Wee Women\u27s Work : Women and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

International norms on intrastate conflicts, such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, call for women to participate in peace processes in countries emerging from conflict and civil strife, including those divided by identity-based conflict. However, scholars of post-war recovery in international relations and comparative politics have raised questions about the extent and effect of women’s participation in peace processes, and in politics more generally, in divided societies given underlying social, economic, and political barriers that impeded access to decisive or authoritative political decision-making. A critical question in the literature on women’s participation in post-conflict reconciliation-related dialogue and joint action relates to whether intragroup “community development” focusing principally on social and economic concerns can contribute to fostering women’s participation in intergroup reconciliation and peacebuilding. This study explores the experiences of community development in Northern Ireland with the research question: How and under what conditions do women contribute to peacebuilding? The research represents formal interviews with experts in the community and voluntary sector and the women’s sector, informal focus groups, and six months of ethnographic field research based primarily in Belfast. Northern Ireland is a case of protracted social conflict in which the society is still deeply divided, despite successful implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Women played a significant role in the peace process by forming their own political party—the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition—and yet are poorly represented in political institutions today. Instead, women dominate the field of community development contributing to peace through capacity-building and other bottom-up practices. Women pursue community development in this case for two broad reasons: first, because it is not political in the formal institutional sense; second, in an environment where women are expected to play traditional roles, community development is interpreted as an extension of these roles allowing women to navigate through the constraints of a gendered public space and employ their roles as women to seek change that does not threaten the political status quo

AMH/MIS as a contraceptive that protects the ovarian reserve during chemotherapy

The ovarian reserve represents the stock of quiescent primordial follicles in the ovary which is gradually depleted during a woman\u27s reproductive lifespan, resulting in menopause. Mullerian inhibiting substance (MIS) (or anti-Mullerian hormone/AMH), which is produced by granulosa cells of growing follicles, has been proposed as a negative regulator of primordial follicle activation. Here we show that long-term parenteral administration of superphysiological doses of MIS, using either an adeno-associated virus serotype 9 (AAV9) gene therapy vector or recombinant protein, resulted in a complete arrest of folliculogenesis in mice. The ovaries of MIS-treated mice were smaller than those in controls and did not contain growing follicles but retained a normal ovarian reserve. When mice treated with AAV9/MIS were paired with male breeders, they exhibited complete and permanent contraception for their entire reproductive lifespan, disrupted vaginal cycling, and hypergonadotropic hypogonadism. However, when ovaries from AAV9-MIS-treated mice were transplanted orthotopically into normal recipient mice, or when treatment with the protein was discontinued, folliculogenesis resumed, suggesting reversibility. One of the important causes of primary ovarian insufficiency is chemotherapy-induced primordial follicle depletion, which has been proposed to be mediated in part by increased activation. To test the hypothesis that MIS could prevent chemotherapy-induced overactivation, mice were given carboplatin, doxorubicin, or cyclophosphamide and were cotreated with AAV9-MIS, recombinant MIS protein, or vehicle controls. We found significantly more primordial follicles in MIS-treated animals than in controls. Thus treatment with MIS may provide a method of contraception with the unique characteristic of blocking primordial follicle activation that could be exploited to prevent the primary ovarian insufficiency often associated with chemotherapy

The power of voice : storytelling as peacebuilding in post-troubles Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process has been long and tumultuous, yet 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, peace has not become a reality for many Northern Irish citizens. For those who have been excluded from the state and the institution-led peace process, grassroots methods of peacebuilding are needed to create an everyday peace that is owned by and includes all Northern Irish citizens. A narrative approach to peacebuilding is one that addresses many of the challenges to everyday peace following the “Troubles.” By exploring the use and impact of storytelling and narrative on everyday experiences, the narrative approach proves to be a viable tool for elevating and giving ownership of the peace process to marginalized members of Northern Irish society

A global metagenomic map of urban microbiomes and antimicrobial resistance

We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic elements, including 10,928 viruses, 1,302 bacteria, 2 archaea, and 838,532 CRISPR arrays not found in reference databases. We identified 4,246 known species of urban microorganisms and a consistent set of 31 species found in 97% of samples that were distinct from human commensal organisms. Profiles of AMR genes varied widely in type and density across cities. Cities showed distinct microbial taxonomic signatures that were driven by climate and geographic differences. These results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas that enables discovery of organisms and genes, highlights potential public health and forensic applications, and provides a culture-independent view of AMR burden in cities.Funding: the Tri-I Program in Computational Biology and Medicine (CBM) funded by NIH grant 1T32GM083937; GitHub; Philip Blood and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant number ACI-1548562 and NSF award number ACI-1445606; NASA (NNX14AH50G, NNX17AB26G), the NIH (R01AI151059, R25EB020393, R21AI129851, R35GM138152, U01DA053941); STARR Foundation (I13- 0052); LLS (MCL7001-18, LLS 9238-16, LLS-MCL7001-18); the NSF (1840275); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1151054); the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2015-13964); Swiss National Science Foundation grant number 407540_167331; NIH award number UL1TR000457; the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy; Stockholm Health Authority grant SLL 20160933; the Institut Pasteur Korea; an NRF Korea grant (NRF-2014K1A4A7A01074645, 2017M3A9G6068246); the CONICYT Fondecyt Iniciación grants 11140666 and 11160905; Keio University Funds for Individual Research; funds from the Yamagata prefectural government and the city of Tsuruoka; JSPS KAKENHI grant number 20K10436; the bilateral AT-UA collaboration fund (WTZ:UA 02/2019; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, UA:M/84-2019, M/126-2020); Kyiv Academic Univeristy; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine project numbers 0118U100290 and 0120U101734; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013–2017; the CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya; the CRG-Novartis-Africa mobility program 2016; research funds from National Cheng Kung University and the Ministry of Science and Technology; Taiwan (MOST grant number 106-2321-B-006-016); we thank all the volunteers who made sampling NYC possible, Minciencias (project no. 639677758300), CNPq (EDN - 309973/2015-5), the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Advanced Theory and Application in Statistics and Data Science – MOE, ECNU, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong through project 11215017, National Key RD Project of China (2018YFE0201603), and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2017SHZDZX01) (L.S.