The Town Lake Report, Volumes I and II

This report makes brief references to sediment and other trends seen in Waller Creek.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Town Lake’s importance as a natural resource is growing in tandem with Austin’s rapid population. The lake is a source of drinking water for the City, and its greenbelt and open waters are widely used for recreation and as a focal-point for public events. In 1992, under the Clean Lakes program, a comprehensive report entitled the “Town Lake Study” (COA 1992a; COA 1992b; COA 1992c) was prepared. It examined the condition of the lake (Volume I), water quality control alternatives (Volume II) and a feasibility study (Volume III). This report updates the diagnostic study, Volume I (COA 1992a), including the current status of water quality with data analyzed through the year 2000. It also includes a summary of measures taken to reduce pollution from urban runoff since 1990.Waller Creek Working Grou

Sacred communities: contestations and connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries

Negotiating identities: ethnicity and social relations in a young offenders' institution

This article explores the situated nature of male prisoner identities in the late modern British context, using the contrasting theoretical frames of Sykes's (1958) indigenous model and Jacobs' (1979) importation model of prisoner subcultures and social relations. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically, religiously and nationally diverse young offenders institution, consideration is given to how prisoners manage and negotiate difference, exploring the contours of racialization and racism which can operate in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Sociological understandings of identity, ethnicity, racialization and racism are used to inform a more empirically grounded theoretical criminology

Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics

The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?DHE

Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

This paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity

Reduced cytochrome P4501A activity and recovery from oxidative stress during subchronic benzo[a]pyrene and benzo[e]pyrene treatment of rainbow trout

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 254 (2011): 1-7, doi:10.1016/j.taap.2011.04.015.This study assessed the role of aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) affinity, and cytochrome P4501A (CYP1A) protein and activity in polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH)-­‐induced oxidative stress. In the 1-­‐100 nM concentration range benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) but not benzo[e]pyrene (BeP) competitively displaced 2 nM [3H]2, 3, 7, 8-­‐tetrachloro-­‐dibenzo-­‐p-­‐dioxin from rainbow trout AHR2α. Based on appearance of fluorescent aromatic compounds in bile over 3, 7, 14, 28 or 50 days of feeding 3 μg of BaP or BeP/g fish/day, rainbow trout liver readily excreted these polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their metabolites at near steady state rates. CYP1A proteins catalyzed more than 98% of ethoxyresorufin-­‐O-­‐deethylase (EROD) activity in rainbow trout hepatic microsomes. EROD activity of hepatic microsomes initially increased and then decreased to control activities after 50 days of feeding both PAHs. Immunohistochemistry of liver confirmed CYP1A protein increased in fish fed both PAHs after 3 days and remained elevated for up to 28 days. Neither BaP nor BeP increased hepatic DNA adduct concentrations at any time up to 50 days of feeding these PAHs. Comet assays of blood cells demonstrated marked DNA damage after 14 days of feeding both PAHs that was not significant after 50 days. There was a strong positive correlation between hepatic EROD activity and DNA damage in blood cells over time for both PAHs. Neither CYP1A protein nor 3-­‐ nitrotyrosine (a biomarker for oxidative stress) immunostaining in trunk kidney were significantly altered by BaP or BeP after 3, 7, 14, or 28 days. There was no clear association between AHR2α affinity and BaP and BeP-­‐induced oxidative stress.The Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and RO1ES006272 from the National Institute of Health supported this work

Endogenous Epoxygenases Are Modulators of Monocyte/Macrophage Activity

Background: Arachidonic acid is metabolized through three major metabolic pathways, the cyclooxygenase, lipoxygenase and CYP450 enzyme systems. Unlike cyclooxygenase and lipoxygenases, the role of CYP450 epoxygenases in monocyte/macrophage-mediated responses is not known.Methodology/Principal Findings: When transfected in vitro, CYP2J2 is an efficient activator of anti-inflammatory pathways through the nuclear receptor peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) alpha. Human monocytes and macrophages contain PPAR alpha and here we show they express the epoxygenases CYP2J2 and CYP2C8. Inhibition of constitutive monocyte epoxygenases using the epoxygenase inhibitor SKF525A induces cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 expression and activity, and the release of TNF alpha, and can be reversed by either add back of the endogenous epoxygenase products and PPAR alpha ligand 11,12-epoxyeicosatrienoic acid (EET) or the addition of the selective synthetic PPAR alpha ligand GW7647. In alternatively activated (IL-4-treated) monocytes, in contrast to classically activated cells, epoxygenase inhibition decreased TNF alpha release. Epoxygenases can be pro-inflammatory via superoxide anion production. The suppression of TNF alpha by SKF525A in the presence of IL-4 was associated with a reduction in superoxide anion generation and reproduced by the superoxide dismutase MnCl2. Similar to these acute activation studies, in monocyte derived macrophages, epoxygenase inhibition elevates M1 macrophage TNF alpha mRNA and further decreases M2 macrophage TNF alpha.Conclusions/Significance: In conclusion, epoxygenase activity represents an important endogenous pathway which limits monocyte activation. Moreover endogenous epoxygenases are immuno-modulators regulating monocyte/macrophage activation depending on the underlying activation state

Social cohesion and the notion of 'suspect communities': A study of the experiences and impacts of being 'suspect' for Irish communities and Muslim communities in Britain

In this article, we consider how the practice of conceiving of groups within civil society as 'communities' meshes with conceptualisations of certain populations as 'suspect' and consider some of the impacts and consequences of this for particular populations and for social cohesion. We examine how Irish and Muslim people in Britain have become aware of and have experienced themselves to be members of 'suspect communities' in relation to political violence and counterterrorism policies from 1974 to 2007 and investigate the impacts of these experiences on their everyday lives. The study focuses on two eras of political violence. The first coincides with the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) bombing campaigns in England between 1973 and 1996, when the perpetrators were perceived as 'Irish terrorists'; and the second since 2001, when, in Britain and elsewhere, the main threat of political violence has been portrayed as stemming from people who are assumed to be motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam and are often labelled as 'Islamic terrorists'. We outline why the concept of 'suspect communities' continues to be analytically useful for examining: the impact of 'bounded communities' on community cohesion policies; the development of traumatogenic environments and their ramifications; and for examining how lessons might be learnt from one era of political violence to another, especially as regards the negative impacts of practices of suspectification on Irish communities and Muslim communities. The research methods included discussion groups involving Irish and Muslim people. These demonstrated that with the removal of discourses of suspicion the common ground of Britain's urban multiculture was a sufficient basis for sympathetic exchanges. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Setting an agenda for disability research in Australia: organisation-led and targeted consultation report

This report presents the results of the Phase 2b consultation conducted with 974 individuals from 21 non-government organisations (NGOs), including service providers and disabled peoples’ organisations (DPOs), the First Nations-focused National Disability Research Agenda survey and online focus groups and in-depth interviews with people with augmentative and alternative communication needs. It is part of multi-phase research agenda setting exercise that has been conducted to understand existing disability research in Australia and consult with the disability sector to understand their priorities for disability research. This research was funded by the National Disability Research Partnership (NDRP) to underpin their development of an agenda for Australian disability research over the next decade

Stitching time: artisanal collaboration and slow fashion in post-disaster Haiti

The promotion of the textile and garment industries as a development strategy following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a US-backed return to garment assembly lines has prompted an interrogation of some of the local impacts of transnational manufacturing practices in this context. This essay seeks to evaluate alternative fashion practices and social enterprises in Haiti that are currently challenging and disassembling the contemporary forms of slavery predominant in offshore low-wage garment manufacturing. These slower “ethical fashion” cooperatives integrate traditional Haitian skills and cultural konesans (knowledge) with international design languages and market savoir-faire to produce unique handcrafted pieces for the global fashion market. Yet, as this paper argues, these collaborations reveal ongoing neo-colonial inequalities that side-line Haitian agency. Their uneven modes of production and marketing strategies often involve short-term interventions by Western fashion designers that undermine Haitian expertise. This examination of artisan “development” therefore seeks to situate these enterprises in a longer history of sustainability in Haiti, and considers how stitching cloth in response to disaster can retrace the stories of loss and survival of communities and mediate cultural knowledge