The sound of street corner society: UK grime music as ethnography

This article explores the ways in which popular music can be linked to ethnography. While there is a tradition of connecting popular music with sociology, this article posits a further resonance that is not so much theoretical as methodological. The article suggests that forms of contemporary popular music parallel key facets of ethnography, not simply in terms of sociological analysis, but with regard to popular music as an ethnographic resource, as ‘data’, and as the reflexive expression of Paul Willis’ conception of the ‘ethnographic imagination’; and the article argues that contemporary British hip-hop in the form of ‘grime’ is a potent exemplar. This is due to the resolutely cultural, spatial nature of grime music: a factor that marks out grime as a distinctive musical genre and a distinctive ethnographic form, as it is an experientially rooted music about urban locations, made from within those urban locations

Fetal Window of Vulnerability to Airborne Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons on Proportional Intrauterine Growth Restriction

Background: Although the entire duration of fetal development is generally considered a highly susceptible period, it is of public health interest to determine a narrower window of heightened vulnerability to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in humans. We posited that exposure to PAHs during the first trimester impairs fetal growth more severely than a similar level of exposure during the subsequent trimesters. Methods: In a group of healthy, non-smoking pregnant women with no known risks of adverse birth outcomes, personal exposure to eight airborne PAHs was monitored once during the second trimester for the entire cohort (n = 344), and once each trimester within a subset (n = 77). Both air monitoring and self-reported PAH exposure data were used in order to statistically estimate PAH exposure during the entire gestational period for each individual newborn. Results: One natural-log unit increase in prenatal exposure to the eight summed PAHs during the first trimester was associated with the largest decrement in the Fetal Growth Ratio (FGR) (23%, 95 % Confidence Interval (CI), 25 to20%), birthweight (2105 g, 95 % CI, 2188 to 222 g), and birth length (20.78 cm, 95 % CI, 21.30 to 20.26 cm), compared to the unit effects of PAHs during the subsequent trimesters, after accounting for confounders. Furthermore, a unit exposure during the first trimester was associated with the largest elevation in Cephalization Index (head to weight ratio) (3 mm/g, 95 % CI, 1 to 5 mm/g). PAH exposure was not associated with evidence of asymmetric growth restriction in this cohort

Leadership : the madness of the day by Maurice Blanchot

International audienceBlanchot's The Madness of the Day shows that when we have to make sense of experience, we inevitably distance ourselves from the raw, naïve openness of the event. This is something we all know and it is a process that fiction (as well as a great deal of management literature) implicitly tries to deny by evoking a meaningfulness-in-itself that does not properly represent lived processes of relatedness. Drawing on Blanchot, we claim that leadership is an iconic example of this process. Like narrative, leadership is inherently connected to the glorification of accountability, purposefulness and goal-directed orientations. In so far as this is so, leadership is quite mad