Falling prevalence of gastrointestinal malignancy in adults with iron deficiency anaemia, and identification of additional predictive clinical variables: the IDIOM V study

Objective (1) To determine whether the prevalence of gastrointestinal (GI) cancer in adults presenting with iron deficiency anaemia (IDA) is continuing to fall, and (2) to identify clinical variables with the potential to improve the accuracy of an established system for predicting cancer risk in IDA—the Iron Deficiency as an Indicator Of Malignancy (IDIOM) score. Method (1) An audit of 1253 consecutive adults to the IDA service of a single general hospital in 2022/2023, with analysis of the outcome of investigation for GI cancer, and the relationship between this outcome and a series of eight clinical variables. (2) Refinement of the IDIOM score using an imputation method to combine the development and new predictor data sets. Results The prevalence of GI cancer in those undergoing full investigation for IDA was 5.6% (52/934). On univariate logistic regression analysis, there were strong negative associations between GI cancer risk and (1) previous colonic imaging within the last 5 years (OR 0.31, 95% CI 0.08 to 0.87), and (2) long-term exposure to proton pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy (OR 0.18, 95% CI 0.09 to 0.34). Model extension analysis suggested that adding PPI exposure status could improve the accuracy of the IDIOM score: c-statistic—0.84 vs 0.77, calibration slope—1.01 vs 1.05. Conclusion The prevalence of GI cancer in adults presenting with IDA continues to fall, strengthening the case for risk stratification and targeting of invasive investigation at those at higher risk. Adding PPI exposure status may improve the value of the IDIOM score, though this requires confirmation in prospective studies

Towards a More Capacious, Kindly and Caring Criticality: A Post-Critical Manifesto for Ethical-Relational-Creative Reviewing

The words ‘criticality’, ‘critical’, and ‘critique’ can often summon up painful, exposing, and difficult experiences. In a higher education system shaped by hierarchical cultures, abuses of power, performative metrics and competitiveness, many of us are often positioned as (and internalise a sense of ourselves as) lacking. This imputed sense of ‘lack’ begins early in our educational careers and its affective impress often stays with us. As PhD students, we are required to subject ourselves to critique in order to pass confirmation processes; as article authors, our work stands or falls at the critical hands of journal reviewers and editors who, as gatekeepers, decide which of us is ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’. We write as four members of the larger Get Up and Move! Collective, using the special issue call from CriSTaL to explore criticality, critical, critique, to revisit our own contested entanglements in/with criticality in higher education. We deploy the methodological approaches of compositing and composting to ponder the inimical conditions, negative behaviours, and ill-judged peer review comments that give rise to damaging modes of critique. From our work in the Collective, we consider what a more capacious, kindly, and caring criticality might look, feel, and be like. The article ends with A Post-Critical Manifesto for Ethical-Relational- Creative Reviewing, which outlines a praxis for doing criticality differently

The Joy of Sprawly Mess Unknowing: Volcanic Data Eruptions and Irruptions

This article uses the figuration of the volcano to demonstrate the disruptive and irruptive power of post-qualitative research. The article’s volcanic irruptions aim to keep data on the move, to show how data continually and slowly proliferate in rhizomatic, nomadic, and unforeseen ways via different, ongoing experimentations, instantiating the processual research practices of knowledge-ing. This article includes, and celebrates, empirical materials collectively produced as part of a collaborative research project entitled Get Up and Move!, which enacted posthumanist, feminist materialist research practices. We were curious about how we might activate the volcano to disrupt traditional modes of data collection, analysis, and dissemination rituals through research-creation events. By concept-ing with the volcano, through the creation of volcanic calligrams, we intra-act with data, as data erupt and irrupt in powerful, agentic, and surprising ways

Concept-ing with the gift: Walking method/ologies in posthumanist research

This article takes off from a project entitled Get Up and Move! which used walking as a methodology to envisage research in higher education beyond the human and outside individual, instrumental and competitive codings. The Get Up and Move! project activated new research possibilities for walking as an attentive, situated, emplaced and embodied practice of posthuman thinking, doing and becoming; it experimented with walking’s posthuman generativity as a relational and processual methodology; and it aimed to be inventive, experimental, less elitist, and more inclusive. The project’s posthuman orientation was inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis as a human-nonhuman doing-making-thinking-creating together, which is outlined in the first two parts of the article. This remainder of the article conceptually entangles this initial framing with/in a further process of concept-ing, which designates a theoretical-creative-speculative doing with the concept to unfold its ongoing potentialities and push its inventive mobilities. The concept we do our concept-ing with is the concept of the gift. Working from Mauss’s theorisation of the gift, we practice concept-ing as a means to trace new movements, possibilities and imaginaries for walking sympoietically. Our concept-ings pursue van der Tuin and Verhoeff’s (2022, 3) suggestion that concepts are “productive and experimental ‘doings,’ enmeshed in practice rather than fixed, retrospective labels for things.

¿Quién se ha sentido así? Fomentando la vulnerabilidad y la esperanza transformadora en el conocimiento activista del Grado de Estudios Ingleses

Memoria ID2022-112. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2022-2023