learning, and to validate the use of the Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) in a different population. This cross-sectional study of Years 1-3 MBChB students, University of Aberdeen, in 2002-03 (overall response rate=86.2%) identified significant differences in attitudes to communication skills teaching by year of study and gender.

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