Border Externalization on a New Shore: A Comparative Analysis of American and European Migration Policies’ Effects on the Legitimacy of the Right to Asylum

Encountering the two greatest refugee crises in the twenty-first century, the European Union and the United States instituted immigration policies that externalized migration controls. Through international agreements, exportation of border controls to other countries, and other tactics that legally distance refugees and asylum seekers from the EU and US, both global powers threaten the legitimacy and access to human rights. Through a comparative legal analysis of the two destination regions, the legal implications of the kingpin of modern migration strategy – border externalization – will be examined to display the effectual legitimacy of the right to asylum. While many authors criticize the European Union for their veiled disregard for indirect violations of asylum laws by member states and neighbors, a comparison of the legal implications of American immigration policy accuses the United States of mirroring European migration strategy. American and European representatives were primary authors of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1951 Refugee Convention, and 1967 Protocol that collectively established the right to asylum internationally (Andreopoulos, 2020; Hurwitx, 2010). Therefore, the role of these two authorities in enforcing the right to asylum within their own borders is critical to maintaining the legitimacy of this protection. By exploring the historical causes of migration and policies of each region, the article examines the similarities and differences in geography, political arrangement, and catalytic factors that relate the EU and the US’ policy decisions and treatment of human rights obligations. Next, by comparing the effects of border externalization policies, I will demonstrate the legal disconnect between international standards and the actions of the EU and US. In a final examination of the global enforcement of the right to asylum and human rights, the article demonstrates that border externalization’s novel and universal application delegitimizes the right to asylum, a critical international refugee protection

'Kindness and empathy beyond all else' : Challenges to professional identities of Higher Education teachers during COVID-19 times

COVID-19 has continued to effect higher education globally in significant ways. During 2020, many institutions shifted learning online overnight as the sector closed its doors and opened new sites for remote teaching. This article reports on an international study [Phillips et al., 2021] that sought to capture how cross-sectoral teachers experienced these emergency changes during the first months of restrictions. The data, analysed using narrative identity theory, revealed concerns that fall into two broad categories: technologies and relationships. Significantly, it was not a loss of content delivery or changes to assessment that prompted the greatest anxiety for our colleagues, but that they held significant concerns about their students’ mental health; inequities of access to a range of services including technological; and challenges connecting emotionally with their students at a distance. The results provide actionable strategies for higher education institutions to apply in future emergencies where remote teaching is necessary

STORIES FOUND WITHIN THE LEARNINGS OF TEACHING IN COVID-19

COVID-19 has disrupted the educational landscape around the world, putting new pressures on schools, colleges and universities, and more specifically on teaching, learning and assessment. Educators feel fragmented, as their identities as well as their roles pivoted when the pandemic directed them home to teach. This paper explores a global story-based educational research project that sought to capture the pressures, stress and self-efficacy of educators across the world. Our digital ethnographic study sought to explore what educators were experiencing; to archive the worries, hopes, concerns and issues encountered by teachers in new spaces and sites as remote emergency practice began. What has emerged from the 635-educator participant study that includes 105 respondents in the higher education/tertiary sector that we have chosen to focus on here, is an attentiveness to the place of learning and teaching. More importantly, the relations between people and place, and the teachers and their students. This paper explores four stories from the higher education data that have been re-storied as an opening to this pandemic and the effects of the pivot on teaching practice to indicate the times and provide voice to our participants

Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently

Teaching and learning in COVID-19 : Pandemic quilt storying

Something changed during the pandemic; we attuned to a call. A call to action, breathing, support, activism, care, well-being, community, minimised mobilities, planetary health and our relations to all these things, and more. We are women working in education spaces across multiple communities, responsive to ongoing matters of concern (Latour, 2008), aware that our rhizomic connections have no middle or end. We use the method and metaphor of the quilt in this collaboration and hold quilting as a Feminist intervention, a return to her-stories and ways of knowing through story as we stitch together cultural and material stories of place. Our COVID-19 chronicles are a creative, collaborative exploration of the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning and teaching across our respective countries. This paper is a collaboration of critical auto-ethnographies (Holman Jones, 2016), quilted and stitched together by a group of education scholars who united to research the impact of online emergency teaching that forced education site closures globally. Through this collaborative image quilting, we curated responses to our initial 100-word stories of pandemic life in 2020, that we had posted on a collaborative Padlet. Feminist, storying, and ethnographic theory inform alignment and stitching of each 100-word patch

Morphological, genomic and transcriptomic responses of Klebsiella pneumoniae to the last-line antibiotic colistin.

Colistin remains one of the few antibiotics effective against multi-drug resistant (MDR) hospital pathogens, such as Klebsiella pneumoniae. Yet resistance to this last-line drug is rapidly increasing. Characterized mechanisms of colR in K. pneumoniae are largely due to chromosomal mutations in two-component regulators, although a plasmid-mediated colR mechanism has recently been uncovered. However, the effects of intrinsic colistin resistance are yet to be characterized on a whole-genome level. Here, we used a genomics-based approach to understand the mechanisms of adaptive colR acquisition in K. pneumoniae. In controlled directed-evolution experiments we observed two distinct paths to colistin resistance acquisition. Whole genome sequencing identified mutations in two colistin resistance genes: in the known colR regulator phoQ which became fixed in the population and resulted in a single amino acid change, and unstable minority variants in the recently described two-component sensor crrB. Through RNAseq and microscopy, we reveal the broad range of effects that colistin exposure has on the cell. This study is the first to use genomics to identify a population of minority variants with mutations in a colR gene in K. pneumoniae.This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust grant number WT098051. The salaries of AKC and CJB were supported by the Medical Research Council [grant number G1100100/1] and MJE is supported by Public Health England. LB is supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation. KEH is supported by the NHMRC of Australia (Fellowship #1061409)

Identification of the RNA polymerase I-RNA interactome.

Ribosome biogenesis is a complex process orchestrated by a host of ribosome assembly factors. Although it is known that many of the proteins involved in this process have RNA binding activity, the full repertoire of proteins that interact with the precursor ribosomal RNA is currently unknown. To gain a greater understanding of the extent to which RNA-protein interactions have the potential to control ribosome biogenesis, we used RNA affinity isolation coupled with proteomics to measure the changes in RNA-protein interactions that occur when rRNA transcription is blocked. Our analysis identified 211 out of 457 nuclear RNA binding proteins with a >3-fold decrease in RNA-protein interaction after inhibition of RNA polymerase I (RNAPI). We have designated these 211 RNA binding proteins as the RNAPI RNA interactome. As expected, the RNAPI RNA interactome is highly enriched for nucleolar proteins and proteins associated with ribosome biogenesis. Selected proteins from the interactome were shown to be nucleolar in location and to have RNA binding activity that was dependent on RNAPI activity. Furthermore, our data show that two proteins, which are required for rRNA maturation, AATF and NGDN, and which form part of the RNA interactome, both lack canonical RNA binding domains and yet are novel pre-rRNA binding proteins

Earliest rock fabric formed in the Solar System preserved in a chondrule rim

Rock fabrics – the preferred orientation of grains – provide a window into the history of rock formation, deformation and compaction. Chondritic meteorites are among the oldest materials in the Solar System1 and their fabrics should record a range of processes occurring in the nebula and in asteroids, but due to abundant fine-grained material these samples have largely resisted traditional in situ fabric analysis. Here we use high resolution electron backscatter diffraction to map the orientation of sub-micrometre grains in the Allende CV carbonaceous chondrite: the matrix material that is interstitial to the mm-sized spherical chondrules that give chondrites their name, and fine-grained rims which surround those chondrules. Although Allende matrix exhibits a bulk uniaxial fabric relating to a significant compressive event in the parent asteroid, we find that fine-grained rims preserve a spherically symmetric fabric centred on the chondrule. We define a method that quantitatively relates fabric intensity to net compression, and reconstruct an initial porosity for the rims of 70-80% - a value very close to model estimates for the earliest uncompacted aggregates2,3. We conclude that the chondrule rim textures formed in a nebula setting and may therefore be the first rock fabric to have formed in the Solar System