Connexins in respiratory and gastrointestinal mucosal immunity

The mucosal lining forms the physical and chemical barrier that protects against pathogens and hostile particles and harbors its own population of bacteria, fungi and archea, known as the microbiota. The immune system controls tolerance of this population of microorganisms that have proven to be beneficial for its host. Keeping its physical integrity and a correct balance with the microbiota, the mucosa preserves its homeostasis and its protective function and maintains host's health. However, in some conditions, pathogens may succeed in breaching mucosal homeostasis and successfully infecting the host. In this review we will discuss the role the mucosa plays in the defense against bacterial pathogens by considering the gap junction protein connexins. We will detail their implication in mucosal homeostasis and upon infection with bacteria in the respiratory and the gastrointestinal tracts. © 2014 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Inhabiting the impasse: Social exclusion through visible assemblage in neighborhood gentrification

Now that gentrification has taken hold in central Cincinnati and begun to spill outward, nearby neighborhoods in the early stages of gentrification have begun to call for “inclusive redevelopment” to bring vibrancy to depressed neighborhoods without displacing long-term residents. Neighborhood leaders and city officials understand that displacement happens along racial and class lines, yet efforts to directly address this issue have not changed displacement patterns. Research shows social exclusion contributes to displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, and tends to focus on uneven impact across social categories like race and class, but there is much less attention to how exclusion is enacted and these categories reproduced. I argue that this takes place simultaneously in the intimate space and time of everyday encounters, where proximity and relation unfold affectively through things and people to code them anew, pulling some into the momentum of redevelopment, while pushing others aside. This cognitive reversal of how categories work is important because it relocates their origin in small, interstitial, and nonhuman sites. Pairing assemblage theory and posthumanism with interviews and field notes, I demonstrate the role of nonhuman forces in shaping these encounters; how materials like cheese, pint glasses, trash, beards, and liver & onions play marked roles in producing marginalization. My findings show that things and people compose visible assemblages together, like a group of people sitting at a sidewalk table eating pizza and drinking beer. These assemblages are operative in producing and reinforcing social exclusion: they usher practiced bias through the surface aesthetics of the assorted components, enabling affective atmospheres to prescribe outcomes. These emergent, visible assemblages are thus important sites for intervention into processes of social exclusion leading to displacement

‘That which is not a mosque’

This paper takes as its starting point the forcible closure of an art exhibit at the 2015 Venice Biennale in order to illustrate wider dynamics of rising Islamophobia across Europe today. THE MOSQUE was the Icelandic national contribution to the Biennale, an exhibit that lasted only two weeks before being shut down by the local authorities for ‘public safety reasons’. Presented in its press release as ‘merely a visual analog’ of a mosque, the installation was made ‘real’ as the Venetian Islamic community began using it as a site for gathering and prayers, an all-too-real performance that sparked protests and brought the installation’s closure. The fate of THE MOSQUE is a compelling story that speaks to a series of broader struggles over visibility and invisibility, and over who and what has the right to appear in the landscape of a European city. It speaks to the phantom menace of a fetishized Islam that is haunting Europe today, as nativist and anti-immigrant movements mobilize against perceived threats to imagined urban orders