Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia

Physical and Genetic Structure of the Maize Genome Reflects Its Complex Evolutionary History

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most important cereal crops and a model for the study of genetics, evolution, and domestication. To better understand maize genome organization and to build a framework for genome sequencing, we constructed a sequence-ready fingerprinted contig-based physical map that covers 93.5% of the genome, of which 86.1% is aligned to the genetic map. The fingerprinted contig map contains 25,908 genic markers that enabled us to align nearly 73% of the anchored maize genome to the rice genome. The distribution pattern of expressed sequence tags correlates to that of recombination. In collinear regions, 1 kb in rice corresponds to an average of 3.2 kb in maize, yet maize has a 6-fold genome size expansion. This can be explained by the fact that most rice regions correspond to two regions in maize as a result of its recent polyploid origin. Inversions account for the majority of chromosome structural variations during subsequent maize diploidization. We also find clear evidence of ancient genome duplication predating the divergence of the progenitors of maize and rice. Reconstructing the paleoethnobotany of the maize genome indicates that the progenitors of modern maize contained ten chromosomes

A BAC pooling strategy combined with PCR-based screenings in a large, highly repetitive genome enables integration of the maize genetic and physical maps

BACKGROUND: Molecular markers serve three important functions in physical map assembly. First, they provide anchor points to genetic maps facilitating functional genomic studies. Second, they reduce the overlap required for BAC contig assembly from 80 to 50 percent. Finally, they validate assemblies based solely on BAC fingerprints. We employed a six-dimensional BAC pooling strategy in combination with a high-throughput PCR-based screening method to anchor the maize genetic and physical maps. RESULTS: A total of 110,592 maize BAC clones (~ 6x haploid genome equivalents) were pooled into six different matrices, each containing 48 pools of BAC DNA. The quality of the BAC DNA pools and their utility for identifying BACs containing target genomic sequences was tested using 254 PCR-based STS markers. Five types of PCR-based STS markers were screened to assess potential uses for the BAC pools. An average of 4.68 BAC clones were identified per marker analyzed. These results were integrated with BAC fingerprint data generated by the Arizona Genomics Institute (AGI) and the Arizona Genomics Computational Laboratory (AGCoL) to assemble the BAC contigs using the FingerPrinted Contigs (FPC) software and contribute to the construction and anchoring of the physical map. A total of 234 markers (92.5%) anchored BAC contigs to their genetic map positions. The results can be viewed on the integrated map of maize [1,2]. CONCLUSION: This BAC pooling strategy is a rapid, cost effective method for genome assembly and anchoring. The requirement for six replicate positive amplifications makes this a robust method for use in large genomes with high amounts of repetitive DNA such as maize. This strategy can be used to physically map duplicate loci, provide order information for loci in a small genetic interval or with no genetic recombination, and loci with conflicting hybridization-based information

2007, Physical and genetic structure of the maize genome reflects its complex evolutionary history, PLoS

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most important cereal crops and a model for the study of genetics, evolution, and domestication. To better understand maize genome organization and to build a framework for genome sequencing, we constructed a sequence-ready fingerprinted contig-based physical map that covers 93.5% of the genome, of which 86.1% is aligned to the genetic map. The fingerprinted contig map contains 25,908 genic markers that enabled us to align nearly 73% of the anchored maize genome to the rice genome. The distribution pattern of expressed sequence tags correlates to that of recombination. In collinear regions, 1 kb in rice corresponds to an average of 3.2 kb in maize, yet maize has a 6-fold genome size expansion. This can be explained by the fact that most rice regions correspond to two regions in maize as a result of its recent polyploid origin. Inversions account for the majority of chromosome structural variations during subsequent maize diploidization. We also find clear evidence of ancient genome duplication predating the divergence of the progenitors of maize and rice. Reconstructing the paleoethnobotany of the maize genome indicates that the progenitors of modern maize contained ten chromosomes. Citation: Wei F, Coe E, Nelson W, Bharti AK, Engler F, et al. (2007) Physical and genetic structure of the maize genome reflects its complex evolutionary history. PLoS Genet 3(7): e123

[In Press] Writing themselves in : Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse Australians online

There has been limited exploration into the online engagements of people who are Indigenous and gender and sexuality diverse. There are, however, two separate bodies of literature that provide substantial insights into the digital involvement of Indigenous Australians, and gender and sexuality diverse people. Each has identified a myriad of complex negotiations, interactions and resistances that take place through the affordances of digital spaces, along with identifying impacts on well-being. This scoping review discusses dominant themes within existing research on these topics, and documents research that discusses an online blog entitled Archiving the Aboriginal Rainbow that is designed to foreground representations of Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse people. To contextualise this discussion, the paper begins with a review of scholarly literature that articulates and challenges the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous peoples’ gender and sexuality. The literature reviewed exposes new research directions. Namely, the importance of exploration into Indigenous gender and sexuality diverses peoples’ online engagements, and their interrelationship with well-being

[In Press] Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility : familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia

Mobility tactics : young LGBTIQ+ Indigenous Australians' belonging and connectedness

Although previous research indicates a positive relationship between community belonging and well-being in Indigenous Australian contexts, little is known about how this relationship is experienced by Indigenous Australians who are gender and/or sexually diverse. Drawing from qualitative interviews with LGBTIQ+ Indigenous youth, we explore concepts of belonging and connectedness and how these concepts relate to their identities and lived experiences of ‘community’. Although many participants shared similar experiences of conflict and isolation from their Indigenous kinship or geographically located communities, they also emphasised the importance and collective transformative potential of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ community-building that is aroused when forging new communities of belonging and connectedness