Identity and Political Theory

In Identity and Political Theory, Clarissa Hayward and Ron Watson intervene in this debate, theorizing an appropriate role for the state in the contested field of identity politics. They start by parsing different theories of multiculturalism that favor state recognition of minority identity, distinguished by commitments to protect identity groups from external intervention and to permit the groups to impose illiberal restrictions on their own members. They then summarize the retreat from recognition found in poststructuralist arguments that recognition promotes particularistic attachments and exacerbates normalization and coercive subjectification. Their Article provides an important corrective to Charles Taylor\u27s pathbreaking paper, The Politics of Recognition. They contend that the recognition framework misled the debate, failing to capture how states play a critical role in helping produce and reproduce identities. The question is not whether states should intervene in identity-constitution, but how, a question they answer by urging a principle of facilitating democracy and non-domination

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts