Mixing the Digital, Social, and Cultural: Learning, Identity, and Agency in Youth Participation

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital MediaHow do youth use media and technology as they learn to be participants in civic and democratic practices? We share two case studies -- one from a media arts production organization and one from a school board youth group -- that revolve around youth-adult interactions in learning environments that offer youth real opportunities to be influential in their respective communities. The cases feature youth and their involvements with digital media, pedagogical approaches, and engagements that enhance their participatory capacities. There are multiple channels through which these interactions happen, some with and facilitated by adults and others created and negotiated by youth. We describe how youth and adults establish learning environments for each other, negotiate the grounds for participation, and explore the possibilities and limitations of social and digital technologies in these processes, supporting the idea that this learning is something that young people do as agents in their development

Contingent authority and youth influence: When youth councils can wield influence in public institutions

Studies of youth public participation have dealt with varied conceptions of citizenship that emerge from literatures on human rights, civic engagement, youth development, and youth organizing and activism. Where those conceptions rely on developmental logics that limit or exclude youth participation, young people’s attempts to gain authority reveal concurrent ways they navigate these multiple conceptions of participation. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study, the analysis presented here focuses on a specific venue for youth participation: a student advisory board. Data includes participant observation, interviews, and artifacts including resolutions and emails. Twenty-one of 27 students, representing roughly 15 high schools in their school district, participated in the study. When students attended to paperwork like bylaws and the state education code, they gained access to contingent authority, a limited but influential form of Weberian authority. Key implications of the study indicate that while youth advisory councils can reliably produce exclusion on developmental grounds, they can also provide the parameters for establishing contingent authority. Paperwork is a key to accessing this form of bureaucratic authority, but exercising it requires sustained, public practice. This article contributes to literatures on youth studies, public participation and more broadly to sociology of education.Studies of youth public participation have dealt with varied conceptions of citizenship that emerge from literatures on human rights, civic engagement, youth development, and youth organizing and activism. Where those conceptions rely on developmental logics that limit or exclude youth participation, young people’s attempts to gain authority reveal concurrent ways they navigate these multiple conceptions of participation. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study, the analysis presented here focuses on a specific venue for youth participation: a student advisory board. Data includes participant observation, interviews, and artifacts including resolutions and emails. Twenty-one of 27 students, representing roughly 15 high schools in their school district, participated in the study. When students attended to paperwork like bylaws and the state education code, they gained access to contingent authority, a limited but influential form of Weberian authority. Key implications of the study indicate that while youth advisory councils can reliably produce exclusion on developmental grounds, they can also provide the parameters for establishing contingent authority. Paperwork is a key to accessing this form of bureaucratic authority, but exercising it requires sustained, public practice. This article contributes to literatures on youth studies, public participation and more broadly to sociology of education

Deep Stories. Practicing, Teaching, and Learning Anthropology with Digital Storytelling

Have you ever wondered what makes storytelling and digital media a powerful combination? This edited volume examines the opportunities to think, do, and/or create jointly afforded by digital storytelling. The editors of this volume contend that digital storytelling and digital media can create spaces of empowerment and transformation by facilitating multiple kinds of border crossings and convergences involving groups of peoples, places, knowledge, methodologies, and teaching pedagogies. The book is unique in its inclusion of anthropologists and education practitioners and its emphasis on multiple subfields in anthropology. The contributors discuss digital storytelling in the context of educational programs, teaching anthropology, and ethnographic research involving a variety of populations and subjects that will appeal to researchers and practitioners engaged with qualitative methods and pedagogies that rely on media technology

SCD1 Inhibition Causes Cancer Cell Death by Depleting Mono-Unsaturated Fatty Acids

Increased metabolism is a requirement for tumor cell proliferation. To understand the dependence of tumor cells on fatty acid metabolism, we evaluated various nodes of the fatty acid synthesis pathway. Using RNAi we have demonstrated that depletion of fatty-acid synthesis pathway enzymes SCD1, FASN, or ACC1 in HCT116 colon cancer cells results in cytotoxicity that is reversible by addition of exogenous fatty acids. This conditional phenotype is most pronounced when SCD1 is depleted. We used this fatty-acid rescue strategy to characterize several small-molecule inhibitors of fatty acid synthesis, including identification of TOFA as a potent SCD1 inhibitor, representing a previously undescribed activity for this compound. Reference FASN and ACC inhibitors show cytotoxicity that is less pronounced than that of TOFA, and fatty-acid rescue profiles consistent with their proposed enzyme targets. Two reference SCD1 inhibitors show low-nanomolar cytotoxicity that is offset by at least two orders of magnitude by exogenous oleate. One of these inhibitors slows growth of HCT116 xenograft tumors. Our data outline an effective strategy for interrogation of on-mechanism potency and pathway-node-specificity of fatty acid synthesis inhibitors, establish an unambiguous link between fatty acid synthesis and cancer cell survival, and point toward SCD1 as a key target in this pathway

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM