Affecting Neoliberal Public Health Care: Interdependent Relationality between Disabled Care Recipients and their Care Providers

In this dissertation, I trace the neoliberal turn of a public health-care program, Medicaid, and its effects on those who are involved in it: disabled care recipients and their care providers. Also examined is the emergence of an affective relationality between these individuals through their daily practices of care. In 1993, Medicaid went through a neoliberal turn that accelerated its privatization. I investigate the ways in which this turn--in company with the neoliberal transition of other welfare programs and the rise of a transnational care industry--further deployed a gendered, raced, classed, and immigration-based division of care labor that commodified and exploited the labor capacities of mostly lower-income women of color. Similarly, the neoliberal turn led to a reconfiguration of the Medicaid beneficiary criteria for disabled people such that their care needs became commodified and exploited in the interests of a maximized revenue for the care industry. As both populations come to be measured based on their capacities and needs, their wellbeing is overlooked and deteriorating. The narratives I have gathered from care recipients and providers of Medicaid long-term care programs illustrate how they are all turned into consumable and disposable populations for the industry\u27s capital accumulation and the state\u27s suppression of Medicaid expenses. Consequently, care recipients and providers are both pushed to slow death: turning the neoliberal public health care into necropolitical one. Yet, a closer look at these narratives also tells a story more complex than total exploitation. As much as their care practices are embedded in injustices, recursive practices of care between recipients and providers allow them to slowly adapt to each other\u27s distinct body and bodily movements, capacities, needs, desires, and rhythms. They begin to recognize one another\u27s vulnerable situations as situated within the negligent care industry, and to share vulnerable moments together. Using affect theories, I theorize how this relationality moves beyond the cognitive, marking a proprioceptive connection between recipients and providers. Developing a notion of affective relationality, I end this dissertation by arguing that this embodied, interdependent, caring, and co-capacitative relationality destructs the flows of the neoliberal public health-care assemblage

Application Integration Control System for Multi-Scale and Multi-PhysicsSimulation

In the case of long-period and large-scale simulation, unexpected stop which is caused by execution time excess, outage of computers, outage of a network during file transfer and so on, become major issues. To avoid the stop of job execution and file transfer, we have developed Task Flow Control System that is a new control system for application integration with a fault tolerant API. If the computer is outage, the system designates an alternate computer, gathers necessary files and submits a new job. Each scheduler, file transfer and job condition can be flexibly defined in XML. This time, we applied the system to fluid-structure interaction analysis simulation. The result indicates that the system enables a user to easily execute multi-scale and multi-physics simulation using application integration

Sequential therapies after atezolizumab plus bevacizumab or lenvatinib first-line treatments in hepatocellular carcinoma patients

Introduction: The aim of this retrospective proof-of-concept study was to compare different second-line treatments for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and progressive disease (PD) after first-line lenvatinib or atezolizumab plus bevacizumab.Materials and methods: A total of 1381 patients had PD at first-line therapy. 917 patients received lenvatinib as first-line treatment, and 464 patients atezolizumab plus bevacizumab as first-line.Results: 49.6% of PD patients received a second-line therapy without any statistical difference in overall survival (OS) between lenvatinib (20.6 months) and atezolizumab plus bev-acizumab first-line (15.7 months; p = 0.12; hazard ratio [HR] = 0.80). After lenvatinib first-line, there wasn't any statistical difference between second-line therapy subgroups (p = 0.27; sorafenib HR: 1; immunotherapy HR: 0.69; other therapies HR: 0.85). Patients who under-went trans-arterial chemo-embolization (TACE) had a significative longer OS than patients who received sorafenib (24.7 versus 15.8 months, p < 0.01; HR = 0.64). After atezolizumab plus bevacizumab first-line, there was a statistical difference between second-line therapy subgroups (p < 0.01; sorafenib HR: 1; lenvatinib HR: 0.50; cabozantinib HR: 1.29; other therapies HR: 0.54). Patients who received lenvatinib (17.0 months) and those who under-went TACE (15.9 months) had a significative longer OS than patients treated with sorafenib (14.2 months; respectively, p = 0.01; HR = 0.45, and p < 0.05; HR = 0.46).Conclusion: Approximately half of patients receiving first-line lenvatinib or atezolizumab plus bevacizumab access second-line treatment. Our data suggest that in patients progressed to atezolizumab plus bevacizumab, the systemic therapy able to achieve the longest survival is lenvatinib, while in patients progressed to lenvatinib, the systemic therapy able to achieve the longest survival is immunotherapy

Affect and subjectivity

Editoria

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Understanding political development through an intersectionality framework: Life stories of disability activists

This article explores how those who do not share their marginalized identities with their surrounding people (e.g., family members) and thus community resources relating to these identities, initiate and experience political development. The concept of intersectionality is used as an analytical tool to examine how one's political development is mediated via one's intersecting identities, communities, and experience of social in/justices. Life story interviews were conducted with disabled activists to explore this question. The stories reveal how these activists, who had initially resisted identifying as disabled for various reasons, eventually used the politicizing experiences from nondisability identities and communities to reframe and reclaim their disability status. By tracing the political developments of disabled people, this article places importance on understanding the process in a holistic way and on developing activist communities and movements that acknowledge intersecting identities and in/justices

Acknowledging the Psycho-emotional Impacts of Disablism

No abstract availabl