Turning HIV-Positive Clients into "Responsible Citizens"

In this thesis, I examine an ASO in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in order to explore how case managers interpret the complex needs that HIV-positive clients present while trying to encourage them to become responsible citizens. The data are drawn from participant observation, structured interviews with case managers, and a content analysis of case managers' notes in clients' files. I find that clients do not regularly ask for services related to health maintenance, case managers negotiate surveillance and empowerment strategies in four ways, and external factors complicate case managers' ability to carry out their jobs in a climate of surveillance and empowerment. I conclude that responsible citizenship, in the sense of describing how case managers encourage clients to become more self-sufficient, is present in the language that case managers use to depict their approach to case management with clients

The Visibility of Sexual Minority Movement Organizations in Namibia and South Africa

The South African state has responded favorably to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) social movement organizations' (SMOs) efforts to protect and extend sexual and gender minority rights, whereas Namibian state leaders have verbally attacked LGBT organizing and threatened to arrest sexual and gender minorities. In these countries, LGBT persons have organized themselves into publicly visible social movement organizations (SMOs) over the last ten years. Amid such different official responses to LGBT organizing, how, when, and why do Namibian and South African LGBT social movement organizations become publicly visible or retreat from visibility? To answer this question, I turn to sociologist James M. Jasper's (2004, 2006) concept of "strategic dilemma." LGBT social movement organizations encountered strategic dilemmas of visibility or invisibility when they decide whether and how to become visible, modify their public profile, or forgo political opportunities. To understand the micropolitical dynamics of how LGBT social movement organizations negotiated such strategic dilemmas of visibility and invisibility, I engaged in intensive, continuous ethnographic observation of four Namibian and South African LGBT social movement organizations for approximately 800 hours and analyzed my ethnographic fieldnotes. I also analyzed more than 2,100 newspaper articles and LGBT SMO documents and conducted 56 in-depth interviews with staff, members, and leaders of LGBT SMOs. In this dissertation, I explore the varied strategic dilemmas of visibility and invisibility that Namibian and South African LGBT SMOs faced. My findings advance social movement theorizing by demonstrating the importance of studying social movements in the global South. In addition, my findings contribute to postcolonial feminist and queer theorizing by showing how marginalized sexual and gender minorities in post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa used public visibility as a strategy to argue for their democratic inclusion

Not in our community: Queer women challenge religious homophobia in rural Kentucky

An article written by Bernadette Barton and Ashley Currier and published by the Journal of Lesbian Studies on October 21, 2019

A neural circuit for wind-guided olfactory navigation

Abstract To navigate towards a food source, animals frequently combine odor cues about source identity with wind direction cues about source location. Where and how these two cues are integrated to support navigation is unclear. Here we describe a pathway to the Drosophila fan-shaped body that encodes attractive odor and promotes upwind navigation. We show that neurons throughout this pathway encode odor, but not wind direction. Using connectomics, we identify fan-shaped body local neurons called h∆C that receive input from this odor pathway and a previously described wind pathway. We show that h∆C neurons exhibit odor-gated, wind direction-tuned activity, that sparse activation of h∆C neurons promotes navigation in a reproducible direction, and that h∆C activity is required for persistent upwind orientation during odor. Based on connectome data, we develop a computational model showing how h∆C activity can promote navigation towards a goal such as an upwind odor source. Our results suggest that odor and wind cues are processed by separate pathways and integrated within the fan-shaped body to support goal-directed navigation

Data from "A neural circuit for wind-guided olfactory navigation"

Data from: Andrew M. M. Matheson, Aaron J. Lanz, Ashley M. Medina, Al M. Licata, Timothy A. Currier, Mubarak H. Syed & Katherine I. Nagel. A neural circuit for wind-guided olfactory navigation. Nature Communications 13, 4613 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32247-7. The data set can be accessed via Zenodo here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.686383