Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness in Rodrigo Duterte\u27s Philippines

When a presidential contender makes a joke about lusting over a dead Australian missionary, calls the Pope the son of a whore, and confesses to killing criminals during his tenure as city mayor, one could expect that this candidate would not go very far. But not in the year 2016. Dubbed as ‘the year of voting dangerously,’ the Philippines rode the tide of global discontent and gave landslide victory to the controversial Rodrigo Duterte. This chapter examines the discursive underpinnings of Duterte’s rise to power by focusing on the process in which his supporters made ethical calculations from listening to his official speeches, live performance on television debates, and broader discussions in news and social media during the campaign period. We argue that Duterte’s ‘crass politics’ is a push back to the dominant moral politics perpetuated by institutions associated to the Philippines\u27 liberal democratic elite. While we condemn the Duterte regime’s disregard for human rights and due process, especially in the context of his bloody war on drugs, we also advocate a closer look at the ethics of Duterte’s responsiveness to deep-seated injuries endured by his constituencies both among marginalised and middle-class communities. Through a careful yet critical unpacking of his ‘crass politics of responsiveness’ from ethnographic research with Duterte supporters and media analysis of Duterte’s public performances, we hope to put forward a precise understanding of the emerging moral politics that underpins this unorthodox regime

DC Respond to Cognate T Cell Interaction in the Antigen-Challenged Lymph Node

Dendritic cells (DC) are unrivaled in their potential to prime naive T cells by presenting antigen and providing costimulation. DC are furthermore believed to decode antigen context by virtue of pattern recognition receptors and to polarize T cells through cytokine secretion toward distinct effector functions. Diverse polarized T helper (TH) cells have been explored in great detail. In contrast, studies of instructing DC have to date largely been restricted to in vitro settings or adoptively transferred DC. Here we report efforts to unravel the DC response to cognate T cell encounter in antigen-challenged lymph nodes (LN). Mice engrafted with antigen-specific T cells were immunized with nanoparticles (NP) entrapping adjuvants and absorbed with antigen to study the immediate DC response to T cell encounter using bulk and single cell RNA-seq profiling. NP induced robust antigen-specific TH1 cell responses with minimal bystander activation. Fluorescent-labeled NP allowed identification of antigen-carrying DC and focus on transcriptional changes in DC that encounter T cells. Our results support the existence of a bi-directional crosstalk between DC and T cells that promotes TH1 responses, including involvement of the ubiquitin-like molecule Isg15 that merits further study

Values and Principles in European Foreign Policy

As form the book's flyer: As a fresh examination of the values and principles that inform EU Foreign Policy, this book presents a clear and close reading of the EU as an international actor. This up-to-date volume explores the implications of these values and principles on the construction of European Union identity today. It also shows how current debates on European Union foreign policy and on European identity tend to be kept separated as if the process of identity formation had only an internal dimension or it was not related to the external behaviour of an international actor. This new book examines the values and principles that inform EU Foreign Policy in order to achieve a better understanding of the EU as an international actor and to explore implications of these values and principles on the process of the construction of the European Union identity. Conceiving EU Foreign Policy in its broadest context, as a set of political actions that are regarded by external actors as \u2018EU\u2019 actions, the contributors focus on both Pillar I and Pillar II policies, involving EU and member state actions, and material political actions and less material ones such as speech acts. Contents 1. Introduction: values, principles, identity and European Union foreign policy 2. The constitutive nature of values, images and principles in the European Union 3. Theoretical perspectives on the role of values, images and principles in foreign policy 4. Values, Science and the European Union in a Global Order 5. Environmental values and climate change: contrasting the EU with the USA 6. The European Union and gender protection 7. Principles of democracy and human rights: a review of the European Union\u2019s strategies towards its neighbours 8. European Union human rights and democracy in relations with Russia and China 9. The use of force as coercive intervention: the conflicting values of the EU\u2019s external action 10. Values in European Union development cooperation policy 11. European Union regulatory capitalism and multilateral trade negotiations 12. Conclusion: valuing principles in European Union foreign policy. www.routledge.com/politic