The Gendered Experiences of Local Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies

This article explores the gendered experiences of local volunteers operating in conflicts and emergencies. Despite decades of progress to integrate gender issues into development and humanitarian research, policy and practice, the gendered dynamics of volunteering are still little understood. To redress this, this article draws on data collected as part of the Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies (ViCE) Initiative, a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement led by the Swedish Red Cross, and the Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. Contributing original empirical findings on the intersection of gender, volunteering and emergencies, this article offers new ways of thinking about how gender equality and women’s empowerment can be advanced in humanitarian crises, as seen through the experiences of local volunteers

Civil society activists and vulnerability in South India: the relational politics of life history methods and development research

Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment

The clinical decision‐making process involved in end of life care for people with dementia in primary care: A protocol paper

Aim This article is a report of a study protocol designed to explore what factors inform healthcare professionals' clinical decision-making when providing end of life care for people with dementia in primary care. Design The proposed study will adopt a qualitative study design, utilizing an ethnographic approach. Methods A mixed sample group of registered healthcare professionals, including district nurses, specialist nurses and general practitioners, will be purposively sampled and recruited from one health board in Wales, which will cover three settings in primary care. A multi-method approach will be utilized to provide rich data, including non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and review of key documents. Data will be managed using NVivo 12 and analysed thematically. Ethics approval was gained in April 2022. Discussion Little is known about the end of life care decision-making process of healthcare professionals caring for people with dementia in primary care settings. This study will therefore address this pertinent gap. The study findings may also be transferable to healthcare professionals working in similar clinical settings across the UK. Impact It is anticipated that this study will inform the subsequent development of an intervention that can be used by healthcare professionals to support decision making and subsequently the provision of quality end of life care in primary care for people with dementia

Rethinking Volunteering and Cosmopolitanism: Beyond Individual Mobilities and Personal Transformations

In this paper we use assemblage thinking to offer a new interrogation of the relationalities of volunteering and development and to revisit volunteering’s relationship to cosmopolitanism. Recent debates about the rise of new actors in development cooperation have seen a growing interest in the geopolitical significance of volunteers and their contribution to development. Research has addressed the ways international volunteering can shape cosmopolitan subjectivities, whilst claims for volunteering’s universality are a key feature of global development policy. However, we argue that existing approaches to volunteering, cosmopolitanism and development remain contained by established development imaginaries and their ascription of agency, authority and expertise to actors from the global North. We use the idea of the assemblage, and data from two research projects, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent’s (IFRC) Global Review on Volunteering, and a doctoral research project on diaspora volunteering, to explore the constitution of what volunteering is within and between places. Through this, we identify alternative sites for interrogating the capacity of volunteering to challenge established ideas of agency, care and responsibility in development

Reciprocal regulation of PKA and rac signaling

Activated G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and receptor tyrosine kinases relay extracellular signals through spatial and temporal controlled kinase and GTPase entities. These enzymes are coordinated by multifunctional scaffolding proteins for precise intracellular signal processing. The cAMP-dependent protein kinase A (PKA) is the prime example for compartmentalized signal transmission downstream of distinct GPCRs. A-kinase anchoring proteins tether PKA to specific intracellular sites to ensure precision and directionality of PKA phosphorylation events. Here, we show that the Rho-GTPase Rac contains A-kinase anchoring protein properties and forms a dynamic cellular protein complex with PKA. The formation of this transient core complex depends on binary interactions with PKA subunits, cAMP levels and cellular GTP-loading accounting for bidirectional consequences on PKA and Rac downstream signaling. We show that GTP-Rac stabilizes the inactive PKA holoenzyme. However, β-adrenergic receptor-mediated activation of GTP-Rac–bound PKA routes signals to the Raf-Mek-Erk cascade, which is critically implicated in cell proliferation. We describe a further mechanism of how cAMP enhances nuclear Erk1/2 signaling: It emanates from transphosphorylation of p21-activated kinases in their evolutionary conserved kinase-activation loop through GTP-Rac compartmentalized PKA activities. Sole transphosphorylation of p21-activated kinases is not sufficient to activate Erk1/2. It requires complex formation of both kinases with GTP-Rac1 to unleash cAMP-PKA–boosted activation of Raf-Mek-Erk. Consequently GTP-Rac functions as a dual kinase-tuning scaffold that favors the PKA holoenzyme and contributes to potentiate Erk1/2 signaling. Our findings offer additional mechanistic insights how β-adrenergic receptor-controlled PKA activities enhance GTP-Rac–mediated activation of nuclear Erk1/2 signaling

International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs) : a social-geographical framework

Trans-national medicine, historically associated with colonial politics, is now central to discourses of global health and development, thrust into mainstream media by catastrophic events (earthquakes, disease epidemics), and enshrined in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Volunteer human-resource is an important contributor to international health-development work. International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs, that connect richer and poorer countries through healthcare) are situated at a meeting-point between geographies and sociologies of health. More fully developed social-geographic understandings will illuminate this area, currently dominated by instrumental health-professional perspectives. The challenge we address is to produce a geographically and sociologically-robust conceptual framework that appropriately recognises IVHNs’ potentials for valuable impacts, while also unlocking spaces of constructive critique. We examine the importance of the social in health geography, and geographical potentials in health sociology (focusing on professional knowledge construction, inequality and capital, and power), to highlight the mutual interests of these two fields in relation to IVHNs. We propose some socio-geographical theories of IVHNs that do not naturalise inequality, that understand health as a form of capital, prioritise explorations of power and ethical practice, and acknowledge the more-than-human properties of place. This sets an agenda for theoretically-supported empirical work on IVHNs.PostprintPeer reviewe

Volunteering for Development within the New Ecosystem of International Development

This article explores the ways in which volunteering for development is changing in the context of the shifting wider ecology of international development. It draws on a two?year, action research project into the value of volunteering undertaken by volunteer researchers in Kenya, Mozambique, Nepal and the Philippines. The article frames this research and the articles in this IDS Bulletin in the key debates – past, current and emerging – around the role, identity and value of volunteers in development processes. It identifies critical characteristics of effective volunteering for development as: the insider–outsider relationship; participatory processes, long?term programming; and a sustained focus on the poorest and most marginalised. The authors draw attention to the relevance of volunteering to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and call for better understanding of indigenous informal volunteering and how ‘outsider’ volunteers can support it