Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea

"This book examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that women’s political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women’s associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women’s silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women’s claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of ‘traditional’ authorities and the local government. Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies.

Looking for Better Opportunities. An Analysis of Guinean Graduates’ Agency

The time to come – as well as the exploration thereof – remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women’s future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide a vivid picture of their strategies to socially grow older by doing adulthood in contexts of great uncertainty. The examples include Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania, visually enriched through pictures taken by young Malian photographers

Research Assistants: Invisible but Indispensable in Ethnographic Research

Until recently, anthropological literature on the collaboration between the researcher and his/her assistant(s) was rather scarce – although these helpers in the field are highly involved in our knowledge production. In PhD theses, where sole authorship is required for academic degrees, the work with assistants is mentioned briefly in the methodology parts, but then disappears again in the published books. Working with research assistants raises questions of author- ship, authority and ethical considerations in general (Galizia and Schneider 2005: 8, Gupta 2014). In this contribution we argue that collaborations with research assistants strongly influence our data, its analysis and finally our ethnographic texts. Hence, we promote an ethnographic writing that thoroughly reflects working with research assistants and makes this collaboration more explicit

KINEMATICS AND KINETICS OF SQUATS, DROP JUMPS AND IMITATION JUMPS OF SKI JUMPERS

The purpose of this study was to find objective factors in athleticism training which influence the performance of ski jumpers on the hill. Therefore, barbell squats, drop jumps and imitation jumps were measured in a laboratory environment for ten ski jumpers. Force and motion capture data was gathered and forces, velocities as well as an index for the knee valgus were calculated. The results show that especially for the imitation jumps there is a good correlation of the take-off velocity with the performance on the hill. What surprised more is that the more the athletes tended to a knee valgus during all measured movements, the worse the performance. Therefore, athleticism training should concentrate more on improving the knee stability

The FLUXNET2015 dataset and the ONEFlux processing pipeline for eddy covariance data

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.Peer reviewe