Remaking the Self: Trauma, Teachable Moments, and the Biopolitics of Cancer Survivorship

As numerous scholars have noted, cancer survivorship is often represented in popular discourse as providing an opportunity for a physical, emotional, and spiritual makeover. However, this idea that cancer enables the self to be remade on all levels is also increasingly evoked in the field of psychosocial oncology. Exploring cancer survivorship as a biopolitical phenomenon, I focus on two concepts that have become central to understandings of the disease: the ??teachable moment?? and ??post-traumatic growth.?? Drawing primarily on representations of cancer survivorship in the clinical literature, I suggest that cancer is increasingly seen to present a unique opportunity to catalyze the patient??s physical and psychological development. In this framework, the patient can no longer be relied upon to transform him or herself: this change must be externally driven, with clinicians taking advantage of the trauma that cancer entails to kick-start the patient into action. Broadening my analysis to the concepts of ??trauma?? and ??development?? writ large, I go on to suggest that survivorship discourse seems to partake of a larger and relatively recent meta-narrative about development??both individual and societal??and the positive opportunity that trauma is seen to present to stimulate reconstruction on a grand scale.     

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking. World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Veena Das. Arthur Kleinman. Margaret Lock. Mamphele Ramphele. and Pamela Reynolds. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 294 pp.     

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking. World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Veena Das. Arthur Kleinman. Margaret Lock. Mamphela Ramphele. and Pamela Reynolds. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. viii. 294 pp.     

From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village

From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in. Spanish Village. Jane Fishburne Collier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.264 pp.     

Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries

Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries . Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 399 pp.     

No More Foreigners? The Remaking of German Naturalization and Citizenship Law, 1990–2000

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Germany has been taking controversial policy measures that had been quite unimaginable, even in the 1980s. On the one hand, regulations for asylum seekers and ethnic Germans have gradually become restrictive in nature. On the other hand, changes to the Citizenship and Nationality Law of 1913 (Reichs und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz) and the Alien Act of 1965 (Ausländergesetz) have dramatically altered the naturalization process. Before the passage of the new German citizenship law in 1999, the acquisition of citizenship in Germany was solely based on the principle of descent (jus sanguinis). This paper attempts to explain why German government altered its citizenship policy and introduced birthright citizenship. It reviews the post-war contextual factors that have shaped the debate on citizenship and asks whether it is external or internal factors, that is international-level norms and institutions or domestic politics, that led to the change. If domestic politics can fully explain the adoption of the new citizenship law, what domestic forces played an important role? Was state action taken in the name of protecting “the national interest” or was it party politics? What role did societal forces play in the making of new citizenship policy? Did the act seek to mitigate anti-foreigner sentiment growing in Germany since the 1990s? Using archival and documentary research and secondary data on socio-economic and demographic trends in Germany, this paper concludes that domestic politics explain the changes in the citizenship law. I argue that granting and withholding national citizenship, including birthright citizenship, is exclusively in the hands of a nation state. Considering a purely ethnocultural understanding of nation-hood now includes legal and territorial components, the new German citizenship law is a major reform at the both theoretical and conceptual level. However, the practical consequences of the new naturalization process remain to be seen. The main question for the future research agenda is whether the new naturalization and citizenship laws will bring full integration of foreigners living in German society.     

Remaking Body Politics: Dilemmas Over Female Fatness as Symbolic Capital in Two Rural Tuareg Communities

This essay explores nuanced, debated and changing meanings of female fatness as a bodily aesthetic ideal in rural Tuareg communities in northern Niger and Mali. I compare two communities—one where nomadic herding, of longstanding importance among the Tuareg, remains prevalent, and intermarriage is rare between aristocratic and formerly servile persons, and the other where residents have become more settled in hamlets, now garden, and where intermarriage between social categories is frequent. Both communities have experienced conflict with colonial and postcolonial nation-states, but the more nomadic herders have had especially tense relations with French colonial and postcolonial state regimes. Although many oasis residents express greater ambivalence toward female fatness, these communities do not express neatly polarized attitudes but admire it to varying degrees, for different reasons, and attach different meanings to it from their experience of different double-binds over achieving it. Fundamental to understanding these meanings, I argue, are psychosocial dilemmas arising from historical change and regional variation affecting power relationships between persons of aristocratic and those of servile origins, between husbands and wives and between nomadic herders and the nation-state. More broadly, these data show the importance of reversals of power in symbolic capital and suggest more nuanced processes surrounding body politics.     

Regenerating the heart

Cell-based cardiac repair offers the promise of rebuilding the injured heart from its component parts. Work began with committed cells such as skeletal myoblasts, but recently the field has expanded to explore an array of cell types, including bone marrow cells, endothelial progenitors, mesenchymal stem cells, resident cardiac stem cells, and both mouse and human embryonic stem cells. A related strategy for cardiac repair involves cell mobilization with factors such as cytokines. Translation of cell-based approaches to the clinic has progressed rapidly, and clinical trials using autologous skeletal myoblasts and bone marrow cells are under way. Many challenges remain before the vision of healing an infarct by muscle regeneration can be realized. Future research is likely to focus on improving our ability to guide the differentiation of stem cells, control their survival and proliferation, identify factors that mediate their homing and modulate the heart's innate inflammatory and fibrotic responses.     

Definitive assumption of heart function by the artificial heart

Reproducing the function of the natural heart with an artificial heart requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Problems to be solved are anatomical, physiological, biological and technical ones. Moreover, clinical use of the artificial heart on a large scale in the near future may involve economical, ethical and legal issues. These several aspects are reviewed, and the State of the Art in 1981 is established.     

Mechanoelectrical feedback in the healthy heart and in the heart with pathologies

The article discusses the issues of possible connection between mechanical phenomena in myocardium and the electrical processes. Not only cardiomyocytes, but also cardiac fibroplastic are considered as substratum for the mechanisms of mechano-electrical feedbacks. Cardiomyocytes and fibroplastic of healthy animals demonstrate the mechano-electrical feedbacks, which essentially mean that stretching of the cardiac tissue within the physiological limits to 2 mN changes the electrophysiological cell processes. Close to 90% repolarization potential of cardiomyocytes action the mechano-induced depolarization develops; over the background of depolarization, when it reaches the threshold values, extra potentials of action are generated. In fibroplastic, membrane mechano-induced hyperpolarization develops; as result of cellular interaction it may develop hyperpolarization of pacemaking cells of the right auricle and slow the cardiac rythm down. In case of a pathology, for instance, infarct of the left heart ventricle modification of electric cell activity was detected at quite low values of tissue stretching up to 0.2. mN. Mechano-induced depolarization of cardiomyocytes of animals affected by infarct develops at 50% level of repolarization phase of action potential, or at 90% of repolarization phase. In the former case development of mechano-induced depolarization coincides with the period of absolute cell refractering. Extra action potential develops immediately after the refractering phase when the mechano-induced depolarization shifts the membrane potential towards threshold values. In the latter case the mechano-induced depolarization transforms into extra action potential. With further stretching fibrillation develops. In fibroplastic the values of mechano-induced membrane hyperpolarization grow with greater scope of infarct damage. Magnitude of mechano-induced hyperpolarization of auricle fibroplastic taken from the animals with infarcts shows dependence on the period of remodelling if stretching is tissue is a standard parameter. With prolongation of the remodelling period the value of mechano-induced fibroplastic hyperpolarization diminishes. The problem of developing the combinations eliminating mechano-induced cardiac arrhythmia is raised.