Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: the politics of interlocking oppressions in transgender day of remembrance

Transgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways. Description from publisher's site: http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.1.2

Africa in the click stream: audience metrics and foreign correspondents in africa

Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the literature by exploring the relationship of foreign correspondents in Africa with their audiences, and asks whether readership metrics are influencing the journalists’ selection and development of news stories. Drawing on 67 interviews with foreign correspondents in East and West Africa, the article identifies three different approaches to audience metrics: correspondents who are 1) data-driven; 2) data informed; and 3) data denialists. The article discusses the implications of these approaches for the media image of Africa that is distributed around the globe

Sexuality, rights and personhood: tensions in a transnational world

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This article discusses what happens when normative ‘global’ discourses of rights and individuated sexual identity confront the messiness of ‘local’ realities. It considers the tensions that emerge when the relationship between sexual and social identities is not obvious and the implications of such tensions for public health and sexual rights activism. These questions are addressed through debates over the naming of male-to-male sexualities and desires in the context of globalization and the growth of a large NGO (non-governmental organization) sector in urban Bangladesh.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The material in the paper draws on a research project undertaken in 2008-9 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A fundamental objective was to produce a contextualized understanding of sexuality in Dhaka city. Methods used included structured interviews, focus group discussions and informal conversations with a range of participants (students, factory workers, public health professionals and sexual minorities). The aim was to generate a conceptual and analytical framework around sexuality and rights rather than to undertake an empirical survey of any one population.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>As descriptors, globalized identity categories such as Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), used by public health providers, the state and donors; and gay/lesbian, invoked by human rights activists and transnational NGOs, are too narrow to capture the fluid and highly context-specific ways in which gender and sexually nonconforming persons understand themselves in Bangladesh. Further, class position mediates to a significant degree the reception, appropriation or rejection of transnational categories such as MSM and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT). The tension is reflected in the sometimes fraught relations between service providers to MSM, the people they serve and an emerging group who identify as LGBT.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A simple politics of recognition will be inadequate to the task of promoting health and human rights for all; such a strategy would effectively exclude individuals who do not necessarily connect their sexual practices with a specific sexual or social identity.</p

Community Service: Editor pride and user preference on local newspaper websites

Armed with readily accessible online traffic logs that provide detailed information about the items users are selecting to view, editors are voicing concern about the potential effect on their own content decisions. Through a survey of local British newspaper editors, this article examines the overlap between user preferences, as suggested by assessments of website traffic, and content that editors identify as their best. Results are considered in the context of two related subsets of agenda-setting theory, as well as the sociological process of “making news.” The study finds overlap between broad categories of stories preferred by editors and users, but a considerable disconnect over the nature of the items within those categories

Community profiling and gene expression of fungal assimilatory nitrate reductases in agricultural soil

Although fungi contribute significantly to the microbial biomass in terrestrial ecosystems, little is known about their contribution to biogeochemical nitrogen cycles. Agricultural soils usually contain comparably high amounts of inorganic nitrogen, mainly in the form of nitrate. Many studies focused on bacterial and archaeal turnover of nitrate by nitrification, denitrification and assimilation, whereas the fungal role remained largely neglected. To enable research on the fungal contribution to the biogeochemical nitrogen cycle tools for monitoring the presence and expression of fungal assimilatory nitrate reductase genes were developed. To the ∼100 currently available fungal full-length gene sequences, another 109 partial sequences were added by amplification from individual culture isolates, representing all major orders occurring in agricultural soils. The extended database led to the discovery of new horizontal gene transfer events within the fungal kingdom. The newly developed PCR primers were used to study gene pools and gene expression of fungal nitrate reductases in agricultural soils. The availability of the extended database allowed affiliation of many sequences to known species, genera or families. Energy supply by a carbon source seems to be the major regulator of nitrate reductase gene expression for fungi in agricultural soils, which is in good agreement with the high energy demand of complete reduction of nitrate to ammonium

Gender and sexuality I: Genderqueer geographies?

This review considers gender diversity across a range of spaces and places. I note that while the notion of gender has been troubled, there exists opportunities to trouble it further. I highlight the scholarship that has sought to deconstruct genders, and the binary framing of man/woman and male/female roles and relationships. The queering of sexuality has meant that geographers are now tracing the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) bodies experience and live their gender beyond normative binaries. Research concerned with relational gendered subjectivities within LGBTIQ communities is discussed, and I flag the trend that this research may conflate gendered experiences while privileging sexual subjectivities. Finally, I turn to the recent interest by geographers who - drawing on queer and trans* theories - argue for new and innovative understandings of gender diversity

Polyamory: Intimate practice, identity or sexual orientation?

Polyamory means different things to different people. While some consider polyamory to be nothing more than a convenient label for their current relationship constellations or a handy tool for communicating their willingness to enter more than one relationship at a time, others claim it as one of their core identities. Essentialist identity narratives have sustained recent arguments that polyamory is best understood as a sexual orientation and is as such comparable with homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality. Such a move would render polyamory intelligible within dominant political and legal frameworks of sexual diversity. The article surveys academic and activist discussions on sexual orientation and traces contradictory voices in current debates on polyamory. The author draws on poststructuralist ideas to show the shortcomings of sexual orientation discourses and highlights the losses which are likely to follow from pragmatic definitions of polyamory as sexual orientation