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From the Heart of Kulob: Gender, Personhood and Everyday Life in Southern Tajikistan
No full textFrom the Heart of Kulob analyses everyday life in Kulob, the home region of Tajikistan’s president and the political elite which has governed the country since 1992. Rather than focusing on the elite, the book asks what it means to be a woman, a man, a Muslim and a moral person for “ordinary” Kulobis, or people who emphasise how their daily lives are characterised by poverty, hardship, and uncertainty.
Instead of treating gender as being synonymous with “women's lives”, the author considers how shaping gender is a reciprocal process underpinned by intersectionality, patriarchy and structural violence. The chapters address how gender relations, forms of moral personhood and Muslim subjectivities are fashioned via the senses, the performance of emotions, the aspirations for a better life, and a range of forms of humour and steadfastness.
Unlike studies of Muslim societies that emphasise the centrality of piety and good behaviour to the formation of moral subjectivities, From the Heart of Kulob draws attention to the rude, transgressive, cunning, funny and contradictory acts that also constitute a fundamental part of becoming a gendered and moral person in Tajikistan.</p
Systemic acceleration capacity in net-zero transitions: electrifying transportation in California
No full textAccelerating net-zero transitions requires deliberate governance. We examine the deliberate acceleration of net-zero transitions through a case study of California’s governance of private vehicle electrification. Our analysis integrates the literatures on policy mixes and political institutions to offer a novel explanation for how California has effectively expedited its net-zero transition to electric cars. We base our inductive analysis on evidence from 47 expert interviews conducted in 2022–23. We argue that California’s systemic acceleration capacity has two core components: first, an effective policy mix that harnesses the accelerating forces of creative destruction, and second, specific path-dependent political institutions that have enabled this respective policy mix. Together, these two components have contributed to California’s state capacity to accelerate its technology substitution pathway away from internal combustion engines. California’s climate technocracy offers critical lessons for other jurisdictions seeking to speed up similar net-zero transitions.</p
Evaluation Plan - Mature Students Learning Community Intervention
No full textNo description supplied</p
The long and short of it: Distinct natural crystal packing strategies of Cry toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis
No full textBacillus thuringiensis (Bt) strains naturally produce pesticidal proteins as nanocrystalline inclusions that are extraordinarily stable in aqueous environments, but which dissolve selectively at specific pH conditions. These proteins have been used in agriculture for >50 years and are critical to global food security. The majority of previously determined Bt Cry protein structures lack the extended C-terminal "crystallization domain," which is thought to stabilize crystal packing and control selective solubility in insect targets, often via manipulation of disulfide bridges. It has also recently been shown to influence toxicity and target specificity. Here, we use serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) to determine high-resolution full-length native structures of Cry1Ca18 (1.65 Å) and Cry8Ba2 (2.27 Å) in their natural nanocrystalline state. Differences in cysteine content (19 versus 4 residues) reveal distinct in vivo crystal-stabilization strategies. Understanding Bt toxin domain architecture and natural crystal formation is essential for improving biopesticide design and advancing agricultural genetic engineering.</p
Vaping cessation support in England: current provision, confidence, and barriers identified in a cross-sectional survey of healthcare providers
No full textBACKGROUND: Vaping prevalence has increased substantially in England in recent years. However, little is known about the demand for vaping cessation support, or about providers' preparedness and perceived barriers to offering it. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional online survey with stop smoking service and healthcare providers in England (n=96). The survey collected information on service demand, knowledge and beliefs about e-cigarettes, training and confidence in providing vaping cessation support, types of interventions offered, and barriers to delivering support. RESULTS: Of the providers surveyed, 39.6% reported seeing clients seeking vaping cessation support at least weekly, but only 17.7% reported seeing someone daily. By comparison, 93.7% reported seeing clients seeking smoking cessation support at least weekly, and 76.0% daily. Fewer than half (44.8%) of providers offered vaping cessation support; 59.4% had received training to do so. The proportion reporting high confidence in providing vaping cessation support was greater among those who had received training (70.2% vs. 40.5%). Behavioural support was the most common vaping cessation intervention offered (41.7%), followed by nicotine replacement therapy (22.9%), with few providing prescription medications (varenicline/cytisine/bupropion; 0-2.1%). When vaping cessation support was available, providers commented it was often shorter and less intensive than smoking cessation support. Key barriers included lack of commissioning or funding, lack of training, and limited evidence-based interventions. Concerns were also raised that quitting vaping may increase risk of relapsing to smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Four in ten providers of smoking cessation support in England report at least weekly demand for vaping cessation support, but current provision is patchy and constrained by structural and resource-related barriers. IMPLICATIONS: Collectively, our findings suggest vaping cessation is an emerging area of service provision with demand from clients but limited tailored support. Given constrained public health budgets and the current lack of evidence on the cost-effectiveness of vaping cessation interventions, policymakers will need to determine whether and how meeting this demand should be prioritised within tobacco control strategies.</p
Dark Energy Survey year 6 results: photometric dataset for cosmology
No full textWe describe the photometric dataset assembled from the full 6 yr of observations by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) in support of static-sky cosmology analyses. DES Y6 Gold is a curated dataset derived from DES Data Release 2 (DR2) that incorporates improved measurement, photometric calibration, object classification and value-added information. Y6 Gold comprises nearly 5000 deg
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imaging in the south Galactic cap and includes 669 million objects with a depth of
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∼ 23.4 mag at a signal-to-noise ratio ∼ 10 for extended objects and a top-of-the-atmosphere photometric uniformity <2 mmag. Y6 Gold augments DES DR2 with simultaneous fits to multiepoch photometry for more robust galaxy shapes, colors, and photometric redshift estimates. Y6 Gold features improved morphological star–galaxy classification with an efficiency of 98.6% and a contamination of 0.8% for galaxies with 17.5 <
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</p
Drill as Cultural Form: Video-Music, Chromatism, War and the Alternative
No full textDrill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.</p
The industry of silence: the ongoing Nakba and the racialisation of Palestinians
No full textWhat does it take to silence the voices of, and for, a people enduring genocide? In this article, I find the answer in the wisdom of black feminist writings by Audre Lorde and bell hooks. I denounce the oppressive structures that perpetuate the silencing of Palestinians, hiding the ongoing process of their erasure. I critique the global industry of silence - a web of racialising organisations – that actualises colonial narratives, dehumanising Palestinians as a monstrous other. The industry of silence seeks to ensure that Palestinians are always watched and surveilled but never seen in their suffering and never heard as humans. The paper investigates racialisation as the mindset underpinning the Nakba, the ongoing process of dehumanisation, demobilisation, fragmentation, and ultimately, erasure of the Palestinian people. By analysing racialisation as a historical process rooted in the Zionist settler-colonial project, it also explores how this extends beyond Israel into the ‘Western’ world, to organisations in Europe and the U.S. The industry of silence then becomes part of the Nakba. It is through the silencing of dissenting voices that the Nakba lurks amongst us, fed by the mental structures of racism, which live on in the Western ‘colonial amnesia’, influencing how Palestinians are perceived and treated. The industry of silence masks this systemic violence, enabling the genocide. Speaking out becomes then an act of resistance, and affirmation of humanity. I argue that voice is life, and silence is death - collective courage to break the silence will liberate us, by freeing us from the fear that is collectively choking us.</p