A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Practices Exposing Humans to Avian Influenza Viruses, Their Prevalence, and Rationale

Almost all human infections by avian influenza viruses (AIVs) are transmitted from poultry. A systematic review was conducted to identify practices associated with human infections, their prevalence, and rationale. Observational studies were identified through database searches. Meta-analysis produced combined odds ratio estimates. The prevalence of practices and rationales for their adoptions were reported. Of the 48,217 records initially identified, 65 articles were included. Direct and indirect exposures to poultry were associated with infection for all investigated viral subtypes and settings. For the most frequently reported practices, association with infection seemed stronger in markets than households, for sick and dead than healthy poultry, and for H7N9 than H5N1. Practices were often described in general terms and their frequency and intensity of contact were not provided. The prevalence of practices was highly variable across studies, and no studies comprehensively explored reasons behind the adoption of practices. Combining epidemiological and targeted anthropological studies would increase the spectrum and detail of practices that could be investigated and should aim to provide insights into the rationale(s) for their existence. A better understanding of these rationales may help to design more realistic and acceptable preventive public health measures and messages

Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh

This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events

Women Making History

In 2013, Parvin Ardalan, a former journalist and civil-rights activist from Iran, launched a project in Malmö, Sweden called 100 Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work – or, Women Making History for short. Ardalan was Malmö’s first ‘safe-haven writer in residence’ from 2010 to 2012. In 2007, she was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for her work campaigning for the equal rights of men and women in Iran. At the time of the project launch, we, the authors, were involved in the Living Archives research project at Malmö University, which was rethinking the archive as a social resource. We were invited by Parvin and fellow activists to be partners in the work of documentating activity for Women Making History, alongside a few other Malmö-based organisations. This article recounts the movement’s engagement in rewriting Malmö’s history – a rewriting that focused on the lives and work of immigrant women over the last 100 years from a feminist and activist perspective

Amendments and Frames : The Women Making History Movement and Malmö Migration History

This article explores existing and emerging frames of writing history involving a push for new modes of telling and writing history/histories. This, from the point of view of a recent movement, in short named Women Making History, launched in Malmö, Sweden in 2013 aiming to cover a 100-year period, from when immigration began until the present day. The movement - engaged in activism and archival work and research around the lives and work of women immigrants in the city - took off in 2013 with support from authors engaged in a Living Archives research project, and formally ended, though some activity continues, with a book publication in 2016. With the initiator of the movement Feminist Dialogue Malmö University researchers (mainly the two authors and students) have been documenting activities and workshops over hree years, revealing the voicing of ambivalent identities that wish to maintain a plurality and openness of identifications and directions. These voices do not want to be framed as ‘outsiders’, ‘homogenized others’ or ‘victimised strangers’, and struggle with a feeling of being amended to a more homogenous national history – an ambiguous predicament which is investigated in this article through diverse ways of trying to understand how belonging is developed in the notions of multidirectionality, multilogues, amendments and re/framing

Mediating Memory : strategies of interaction in public art and memorials

Abstract The article addresses how a selection of participatory art and memorial projects have engaged with public memory and interaction. The intention has to been to explore the tension between the artists’ strategies - and the actual life span and use of the art works by its audiences. The authors interviewed the artists Esther Shalev- Gerz, Alfredo Jaar and Rafael Lozano Hemmer (during 2008 and 2009) and examined specific works. In addition, one of the literally ‘ground-breaking’ works of process art by Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, was included in the analysis of cases that have provoked interesting social or collective memory debates and community interaction around public art

City Symphony Malmö. The spatial politics of non-institutional memory

City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage, theories of public memory and place. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article

[Access to health care for undocumented immigrants. Rights and practice].

The purpose of this article is to illuminate undocumented immigrants' right to access to health care and their access in practice. Undocumented immigrants have a right to equal access to health care. Access to more than emergency health care in Denmark is dependent on immigration status. Medical doctors' duty to treat does not apply to non-emergency health needs, and the options existing in this situation remain ambiguous. In practice, undocumented immigrants in Denmark are able to receive more than emergency health care through unofficial networks of health care providers