Running hand in hand : the librotraficantes mapping cultural resistance in the US Mexico borderlands

In January 2012, a groundbreaking K-12 Mexican American Studies [MAS] program in Tucson was dismantled by the State. The program had been implemented in the late 1990s to help reverse negative educational and socioeconomic trends within local Chicanx communities. The MAS curriculum had questioned prevailing national identity discourse, countering majoritarian myths of the founding and the functioning of the United States. Despite validated evidence of the program’s successful learning outcomes, it was ruled anti-American and seditious by a right-wing conservative legislature, and subsequently found to contravene state law. The books of the program’s bibliography were removed from the classrooms, these included texts considered a critical part of the canon of Chicanx, African American, and Native American literature. The news of the State’s dismantling of the MAS program resonated with Chicanx community groups across the Southwest, communities long embattled by the outcomes of majoritarian politicking and definitions of justice. One such group, Houston-based Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say [NP], decided to act. NP’s strategy was to return books from the removed MAS bibliography to the program’s students. To do so, the group applied a critical understanding of the racialized criminalization of their communities to then fourteen years of counter/storytelling organizing. Hereby, the Librotraficante Movement was born. In praxis, a group of thirty-eight “book smugglers” who, over a period of five days in March 2012, took a caravan of texts to Tucson, engaging on route with community sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. My project utilizes the caravan’s route as a framework to investigate Chicanx resistance in the contested US Mexico borderlands. I pay particular attention to Texas. Annexed in 1845 by the White Supremacist urges of Manifest Destiny, and bordered in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw Mexico stripped of fifty-percent of its territory, Texas has long been on the frontline of the making of the United States. This “making” brought about not only much of the geopolitical space of the nation, but the racialization of those who now found themselves, in the words of Mexican General José Mariano Salas in 1856, “strangers in their own land” (qtd. in Griswold del Castillo 1990, 3). Post-Hidalgo, said “strangers” were disenfranchised by settler-colonialism. They were surveilled and brutalized by the Texas Rangers, and from 1924 by the US Border Patrol whose praxis at that time, as Kelly Lytle Hernández argues, “was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands” (2010, 41). Little has changed. Yet, in this often-visceral contested space, Mexican heritage communities continue to struggle and thrive. The Librotraficante caravan’s Texas journey maps myriad resistance to historical and contemporary trauma as it “operates”, in Ofelia Garcia and Camila Leiva’s words, “within a dynamic network of cultural transformation” (2014, 203). This dissertation brings to light a legacy of Chicanx cultural resilience that troubles US-centric narrative constructions of identity and belonging. My work is located at the intersections of Cultural, Chicanx, Borderlands, American, Literary, and Ethnic Studies, and the Political and Social Sciences. It is at these intersections that sites in my four case-study cities (Tucson, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso) operate in response to, and despite, historical and contemporary oppressions. Said oppressions take the shape of, but are not limited to, epistemological colonization, NAFTA, gentrification, right-wing politicking, border militarization, anti-immigrant discourse, and the persistent marking of brown bodies as “illegal”. My goal is to elevate the historical, cultural, political, and literary consciousness produced by the resistance organizing of the sites. This, I argue, is a consciousness that arises from within the community’s collective experiences

Productivity Indicators and Challenges in New Zealand Workplaces

As part of a government initiative, the Department of Labour’s Workplace Productivity Working Group has been charged with the task of stimulating debate and broadening the discourse on workplace productivity. The Department of Labour has also supported research into how New Zealand businesses are responding to the productivity challenges they face. The paper presents findings from two studies that were part of this research agenda. In particular, the paper reports on the experiences of individual business case studies, (predominantly SMEs), of introducing and maintaining initiatives designed to raise workforce productivity. Analysis of the data reveals a number of key themes: catalysts and drivers for change; distinctive characteristics of high performing firms; differing characteristics of the case studies; and barriers to introducing productivity initiatives and some solutions. The findings also indicated that in practice, efficiency increased both though innovation and a realignment of activities, with higher value added than those conducted in the past. However, there is an inherent tension with these and other similar studies that cannot easily be resolved. On one hand, employers are striving to obtain increased worker performance and gain more productivity while on the other hand they are driving their employers to wok longer, harder and more effectively often in extremely hazardous conditions. Thus, it would appear that efforts to increase productivity can have contradictory results

A Framework for Building Technological Learning: Evidence from the New Zealand Dairy Industry

One aspect of the process of technology adoption is technological learning (TL), the way farmers gather information and turn it into knowledge. In a study of the New Zealand dairy industry, researchers examined the factors that affect TL. Findings suggest that the speed with which farmers engage in TL is influenced by the efficiency of the innovation system, the maturity of the farm system, and the individual characteristics of the farmer. The article presents a model demonstrating how these three sets of factors may affect TL that can be used by Extension agents to help them develop a strategy for engaging farmers in TL

Locating a novel autosomal recessive genetic condition using only WGS data from three cases and six controls; a case study of a new variant in the cattle glucokinase gene

New Mendelian genetic conditions, which adversely affect livestock, arise all the time. To manage them effectively, some methods need to be devised that are quick and accurate. Until recently, finding the causal genomic site of a new autosomal recessive genetic disease has required a two-stage approach using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) chip genotyping to locate the region containing the new variant. This region is then explored using fine-mapping methods to locate the actual site of the new variant. This study explores bioinformatic methods that can be used to identify the causative variants of recessive genetic disorders with full penetrance with just nine whole genome-sequenced animals to simplify and expedite the process to a one-step procedure. Using whole genome sequencing of only three cases and six carriers, the site of a novel variant causing perinatal mortality in Irish moiled calves was located. Four methods were used to interrogate the variant call format (VCF) data file of these nine animals, they are genotype criteria (GCR), autozygosity-by-difference (ABD), variant prediction scoring, and registered SNP information. From more than nine million variants in the VCF file, only one site was identified by all four methods (Chr4: g.77173487A>T (ARS-UCD1.2 (GCF_002263795.1)). This site was a splice acceptor variant located in the glucokinase gene (GCK). It was verified on an independent sample of animals from the breed using genotyping by polymerase chain reaction at the candidate site and autozygosity-by-difference using SNP-chips. Both methods confirmed the candidate site. Investigation of the GCR method found that sites meeting the GCR were not evenly spread across the genome but concentrated in regions of long runs of homozygosity. Locating GCR sites was best performed using two carriers to every case, and the carriers should be distantly related to the cases, within the breed concerned. Fewer than 20 animals need to be sequenced when using the GCR and ABD methods together. The genomic site of novel autosomal recessive Mendelian genetic diseases can be located using fewer than 20 animals combined with two bioinformatic methods, autozygosity-by-difference, and genotype criteria. In many instances it may also be confirmed with variant prediction scoring. This should speed-up and simplify the management of new genetic diseases to a single-step process

Marginalised or enabled voices? 'User participation' in policy and practice

The idea of participation has been central to many policy developments in recent years. Both Conservative and Labour governments have used notions of participation and involvement in attempts to justify and implement their social policies. Yet, despite a plethora of initiatives and guidance around ‘participation’ emerging from all levels of government, and a substantial academic literature, there remains a major, and potentially damaging, lack of clarity over many aspects of participation, while the secret of achieving ‘real’ participation appears to continue to remain elusive

Productivity Indicators and Challenges in New Zealand Workplaces

As part of a government initiative, the Department of Labour’s Workplace Productivity Working Group has been charged with the task of stimulating debate and broadening the discourse on workplace productivity. The Department of Labour has also supported research into how New Zealand businesses are responding to the productivity challenges they face. The paper presents findings from two studies that were part of this research agenda. In particular, the paper reports on the experiences of individual business case studies, (predominantly SMEs), of introducing and maintaining initiatives designed to raise workforce productivity. Analysis of the data reveals a number of key themes: catalysts and drivers for change; distinctive characteristics of high performing firms; differing characteristics of the case studies; and barriers to introducing productivity initiatives and some solutions. The findings also indicated that in practice, efficiency increased both though innovation and a realignment of activities, with higher value added than those conducted in the past. However, there is an inherent tension with these and other similar studies that cannot easily be resolved. On one hand, employers are striving to obtain increased worker performance and gain more productivity while on the other hand they are driving their employers to wok longer, harder and more effectively often in extremely hazardous conditions. Thus, it would appear that efforts to increase productivity can have contradictory results

The foot-health of people with diabetes in regional and rural Australia:Baseline results from an observational cohort study

Background: There is limited Australian epidemiological research that reports on the foot-health characteristics ofpeople with diabetes, especially within rural and regional settings. The objective of this study was to explore theassociations between demographic, socio-economic and diabetes-related variables with diabetes-related footmorbidity in people residing in regional and rural Australia.Methods: Adults with diabetes were recruited from non-metropolitan Australian publicly-funded podiatry services. Theprimary variable of interest was the University of Texas diabetic foot risk classification designated to each participant atbaseline. Independent risk factors for diabetes-related foot morbidity were identified using multivariable analysis.Results: Eight-hundred and ninety-nine participants enrolled, 443 (49.3%) in Tasmania and 456 (50.7%) in Victoria.Mean age was 67 years (SD 12.7), 9.2% had type 1 diabetes, 506 (56.3%) were male, 498 (55.4%) had diabetes for longerthan 10 years and 550 (61.2%) either did not know the ideal HbA1c target or reported that it was ≥7.0. A majority hadperipheral neuropathy or worse foot morbidity (61.0%). Foot morbidity was associated with male sex (OR 2.42, 95% CI1.82–3.22), duration of diabetes > 20 years (OR 3.25, 95% CI 2.22–4.75), and Tasmanian residence (OR 3.38, 95% CI 2.35–4.86).Conclusions: A high proportion of the regional Australian clinical population with diabetes seen by the publiclyfunded podiatric services in this study were at high risk of future limb threatening foot morbidity, and participantsresiding in Northern Tasmania are more likely to have worse diabetes-related foot morbidity than those from regionalVictoria. Service models should be reviewed to ensure that diabetes-related foot services are appropriately developedand resourced to deliver interdisciplinary evidence-based care

Going beyond personal protection against mosquito bites to eliminate malaria transmission: population suppression of malaria vectors that exploit both human and animal blood

Protecting individuals and households against mosquito bites with long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) or indoor residual spraying (IRS) can suppress entire populations of unusually efficient malaria vector species that predominantly feed indoors on humans. Mosquitoes which usually feed on animals are less reliant on human blood, so they are far less vulnerable to population suppression effects of such human-targeted insecticidal measures. Fortunately, the dozens of mosquito species which primarily feed on animals are also relatively inefficient vectors of malaria, so personal protection against mosquito bites may be sufficient to eliminate transmission. However, a handful of mosquito species are particularly problematic vectors of residual malaria transmission, because they feed readily on both humans and animals. These unusual vectors feed often enough on humans to be potent malaria vectors, but also often enough on animals to evade population control with LLINs, IRS or any other insecticidal personal protection measure targeted only to humans. Anopheles arabiensis and A. coluzzii in Africa, A. darlingi in South America and A. farauti in Oceania, as well as A. culicifacies species E, A. fluviatilis species S, A. lesteri and A. minimus in Asia, all feed readily on either humans or animals and collectively mediate residual malaria transmission across most of the tropics. Eliminating malaria transmission by vectors exhibiting such dual host preferences will require aggressive mosquito population abatement, rather than just personal protection of humans. Population suppression of even these particularly troublesome vectors is achievable with a variety of existing vector control technologies that remain underdeveloped or underexploited