Cross-cutting principles for planetary health education

Since the 2015 launch of the Rockefeller Foundation Lancet Commission on planetary health,1 an enormous groundswell of interest in planetary health education has emerged across many disciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. Advancing these global efforts in planetary health education will equip the next generation of scholars to address crucial questions in this emerging field and support the development of a community of practice. To provide a foundation for the growing interest and efforts in this field, the Planetary Health Alliance has facilitated the first attempt to create a set of principles for planetary health education that intersect education at all levels, across all scales, and in all regions of the world—ie, a set of cross-cutting principles

Heat-Killed Trypanosoma cruzi Induces Acute Cardiac Damage and Polyantigenic Autoimmunity

Chagas heart disease, caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, is a potentially fatal cardiomyopathy often associated with cardiac autoimmunity. T. cruzi infection induces the development of autoimmunity to a number of antigens via molecular mimicry and other mechanisms, but the genesis and pathogenic potential of this autoimmune response has not been fully elucidated. To determine whether exposure to T. cruzi antigens alone in the absence of active infection is sufficient to induce autoimmunity, we immunized A/J mice with heat-killed T. cruzi (HKTC) emulsified in complete Freund's adjuvant, and compared the resulting immune response to that induced by infection with live T. cruzi. We found that HKTC immunization is capable of inducing acute cardiac damage, as evidenced by elevated serum cardiac troponin I, and that this damage is associated with the generation of polyantigenic humoral and cell-mediated autoimmunity with similar antigen specificity to that induced by infection with T. cruzi. However, while significant and preferential production of Th1 and Th17-associated cytokines, accompanied by myocarditis, develops in T. cruzi-infected mice, HKTC-immunized mice produce lower levels of these cytokines, do not develop Th1-skewed immunity, and lack tissue inflammation. These results demonstrate that exposure to parasite antigen alone is sufficient to induce autoimmunity and cardiac damage, yet additional immune factors, including a dominant Th1/Th17 immune response, are likely required to induce cardiac inflammation

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The Pioneers of Sámi Children’s Books : The “Mothers” Who Made the Invisible Visible

This article discusses the Sámi children’s books produced in the 1970s and 1980s during the Sámi political “awakening,” and which are part of the larger Sámi project of cultural self-determination. In the historical legacy of images of the Sámi that were part of the vast colonial apparatus employed by the surrounding majority cultures, Sámi children of earlier generations had been exposed to and internalized representations of themselves that reproduced a hierarchical social order in which they were on the lower rungs. Since the 1970s, Sámi children’s book creators have been actively engaged in decolonizing children’s literature from this legacy of settler colonization and assimilationist policies by not only foregrounding language and Sámi traditions, but also reappropriating stereotypes and images in a decolonizing gesture in order to reclaim their past and their identities. Because the first generation of Sámi children’s book authors and illustrators were women, Vuokko Hirvonen has termed them the “mothers” of Sámi literature (Voices from Sápmi). Their books also contain deeply feminist critiques, not only of the legacy of the majority culture, but of patriarchy within Sámi culture as well. By working and reconfiguring traditional narratives, their books have thus a dual mission of giving voice, visibility and agency to the Sámi while recouping the silenced female voice

Fantasy Imaginaries and Landscapes of Desire: Gustaf Tenggren’s Forgotten Decades

Gustaf Tenggren (1896–1970) was a 20th-century Swedish-born American illustrator of children’s books, magazines, advertisements, and artwork for the Disney Studio. Tenggren’s work was so ubiquitous that it remains in circulation and widely recognized today. But this large body of work has been understudied, as has its impact on the popular imagination. This article revisits Tenggren’s long career, and reinserts periods often skipped over, such as his work in magazine advertising during the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that although Tenggren is most often referred to as a children’s book and fairy-tale illustrator, his style was developed in the commercial field of magazine advertising, which incorporated aspects of modern art. That is, those aspects of modernism – abstraction, attention to form, the bright use of color for emotional impact – that were so much a part of fin de siècle Europe, a time when Tenggren was in art school, were appropriated first by advertising in America, and then by children’s book illustration. Thus, in the process, modernism was translated and democratized for middle-class consumers

Taken into the Mountain: Cavernous and Categorical Entrapments

This article’s focus is the intersection of sexual and textual violence against women in traditional narratives as they have come to be mediated through folkloric and narrative processes. It argues that stories about women’s (sexually motivated) abduction and containment function at the narrative, typological, and structural levels to sustain a gendered hierarchy that works to contain/constrain women. Although the gendering of these narratives inheres in much of the material, the interventions on the part of institutions, publishers, editors, collectors, translators, scholars, and folklorists in general have organized, selected, explicated, and canonized some tales at the expense of others that has maintained an entrenched patriarchal privilege by denying the sexual violence that is at the heart of these same narratives. With an exploration of the wide-ranging Scandinavian theme of Bergtagning (taken into the mountain) across multiple genres and in the context of its editorial and publishing history, this article traces the narrative processes that shape the discursive field through which threads a gender ideology that asserts and normalizes male privilege

Taken into the Mountain: Cavernous and Categorical Entrapments

This article’s focus is the intersection of sexual and textual violence against women in traditional narratives as they have come to be mediated through folkloric and narrative processes. It argues that stories about women’s (sexually motivated) abduction and containment function at the narrative, typological, and structural levels to sustain a gendered hierarchy that works to contain/constrain women. Although the gendering of these narratives inheres in much of the material, the interventions on the part of institutions, publishers, editors, collectors, translators, scholars, and folklorists in general have organized, selected, explicated, and canonized some tales at the expense of others that has maintained an entrenched patriarchal privilege by denying the sexual violence that is at the heart of these same narratives. With an exploration of the wide-ranging Scandinavian theme of Bergtagning (taken into the mountain) across multiple genres and in the context of its editorial and publishing history, this article traces the narrative processes that shape the discursive field through which threads a gender ideology that asserts and normalizes male privilege

Into the “Land of Snow and Ice”: Racial Fantasies in the Fairy-Tale Landscapes of the North

This article examines fantasies of race and place in Scandinavian children’s literature of the mid-1800s to early 1900s. Overtly fictionalized accounts of journeys to “fairy-tale landscapes” in the Scandinavian context take the form of “Journeys to the North”—in particular the “Journey to Lapland.” Although these narratives rest on a well-formed mythology of the North as a locus of fascination both imagined and encountered as well as on standard fairy-tale motifs and structures, they nonetheless constitute lessons on race, place, and identity for future modern subjects