Panel. Faulkner and the Civil Rights Movement: A Reassessment

Long Faulkner: Charting Legacy on a Civil Rights Continuum / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State UniversityThe concept of a “civil rights continuum” functions as a critical framework for reflecting on Faulkner’s legacy in a time frame extending from post-World War II labor activism through the post-Civil Rights era. Responsive to the call for a “long Civil Rights Movement” to trouble conventional periodization, this continuum affords a revealing long view of Faulkner’s civil rights legacy, as illustrated by two key coordinates charted in the discussion: the spatial rendering of proliferating boundaries in Intruder in the Dust in relation to the enduring trope of Mississippi as “the closed society” and the temporal rendering of the past as “not even past” in Requiem for a Nun as strategically deployed in the discourse of post-racialism. Faulkner and the Inheritors of Slavery / David A. Davis, Mercer UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black” (1940) and Richard Wright’s documentary narrative Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) depict the misunderstanding between black and white southerners in the generation before the civil rights movement. Faulkner focuses on the white community’s confusion about Rider’s grief over his wife’s death, which has disastrous results. Wright attempts to explain the history and experience of blacks to whites, adopting a didactic, first-person plural narrative voice. Wright’s narrative approach helps to explain the abrupt shift from third-person narration to the white deputy sheriff’s voice in Faulkner’s story, which signals the mysterious separation between the races in the South. Who was William Faulkner to them?: Civil Rights Workers, Mississippi Moderates and Faulkner / Sharon Monteith, University of NottinghamIn an essay titled “Faulkner and the Racial Crisis” Louis Daniel Brodsky asserts that both groups in my title were Faulkner’s detractors as a result of his “gradualist” position on civil rights. This paper explores that claim by examining civil rights organizers and Mississippi’s Freedom Summer volunteers, black and white, who were inspired by his work, and crusading racial liberals with whom Faulkner aligned himself to write satirically about segregation. Literary scholar Louis Rubin once imagined the ghost of Faulkner on the University of Mississippi campus in 1962. He mused “I think perhaps he would have put on his coat and tie and hat and gone over to the campus and stood quietly alongside of James Meredith. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. Most of the citizens who milled about the campus would not have known who he was, or if they had, they would not have cared. Who was William Faulkner to them?” This paper teases out some possible answers to that question

Standard deviation : standardization and quality control in the mash-up era

Standards touch many aspects of our lives, from purchasing to consuming, to maintaining product consistencies (e.g. ISO 9001). Standardization aids replicating: compliance, quality and durability to diffuse geographic areas, driving innovation by providing constraints (BSI). Historically, standardization was a cornerstone for commerce enabling traders to interact, trusting accurate measures, used in judging a product’s worth. Open Design utilizes Internet-accessible digital making platforms, for creating and disseminating ideas. The rise of Fabrication Laboratories and distributed digital manufacturing (e.g. domestic 3D printing) has increased accessibility of high-quality manufacture. Design agents as well as designers can create products; either for personal use from the bottom-up, or re-appropriate another maker’s solution. Reciprocity is key to the process. As such, in this paper we refer to design agents, rather than applying labels of “professional” or “user”. However, as design agents become enabled to produce complex artefacts, “objective validation” for shared blueprints quality, becomes imminent. For example, 3D printing is reviving DIY toy making, with materials that can degrade overtime, potentially presenting choking hazards. Due to this status quo, the authors are not presenting lawsuit opportunities, but preventative procedures whilst encouraging proliferation of design agent led Open Design. Regulatory requirements for sectors touched by “open phenomenon” are unprepared. How can maker communities, design agents and others lead the way in promoting ways of working that enable robust quality control in open environments? To answer this question, interviews with British Standards Institute (BSI) representatives were triangulated with design workshops. This participatory approach to knowledge creation was chosen due to its inherent compatibility with the theoretical underpinnings of Open Design. This paper presents models exploring “standards integration” for Open Design purposes, enabling design agents to create “compliant” outputs, to benefit all. We conclude that there are possible avenues for standardization, but that this must be tested in the field. #open design, #digital manufacture, #industry standard

Prevalence of Health-Risk Behaviours Among Indigenous Australians With Diabetes: A Review

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are at high risk of Type 2 diabetes and its complications. Optimal lifestyle choices can improve health outcomes. A thematic review of original research publications related to smoking, nutrition, alcohol intake, physical activity and emotional wellness in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians with diabetes was performed. Overall, 7118 English-language publications were identified by search engines (PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Medline-Web of Science, and Google Scholar) with search terms Indigenous Australians OR Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders AND diabetes AND lifestyle OR smoking OR nutrition OR alcohol OR physical activity OR emotional wellbeing and their common synonyms. After review of abstracts and publication reference lists, 36 articles met inclusion criteria and were reviewed. In general, the self-reported health-related behaviours of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian adults with diabetes, which is predominantly Type 2 diabetes, was suboptimal. An important clinical challenge in diabetes care is to sustainably reduce smoking, improve nutrition (including alcohol use), increase physical activity, reduce sedentary time, and improve emotional wellbeing, which should lead to reduced rates of diabetes complications. Regular assessments and multi-stakeholder input, including individuals, communities, clinical, health policy, societal and government inputs and partnerships, are desirable to facilitate closing the gap in health between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous Australians

The future of textiles sourcing: exploring the potential for digital tools

Textile selection involves aspects of objective function and subjective experience. While technical assessments of textiles are extensively supported by standards and machinery that provide the industry with rigorous specifications, the more subjective characteristics remain heavily reliant on designers’ tacit knowledge, experience and intuition. In this paper, we present a study that investigated designers’ textile sourcing activities and if and how digital tools could provide support. The study was conducted in a textile fair with an expert audience in the mind-set of sourcing. An existing digital tool that allows textiles manipulation was introduced to familiarise participants with the digital context and enable conversations on the future of textiles sourcing. We also look at the implications of adopting digital tools for their activities including a transition to more sustainable practices. The results raise awareness of designers’ use of experiential information to support textiles sourcing, besides highlighting requirements for designing future digital tools

RhoA/Rho kinase (ROCK) alters fetuin-A uptake and regulates calcification in bovine vascular smooth muscle cells (BVSMC)

RhoA/Rho kinases (ROCK) play a critical role in vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) actin cytoskeleton organization, differentiation, and function and are implicated in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease. We have previously determined that an important step in the regulation of calcification is fetuin-A endocytosis, a process that is dependent on changes in the cytoskeleton, which, in turn, is known to be affected by the RhoA/ROCK signaling pathway. In the present study, bovine VSMC (BVSMC) were treated with the ROCK inhibitor Y-27632 or transfected with ROCK small interfering (si) RNA to knock down ROCK expression. Both conditions resulted in reduced actin stress fibers and increased Cy5-labeled fetuin-A uptake. Inhibition of ROCK by Y-27632 or siRNA also significantly increased BVSMC alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity and calcification of BVSMC and rat aorta organ cultures. Cells were then incubated in calcification media in the presence or absence of Y-27632 and matrix vesicles (MV) isolated by collagenase digestion. These MV, isolated from BVSMC incubated with Y-27632, had increased ALP activity and increased ability of MV to subsequently calcify collagen by 66%. In contrast, activation of RhoA, which is upstream of ROCK, by transfecting plasmids encoding the dominant active Rho GTPase mutant (Rho-L63) led to decreased fetuin-A uptake and reduced calcification in BVSMC. These results demonstrate that the RhoA/ROCK signaling pathway is an important negative regulator of vascular calcification

CD46 is phosphorylated at tyrosine 354 upon infection of epithelial cells by Neisseria gonorrhoeae

The Neisseria type IV pilus promotes bacterial adhesion to host cells. The pilus binds CD46, a complement-regulatory glycoprotein present on nucleated human cells (Källström et al., 1997). CD46 mutants with truncated cytoplasmic tails fail to support bacterial adhesion (Källström et al., 2001), suggesting that this region of the molecule also plays an important role in infection. Here, we report that infection of human epithelial cells by piliated Neisseria gonorrhoeae (GC) leads to rapid tyrosine phosphorylation of CD46. Studies with wild-type and mutant tail fusion constructs demonstrate that Src kinase phosphorylates tyrosine 354 in the Cyt2 isoform of the CD46 cytoplasmic tail. Consistent with these findings, infection studies show that PP2, a specific Src family kinase inhibitor, but not PP3, an inactive variant of this drug, reduces the ability of epithelial cells to support bacterial adhesion. Several lines of evidence point to the role of c-Yes, a member of the Src family of nonreceptor tyrosine kinases, in CD46 phosphorylation. GC infection causes c-Yes to aggregate in the host cell cortex beneath adherent bacteria, increases binding of c-Yes to CD46, and stimulates c-Yes kinase activity. Finally, c-Yes immunoprecipitated from epithelial cells is able to phosphorylate the wild-type Cyt2 tail but not the mutant derivative in which tyrosine 354 has been substituted with alanine. We conclude that GC infection leads to rapid tyrosine phosphorylation of the CD46 Cyt2 tail and that the Src kinase c-Yes is involved in this reaction. Together, the findings reported here and elsewhere strongly suggest that pilus binding to CD46 is not a simple static process. Rather, they support a model in which pilus interaction with CD46 promotes signaling cascades important for Neisseria infectivity

The tactile triangle: a design research framework demonstrated through tactile comparisons of textile materials

Tactile experiences of textile materials are difficult to communicate and elicit. To interrogate this space we propose the tactile triangle, a framework to facilitate systematic analysis and comparison of tactile experiences. The three levels reflect different aspects of tactile experience and possible methods to capture them: physical properties, in which human senses or objective testing measure fabric properties; the perceptual space level in which triadic comparisons reveal combinations of various dimensions which capture and describe tactile experiences; and finally the communication level, in which design games elicit languages communicating tactile perceptions. A case study illustrates the frameworks use to compare the tactile experiences of textiles in experts and consumers. The results show expert and consumer perceptions overlapped and correlated well to objective measures except in the perception of temperature. We conclude by discussing the frameworks effectiveness, the contribution of individual methods, and its potential as a communication tool for designers

FabricTouch: A Multimodal Fabric Assessment Touch Gesture Dataset to Slow Down Fast Fashion

Touch exploration of fabric is used to evaluate its properties, and it could further be leveraged to understand a consumer’s sensory experience and preference so as to support them in real time to make careful clothing purchase decisions. In this paper, we open up opportunities to explore the use of technology to provide such support with our FabricTouch dataset, i.e., a multimodal dataset of fabric assessment touch gestures. The dataset consists of bilateral forearm movement and muscle activity data captured while 15 people explored 114 different garments in total to evaluate them according to 5 properties (warmth, thickness, smoothness, softness, and flexibility). The dataset further includes subjective ratings of the garments with respect to each property and ratings of pleasure experienced in exploring the garment through touch. We further report baseline work on automatic detection. Our results suggest that it is possible to recognise the type of fabric property that a consumer is exploring based on their touch behaviour. We obtained mean F1 score of 0.61 for unseen garments, for 5 types of fabric property. The results also highlight the possibility of additionally recognizing the consumer’s subjective rating of the fabric when the property being rated is known, mean F1 score of 0.97 for unseen subjects, for 3 rating levels