Enhanced cytotoxicity of silver complexes bearing bidentate N-heterocyclic carbene ligands

A diverse library of cationic silver complexes bearing bis(N-heterocyclic carbene) ligands have been prepared which exhibit cytotoxicity comparable to cisplatin against the adenocarcinomas MCF7 and DLD1. Bidentate ligands show enhanced cytotoxicity over monodentate and macrocyclic ligands

Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed-method analysis of twelve policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the ‘world of ideas’ and the ‘world of policy and practice’. Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.ESRC Future Research Leaders ES/N016319/1 Commonwealth Scholarship Commissio

A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism

Thinking about think tanks in health care : a call for a new research agenda

Little sociological attention has been given to the role of think tanks in health policy and planning. Existing work in political science and public administration tends to define and categorise think tanks and situate them as a disinterested source of policy expertise. Despite the increasingly visible presence of think tanks in the world of health care, such work has done little to reveal how they operate, by whom and to what ends. Our article seeks to redress this firstly by examining why they have remained relatively hidden in academic analyses and secondly by advocating an interpretive approach that incorporates think tanks within the wider landscape of health policy and planning. In contrast to most existing literature, an interpretive approach acknowledges that much of the messy business of healthcare policy and planning remains hidden from view and that much can be gleaned by examining the range of organisations, actors, coalitions, everyday activities, artefacts and interactions that make up the think tank stage and that work together to shape health policy and planning. Given the paucity of research in this area, we urge the medical sociology community to open the field to further academic scrutiny

Think tanks in ‘hard times’ – the Global Financial Crisis and economic advice

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that ensued had reverberations that were not only social, political and economic. The crises also led to increased doubt in the value and usefulness of policy expertise and in its producers. This ‘epistemic crisis’ is the starting point of this thematic issue dedicated to think tanks in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession. The Introduction to the issue has four objectives. First, it gives a high-level overview of the challenges and opportunities think tanks have faced in the wake of these crises, given the paradox of growing demand for policy expertise precisely at the moment when such expertise and its makers became suspect for many. Second, the Introduction gives an overview of the research literature on think tanks and their role in the policy-making process and the public debate. Third, the articles comprising this thematic issue are introduced, and connections between them established. Fourth, the introduction gauges the effects of Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession, but also crises more generally, on think tanks and the environment they operate in, and speculates about the future of the think tank industry