"If Those Old Women Catch You, You're Going To Cop It”: Night Patrols, Indigenous Women, and Place Based Sovereignty in Outback Australia

Night Patrols (‘patrols’) are a uniquely Indigenous Australian form of community self-policing. Patrols do not fit neatly into established paradigms of ‘policing’ emanating from the Global North. They are not part of the apparatus of the state police, nor do they offer commodified private security services and, unlike mainstream police, they cannot legitimately call on a reservoir of coercive powers to ensure compliance. In this article we sketch out what we describe as the ‘contested space’ of Indigenous self-policing, as represented by patrols, through a postcolonial lens, paying particular attention to the role of Indigenous women’s agency in creating, nurturing and sustaining night patrol work within an Indigenous ethics of care and notions of wellbeing. Drawing on international critical postcolonial scholarship we tease out the links between patrol work and broader expressions of sovereign power embedded in Indigenous law. Our key contention is that there are learnings from the Australian experience for other postcolonies, where there are kindred debates regarding the balance between Indigenous and colonial systems of justice and policing. We highlight the experience of patrols in the Northern Territory (NT) where the policing of Indigenous space and place have become a key priority for the Australian Government after a major focus on issues of child abuse and family violence

Hyperincarceration and Indigeneity

In this article we explore the notion of hyperincarceration in Australia. We argue that hyperincarceration is not only constituted in the prison but also through the state constricting, through a multiplicity of strategies, Indigenous livelihoods on homelands, the practice of language and culture, and the freedoms of civil society

Chiasma

Newspaper reporting on events at the Boston University School of Medicine in the 1960s

Uptake, Distribution and Diffusivity of Reactive Fluorophores in Cells: Implications Toward Target Identification

There is much recent interest in the application of copper-free click chemistry to study a wide range of biological events in vivo and in vitro. Specifically, azide-conjugated fluorescent probes can be used to identify targets which have been modified with bioorthogonal reactive groups. For intracellular applications of this chemistry, the structural and physicochemical properties of the fluorescent azide become increasingly important. Ideal fluorophores should extensively accumulate within cells, have even intracellular distribution, and be free (unbound), allowing them to efficiently participate in bimolecular reactions. We report here on the synthesis and evaluation a set of structurally diverse fluorescent probes to examine their potential usefulness in intracellular click reactions. Total cellular uptake and intracellular distribution profiles were comparatively assessed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The intracellular diffusion coefficients were measured using a fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP)-based method. Many reactive fluorophores exhibited suboptimal properties for intracellular reactions. BODIPY- and TAMRA-based azides had superior cellular accumulation, whereas TAMRA-based probes had the most uniform intracellular distribution and best cytosolic diffusivity. Collectively, these results provide an unbiased comparative evaluation regarding the suitability of azide-linked fluorophores for intracellular click reactions

PIP3-dependent macropinocytosis is incompatible with chemotaxis

In eukaryotic chemotaxis, the mechanisms connecting external signals to the motile apparatus remain unclear. The role of the lipid phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate (PIP3) has been particularly controversial. PIP3 has many cellular roles, notably in growth control and macropinocytosis as well as cell motility. Here we show that PIP3 is not only unnecessary for Dictyostelium discoideum to migrate toward folate, but actively inhibits chemotaxis. We find that macropinosomes, but not pseudopods, in growing cells are dependent on PIP3. PIP3 patches in these cells show no directional bias, and overall only PIP3-free pseudopods orient up-gradient. The pseudopod driver suppressor of cAR mutations (SCAR)/WASP and verprolin homologue (WAVE) is not recruited to the center of PIP3 patches, just the edges, where it causes macropinosome formation. Wild-type cells, unlike the widely used axenic mutants, show little macropinocytosis and few large PIP3 patches, but migrate more efficiently toward folate. Tellingly, folate chemotaxis in axenic cells is rescued by knocking out phosphatidylinositide 3-kinases (PI 3-kinases). Thus PIP3 promotes macropinocytosis and interferes with pseudopod orientation during chemotaxis of growing cells

In Defence of Decolonisation: a response toSouthern Criminology

Mohwak scholar Taiaiake Alfred has remarked that in settler colonies, reconciliation is another form of re-colonisation. The “reconciliation of Indigenous people to colonialism”, in Alfred’s words, do not challenge structures of power that deny First Nations people substantive rights. We draw on Alfred’s observations to highlight the agenda of Southern Criminology. This increasingly influential school while seeking to engage epistemologies of the South reinscribes colonial relations of power, including colonial hierarchies of knowledge. It does so by uncritically bringing together the North and the South through a working partnership in criminology. Our blog represents a defence of decolonising frameworks. We contend that challenging colonial legacies in criminology is crucial for building more inclusive ideas and praxes

Indigenous family violence : an attempt to understand the problems and inform appropriate and effective responses to criminal justice system intervention

Whilst high levels of concern about the prevalence of family violence within Indigenous communities have long been expressed, progress in the development of evidence-based intervention programs for known perpetrators has been slow. This review of the literature aims to provide a resource for practitioners who work in this area, and a framework from within which culturally specific violence prevention programs can be developed and delivered. It is suggested that effective responses to Indigenous family violence need to be informed by culturally informed models of violence, and that significant work is needed to develop interventions that successfully manage the risk of perpetrators of family violence committing further offences.<br /

SILAC-based proteomic quantification of chemoattractant-induced cytoskeleton dynamics on a second to minute timescale

Cytoskeletal dynamics during cell behaviours ranging from endocytosis and exocytosis to cell division and movement is controlled by a complex network of signalling pathways, the full details of which are as yet unresolved. Here we show that SILAC-based proteomic methods can be used to characterize the rapid chemoattractant-induced dynamic changes in the actin–myosin cytoskeleton and regulatory elements on a proteome-wide scale with a second to minute timescale resolution. This approach provides novel insights in the ensemble kinetics of key cytoskeletal constituents and association of known and novel identified binding proteins. We validate the proteomic data by detailed microscopy-based analysis of in vivo translocation dynamics for key signalling factors. This rapid large-scale proteomic approach may be applied to other situations where highly dynamic changes in complex cellular compartments are expected to play a key role