Can affirmative action improve gender parity in India? The case of mukhiyapatis in Bihar

Apurv Chauhan argues that patriarchal expectations undermine the political empowerment of women at the local government level in Bihar

Developing a social psychology of poverty: social objects and dialogical representations

This thesis develops a social psychological approach to researching poverty. Critiquing the existing models of poverty research in psychological sciences, it conceptualises poverty as a social object whose meanings are generated socially and dialogically. Using the theory of social representations and a dialogical framework informed by G.H. Mead’s work on the social Self and the thesis of dialogical mind, it examines both content (social representations) and processes (dialogicality) of meaning-making on poverty in the Indian public sphere at two levels. First, in a village in Bihar, India, 41 poor and 25 elite participants were interviewed over a period of six months to understand meaning-making in a local community setting. Second, 424 news stories on poverty in two national newspapers were sampled to explore the broader public sphere of India. The research found that poor participants represented poverty in three domains: their present state of being in poverty, their plans to escape poverty, and the social actors responsible for facilitating their escape. Representations in the first two domains allowed poor people to cope with the harsh realities of poverty whereas representations in the third domain allowed coping with their failure in escaping poverty. Elite representations were also organised in three domains: the descriptions of poverty, the reasons why poverty existed, and the possibility of poverty amelioration through improving healthcare and education provisions for the poor. The primary symbolic coping function of the elites’ representations was of absolving their Selves from any blame for the existence poverty — this was achieved by ascribing the responsibility for poverty on the Government and the poor people themselves. The newspapers represented poverty in four ambivalent domains as: an objective reality, a threat, a barrier, and as a political opportunity. Symbolic coping in the mass-media involved features of both poor and elite groups’ representations. In terms of the ‘processes’ through which these representations are generated, the research synthesises how meanings are developed both in terms of and through the Ego–Alter dialogical interdependence, which is also shown to be the link between the content and the processes of social representations. On the basis of its findings, this thesis demonstrates that the representation of poverty — and by extension, of all social objects — is necessarily contingent on the realisation of the Ego’s relationship with Alters in the social world. In this direction, the role of Social Acts, as conceptualised by Mead, is explored in-depth. Finally, the overall representational field of poverty is presented in terms of its stable thematic core and malleable periphery while demonstrating that the relationship between the core and periphery is dialogically mediated. As a whole, this thesis develops a novel approach to studying social problems like poverty in the discipline. In doing so, it also advances links between the theory of social representations, Mead’s work, and the thesis of dialogical mind

Tracking collective emotions in sixteen countries during COVID-19: A novel methodology for identifying major emotional events using Twitter

Using messages posted on Twitter, this research developed a new methodology for estimating collective emotions (CEs) within countries. It applied time-series analytic methodology to develop and demonstrate a novel application of CEs to identify emotional events that are significant at the societal level. The study analyzed over 200 million words from over 10 million Twitter messages posted in sixteen countries during the first 120 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daily levels of collective anxiety and positive emotions were estimated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count’s (LIWC) psychologically validated lexicon. The resulting time series estimates of both collective emotions were analyzed for structural breaks which mark abrupt changes in a series due to external shocks. External shocks to collective emotions come from events that are of shared emotional relevance and the analysis of structural breaks showed that a reduction in collective anxiety and increase in collective positive emotions in most countries followed WHO’s declaration of the COVID-19 situation as a global pandemic. Announcements of economic support packages and social restrictions also had similar impacts in countries. This indicated that reduction of uncertainties around the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation during the first 120 days of the pandemic had a positive emotional impact on people in all the countries in the study. The study contributes to the field of CEs and applied research on collective psychological phenomena

Deliberation on Childhood Vaccination in Canada: Public Input on Ethical Trade-Offs in Vaccination Policy

Background: Policy decisions about childhood vaccination require consideration of multiple, sometimes conflicting, public health and ethical imperatives. Examples of these decisions are whether vaccination should be mandatory and, if so, whether to allow for non-medical exemptions. In this article we argue that these policy decisions go beyond typical public health mandates and therefore require democratic input. Methods: We report on the design, implementation, and results of a deliberative public forum convened over four days in Ontario, Canada, on the topic of childhood vaccination. Results: 25 participants completed all four days of deliberation and collectively developed 20 policy recommendations on issues relating to mandatory vaccinations and exemptions, communication about vaccines and vaccination, and AEFI (adverse events following immunization) compensation and reporting. Notable recommendations include unanimous support for mandatory childhood vaccination in Ontario, the need for broad educational communication about vaccination, and the development of a no-fault compensation scheme for AEFIs. There was persistent disagreement among deliberants about the form of exemptions from vaccination (conscience, religious beliefs) that should be permissible, as well as appropriate consequences if parents do not vaccinate their children. Conclusions: We conclude that conducting deliberative democratic processes on topics that are polarizing and controversial is viable and should be further developed and implemented to support democratically legitimate and trustworthy policy about childhood vaccination

Pan-cancer analysis of transcripts encoding novel open-reading frames (nORFs) and their potential biological functions.

Uncharacterized and unannotated open-reading frames, which we refer to as novel open reading frames (nORFs), may sometimes encode peptides that remain unexplored for novel therapeutic opportunities. To our knowledge, no systematic identification and characterization of transcripts encoding nORFs or their translation products in cancer, or in any other physiological process has been performed. We use our curated nORFs database (nORFs.org), together with RNA-Seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Genotype-Expression (GTEx) consortiums, to identify transcripts containing nORFs that are expressed frequently in cancer or matched normal tissue across 22 cancer types. We show nORFs are subject to extensive dysregulation at the transcript level in cancer tissue and that a small subset of nORFs are associated with overall patient survival, suggesting that nORFs may have prognostic value. We also show that nORF products can form protein-like structures with post-translational modifications. Finally, we perform in silico screening for inhibitors against nORF-encoded proteins that are disrupted in stomach and esophageal cancer, showing that they can potentially be targeted by inhibitors. We hope this work will guide and motivate future studies that perform in-depth characterization of nORF functions in cancer and other diseases

Plates for slates: the impact of a school feeding programme on community representations of schools

Using the nationwide school-feeding programme—the Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS)—in India as its anchor, this paper critically evaluates the use of schools as sites for discharging social policies. Data from semi structured interviews (N = 26) and focus groups (N = 8) conducted in a north Indian village provide evidence that the community distrusts the central and the regional governments and regards state run schools as deficient institutions. In such a social climate, the community perceived the MDMS as an evil governmental design to distract poor people from education. Such representations, the paper argues, further erode the faith of the community in state run schools. Crucially, data from the study indicate that the MDMS has contributed to a shift in community representations of schools from being a site for imparting education to that of an institution providing free meals. It is argued that such a shift in community representations of schools may hinder the agenda of promoting education in disadvantaged settings. The paper concludes by identifying two critical considerations in using schools as the site of social policy: (a) the symbolic environments of meaning making which inform local interpretations of policies; and (b) the local meaning making and representations that communities develop of new or existing social policies. The theory of social representation informs the arguments made in this paper