Book review: luxury: fashion, lifestyle and excess by Patrizia Calefato

Luxury has been both celebrated and condemned throughout history right up to the present day. This text examines luxury and its relationship with desire, status, consumption and economic value, exploring why luxury remains prominent even in the context of a global recession. Jade Montserrat recommends this read to those interested in fashion studies, cultural studies and sociology

Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the Context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project

This thesis is a combination of critical and creative practice. Creative practice includes performance (Shadowing Josephine/Revue; Figures: 4-7, 10, 18-24, 29-34), performances-to-camera (Clay, Peat and Cage; Figures: 35-44), and performance drawing installation/live art/works on paper (No Need for Clothing, and its iterations; Figures: 45-63, 72-74). These artworks, each endowed with their own methodology and references, combine to inform an aesthetic and praxis, draw from personal experience and memory, and are constructed by means of an inherent analysis of the materials used. The body of work considers community and communality as a material axis for belonging and imagining, within and beyond the frame of artmaking and art discourse. This thesis asks the question: can making performance and live art be thought of as a grammar for drawing, with the body as a medium? Speaking of an emergent Black subjectivity in postcolonial Caribbean cinema in his essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall posed the question: “From where does he/she speak?” Taking this further, I ask: how might his question expand the methodological role and function of performance and location from a Northern premise?1 And from where, therefore, is my (and by implication all Othered bodies’) space, and place? As a cisgender queer, millennial, postcolonial, mixed-heritage subject whose identity was formed in the borough of Scarborough in rural North Yorkshire, from where I currently work and live, my project provides a unique basis and new insight for political and intellectual self-positioning within Black Diasporic cultural discourse, specifically Black2 British artmaking and the critical art history demanded by the age of Black Lives Matter.3 In Josephine Baker (1906-75) I found a cultural icon in whom to anchor this displacement. Baker, an African American music hall legend, Black activist, and world traveller, was born in poverty in St. Louis in the US, and took Paris by storm in 1925 as Fatou in “La Folie du Jour” at Les Folies Bergère. Baker’s life and work, particularly the idea of her pivotal twentieth-century experiment of the ‘rainbow tribe’, in which she adopted a group of twelve ethnically diverse children, has stimulated me to reclaim agency, autonomy and identity-making within my practice. The work explores and expands Baker’s fairy-tale-like ideas of a modern mixed-race family from today’s climate of global, twenty-first-century issues surrounding cultural diversity and political freedom within the context of the imperial movement. Baker’s idealistic family experiment was her flawed solution to a global problem: how to transcend race

I care by...

The Care research group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) was conceived in the last week of June 2020, a month after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, an act which catalysed global protests on systemic racism and police brutality. In the UK, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to show solidarity with demonstrators in the US. Coinciding with the easing of the lockdown restrictions imposed to manage the coronavirus, the marches shone a light on the government’s failure to protect Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people from the disproportionate risk posed by COVID- 19, and on the police’s increased use of stop and search in areas with large BAME populations. The pandemic has shone the harshest of lights on the question of care in the age of neoliberalism: who gets it; who needs it; who does it; who controls it. The Care research group, comprising staff and postgraduate researchers within the School of Arts and Humanities at the RCA, works in this light. Over the course of a year, as the inequalities of the virus were becoming all too clear, the group regularly came together via Zoom to reflect on: the question of how to care for the human body in the technical-patriarchal societies the virus has re-inscribed; the ‘un-doing’ of what Judith Butler describes as the binary of vulnerability and resistance; the politically-transformative potential of prioritising care (rooted in empathy, solidarity, kinship) over capitalist gain; the activation of creative research practices (including but by no means limited to writing, looking, painting, drawing, filming, performing, collecting, assembling, curating, making public) as means of caring/transforming. The group’s activities through the year of trying, failing, and trying again to care for its work and members are gathered in a co-authored Declaration of Care, published here, and expanded upon with attention to some of the methods group members developed in their research through practice. The Declaration was recited in a participatory performance with invited artist Jade Montserrat on 10 March 2021. Over the course of a two-hour webinar, participants including members of the public were invited to draw alongside Montserrat with whatever materials they had to hand as they listened to texts on the vulnerabilities of bodies, the structuring of care within institutions, and the tactile, sensory, healing qualities of creative practice. This book includes a selection of the participants’ drawings, a Reader comprising the texts that were shared, and Montserrat’s drawings created through the performance. Ahead of the performance, Montserrat delivered an address to the Care research group which looked back on a lifetime of calling for a kind of care that was never provided. Excerpts from Montserrat’s address are included here too, alongside a text and image which reflect on the group’s affective reactions to the experience of listening to it, titled Episode. The Declaration is a list of methods (approaches, processes, techniques), an enumeration of how Care research group members have worked, and would like to work: ‘I care by…’. This is a statement which has reverberated throughout the year, which bears repeating, which resounds still. Gemma Blackshaw, Care research group convenor, 2020–202

Cutaneous lymphoma international consortium study of outcome in advanced stages of mycosis fungoides and Sézary syndrome: effect of specific prognostic markers on survival and development of a prognostic model

Advanced-stage mycosis fungoides (MF; stage IIB to IV) and Sézary syndrome (SS) are aggressive lymphomas with a median survival of 1 to 5 years. Clinical management is stage based; however, there is wide range of outcome within stages. Published prognostic studies in MF/SS have been single-center trials. Because of the rarity of MF/SS, only a large collaboration would power a study to identify independent prognostic markers. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Literature review identified the following 10 candidate markers: stage, age, sex, cutaneous histologic features of folliculotropism, CD30 positivity, proliferation index, large-cell transformation, WBC/lymphocyte count, serum lactate dehydrogenase, and identical T-cell clone in blood and skin. Data were collected at specialist centers on patients diagnosed with advanced-stage MF/SS from 2007. Each parameter recorded at diagnosis was tested against overall survival (OS). RESULTS: Staging data on 1,275 patients with advanced MF/SS from 29 international sites were included for survival analysis. The median OS was 63 months, with 2- and 5-year survival rates of 77% and 52%, respectively. The median OS for patients with stage IIB disease was 68 months, but patients diagnosed with stage III disease had slightly improved survival compared with patients with stage IIB, although patients diagnosed with stage IV disease had significantly worse survival (48 months for stage IVA and 33 months for stage IVB). Of the 10 variables tested, four (stage IV, age > 60 years, large-cell transformation, and increased lactate dehydrogenase) were independent prognostic markers for a worse survival. Combining these four factors in a prognostic index model identified the following three risk groups across stages with significantly different 5-year survival rates: low risk (68%), intermediate risk (44%), and high risk (28%). CONCLUSION: To our knowledge, this study includes the largest cohort of patients with advanced-stage MF/SS and identifies markers with independent prognostic value, which, used together in a prognostic index, may be useful to stratify advanced-stage patients

A novel Alzheimer disease locus located near the gene encoding tau protein

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordAPOE ε4, the most significant genetic risk factor for Alzheimer disease (AD), may mask effects of other loci. We re-analyzed genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from the International Genomics of Alzheimer's Project (IGAP) Consortium in APOE ε4+ (10 352 cases and 9207 controls) and APOE ε4- (7184 cases and 26 968 controls) subgroups as well as in the total sample testing for interaction between a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and APOE ε4 status. Suggestive associations (P<1 × 10-4) in stage 1 were evaluated in an independent sample (stage 2) containing 4203 subjects (APOE ε4+: 1250 cases and 536 controls; APOE ε4-: 718 cases and 1699 controls). Among APOE ε4- subjects, novel genome-wide significant (GWS) association was observed with 17 SNPs (all between KANSL1 and LRRC37A on chromosome 17 near MAPT) in a meta-analysis of the stage 1 and stage 2 data sets (best SNP, rs2732703, P=5·8 × 10-9). Conditional analysis revealed that rs2732703 accounted for association signals in the entire 100-kilobase region that includes MAPT. Except for previously identified AD loci showing stronger association in APOE ε4+ subjects (CR1 and CLU) or APOE ε4- subjects (MS4A6A/MS4A4A/MS4A6E), no other SNPs were significantly associated with AD in a specific APOE genotype subgroup. In addition, the finding in the stage 1 sample that AD risk is significantly influenced by the interaction of APOE with rs1595014 in TMEM106B (P=1·6 × 10-7) is noteworthy, because TMEM106B variants have previously been associated with risk of frontotemporal dementia. Expression quantitative trait locus analysis revealed that rs113986870, one of the GWS SNPs near rs2732703, is significantly associated with four KANSL1 probes that target transcription of the first translated exon and an untranslated exon in hippocampus (P≤1.3 × 10-8), frontal cortex (P≤1.3 × 10-9) and temporal cortex (P≤1.2 × 10-11). Rs113986870 is also strongly associated with a MAPT probe that targets transcription of alternatively spliced exon 3 in frontal cortex (P=9.2 × 10-6) and temporal cortex (P=2.6 × 10-6). Our APOE-stratified GWAS is the first to show GWS association for AD with SNPs in the chromosome 17q21.31 region. Replication of this finding in independent samples is needed to verify that SNPs in this region have significantly stronger effects on AD risk in persons lacking APOE ε4 compared with persons carrying this allele, and if this is found to hold, further examination of this region and studies aimed at deciphering the mechanism(s) are warranted

Book review: Adorno reframed by Geoffrey Boucher

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of high art, Theodor W. Adorno is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book aims to challenge this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Jade Montserrat finds that the author is extremely generous in his descriptions of the artists’ vision and treatment

Book review: Renegotiating the body: feminist art in 1970sLondon

What makes art ‘feminist art’? Kathy Battista‘s engagement with the founding generation of female practitioners centres on 1970s London as the cultural hub from which a new art practice arose. Emphasising the importance of artists including Bobby Baker, Anne Bean, and Catherine Elwes, Battista investigates some of the most controversial and provocative art from the era. To be sincerely alive to female and male art practices and the larger cultural, social and political issues concerning us today, we need to be awake to the period discussed in Renegotiating the Body, writes Jade Montserrat

Book review: Museums: a visual anthropology

Museums: A Visual Anthropology." Mary Bouquet. Berg Publishing. April 2012. --- Museums: A Visual Anthropology traverses continents and centuries at a rapid, engaging and easily interpretive pace, providing a summary of the key ideas, debates and texts of the most important approaches to the study of museums from around the world. Essential reading for students of anthropology and museum studies, finds Jade Montserrat

Book Review: Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception

"Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception." Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi. I.B. Tauris. August 2013. --- "Inventing Peace" differs considerably from the usual academic offerings on peace or IR, with film-maker Wim Wenders and philosopher Mary Zournazi reflecting on the need to reinvent our understandings of war and injustice. Inspired by various cinematic and artistic examples, Wenders and Zournazi engage in a provocative debate that will be of interest to those studying media and cinema, and to those looking for a new take on moving forward with peace, concludes Jade Montserrat

Book review: Feminism and popular culture: investigating the postfeminist mystique by Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters

"Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique." Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters. September 2013. I.B. Tauris. --- Is feminism undead? Feminism and Popular Culture seeks to map the fraught and often unpredictable relationship between popular culture, feminism and postfeminism. From the shadowy city spaces of Mad Men and Homeland to the dystopic suburbia of The Stepford Wives and American Horror Story, the authors trace the maniacal career women, hysterical housewives and amnesiac daughters who roam the postfeminist landscape. Through recourse to these figures, they attept to illuminate postfeminism’s obsessive resuscitation of seemingly outdated models of femininity and ask why these should today be gilded with new appeal. Jade Montserrat recommends the book to pop culture fans and scholars alike