The “Idiot Sticks”: Kwakwaka’wakw Carving and Cultural Resistance in Commercial Art Production on the Northwest Coast

Between 1884 and 1951 a ban on potlatching prohibited Indigenous communities of British Columbia from practicing traditional economic, ceremonial, and political activities, restricting them to state-sanctioned gatherings and celebrations. Unable to perform traditional dances and wear the associated regalia, Native artistic practices, in particular carving, began to fall into disuse as demand dried up. Restricted to only a few artistic forms permitted by local authorities, carvers turned to the growing tourist market, a field dominated by non-Native dealers but also disdained by government as inauthentic and, thus, ostensibly non-threatening. Among art forms most popular with the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Vancouver Island and the corresponding British Columbia coast were model totem poles, which have often been overlooked as facile souvenir art and even sometimes derided as “idiot sticks.” In reality, however, drawing from both historical accounts and contemporary interviews with Kwakwaka’wakw carvers, this article demonstrates that these model totem poles were a subversive method of Indigenous defiance of Canadian authority. Carvers satirically enacted resistance through these model poles, not only mocking those who would presume to judge without knowledge, but in preserving information for future generations, could ensure the survival of traditional designs and techniques and register protest at their treatment by non-Native government and societ

Miniature dissonance and the museum space: Reconsidering communication through miniaturisation

Miniature objects from non-European contexts have ideological elements which are often overlooked in the museum space because their small size and iconic relations make them difficult to accurately interpret and disrupt curatorial efforts to impose meaning upon them; a situation I term miniature dissonance. This article will examine this phenomenon using three related case studies featuring miniatures from the Northwest Coast of North America. It will consider what might have been misunderstood in these objects and what they might originally have been intended to achieve, followed by an example from a recent Ancient Egyptian exhibition which demonstrates that this problem is both more widespread and problematic than is often recognised. These miniatures disrupt curatorial intentionality in the museum space, and it is only by carefully considering their origins and affordances that they can be adequately and accurately interpreted and displayed

Shared care and gender identity support in Primary Care: The perspectives and experiences of parents/carers of young trans people

open access articleThis article addresses the complex issues surrounding trans youths’ shared care perceived by parents in primary care settings in the UK. The analyses in this article draws on qualitative data derived from an online survey of 153 parents with trans children. Through the conceptual framework of healthcare assemblages, findings suggest that quality shared care for trans youth is based upon transient service relationships inherent in their healthcare—primary care, gender identity services, endocrinologists, and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS)—and, as such, this complexity must be understood better by GPs in order for quality shared care to be administered. We explored various blockages to quality shared care within primary care surgeries that produced limit situations, such as lack of knowledge, training, or experience with trans healthcare. One other key factor was that there were strong external forces that were limiting trans youths’ quality shared care in the form of abject depictions from beyond the consultation, which all produced negative effects. Despite these blockages, we also demonstrate how and where quality shared care is received. For instance, we show that continuity of care or treatment after an initial diagnosis or assessment contributes to quality shared care as too does personalized care to those youths receiving it. Overall, this research provides insights into the complex perceptions of parents about what quality shared care is and ought to be for trans youth

Lars Hætta’s miniature world: Sámi prison op-art autoethnography

This article examines a collection of miniature objects, now held in museum collections, which were originally made by a Sámi political prisoner in Norway during the mid-19th century as part of an educational programme. The author draws on recent developments in the theory of miniaturization to consider these miniatures as examples of prison op-art autoethnography: communicative devices which seek to address broad and complex social issues through the process of the creation and distribution of semiophorically functionless mimetic objects of reduced scale and complexity, and which reflect the restrictions of incarcerated artistic expression and the questions this raises regarding authenticity and hybridity

Turbulence in Focus: Benchmarking Scaling Behavior of 3D Volumetric Super-Resolution with BLASTNet 2.0 Data

Analysis of compressible turbulent flows is essential for applications related to propulsion, energy generation, and the environment. Here, we present BLASTNet 2.0, a 2.2 TB network-of-datasets containing 744 full-domain samples from 34 high-fidelity direct numerical simulations, which addresses the current limited availability of 3D high-fidelity reacting and non-reacting compressible turbulent flow simulation data. With this data, we benchmark a total of 49 variations of five deep learning approaches for 3D super-resolution - which can be applied for improving scientific imaging, simulations, turbulence models, as well as in computer vision applications. We perform neural scaling analysis on these models to examine the performance of different machine learning (ML) approaches, including two scientific ML techniques. We demonstrate that (i) predictive performance can scale with model size and cost, (ii) architecture matters significantly, especially for smaller models, and (iii) the benefits of physics-based losses can persist with increasing model size. The outcomes of this benchmark study are anticipated to offer insights that can aid the design of 3D super-resolution models, especially for turbulence models, while this data is expected to foster ML methods for a broad range of flow physics applications. This data is publicly available with download links and browsing tools consolidated at https://blastnet.github.io.Comment: Accepted in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023). 55 pages, 21 figures. v2: Corrected co-author name. Keywords: Super-resolution, 3D, Neural Scaling, Physics-informed Loss, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Partial Differential Equations, Turbulent Reacting Flows, Direct Numerical Simulation, Fluid Mechanics, Combustio

Absence of SPARC results in increased cardiac rupture and dysfunction after acute myocardial infarction

The matricellular protein SPARC (secreted protein, acidic and rich in cysteine, also known as osteonectin) mediates cell–matrix interactions during wound healing and regulates the production and/or assembly of the extracellular matrix (ECM). This study investigated whether SPARC functions in infarct healing and ECM maturation after myocardial infarction (MI). In comparison with wild-type (WT) mice, animals with a targeted inactivation of SPARC exhibited a fourfold increase in mortality that resulted from an increased incidence of cardiac rupture and failure after MI. SPARC-null infarcts had a disorganized granulation tissue and immature collagenous ECM. In contrast, adenoviral overexpression of SPARC in WT mice improved the collagen maturation and prevented cardiac dilatation and dysfunction after MI. In cardiac fibroblasts in vitro, reduction of SPARC by short hairpin RNA attenuated transforming growth factor β (TGF)–mediated increase of Smad2 phosphorylation, whereas addition of recombinant SPARC increased Smad2 phosphorylation concordant with increased Smad2 phosphorylation in SPARC-treated mice. Importantly, infusion of TGF-β rescued cardiac rupture in SPARC-null mice but did not significantly alter infarct healing in WT mice. These findings indicate that local production of SPARC is essential for maintenance of the integrity of cardiac ECM after MI. The protective effects of SPARC emphasize the potential therapeutic applications of this protein to prevent cardiac dilatation and dysfunction after MI

The contribution of refractoriness to arrhythmic substrate in hypokalemic Langendorff-perfused murine hearts

The clinical effects of hypokalemia including action potential prolongation and arrhythmogenicity suppressible by lidocaine were reproduced in hypokalemic (3.0 mM K(+)) Langendorff-perfused murine hearts before and after exposure to lidocaine (10 μM). Novel limiting criteria for local and transmural, epicardial, and endocardial re-excitation involving action potential duration (at 90% repolarization, APD(90)), ventricular effective refractory period (VERP), and transmural conduction time (Δlatency), where appropriate, were applied to normokalemic (5.2 mM K(+)) and hypokalemic hearts. Hypokalemia increased epicardial APD(90) from 46.6 ± 1.2 to 53.1 ± 0.7 ms yet decreased epicardial VERP from 41 ± 4 to 29 ± 1 ms, left endocardial APD(90) unchanged (58.2 ± 3.7 to 56.9 ± 4.0 ms) yet decreased endocardial VERP from 48 ± 4 to 29 ± 2 ms, and left Δlatency unchanged (1.6 ± 1.4 to 1.1 ± 1.1 ms; eight normokalemic and five hypokalemic hearts). These findings precisely matched computational predictions based on previous reports of altered ion channel gating and membrane hyperpolarization. Hypokalemia thus shifted all re-excitation criteria in the positive direction. In contrast, hypokalemia spared epicardial APD(90) (54.8 ± 2.7 to 60.6 ± 2.7 ms), epicardial VERP (84 ± 5 to 81 ± 7 ms), endocardial APD(90) (56.6 ± 4.2 to 63.7 ± 6.4 ms), endocardial VERP (80 ± 2 to 84 ± 4 ms), and Δlatency (12.5 ± 6.2 to 7.6 ± 3.4 ms; five hearts in each case) in lidocaine-treated hearts. Exposure to lidocaine thus consistently shifted all re-excitation criteria in the negative direction, again precisely agreeing with the arrhythmogenic findings. In contrast, established analyses invoking transmural dispersion of repolarization failed to account for any of these findings. We thus establish novel, more general, criteria predictive of arrhythmogenicity that may be particularly useful where APD(90) might diverge sharply from VERP

Society and Learning Research Priority Area - Research share September 2021

The session, held in September 2021, is an introduction to the work of Society and Leaning Research Priority Area (RPA), in which we examine the nature and role of the RPA as well as the ways in which it supports research in the university. The largest part of the event is an opportunity for staff to share a slide on their research, including the focus of the work, ongoing and potential projects, and opportunities for others to get involved

So Much More Than Art : Indigenous Miniatures of the Pacific Northwest

"Miniature canoes, houses and totems, and human figurines have been produced on the Northwest Coast since at least the sixteenth century. What motivates Indigenous artists to produce these tiny artworks? Are they curios, toys, art, or something else? So Much More Than Art is an original exploration of this intricate cultural pursuit. Through case studies and conversations with contemporary Indigenous artists, Jack Davy uncovers the ways in which miniaturization has functioned as a subtle form of communication and, since contact, resistance in the face of aggressive colonization. His interviewees dismiss the persistent assertion running through studies of material culture that miniatures were no more than toys for children or souvenir trinkets. They are in fact crucial components of satirical opposition to colonial government, preservation of traditional techniques, and political and legal negotiation." -- Publisher's website