Role of the Transcription Factor Sox4 in Insulin Secretion and Impaired Glucose Tolerance

OBJECTIVES— To identify, map, clone, and functionally validate a novel mouse model for impaired glucose tolerance and insulin secretion

Once a feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project has created a selection of texts central to our many and different experiences as feminists. I used to say that Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year was the story of my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965, when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor, had a child, and followed his career—which in the novel led Emma to Hereford for a summer season of plays

Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced