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Nature of the Paleo-Pacific Subduction along the East Asian Continental Margin in the Mesozoic: insights from the sedimentary record of West Sarawak, Borneo
Get PDFThe Mesozoic subduction history of the Paleo-Pacific plate below the East Asian margin remains contentious, in part because the southern part is poorly understood. To address this, we conducted a sediment provenance study to constrain Mesozoic subduction history below West Sarawak, Borneo. A combination of detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology, heavy minerals, trace element, and bulk rock Nd isotope data were used to identify the tectonic events. The overall maturity of mineral assemblages, dominantly felsic sources, abundant Precambrian-aged zircons, and low εNd(0) values (average −13.07) seen in Late Triassic sedimentary rocks suggest a period of inactive subduction near Borneo. Slab shallowing subduction occurred between 200 and 170 Ma based on subdued magmatism and tectonic compression across West Sarawak. From c. 170 to 70 Ma there was widespread magmatism and we interpret the Paleo-Pacific slab steepened. Collectively, we show the Paleo-Pacific plate subduction had variable slab dip histories in Borneo
Luo Zhenyu
No full textBoook synopsis: Discover the stories of 100 women and men whose activities in the 19th century laid the foundations of modern China
Mimetic desire & the scapegoat: notes on the thought of René Girard
No full textRené Girard (1923-2015) was a synthetic theorist with a singular idée fixe, a grand pattern that he could not help but see inscribed and repeated everywhere in human culture. The key elements of Girard’s philosophical anthropology are mimetic desire, mimetic violence, and the scapegoat mechanism. This piece explains these key ideas and offers some reflections on their relationship with critical thought
Attentional modulation of neural sound tracking in children with and without dyslexia
Get PDFAuditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech perception difficulties in noisy environments in dyslexic readers are also suggestive of the putative contribution of auditory attention to reading development. To date, it is unclear whether non-speech selective attention and its underlying neural mechanisms are impaired in children with dyslexia and to which extent these deficits relate to individual reading and speech perception abilities in suboptimal listening conditions. In this EEG study, we assessed non-speech sustained auditory selective attention in 106 7-to-12-year-old children with and without dyslexia. Children attended to one of two tone streams, detecting occasional sequence repeats in the attended stream, and performed a speech-in-speech perception task. Results show that when children directed their attention to one stream, inter-trial-phase-coherence at the attended rate increased in fronto-central sites; this, in turn, was associated with better target detection. Behavioural and neural indices of attention did not systematically differ as a function of dyslexia diagnosis. However, behavioural indices of attention did explain individual differences in reading fluency and speech-in-speech perception abilities: both these skills were impaired in dyslexic readers. Taken together, our results show that children with dyslexia do not show group-level auditory attention deficits but these deficits may represent a risk for developing reading impairments and problems with speech perception in complex acoustic environments
Women construction workers in Nepal: collectivities under precarious conditions
Get PDFIn this article we explore the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal, and the strategies that these workers have adopted to challenge the exploitation and inequalities they confront. We firstly argue that the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal are shaped by compulsive engagement in labour markets under conditions of informality, precarity and gendered responsibility for social reproduction. These experiences reflect multiple intersections of gender, class, caste and ethnicity in the arenas of the household, the workplace, trade unions and the state. However, policy interventions relating to women’s participation in labour markets and inspired by the Gender Equality as Smart Economics approach, such as Nepal’s post-earthquake mason training scheme targeting women construction workers, render invisible these structures of inequality, exploitation and violence.
Secondly, we argue that women construction workers negotiate – and in some cases challenge and change – working conditions, primarily through a variety of informal and formal collective strategies. Women construction workers’ own narratives and practices, we find, bear little resemblance to the narratives promoted by the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the state, in which women workers appear as resilient, altruistic and industrious entrepreneurial subjects seeking individual self-improvement within the neoliberal framework. They rather invoke informal and organised collectivities, negotiate and often resist gendered norms of behaviour and at times radically re-envision the scope of trade union struggles
Quality of working life can protect against cognitive and emotional vulnerability in women living with metastatic breast cancer: a cross-sectional study
No full textPurpose: Research focusing on the cognitive and emotional health of women with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is limited. The focal aim of the current study was to explore how quality of working life was related to global health, perceived cognitive function, anxiety and depression. To this end, women’s experience of employers after MBC diagnosis and its relationship to quality of working life was also explored.
Methods: Women living with MBC (N = 88) completed online questionnaires assessing their global health status, perceived cognitive and emotional vulnerability and their experience of employers following diagnosis. Women working at the time of the study also reported on their quality of working life.
Results: Women’s experience of employers after MBC diagnosis was positively related to their quality of working life. Importantly, greater quality of working life met with better perceived cognitive function and global health, as well as lower levels of depression in working women.
Conclusions: Our study is the first to establish the role of quality of working life in protecting against levels of cognitive vulnerability and emotional vulnerability to depression in women with MBC. We also highlight the importance of having a positive experience with employers. Our findings suggest that educational programmes can be provided to employers to enhance their understanding and awareness of the needs of women with MBC.
Implications for Cancer Survivors: Women with MBC may benefit from employers accessing educational (or support) programmes that can increase their awareness of the treatment-related sequelae and needs of women with MBC in the workplace
Academics engaging in knowledge transfer and co-creation: push causation and pull effectuation?
Get PDFAlthough academics are increasingly engaging with businesses, some fundamental aspects of this phenomenon (i.e., their motivations, decision-making approaches, and the interplay between the two) remain understudied. We therefore conducted a qualitative inductive study comprising 68 interviews with academics who had engaged in two forms of activities—knowledge transfer and co-creation. Whereas the entrepreneurship literature offers a resource-based argument, we made an original contribution to the literature by introducing an engagement-based argument in order to offer a more accurate prediction of the motivations and decision-making approaches of academics engaged in knowledge transfer and co-creation activities. We found that when the resource- and engagement-based arguments offer different predictions of the interplay between the motivations and decision-making approaches adopted, the cognitive proximity between academics and business researchers, which reflects whether the partners are from the same/different disciplines, resolves the puzzle. We captured these situational contingencies by developing six propositions that indicate how the engagement- and resource-based arguments jointly offer a more comprehensive explanation of the interplay. We discuss the implications of our findings with regard to how universities could offer customized training, rewards, and support structures based on the four types of interplay between the motivation and decision-making approaches
Beyond speaking out: #metoo and the limits of narrative politics
Get PDFSince the late 1960s, ‘speaking out’ has formed a central aspect of feminist mobilisations against rape. Feminist anti-rape politics has been characterised not only by the production and dissemination of survivor narratives, but by a belief in their transformative potential, that ‘breaking the silence’ could, ultimately, ‘end the violence’. As I have argued elsewhere, this politics has been simultaneously transformative and limited, operating both to enable women’s narratives and to restrict what stories can be told, how and the uses to which they can be put (Serisier, 2018). In this chapter, I focus primarily on speaking out in the social media age, arguing that feminist hashtag campaigns such as #MeToo might be taken to represent the peak of speaking out’s potential and of its limits. I therefore use twitter hashtag campaigns to ask about the potential for a different form of narrative politics and even for the need to move beyond a politics grounded in stories of suffering. I argue that survivor narratives remain potent political tools, but the uses to which they are put requires further thought. Drawing on the insights of activists such as Tarana Burke who have called for a move beyond ‘me too’ to the ‘work’ of sexual violence I examine the role for survivor narratives in this work, arguing that a feminist politics against rape must work creatively with both the narrative and the political strengths of survivor movements and discourse
Direct quotations in the rhetorical structure of literature PhD thesis introductions
Get PDFDirect quotation (DQ) use varies considerably across disciplines, from complete absence in hard sciences to relative frequency in social sciences. This study investigates DQs in literature, focusing on PhD thesis introductions in English. A corpus of 15 introductions tagged for move-and-step genre analysis was used to investigate DQ frequency, their distribution in the rhetorical structure of introductions, and source text types used for DQs. The findings show that i) DQs are the most common source use practice in the corpus; ii) DQs are concentrated in three rhetorical steps: reviewing previous research, presenting the analysed literary work, and making topic generalisations; and iii) source text type used for DQs is associated with specific rhetorical steps. These findings suggest that DQs are essential for the realisation of the rhetorical purpose of the steps which carry them and for knowledge construction in literature PhD theses
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