The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru

Since 1989 abortion in Chile has been illegal in every single circumstance. This means that tens of thousands of women every year undergo clandestine abortions at great risk to their health. Class directly influences Chilean women’s relationships to abortion; wealthier women can pay for the confidentiality of a safe doctor whereas poorer women cannot. There is just one region where women regardless of class can easily travel to another country in search of abortions, Arica in northern Chile. This paper considers the previously unstudied phenomenon whereby women cross the border quickly and cheaply from northern Chile to the Peruvian city of Tacna where numerous clinics offer the procedure. This paper utilises Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to trace how women are forced to cross a border to avoid government legislation and finds that even by leaving the territory of the state, women do not fully leave state control. Despite the lack of official statistics, interviews with healthworkers and a young woman who made the crossing show that abortion border crossings do occur and this paper reflects on the legal, safety, and biopolitical ramifications of these journeys for Chilean women

Violence on the Chile-Peru border: Arica 1925-2015

This thesis examines the paradox of the Chile-Peru border, and specifically the Chilean border city of Arica, between 1925 and 2015. Through an eclectic mixed method ‘collage’, primarily relying on archival research and extended interviews, the richness of the lived experience of the border comes to the fore. Arica has been a space of violence since it was appropriated from Peru by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and I am interested in how this violence has lingered and manifested itself in various ways since Arica officially became Chilean territory in the 1920s. This violence often stems from a performance of Chilean machismo at the border. Arica is a space of contradiction. A space of extreme nationalism but also of rejection of the Chilean state, of being central to the Chilean nation but also of being peripheral and abandoned. Over five ‘border moments’ over ninety years Arica oscillates between centrality and marginality dependent on threats to Chilean sovereignty at the border. Through a chronological and multi-disciplinary arc the history of violence in Arica can be better understood. The thesis begins in 1925 when the United States became involved in the dispute over the Chile-Peru border that hadn’t been settled since the War of the Pacific. Violence permeated the region and made an attempted plebiscite impossible and although the border was demarcated through other means in 1929, Arica soon became ignored by the Chilean state. A state of abandonment remained until the 1950s when economic initiatives enacted at the regional level succeeded in raising the prospects and spirits of Arica, purging the area of violence, until the 1970s when General Pinochet’s new economic plan reversed Arica’s progress. Arica instead became a military space in this decade as tensions arose between Pinochet and Peruvian dictator General Velasco and international violence returned. This international level is then contrasted with violence at the corporeal level in Arica in the 1980s when HIV/AIDS and abortion both became increasingly pertinent at the border. The thesis closes with how violence remains present in Arica today, particularly as seen through the 2014 maritime border dispute

Violence on the Chile-Peru border: Arica 1925-2015

This thesis examines the paradox of the Chile-Peru border, and specifically the Chilean border city of Arica, between 1925 and 2015. Through an eclectic mixed method ‘collage’, primarily relying on archival research and extended interviews, the richness of the lived experience of the border comes to the fore. Arica has been a space of violence since it was appropriated from Peru by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and I am interested in how this violence has lingered and manifested itself in various ways since Arica officially became Chilean territory in the 1920s. This violence often stems from a performance of Chilean machismo at the border. Arica is a space of contradiction. A space of extreme nationalism but also of rejection of the Chilean state, of being central to the Chilean nation but also of being peripheral and abandoned. Over five ‘border moments’ over ninety years Arica oscillates between centrality and marginality dependent on threats to Chilean sovereignty at the border. Through a chronological and multi-disciplinary arc the history of violence in Arica can be better understood. The thesis begins in 1925 when the United States became involved in the dispute over the Chile-Peru border that hadn’t been settled since the War of the Pacific. Violence permeated the region and made an attempted plebiscite impossible and although the border was demarcated through other means in 1929, Arica soon became ignored by the Chilean state. A state of abandonment remained until the 1950s when economic initiatives enacted at the regional level succeeded in raising the prospects and spirits of Arica, purging the area of violence, until the 1970s when General Pinochet’s new economic plan reversed Arica’s progress. Arica instead became a military space in this decade as tensions arose between Pinochet and Peruvian dictator General Velasco and international violence returned. This international level is then contrasted with violence at the corporeal level in Arica in the 1980s when HIV/AIDS and abortion both became increasingly pertinent at the border. The thesis closes with how violence remains present in Arica today, particularly as seen through the 2014 maritime border dispute

El estudiante y la frontera: una aproximación a los imaginarios geográficos en el Norte de Chile

ResumenSe realiza una aproximación al imaginario geográfico trifronterizo en el extremo norte de Chile, desde la perspectiva de niños y jóvenes, comprendiendo la frontera como una construcción tanto social como experiencial. El trabajo aborda el imaginario geográfico a partir de la aplicación de mapas mentales en instituciones educacionales públicas de la región de Arica y Parinacota, utilizándose una metodología semi-cualitativa. Los resultados demuestran que existe una frontera dinámica, que sin embargo recae en una paradoja, dado que en la mayoría de los mapas mentales analizados nos enfrentamos a una frontera-barrera, pero que en el discurso de los informantes se deja ver lo contrario, una frontera-porosa o multi-transterritorial.Palabras claves: frontera, territorio, cognición, mapas mentales, región de Arica y Parinacot

Shifts to global development : is this a reframing of power, agency and progress?

This special section on global development has been developed from a conference roundtable event run by the Development Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. In this special section, we (some of the committee) introduce the four papers and their critical contributions to emerging debates. These extend early work on how the “global” is being made, focusing on the projects of multilateral development agencies and state institutions to examine how (and whether) the rebranding of “international development” as “global development” constitutes a shift in thinking and practice. Together, the papers draw our attention to the considerable opportunities and implications that this reframing offers, while highlighting that critical attention is required as to how that framing is deployed and by whom. They reveal disparity between global development as a much-needed reframing of power, agency, and progress and global development as produced by mainstream development actors and interventions, necessitating more critical research into how this normative agenda is adopted and enacted in dominant policy and practice.PostprintPeer reviewe

Demanding the impossible: a strike zine

A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms

The correlation between reading and mathematics ability at age twelve has a substantial genetic component

Dissecting how genetic and environmental influences impact on learning is helpful for maximizing numeracy and literacy. Here we show, using twin and genome-wide analysis, that there is a substantial genetic component to children’s ability in reading and mathematics, and estimate that around one half of the observed correlation in these traits is due to shared genetic effects (so-called Generalist Genes). Thus, our results highlight the potential role of the learning environment in contributing to differences in a child’s cognitive abilities at age twelve

Genome-wide association study identifies a variant in HDAC9 associated with large vessel ischemic stroke

Genetic factors have been implicated in stroke risk but few replicated associations have been reported. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in ischemic stroke and its subtypes in 3,548 cases and 5,972 controls, all of European ancestry. Replication of potential signals was performed in 5,859 cases and 6,281 controls. We replicated reported associations between variants close to PITX2 and ZFHX3 with cardioembolic stroke, and a 9p21 locus with large vessel stroke. We identified a novel association for a SNP within the histone deacetylase 9(HDAC9) gene on chromosome 7p21.1 which was associated with large vessel stroke including additional replication in a further 735 cases and 28583 controls (rs11984041, combined P = 1.87×10−11, OR=1.42 (95% CI) 1.28-1.57). All four loci exhibit evidence for heterogeneity of effect across the stroke subtypes, with some, and possibly all, affecting risk for only one subtype. This suggests differing genetic architectures for different stroke subtypes

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis