Midwives and Pregnant Women of Color: Why We Need to Understand Intersectional Changes in Midwifery to Reclaim Home Birth

The vast majority of births occur in hospitals attended by physicians. However, this has not always been the case. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, home births held the majority and were primarily attended by midwives, the majority of whom were women of color and immigrant women. The move toward hospital birth is rarely discussed today and midwifery and home birth, though now both experiencing a small comeback, are often viewed with skepticism and fear. This Note discusses the raced and gendered history of this change in American birth norms and argues that the racist and sexist motivations and phenomena that prompted the move into hospitals and away from midwives is relevant to understanding current birth trends and statistics. The Note begins with an overview and discussion of the raced and gendered history of American midwifery. Next, the Note explains the history of the Medicalization of pregnancy and birth–here, exerting excessive medical rhetoric into and oversight over reproduction, and especially women of color’s reproduction, in order to control it. Finally the Note considers current home birth and midwifery trends and statistics and their connection to the race and gender discrimination of twentieth century birth and midwifery. The Note concludes that the racist and sexist underpinnings of the change from home to hospital birth still operate in our current birthing systems to keep women of color in hospitals and out of the midwifery profession

Curriculum renewal and learning through doing: Work-integrated learning in practice

In late 2018 Curtin University commissioned the independent Foresight Review of the WA School of Mines’ Mining Engineering curriculum. The review was conducted against a background of declining enrolments in the Mining Engineering programmes across much of Australia and the Western world, including at Curtin.  A key recommendation of this review was that the WA School of Mines (WASM) should:  “Work with the resources sector to develop and implement a renewed curriculum that reflects the needs of the resources sector of the future and the new skills required, while maintaining the important core graduate attributes that define each discipline and the requirements of accreditation bodies (i.e. Engineers Australia)”. This presentation will share insights into some of the collaborative teaching models that have been piloted as a part of WASM’s staged implementation of work-integrated learning into their mining engineering and metallurgical engineering curricula with the author’s hope that, through sharing what they have “learned through doing”, they might help other colleagues seeking to do similar within their own organisations

Masculinity, Madness, and Woolf\u27s Redefinition of Beauty in Mrs. Dalloway

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf contests numerous conventions of her time, including conceptions of beauty, and its relation to gender, normalcy, and behavior. The notion of beauty as a discreet aesthetic category is not new. In fact, representations of beauty in Mrs. Dalloway directly oppose those of Edmund Burke, who categorized aesthetics of beauty in the eighteenth century. He argued that beauty is the opposite of the sublime, and classified it as having attributes of the feminine form. Burkean notions of gendered aesthetics were mirrored in Victorian gender expectations, so that men, as the opposite of their weak female counterparts, developed a duty bound, nationalistic sense of honorable masculinity, lacking show of emotion and epitomized by reason and authority. The turn of the twentieth century marked the beginning of the modernist period where, in the wake of a post-World War I world, artists, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, felt the need to redefine art in the midst of post-war destruction. This change created an opportunity to play with conventional gender roles and its supposed relation to beauty, as seen in Wyndham Lewis\u27s short-lived, but unforgettable BLAST, with its hot pink cover, whose hue and title suggest an obliteration of former conventions of art and gender, paving the way for other modernist works. Woolf contributes to this period in her strides to reconfigure beauty as an aesthetic category that reveals society\u27s misconceptions about gender and madness alike. In 1925, Mrs. Dalloway was published, and I argue that Woolf\u27s traumatized World War I veteran Warren Smith becomes a locus for interesting issues of madness, masculinity, and beauty, wherein Woolf\u27s patchwork of narrators work to criticize the Burkean beauty of the pre-war Victorian world, and replace it with a new beauty: one that is simple in its creation, and ultimately allows Septimus to take control of his life one last time, by ending it

Pomp and Circumstances: A Film

In their own way, each of these films enhance audiences\u27 understanding of the film industry and the creative and technical skills required in filmmaking

Redox regulation of cysteine-674 of SERCA 2 is critical for growth factor- and ischemia-induced angiogenesis

Ischemic cardiovascular disease shows trends of increasing morbidity and mortality in the United States and around the world. Current therapeutic options are limited, but the identification of key disease mechanisms and targets will inform novel therapeutic development to help decrease disease burden. One potential target is the sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA), a key regulator of Ca2+ homeostasis which plays multiple roles in the cardiovascular system. SERCA catalyzes the hydrolysis of ATP and couples it to the translocation of free cytosolic Ca2+ into SR/ER stores. SERCA is redox-regulated, and is susceptible to both stimulatory and inhibitory oxidative post-translational modification. For example, oxidation of SERCA by physiological levels of nitric oxide (NO) causes reversible oxidative modification of SERCA cysteine thiols by introducing glutathione adducts. S-glutathiolation enhances SERCA Ca2+ uptake activity, which results in rapid reductions in cytoplasmic Ca2+ levels, and promotes endothelial angiogenic responses in vitro. S-glutathiolation of SERCA specifically at cysteine-674 (C674) is a key signal regulating SERCA activity under physiological conditions, and a next crucial step is establishing causal relationships between defects in C674 S-glutathiolation and human disease. The following study elucidates the role of redox regulation of the C674 thiol in the mechanisms of vascular disease by employing a SERCA 2 C674S knock-in (SKI) mouse in which the key thiol is lacking in 50% of SERCA, rendering the protein less able to be activated by glutathiolation. Following hind limb ischemia, SKI animals had impaired blood flow recovery, indicating an angiogenic defect. Cultured SKI microvascular endothelial cells showed impaired migration and decreased network formation. Fura-2 Ca2+ signaling studies revealed lower Ca2+ stores and decreased VEGF- and NO-induced Ca2+ influx. Also, hypoxia-induced expression of pro-angiogenic genes (VEGF, VEGF receptor 2 and eNOS) was decreased in SKI endothelial cells. Adenoviral overexpression of calreticulin, a major ER Ca2+ binding protein, enhanced levels of VEGF receptor protein and eNOS phosphorylation. Taken together, these data indicate that impairing normal redox regulation of the C674 thiol via reversible S-glutathiolation interferes with endothelial cell Ca2+ homeostasis and angiogenic gene expression, suggesting mechanisms by which impaired SERCA glutathiolation contributes to worsened angiogenesis during ischemia

From gratitude to service: engagement, influence and impact

Report detailing the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues' impact, influence and reach. This report features figures and infographics for the different areas of the Centre’s work to date. Since launching in May 2012, the Jubilee Centre has conducted rigorous research into how character and virtues impact on individuals and society. During this time, the Centre has engaged with the British public in a range of different ways and has sought to make a significant difference to how character and virtues are perceived. This new report, From Gratitude to Service, demonstrates the influence the Centre has achieved on the ground in a short period of time and the wide variety of channels through which the Centre has promoted and applied its research evidence. The report explores all aspects of the Centre’s work including research, influence and engagement with policy, partnerships and international collaborations, its work with schools and the community

Frustrations, Fights, and Friendships: The Physical, Emotional, and Behavioural Effects of High-Density Crowding on Mumbai’s Suburban Rail Passengers

Crammed together in tight folds of humanity, the suburban rail passengers of Mumbai, India, experience the most densely crowded trains in the world (Basu & Hunt, 2012). Whilst the immediate physical descriptors of crowdedness in Mumbai are well understood (Hirsch, 2016), there is little knowledge of the effect this has on the multitude of passengers. This is an important omission, as the effects of crowding on passengers impact their attitudes, travel behavior, and travel decisions. This paper therefore seeks to discern the physical, emotional, and behavioural effects of rail passenger crowding in Mumbai, India. To achieve this, a qualitative methodology, including 49 face-to-face interviews and 48 hours of ethnographic and autoethnographic observations in Mumbai were conducted. Mumbai is an ideal place to study these effects as it has high-density crowding, the likes of which are not experienced elsewhere. Additionally, there is a limited understanding of the effect of crowding on passengers in non-Western societies. With increasing rail ridership worldwide, the experiences of Mumbai’s passengers within high densities may align with the future experiences of passengers in other Western and non-Western countries. For academics and service providers, understanding the specifics of the crowd, such as the density, passenger perceptions, and culture is important. With that knowledge, strategies to improve the experience of crowding would be more effective