How to build a political opposition in Tanzania

Effective political organising is crucial to the success of opposition parties under authoritarian regimes, yet little has been researched about what organising actually looks like on the ground. Fieldwork following the Chadema opposition in Tanzania reveals different practices, in different places, highlighting the importance of innovation among local activists and party leaders

The Rally-Intensive Campaign : A Distinct Form of Electioneering in Sub-Saharan Africa and Beyond

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support for his research from the Economic and Social Research Council studentship, the Norman-Chester administered by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and the Travel and Research Fund administered by St. Cross College at the University of Oxford. The author received no other financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

The anti-authoritarian populisms : ideologies of democratic struggle in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and worldwide

Open Access via the CUP agreementPeer reviewe

Campaign rallies and political meaning-making

Prior research determines whether politicians at rallies make programmatic, clientelist or personalist appeals. We argue that this reductive approach obscures the variety of meaning-making at rallies. We offer a vision of rallies as complex communicative events, at which multiple actors co- and counter-produce messages in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we argue that there are patterns in meaning-making at rallies. Rallies are produced in accordance with a genre which guides what components are included in them and how they are interpreted. We argue that rallies produced in that genre fashion and foreground three constructs above others: candidates, collectivities and contests. They fashion them, among other things, through representative claims. Altogether, we show that rallies are significant sites of political communication in Africa and worldwide

The rally-intensive ground campaign: electioneering and party adaptation in Tanzania

This thesis is about election campaigning in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the central feature of many African ground campaigns is the prominence assumed by the rally. Where aggregate rally attendance is high, ground campaigns are ‘rally-intensive’; this rally-intensiveness is key to understanding how parties electioneer and organise. These assertions complicate comparative typologies of election campaigns. Part I examines under what circumstances ground campaigns become rally-intensive. It draws on historic studies of electioneering in both Western and African countries to show that campaigns became more rally-intensive after the proliferation of electronic amplification. Thereby, it illustrates that many rally-intensive campaigns emerged in the twentieth century and across continents. Next, it analyses Afrobarometer data to examine African rally attendance. It reveals that rising Internet, newspaper and television penetration reduces rally attendance. While this suggests that media penetration dampens rally attendance, there is evidence that other factors buoy it. Part II examines electioneering in Tanzania. It analyses a survey conducted before and after the 2015 general election, and reveals some evidence that rallies have mobilisational and persuasive effects. Next, it draws on extensive participant observation of rallies and demonstrates that parties expend enormous efforts ‘producing’ rallies. Finally, it shows that canvassers alter who they contact in anticipation of who will attend rallies. Local actors’ roles in these tasks make them crucial auxiliaries in rally-intensive campaigns. Part III uses qualitative evidence to demonstrate that Tanzanian parties have developed new, capital-intensive means of producing rallies. Inter-candidate and inter-party competition drove processes of rally capitalisation. Accordingly, parties fostered closer relationships with financiers to raise more funds. Thereby, the rally became a vehicle of party adaptation. These findings are instructive about party electioneering and organisation in Tanzania, but they are applicable by degrees wherever rally-intensive ground campaigns can be found, both in sub-Saharan Africa and further abroad.</p

Endothelial focal adhesion kinase mediates cancer cell homing to discrete regions of the lungs via E-selectin up-regulation

Primary tumors secrete factors that alter the microenvironment of distant organs, rendering those organs as fertile soil for subsequent metastatic cancer cell colonization. Although the lungs are exposed to these factors ubiquitously, lung metastases usually develop as a series of discrete lesions. The underlining molecular mechanisms of the formation of these discrete lesions are not understood. Here we show that primary tumors induce formation of discrete foci of vascular hyperpermeability in premetastatic lungs. This is mediated by endothelial cell-focal adhesion kinase (FAK), which up-regulates E-selectin, leading to preferential homing of metastatic cancer cells to these foci. Suppression of endothelial-FAK or E-selectin activity attenuates the number of cancer cells homing to these foci. Thus, localized activation of endothelial FAK and E-selectin in the lung vasculature mediates the initial homing of metastatic cancer cells to specific foci in the lungs

Profiling Bladder Cancer Organ Site-Specific Metastasis Identifies LAMC2 as a Novel Biomarker of Hematogenous Dissemination

Little is known about which genes mediate metastasis in bladder cancer, which accounts for much of the mortality of this disease. We used human bladder cancer cell lines to develop models of two clinically common metastatic sites, lung and liver, and evaluated their gene expression with respect to human tumor tissues. Parental cells were injected into either the murine spleen to generate liver metastases or tail vein to generate lung metastases with sequential progeny derived by re-injection and comparisons made of their organ-specific nature by crossed-site injections. Both genomic and transcriptomic analyses of organ-selected cell lines found salient differences and shared core metastatic profiles, which were then screened against gene expression data from human tumors. The expression levels of laminin V gamma 2 (LAMC2) contained in the core metastatic signature were increased as a function of human tumor stage, and its genomic location was in an area of gain as measured by comparative genomic hybridization. Using immunohistochemistry in a human bladder cancer tissue microarray, LAMC2 expression levels were associated with tumor grade, but inversely with nodal status. In contrast, in node-negative patients, LAMC2 expression was associated with visceral metastatic recurrence. In summary, LAMC2 is a novel biomarker of bladder cancer metastasis that reflects the propensity of cells to metastasize via either lymphatic or hematogenous routes