Is there a post-racism? On David Theo Goldberg’s conjunctural analysis of the post-racial

ABSTRACT

I comment on David Theo Goldberg’s Are We all Postracial Yet? by interpreting it as a programmatic essay towards a new conjunctural analysis of a globalizing racism, and as an emerging globalizing dialogue against racism. In the spirit of Goldberg’s book I relate these two modes of critical engagement in order to open a global perspective through which a relational understanding of racism can be formulated with respect to two neoliberal contexts, continental Europe and the United States. To this end I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar and in particular his early consideration of ‘neo-racism’.     

Bringing the “General Strike” Back In: DuBois,Slavery and Emancipation

ABSTRACT

The “general strike” of slaves in the Civil War was a direct action that involved millions of small and large acts of defiance by slaves. These actions pushed President Lincoln from hesitation to full on military action, although this chapter of history has been neglected. The work of W.E.B. Du Bois reinserted the agency of slaves in their own liberation through the “general strike” but this analysis has also been pushed to the margins. David Roediger's “Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All' is an important corrective to this historical omission.     

Bottomless cup,plug‐in drug: A telethnography of coffee

In this paper, I use an anthropological perspective to explore the dimensions of “coffeeworld” as it is depicted on prime time network television programming. I do not examine coffee commercials, but rather the programming context that conditions in part viewers’ perceptions of coffee, which ostensibly delivers a receptive audience to prospective marketers. I explore the cultural significance of coffee in the form of themes emerging from a close viewing of top‐rated programs.     

Playing with perspectives: spirit possession,mimesis, and permeability in the buuta ritual in South India

The aim of this study is to investigate spirit possession through the lenses of mimesis, permeability, and perspectivity. Recent studies have explored the significance of perspective exchange as reciprocal subjectification. At the same time, the importance of reflexive self‐awareness amid perspective exchange has been noted. Linking studies on perspective exchange with those on spirit possession, this article tries to show an alternative understanding of perspective exchange as the de‐subjectification and generative transformation of self and other. Focusing on the buuta ritual in South India, I examine perspective exchange as the capability for freeing oneself from one's subjectivity enough to let various perspectives come and go through the permeable self. Being permeable and reflexive, the buuta impersonator plays with multiple perspectives to transform both his and others' perspectives to enable all to become ‘real’ humans in relation to the deity.     

HIV,Embodied Secrets,and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.     

Carbon isotope ratios of photolithotrophs from allt meall nan damh,a burn at ardeonaig,Perthshire, and their ecophysiological significance

Summary

δ¹³C measurements were made of dissolved inorganic C, and of submerged benthic cyanobacteria, algae and bryophytes, from Allt Meall nan Damh, a burn at Ardeonaig, Perthshire. The δ¹³C of the CO₂, HCO3/- and CO3/2- components of the inorganic C were computed, and the Δ values of the organic C in the photolithotrophs were then calculated relative to dissolved CO₂. The decreasing order of A values in the Ardeonaig Burn is Lemanea and bryophytes ≥ green macroalgae and Audouinella > diatom mats, which is the same as in the Dighty Burn. However, the Δ values of Lemanea and the bryophytes, which depend on diffusive CO₂ entry, are lower at Ardeonaig than in the Dighty Burn, suggesting greater diffusive limitation to photosynthesis in the Ardeonaig Burn. It is not easy to relate this difference in Δ values in Lemanea to the higher C:N atomic ratio in the Ardeonaig Burn (21.2 ± 0.64) than in the Dighty Burn (9.5–11.0). The Δ values relative to HCO3/- for the HCO3/--using diatom mat in the Ardeonaig Burn is also lower than that in the Dighty Burn; this is consistent with a greater diffusion limitation of photosynthesis in the thicker mats in the Ardeonaig Burn. The δ¹³C of a Lyngbya mat overlying a Lemanea population stranded by low summer water levels indicates that some of the C fixed by the HCO3/--using Lyngbya comes from respiration of low-δ¹³C inorganic C by the Lemanea which is shaded by the Lyngbya. The δ¹³C values of Mesotaenium in its mucilage sheath on a thinly vegetated bank is suggestive of predominant use of the higher CO₂ concentrations with lower δ¹³C from groundwater rather than of atmospheric CO₂ yielding lower dissolved CO₂ concentrations with a higher δ¹³C value.     

Resettled and unsettled: Syrian refugees and the intersection of race and legal status in the United States

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine how the intersection of legal status and racialization shapes immigrant’s sense of security; or of legal and interpersonal safety. I draw on an ethnography of Syrian refugees who hold a permanent legal status, and who entered the United States in 2015, as Donald Trump was launching his campaign, amplifying anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment. Following refugee experiences from their arrival, through the issuance of the first executive order banning travel in January 2017, I show how this group, racialized as Muslim and Arab, was categorized as a threat to national security. I also capture the uneven way they came to recognize their racialization. While a permanent legal status is likely a necessary condition for feeling a sense of security in the United States, I argue that it is an insufficient one. I show that Syrian refugees’ racialization attenuated their sense of security despite their legal status.     

Afterword: In Search of Melanesian Order

ABSTRACT

These essays explore three contemporary forms of order in Papua New Guinea: improvised village courts, a nursing school curriculum including village practicums, and student boycotts and strikes. My comments assess these new sorts of order as reflected against earlier ethnographic accounts of Papua New Guinean societies as well as those elsewhere in Melanesia. This often has taken the region’s social groups and lineages, religions and belief systems, and most recently the Melanesian state itself to be weak, messy, and inconstant. I ask how culturally ‘Melanesian’ are these contemporary examples of order and disorder, and find significant continuities in their underlying nostalgia for an imagined, more orderly past, in beliefs about causes of disorder, and in strategies and remedies to order and reorder everyday life.     

Amyloids or prions? That is the question

ABSTRACT

Despite major efforts devoted to understanding the phenomenon of prion transmissibility, it is still poorly understood how this property is encoded in the amino acid sequence. In recent years, experimental data on yeast prion domains allow to start at least partially decrypting the sequence requirements of prion formation. These experiments illustrate the need for intrinsically disordered sequence regions enriched with a particularly high proportion of glutamine and asparagine. Bioinformatic analysis suggests that these regions strike a balance between sufficient amyloid nucleation propensity on the one hand and disorder on the other, which ensures availability of the amyloid prone regions but entropically prevents unwanted nucleation and facilitates brittleness required for propagation.     

Methods Used in Economic Evaluations of Chronic Kidney Disease Testing — A Systematic Review

BackgroundThe prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is high in general populations around the world. Targeted testing and screening for CKD are often conducted to help identify individuals that may benefit from treatment to ameliorate or prevent their disease progression.AimsThis systematic review examines the methods used in economic evaluations of testing and screening in CKD, with a particular focus on whether test accuracy has been considered, and how analysis has incorporated issues that may be important to the patient, such as the impact of testing on quality of life and the costs they incur.MethodsArticles that described model-based economic evaluations of patient testing interventions focused on CKD were identified through the searching of electronic databases and the hand searching of the bibliographies of the included studies.ResultsThe initial electronic searches identified 2,671 papers of which 21 were included in the final review. Eighteen studies focused on proteinuria, three evaluated glomerular filtration rate testing and one included both tests. The full impact of inaccurate test results was frequently not considered in economic evaluations in this setting as a societal perspective was rarely adopted. The impact of false positive tests on patients in terms of the costs incurred in re-attending for repeat testing, and the anxiety associated with a positive test was almost always overlooked. In one study where the impact of a false positive test on patient quality of life was examined in sensitivity analysis, it had a significant impact on the conclusions drawn from the model.ConclusionFuture economic evaluations of kidney function testing should examine testing and monitoring pathways from the perspective of patients, to ensure that issues that are important to patients, such as the possibility of inaccurate test results, are properly considered in the analysis.     

The Dolezal affair: race,gender, and the micropolitics of identity

ABSTRACT

This article treats the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined discussion of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation. I situate the Dolezal affair in the context of the massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks, which has significantly enlarged the scope for choice and self-fashioning in the domains of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. Anxieties about opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent identity claims have generated efforts to “police” unorthodox claims – as well as efforts to defend such claims against policing – in the name of authentic, objective, and unchosen identities. Instead of a shift from given to chosen identities, as posited by theories of reflexive modernity, we see a sharpened tension between idioms of choice, autonomy, subjectivity, and self-fashioning on the one hand and idioms of givenness, essence, objectivity, and nature on the other.     

Blood,sweat, and tears: Embedding biological samples in social science research on children,

Abstract

In the first decade of the 21^st Century, calls for interdisciplinary research are commonplace. Yet, relatively few papers discuss how to complete such research successfully. In this paper, I describe the details of data collection focused on five, six and seven‐year old children. The project examined the effect of environmental contaminants on children's educational outcomes. It included a primary caregiver interview, a skill test with the child, and a venous blood draw from the child to test for lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, nicotine, and cotinine. This paper describes key issues and the solutions I adopted. Challenges discussed here include navigating the Institutional Review Board Process, analyzing the blood, obtaining the supplies needed to draw blood, banking blood for future research, hiring a phlebotomist, and recruiting subjects. While not all details will apply directly to other research projects, this paper provides some perspective on the current realities facing social scientists who decide to collect biological samples.     

Increased risk of type I errors in cluster randomised trials with small or medium numbers of clusters: a review,reanalysis, and simulation study

BackgroundCluster randomised trials (CRTs) are commonly analysed using mixed-effects models or generalised estimating equations (GEEs). However, these analyses do not always perform well with the small number of clusters typical of most CRTs. They can lead to increased risk of a type I error (finding a statistically significant treatment effect when it does not exist) if appropriate corrections are not used.MethodsWe conducted a small simulation study to evaluate the impact of using small-sample corrections for mixed-effects models or GEEs in CRTs with a small number of clusters. We then reanalysed data from TRIGGER, a CRT with six clusters, to determine the effect of using an inappropriate analysis method in practice. Finally, we reviewed 100 CRTs previously identified by a search on PubMed in order to assess whether trials were using appropriate methods of analysis. Trials were classified as at risk of an increased type I error rate if they did not report using an analysis method which accounted for clustering, or if they had fewer than 40 clusters and performed an individual-level analysis without reporting the use of an appropriate small-sample correction.ResultsOur simulation study found that using mixed-effects models or GEEs without an appropriate correction led to inflated type I error rates, even for as many as 70 clusters. Conversely, using small-sample corrections provided correct type I error rates across all scenarios. Reanalysis of the TRIGGER trial found that inappropriate methods of analysis gave much smaller P values (P ≤ 0.01) than appropriate methods (P = 0.04–0.15). In our review, of the 99 trials that reported the number of clusters, 64 (65 %) were at risk of an increased type I error rate; 14 trials did not report using an analysis method which accounted for clustering, and 50 trials with fewer than 40 clusters performed an individual-level analysis without reporting the use of an appropriate correction.ConclusionsCRTs with a small or medium number of clusters are at risk of an inflated type I error rate unless appropriate analysis methods are used. Investigators should consider using small-sample corrections with mixed-effects models or GEEs to ensure valid results.     

The state as a whiteman,the whiteman as a /’hun: personhood,recognition, and the politics of knowability in the Kalahari

The article is dedicated to the loving memory of !A|’xuni.

The Ju|’hoansi of east central Namibia sometimes refer to the state as a whiteman and to the whiteman as a /’hun (steenbok). In this article, I contextualize these naming practices by tracing the history of colonial encounters on the fringes of the Western Kalahari through a small-scale animist perspective. I then discuss what this means for the concept of ‘recognition’, which I treat as a two-way intersubjective process of making oneself un/knowable to others. I argue that the Ju|’hoansi have engaged in parallel processes of mis/recognition vis-à-vis their colonial Others. By failing to enter into reciprocal relations with the Ju|’hoansi, the whiteman and the state have remained outside of the Ju|’hoansi's social universe and have thus compromised their own personhood.     

Power/Knowledge,Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico

For over a century the Mexican state has justified its control of forests by claiming that rural people are ignorant and destructive fire setters, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Academic and popular stereotypes of the state have tended to assume that official power and knowledge go hand in hand. In an institutional ethnography ofthe Mexican environment agency, SEMARNAP, I. show how official ignorance is deployed both within and outside state forestry institutions, and how ignorance and complicity may be as important as knowledge in asserting state power. Rather than internalizing official fire discourse, rural people in Mexico learn to mouth polite fictions in their encounters with officials. I argue that the scholarship on governmentality derived from Foucault has uncritically internalized the link between power and knowledge. A closer attention to the production and translation of knowledge within state institutions leads to a more nuancedunderstanding of various forms of obscurity and ignorance which accompany official knowledge claims. This paper is drawn from my fieldwork and archival research in Mexico in the summer of 1998 and between April 2000 and August 2001.     

Emplacing Christ: An Indigenous Australian Ethics of Placemaking Across Borders

ABSTRACT

Travelling from my old heimat, Germany, I joined in September 2015 a group of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Bible translators on a two-week long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This journey offered further probing into Anangu attachments to place that, until then, I had only known through ethnographic research in their desert homelands in northern South Australia. In the present article, I explore how and why the Anangu Christians forged links with biblically inscribed places to which they had no ancestral ties. What they did bring is a deep-seated sense of emotional connection with Jesus abiding in heaven, and here the pilgrimage was a chance to anchor this relationship in his land – to emplace Christ. Notable in this process of shifting the presence of Jesus from heaven to earth was the pilgrims’ moral concern to keep separate the emplaced stories of their ancestral lands on one hand, and the grounded narratives of the Christian Scriptures on the other. In Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans’ terms, their approach was one of ‘incommensuration’, a strategy to avoid moral conflict by refusing to make comparisons between religious traditions. My article may thus be read as an ethnographic contribution towards the understanding of an Australian Indigenous ethics of placemaking across borders.     

Actual and perceived collision risk for bird strikes at Namibian airports

At Namibia’s two major airports, Hosea Kutako International and Eros (domestic), 117 bird strike collision incidents were recorded between 2006 and 2010. A risk assessment, which included a proposed risk weighting methodology, was conducted at Hosea Kutako and Eros airports, which estimated the probability of an accident/collision as well as the consequence of such a collision. The assessment included surveys of bird occurrence frequencies as well as pilot interviews. The results of the risk assessments were compared with actual bird strike incidences for each species, frequency of occurrence of birds and pilot perceptions of species risk, in order to find whether risk assessment and pilot perception are reliable measures of potential bird strike incidence. White-backed Vulture Gyps africanus and Helmeted Guineafowl Numida meleagris were the highest risk species at both airports. They were also, after Crowned Lapwing Vanellus coronatus, the species most often observed by pilots. Bird strike records showed that Crowned Lapwing and Helmeted Guineafowl were also the most frequently struck birds at both airports. The study illustrates how combining risk assessment, pilot perception and bird strike history can benefit bird strike minimisation plans at airports through the rapid identification of priority bird species.     

The gamification of elementary school biology: a case study on increasing understanding of plants

ABSTRACT

This study presents a new technique, the “Which plant am I?” game, which helps to increase pupils’ plant knowledge, while motivate them to become familiar with more plants. On the other hand pupils’ plant knowledge was tested in Serbia.

The “Which Plant Am I?“ game was tested with two groups of pupils (in average 11 years old). Pupils in the experimental group took part in outdoor classes and played the ”Which plant am I?” game. Pupils of the control group observed plants only in the classroom. This technique can deliver significant improvement in pupils’ knowledge about plants and motivate them through an active and playful learning process. This technique can be one possible solution of plant blindness.     

Efficacy of handrubbing with alcohol based solution versus standard handwashing with antiseptic soap: randomised clinical trial

ObjectiveTo compare the efficacy of handrubbing with an alcohol based solution versus conventional handwashing with antiseptic soap in reducing hand contamination during routine patient care.DesignRandomised controlled trial during daily nursing sessions of 2 to 3 hours.SettingThree intensive care units in a French university hospital.Participants23 healthcare workers.InterventionsHandrubbing with alcohol based solution (n=12) or handwashing with antiseptic soap (n=11) when hand hygiene was indicated before and after patient care. Imprints taken of fingertips and palm of dominant hand before and after hand hygiene procedure. Bacterial counts quantified blindly.ResultsWith handrubbing the median percentage reduction in bacterial contamination was significantly higher than with handwashing (83% v 58%, P=0.012), with a median difference in the percentage reduction of 26% (95% confidence interval 8% to 44%). The median duration of hand hygiene was 30 seconds in each group.ConclusionsDuring routine patient care handrubbing with an alcohol based solution is significantly more efficient in reducing hand contamination than handwashing with antiseptic soap.

What is already known on this topic

To improve compliance with hand hygiene during patient care, handrubbing with an alcohol based solution has been proposed as a substitute for handwashing because of its rapid action and accessibilityExperimental studies show that handrubbing is at least as effective as medicated soap in reducing artificial contamination of handsMany healthcare workers still have reservations regarding its efficacy and are reluctant to use this technique

What this study adds

When used in routine practice, handrubbing with an alcohol based solution after contact with patients achieved a greater reduction in bacterial contamination of hands than conventional handwashing with medicated soap     

The power of the arts: Evaluating a community artist-in-residence program through the lens of studio thinking

ABSTRACT

This article takes an analytical look at Engaging Creative Minds, a pilot community program geared to enrich learning of common core standards through a local artist-in-residence partnership with public schools. This program was designed to increase the level of engagement and student growth in classes that typically relied on rote memory and passive instruction. Using the theoretical framework found in studio thinking and the Eight Studio Habits of Mind, the authors investigate the efficacy of this program by providing examples from specific residency experiences to show how the studio habits of mind were used in the classroom to increase engagement, community involvement, and student growth, demonstrating the power of the arts and the potential for policy change.