Chapter 11 Liminal Precarity and Compromised Agency

This chapter examines what moves migrants in the Global North to take up gig work and stick with it for various periods of time despite its by now well documented precarious conditions, by investigating the role that gig platforms play in their life-building trajectories

Attitude development in designer's education

Modern academic design and engineering education adopted the issues and goals of holistic development of design competence. Holistic design competence is a combination of generic capacities: capability, knowledge, skill, experience and attitude. All capacities should be addressed in academic education, but the development of attitude is not sufficiently emphasized. Designers’ attitude can be seen as the relationship between a designer and the design profession. With a good designers’ attitude, different types of design problems can be solved and all the capacities, including attitude, can be developed. This paper proposes that developing a good designers’ attitude can be implemented in design education and should be done. We present the five different elements that comprise an attitude: communication, reliability, trust, motivation and open mindset. The relations between elements of designers’ attitude and other capacities of design competence are discussed. We studied the manifestation of attitudes and their development in a project of the so called Global Product Realization (GPR) course. The GPR course incorporates students from several European universities who are asked to solve a real design problem for an industrial company. The conclusion is that this project has supported the development of all five attitudinal elements. Since GPR projects are multi disciplinary, multi cultural and communication is non face-toface, a certain level of designers’ attitude is required for such projects. Further research is needed to support the vision that development of designers’ attitude needs to be addressed earlier in design education, preferably from the very first course

Digital Spaces, Material Traces: How Matter Comes to Matter

Abstract This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to 'matter' in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of the virtual as it relates to everyday reality, in addition to rethinking the digital in relation to our common conception of materiality. To develop such an understanding, the discussion is organized around three sections. The first section addresses the notion of 'virtuality' by arguing that empirical inquiries into new media cultures should expand their conception of the 'virtual' beyond its common associations with digitally mediated environments, in order to properly recognize the materiality of everyday digital practices. The second section focuses on how 'virtual' performances of gender, sexuality and embodiment become materialized in digital space. Finally, the third section addresses gender performance and embodied memory in relation to the archival properties of internet platforms that feature usergenerated content. It is concluded that that the virtual plays a constitutive role in the materialization of gender, sexuality and embodiment in both digital and physical spaces. Rather than approaching digitally virtual images in terms of disembodied information and signification, we should continue to ask how they in-form and are in-formed by the volatile and intractable matter of gender, sexuality and embodiment

A novel design education approach for professional global product realization

Emerging trends in design practice, such as collaborative design and multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary (multi-x) teamwork, call for ongoing changes in design education. Educational institutions need to be proactive in adapting to such trends, in order to ensure an adequate development of the design competences of their students. The graduated design students must be able to effectively solve real-life new product development (NPD) problems in multi-x environments. In this paper we present a novel approach towards design education, where special focus is put on multi-x collaboration of design students in solving NPD tasks. We present the idea of an Academic Virtual Enterprise (AVE), a project oriented educational agreement, which is based on volatile alliance of industrial and academic partners for mutual advantages. A course, called Global Product Realization (GPR) is presented as an example of how to implement AVE into design education and provide a stimulating learning environment for students in several disciplines (i.e. mechanical engineering, programming, electronics, design, etc.), where they can get experience in multi-x collaboration in NPD and develop several aspects of design competences needed for their future professional practice

Writing from Experience

This article examines how weblog authors present their online gender identity, in order to establish how these modes of presentation fit into the research landscape about gender identity and computer-mediated communication (CMC). After a preliminary descriptive analysis of a sample of Dutch and Flemish weblogs, the authors conduct a qualitative content analysis of four of these `blogs'. They conclude that these weblog writers present their gender identity through narratives of `everyday life' that remain closely related to the binary gender system. However, their performance of `masculinity' and `femininity' is more diffuse and heterogeneous than some theories in the field of gender and CMC would assume. In addition, the act of diary writing on weblogs can be understood as challenging the masculine connotation of the weblog as an ICT, demonstrating that the use of a technology is pivotal in shaping the ways in which technologies themselves are conceived of as `masculine' or `feminine'

Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy: An Intervention

In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate the gig economy research agenda. First, we argue that platform labour simultaneously degrades working conditions while offering migrants much-needed opportunities to improve their livelihoods. Second, we contend that the reclassification of gig workers as employees is by itself not sufficient to counter the precarisation of migrant gig work. Instead, we need ambitious policies at the intersection of immigration, social welfare, and employment regulation that push back against the digitally mediated commodification of migrant labour worldwide

Recent models for adaptive personality differences: a review

In this paper we review recent models that provide adaptive explanations for animal personalities: individual differences in behaviour (or suites of correlated behaviours) that are consistent over time or contexts. We start by briefly discussing patterns of variation in behaviour that have been documented in natural populations. In the main part of the paper we discuss models for personality differences that (i) explain animal personalities as adaptive behavioural responses to differences in state, (ii) investigate how feedbacks between state and behaviour can stabilize initial differences among individuals and (iii) provide adaptive explanations for animal personalities that are not based on state differences. Throughout, we focus on two basic questions. First, what is the basic conceptual idea underlying the model? Second, what are the key assumptions and predictions of the model? We conclude by discussing empirical features of personalities that have not yet been addressed by formal modelling. While this paper is primarily intended to guide empiricists through current adaptive theory, thereby stimulating empirical tests of these models, we hope it also inspires theoreticians to address aspects of personalities that have received little attention up to now

Feasibility of therapeutic drug monitoring of sorafenib in patients with liver or thyroid cancer

Introduction: Sorafenib is a tyrosine-kinase inhibitor approved for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma, thyroid carcinoma, and desmoid fibromatosis. As high inter-individual variability exists in exposure, there is a scientific rationale to pursue therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM). We investigated the feasibility of TDM in patients on sorafenib and tried to identify sub-groups in whom pharmacokinetically (PK) guided-dosing might be of added value. Methods: We included patients who started on sorafenib (between October 2017 and June 2020) at the recommended dose of 400 mg BID or with a step-up dosing schedule. Plasma trough levels (Ctrough) were measured at pre-specified time-points. Increasing the dose was advised if Ctrough was below the target of 3750 ng/mL and toxicity was manageable. Results: A total of 150 samples from 36 patients were collected. Thirty patients (83 %) had a Ctrough below the prespecified target concentration at a certain time point during treatment. Toxicity from sorafenib hampered dosing according to target Ctrough in almost half of the patients. In 11 patients, dosing was adjusted based on Ctrough. In three patients, this resulted in an adequate Ctrough without additional toxicity four weeks after the dose increase. In the remaining eight patients, dose adjustment based on Ctrough did not result in a Ctrough above the target or caused excessive toxicity. Conclusions: TDM for sorafenib is not of added value in daily clinical practice. In most cases, toxicity restricts the possibility of dose escalations.</p

Influence of genetic variation in COMT on cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity in cancer patients

Cisplatin is a chemotherapeutic agent widely used for multiple indications. Unfortunately, in a substantial set of patients treated with cisplatin, dose-limiting acute kidney injury (AKI) occurs. Here, we assessed the association of 3 catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with increased cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity. In total, 551 patients were genotyped for the 1947 G>A (Val158Met, rs4680), c.615 + 310 C>T (rs4646316), and c.616 – 367 C>T (rs9332377) polymorphisms. Associations between these variants and AKI grade ≥3 were studied. The presence of a homozygous variant of c.616-367C>T was associated with a decreased occurrence of AKI grade 3 toxicity (p = 0.014, odds ratio (OR) 0.201, 95% confidence interval (CI) (0.047–0.861)). However, we could not exclude the role of dehydration as a potential cause of AKI in 25 of the 27 patients with AKI grade 3, which potentially affected the results substantially. As a result of the low incidence of AKI grade 3 in this dataset, the lack of patients with a COMT variant, and the high number of patients with dehydration, the association between COMT variants and AKI does not seem clinically relevant

The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma