Refugee Homes and the Right to Property: Sunk Costs and Networked Mobility

For refugees outside their state of origin, access to humanitarian protection can come at the cost of the right to own a home. Following Anneke Smit’s scholarship on the possible contradictions between humanitarian protection and property rights, this paper explores the case of refugee homes built in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) by Syrian asylum seekers. Interviews with Syrian refugees collected in Iraq from 2018-2019 reveal the paradoxical situation faced by refugees who invest time, expertise, memory, hope, and money in a house—yet do not own it. While non-citizens in the KRI rarely have the chance to secure legal title to real estate, these home-building projects are often completed in humanitarian spaces, such as those of the Arbat UNHCR camp. The resulting dwellings have a liminal legal status yet advance a tacit claim to permanence, a material argument composed through cinderblocks, paint, and the routine power of residence. And while these homes materialize nodes within transnational networks of belonging (Diminescu), they also represent sunk costs. Thus, these homes have the paradoxical effect of enabling further movement for some while tethering others to a camp community which forbids their sale. When resources are invested in a house that cannot be sold, such a dwelling is likely to inhibit future freedom of movement, despite the general protection of refugee rights in the KRI. Regarding the Arbat camp, the public expectation of refugee repatriation is confounded by the fact that these homes tend to tether families to a site 25 kilometers from the nearest major city, Sulaymaniyah. This case study urges us to consider how humanitarian policy can, in plotting a course between the right to property and humanitarian protection, constrain the mobility of those it is designed to protect

Transformations of Free Movement: Syrian Refugee Rights within Neoliberal Signal Territories

Alongside representations of the fractious civil conflict in Syria, our media frequently depict victims of forced displacement using their smartphones. In October 2015, Time published images of refugees taking selfies after making the journey from the Turkish coast to Lesbos, Greece. These images show refugees using mobile devices to enjoy human rights like the freedoms of expression and movement. Absent is the state sanction implied by UN compacts such as the 1951 Refugee Convention. This paper situates these representations, recent scholarship, and my own fieldwork with Syrian refugees sheltering in the Kurdish Region of Iraq within an analysis of human rights and neoliberal signal territories. Media scholar Lisa Parks describes signal territories as regions defined not by sovereign jurisdiction but the broadcast capacity enabled by telephonic infrastructure. The massive investment that created this infrastructure was incited largely by neoliberal deregulation of national communication regimes. Even holdouts like Syria’s state-controlled cell provider, Syria-Telecom, an enduring source of income for the Assad regime, can at times be accessed by refugees lingering across the border in Jordan. How might neoliberal signal territories impact forced migration, especially in recent and ongoing cases of Syrian refugees traversing state bounds? As feminist theorist Brooke Ackerly has noted, human rights may be transformed in practice. Inspired by her work, I argue that refugees’ use of mobile technology within signal territories suggests a way of rethinking features of the UN framework from the ground, and infrastructure, up. We are facing not the neoliberal foreclosure of rights, but shifts in embodied social practices enabled by technology. How might refugees’ use of mobile devices suggest the transformation of their, and therefore our, human right to freedom of movement

Trajectories of Belonging: Literacies and Intersectionality in the Mobile Phone and Home Building Practices of Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This dissertation responds to Syrian nationals’ stories of displacement and settlement. Within these accounts, people contend with forced migration through language, personal networks, and technology. A sociomaterial theory of literacy recognizes the way in which these interviewees sought safety and belonging while accessing concrete systems in order to achieve material effects such as mobility and shelter. This dissertation’s case studies pertaining to mobile devices and refugee homes contribute to an infrastructural understanding of literacies as semiotic, social, affective, and material practices bearing an affordant and epistemically generative relation to physical infrastructures. The project’s interviewees used 2G communication infrastructures while travelling from Syria to Iraq and generated political readings of the powerful actors curating these infrastructures. These literate practices were motivated by dynamic emotional investments, which I read through the concept of belonging, a process of felt affiliation to people, places, and identities. By viewing belonging in terms of trajectories, I aim to suggest the rise and fall of emotional connection amid processual time and shifts in location. Expressions of belonging revealed that the overwhelming majority of the project’s interview participants identify as Kurds, and that they anticipated feeling at home in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). They were generally welcomed, yet a combination of factors tended to introduce vicissitudes into this feeling of belonging, including tensions between the refugee and host communities. The interviews gathered here suggest that many Kurdish-identifying interviewees experienced nuanced intersectional vulnerabilities co-constituted not only by Kurdish identity but also by language and dialect, social class, gender expression, Syrian origin, and documentary status. Situated intersectionality offers a framework for engaging non-Western categories of belonging and a social justice-oriented logic for articulating historical and political contexts with qualitative findings. Most importantly, it leads here to the disruption of mono-categorical claims about the community under discussion, including the Turkish state’s frequent justification of military aggression in the region through the reduction of all Kurds to the figure of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist. In this way, this dissertation cultivates an orientation of transnational solidarity with the Kurdish-identifying Syrian asylum seekers living in the KRI

753B Efficacy in Acute Myeloid Leukemia

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp21/1245/thumbnail.jp

Morphoproteomic profiling of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in desmoplastic small round cell tumor (EWS/WT1), Ewing's sarcoma (EWS/FLI1) and Wilms' tumor(WT1).

BackgroundDesmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT) is a rare sarcoma in adolescents and young adults. The hallmark of this disease is a EWS-WT1 translocation resulting from apposition of the Ewing's sarcoma (EWS) gene with the Wilms' tumor (WT1) gene. We performed morphoproteomic profiling of DSRCT (EWS-WT1), Ewing's sarcoma (EWS-FLI1) and Wilms' tumor (WT1) to better understand the signaling pathways for selecting future targeted therapies.MethodologyThis pilot study assessed patients with DSRCT, Wilms' tumor and Ewing's sarcoma. Morphoproteomics and immunohistochemical probes were applied to detect: p-mTOR (Ser2448); p-Akt (Ser473); p-ERK1/2 (Thr202/Tyr204); p-STAT3 (Tyr 705); and cell cycle-related analytes along with their negative controls.Principal findingsIn DSRCT the PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway is constitutively activated by p-Akt (Ser 473) expression in the nuclear compartment of the tumor cells and p-mTOR phosphorylated on Ser 2448, suggesting mTORC2 (rictor+mTOR) as the dominant form. Ewing's sarcoma had upregulated p-Akt and p-mTOR, predominantly mTORC2. In Wilm's tumor, the mTOR pathway is also activated with most tumor cells moderately expressing p-mTOR (Ser 2448) in plasmalemmal and cytoplasmic compartments. This coincides with the constitutive activation of one of the downstream effectors of the mTORC1 signaling pathway, namely p-p70S6K (Thr 389). There was constitutive activation of the Ras/Raf/ERK pathway p-ERK 1/2 (Thr202/Tyr204) expression in the Wilms tumor and metastatic Ewing's sarcoma, but not in the DSRCT.ConclusionMORPHOPROTEOMIC TUMOR ANALYSES REVEALED CONSTITUTIVE ACTIVATION OF THE MTOR PATHWAY AS EVIDENCED BY: (a) expression of phosphorylated (p)-mTOR, p-p70S6K; (b) mTORC 2 in EWS and DSRCT; (c) ERK signaling was seen in the advanced setting indicating these as resistance pathways to IGF1R related therapies. This is the first morphoproteomic study of such pathways in these rare malignancies and may have potential therapeutic implications. Further study using morphoproteomic assessments of these tumors are warranted

La amiga de la flor

Victoria Rodrigo, PhD- Serie Leamos’ EditorProfessor of Spanish World Languages and Cultures DepartmentGeorgia State Universityhttps://scholarworks.gsu.edu/wcl_leamos/1009/thumbnail.jp

Fe VII lines in the spectrum of RR Telescopii

Thirteen transitions within the ground 3d^2 configuration of Fe VII are identified in ultraviolet and optical spectra of the symbiotic star RR Telescopii obtained with the STIS instrument of the Hubble Space Telescope. The line fluxes are compared with theoretical data computed with the recent atomic data of K.A. Berrington et al., and high resolution optical spectra from VLT/UVES are used to identify blends. Seven branching ratios are measured, with three in good agreement with theory and one affected by blending. The lambda5277/lambda4943 branching ratio is discrepant by > 3 sigma, indicating errors in the atomic data for the lambda5277 line. A least-squares minimization scheme is used to simultaneously derive the temperature, T, and density, N_e, of the RR Tel nebula, and the interstellar extinction, E(B-V), towards RR Tel from the complete set of emission lines. The derived values are: log T/K = 4.50 +/- 0.23, log N_e/cm^-3=7.25 +/- 0.05, and E(B-V)<0.27. The extinction is not well-constrained by the Fe VII lines, but is consistent with the more accurate value E(B-V)=0.109^{+0.052}_{-0.059} derived here from the Ne V lambda2974/lambda1574 ratio in the STIS spectrum. Large differences between the K.A. Berrington et al. electron excitation data and the earlier F.P. Keenan & P.H. Norrington data-set are demonstrated, and the latter is shown to give worse agreement with observations.Comment: To be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics; 7 pages, 4 figure

You\u27re So Harsh On Me: Meanness in Psychopathy and Perceived Family Criticism

Overall, the lack of research on percieved criticism, especially within populations that display meanness, show a need for research because just like mood, percieved criticism may change throughout the day. Understanding the relationship between psychopathic meanness and momentary patterns of percieved criticism among family members could provide helpful insight into social interactions and elucidating patterns of family dysfunction involved in the most antagonistic features of psychopathy.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/durep_posters/1151/thumbnail.jp

Outpatient and Home Chemotherapy with Novel Local Control Strategies in Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor

Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor (DSRCT) has a very poor prognosis. This report illustrates novel chemotherapy and local control interventions in a 5-year old patient. The patient was treated in the outpatient setting, achieved remission, with excellent quality of life. The patient presented with massive ascites and >1000 abdominal tumors. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy included vincristine (1.5 mg/m2), ifosfamide (3 g/m2/day × 3), dexrazoxane/doxorubicin (750/75 mg/m2), and etoposide (150 mg/m2). Continuous hyperthermic peritoneal perfusion (CHPP) with cisplatin (100 mg/m2) was given after extensive cytoreductive surgery. This was followed by irinotecan (10 mg/m2/day × 5 × 2 weeks) + temozolomide monthly × 2, then abdominal radiation 30 Gy with simultaneous temozolomide (100 mg/m2/day × 5). A total of 12 cycles of irinotecan and temozolamide were given. Except for initial chemotherapy, subsequent courses were in the outpatient setting. Focal retroperitoneal relapse at 18 months was treated with IMRT with bevacizumab (5 mg/kg) and 2 perihepatic metastases with radio frequency ablation/cryoablation followed by chronic outpatient maintenance chemotherapy (valproic acid, cyclophosphamide, and rapamycin). Almost 2 years from diagnosis, the patient maintained an excellent quality of life. This is a novel approach to the treatment of children with massive abdomino-pelvic DSRCT