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The Medical Tech Facilitator: An Emerging Position in Dutch Public Healthcare and Their Tinkering Practices
No full textThis article focuses on the emerging position of the ‘medical tech facilitator’ developed by practitioners in the Dutch public healthcare system. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Dutch hospitals. It highlights, firstly, the practices and ongoing negotiations that these facilitators engage in, to maintain a position between two parties—the medical sector and the technology industry. I argue that the practices of medical tech facilitators are not (only) a result of personal, lucrative interests, but should be seen as a pragmatic way of coping, or tinkering, with a healthcare system that is experienced by them as frustrating and inefficient. Secondly, the article reveals the outcomes of these practices for public healthcare. I will pose that this emerging and ambiguous position leads to a co-production of specific health policies—something which is concerning, considering the fact that medical tech facilitators typically lack technological expertise. As such, they both resist and reproduce the problems they experience in their daily work. 
Invoking Senghor: Universal Healthcare Coverage and the Place of Culture in Senegal
No full textSenegal introduced Couverture Maladie Universelle (CMU), its version of universal health coverage (UHC), in 2013, basing it on the establishment of mutual health insurance. Mutual health organisations (mutuelles de santé) manage the pooling of funds, including member enrolment fees and government subsidies; in an effort to extend the reach of UHC, the Senegalese cultural sector created a mutuelle of its own. As part of ethnographic fieldwork focused on CMU, I attended a ceremony at the Grand Théâtre National de Dakar on the occasion of this mutuelle receiving a large cheque from the government. In this Field Note I examine the centring of Senegalese culture during this event to reflect on the national project of development itself. The event’s celebration of the arts sector coupled with its emphasis on mutualism and solidarity invoked Senegal’s post-colonial developmentalist visions and aspirations that were motivated by négritude and African socialism under its first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Engaging with renewed calls for African values and morality to be put at the centre of development, I argue that ambitious endeavours like CMU present such an attempt and help buoy it, but that, in the context of continued healthcare underfunding, one-off gifts like that presented during the ceremony are unsustainable. 
Through Ecocriticism and Affect Theory, Exploring Climate Change Artistry: The Ice Receding/Books Reseeding Project
Get PDFThis article delves into the Ice Receding/Books Reseeding project of multidisciplinary artist Basia Irland through the lenses of ecocriticism and affect theory, uncovering its profound significance as a climate change artwork. An example of participatory artwork utilizing transmedia storytelling, this project provides a transformative platform that immerses audiences in the realities of non-human climate change impacts. Through an ecocritical examination, the article explores the intricate dynamics of human-non-human relationships depicted in the project, while affect theory sheds light on the emotional responses it evokes. Ultimately, I argue that participatory art is a crucial tool for climate change communication and activism, advocating for its broader adoption in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainability through the direct involvement of participants. Analyzing Irland’s Ice Receding/Books Reseeding project, the article underscores the potential of climate change art as a powerful medium for effective environmental communication and offers practical guidance for communicators aiming to optimize its impact
Gender Prehistory: Shaping Techniques applied to Osseous Artefacts
No full textScraping and abrasion are quite ancient and universal techniques. On bone, antler, and teeth, these two techniques can sometimes be used for the reduction sequence but mainly serve for shaping, even though chronological, cultural, and geographical gradients can be observed. In some archaeological assemblages, during the European Neolithic for example, abrasion dominates whatever the type of object manufactured. In contrast, in the Arctic Pre-Inuit and Inuit contexts scraping largely predominates. Our goal is to question the variations from an almost complete exclusivity for only one technical practice to a mix of both. In particular, could the sexual division of labour influence both the technical and social spheres of activity? Why for a given type of artifact is a clear choice sometimes made for only one technique when both scraping and abrading are encountered within a single assemblage? To address these questions, we compared data obtained from different socio-economic and environmental contexts. The techniques used to produce osseous and lithic tools by Neolithic and Epipaleolithic groups from Europe, Near East and Maghreb have been analyzed and compared to those encountered in the American Arctic societies. Ethnographical comparisons help in analyzing potential links between techniques, lifestyles and gender. High-mobility, hunter-gatherer subsistence and scraping seem to be in association and opposed to sedentary, farming, milling, women activity and abrasion.L’abrasion et le raclage sont des techniques banales, très anciennes et universelles, mises en œuvre pour le travail des matières osseuses dès le Paléolithique moyen. Elles sont le plus souvent associées à l’étape de façonnage des objets, en terme opératoires, mais aussi, dans certains cas appliquées au débitage. Quand ces deux techniques se trouvent utilisées conjointement par les artisans, leur proportion varie en fonction de gradients chronologiques, culturels mais aussi géographiques. Ainsi, dans le Vieux monde, à partir du Pre-Pottery Neolithic B moyen au Proche-Orient (PPNB moyen, fin du IXe millénaire) (Aurenche 2010), au Néolithique ancien européen (fin du VIIe / début du VIe millénaires), et, dans une moindre mesure au Maghreb oriental (VIIe / VIe millénaire), l’abrasion est majoritairement employée pour le façonnage des objets, quels que soient leur type. Le raclage est plus régulièrement appliqué à l’entretien des outils et à leur raffûtage, au cours de leur utilisation. A l’opposé du Néolithique, dans le contexte arctique du Nouveau monde, le raclage prédomine très largement ; l’abrasion n’est utilisée que de façon exceptionnelle, pour obtenir une surface plane, renforcer le bord d’un tranchant ou pour la confection d’objets à valeur symbolique.
Quelles sont les raisons pour lesquelles les proportions de ces deux techniques varient pour aller jusqu\u27à une quasi-exclusivité pour l’une ou l’autre pratique selon les contextes ? Une division genrée du travail, différente selon les cultures, peut-elle rendre copte d’un lien entre sphères technique et sociale ? Pour traiter ces questions, nous avons comparé les données provenant de contextes socio-économiques et environnementaux différents.
Les résultats issus de la comparaison conduisent à proposer un lien entre techniques, mobilité et genre des individus. Ainsi, les sociétés arctiques se caractérisent par une forte mobilité et une répartition genrée des productions : les matières souples sont travaillées par les femmes, alors les matières dures le sont par les hommes. Les deux groupes partagent cependant un même registre de techniques, ce qui permet, au besoin, de toujours suppléer à l’absence de l’un ou l’autre genre. Les matières osseuses, travaillées par les hommes, font l’objet d’un traitement spécifique, distinct de celui des autres matériaux tels que le bois végétal ou la pierre, avec un façonnage quasi-exclusif effectué par raclage. A l’inverse, dans le Néolithique, et ce depuis le Pre-Pottery Neolithic B moyen (PPNB moyen), la sédentarité et le développement des activités de mouture ont probablement bouleversé la répartition du travail entre hommes et femmes, et accessoirement l’usage des techniques. La fabrication de nombreux objets en matière osseuse employé au quotidien y serait associée aux activités féminines, travail des peaux et des végétaux souples, et attachées à la sphère domestique, dans ou à proximité immédiate de la maison. Le raclage est plus fréquemment employé pour le raffûtage des outils pointus. Nous proposons d’y voir l’expression de différences de lieux entre la fabrication (domestique) et l’usage (hors du contexte domestique) des outils. De même, à l’échelle culturelle, nous soutenons l’idée de l’emploi du raclage versus abrasion, comme l’expression de sociétés mobiles, associées à un mode de vie nomade, versus sociétés sédentaires, associées à l’agriculture. Ainsi, malgré des conditions environnementales et climatiques imposant parfois des adaptations techniques, ce transfert ne s’est cependant pas opéré en contexte arctique où les artisans, toujours mobiles, ont parfois préféré substituer le raclage à la perforation plutôt qu’employer l’abrasion. De même, l’abrasion étant employée dans la fabrication et le maintien des outils, et par analogie de la gestuelle de l’abrasion et des activités de mouture ou de broyage, le développement et la prédominance de l’abrasion, au Néolithique, pourrait ressortir de la féminité. C’est en tout cas une hypothèse que l’on peut poser et travailler à l’avenir.
 
Sugar, A Morally Ambiguous Substance: Responsibility, Social Class and Pleasure in Scotland’s State Primary Schools
No full textChildren’s sugar consumption has been marked out as an important area of public health policymaking in the UK, due to connections between sugar consumption, obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental decay. Yet unlike other regulated substances (alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes), ‘moderate’ or ‘responsible’ sugar consumption, rather than abstinence, is the desired policy outcome. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Edinburgh in 2018–19 in two demographically mixed Scottish state primary schools, I examine how school staff navigate this space of lenience written into state health policy—whereby some sugar can be consumed, sometimes. The public health dangers of sugar consumption, coupled with its relational pleasures (through associations with kinship, nurture and celebration) help illuminate how schools—as responsible agents—attempt to care for and govern children. It is sugar’s ambiguity, I argue, that enables it to become a crucial tool for children’s socialisation. Where and how sugar can be consumed responsibly, and which pleasures are deemed permissible or excessive, vary contextually: they are shaped through social class, and depend on the school policy being enacted. Beyond being an object to regulate, children’s pleasures in sugar are central to affective, social and class-informed practices of creating morally responsible persons
The Glass Witness: Visual and Tactile Engagements with Online Medical Crowdfunding
No full textDonation-based crowdfunding platforms invite people to tell stories of unmet health needs in a hybrid form—using both words and images—but research to date has not addressed the role of visual practice in this setting, in any detail. In this Photo Essay I present an art installation responding to this gap and informed by empirical data from a three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a feminist new materialist lens, and connecting to scholarship on visuality and the gaze, I used the medium of stained glass to evoke and connect the experiences of both campaigners and audiences. I briefly discuss the design process, alongside reflections on the role of graphic medical imagery in an assemblage of witnessing; on disability, shock, and the economic function of voyeurism; on non-normative bodies and subjectification through the gaze; on biases in audience recognition; and on paradoxes of intimacy and distance through digital technology. I highlight that both the content and the context of images have a role in shaping the ‘response-ability’ of networked publics to the suffering of distant others; in the case of medical crowdfunding, with significant consequences for healthcare access.
Making Homes in a Nursing Facility in Athens
No full textThis Photo Essay seeks to visualise the room-homes of the residents in one of the largest semi-public nursing homes in Athens, Greece. Unlike in other facilities, residents are given the opportunity to intervene in their individual rooms, to change and fill the space with objects from their past lives and the houses they lived in, such as furniture, curtains, carpets, computers, crockery, or flowerpots. They also bring and live through photographs of their previous lives. I focus on the room-homes people create in this nursing home, the worlds they build. I conceive this visual ethnography as an account of the process of ‘house-ing’ (Biehl and Neiburg 2021, 540), ‘charting how forms and figures of dwelling constitute the house as a sensorial archiving machine of sorts, shaping affective pasts and the stories and trajectories of tomorrow’ (2021, 544).
Peering into the Cosmic Dawn: JWST Cycle 1 Data Reveals Early Galaxy Candidates at Redshifts z > 9.5
Get PDFObserving high-redshift objects provides a window into the past, enabling insight into galaxy formation, matter distribution, and the nature of dark matter and energy. This report presents a sample of work on Cycle 1 of the James Webb Space Telescope concerning the discovery of high-redshift early galaxy candidates. Potential objects from these surveys had their photometric redshift computed using the LePhare simulation program and analysed using LePhare-generated spectral energy distribution fits. A total of 46 candidates at redshifts beyond z > 9.5 were found between three surveys: two in DDT2750, 30 in JADES, and 14 in NGDEEP
“Are You Quite Sure They Gave You Them All?”John Edward Crombie and the Personal Papers of the Rev. Walter Gregor (1825-97)
Get PDFRegional studies, Aberdeenshire, Walter Gregor, Folk Lore Society, Folk-Lore Journal, New Spalding Club, John Edward Crombie, John William Crombie, Custom, Calendar Custom, Folk tale, Proverbs, Rites of passage, Fishing, Farming, Material culture, Scottish culture, Ethnology, Folklor
Using total-body PET to investigate relationships between excretory organs time activity curves and the metabolite fraction for [18F]SynVesT-1
Get PDFAccurate quantification of dynamic PET data using kinetic modelling requires assessment of the metabolism of the tracer to obtain the quantity of unchanged parent tracer in the blood. Several image derived input functions methods have been demonstrated to be effective for kinetic modelling; however, currently no image derived metabolite correction method exists. Finding an image derived metabolite correction would remove the need for invasive blood sampling.
This study uses 7 full body 18F-SynVesT-1 total body mouse scans. Initially, the time activity curves (TACs) for a range of organs including the liver, kidney and bladder were studied. Factor analysis (FA) was investigated to accurately separate contributions from the kidney – cortex, medulla and collecting duct. Following this, the relationships between each of the organ TACs and the parent plasma fraction (PPf) was investigated.
FA analysis successfully discriminates between contributions from the cortex, medulla and collecting duct of the kidneys. In the context of total body scans, FA removes the need for manual drawing of volumes of interest allowing for more consistency amongst studies. By separating out these regions, a relationship between the kidney medulla and the metabolites also came to light.
In addition, the average of the seven bladder time activity curves against the plasma parent fraction [Figure 1] shows a potential relationship between the excretion of the tracer and its metabolism. Combining excretory organ relationships with the parent fraction and potentially liver data opens the possibility for a model to be produced to fit a metabolite curve when we have access to a total body PET scan.
While this research is in its early stages, it has shown relationships between excretory organ TACs and the metabolite fraction. This has the potential to allow for metabolite correction models to be created directly from the image data. Model architectures are under investigation.
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