62 research outputs found

    Structural Sensorimotor Adaptations in Young Adults with Low Back Pain

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    Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is the largest cause of disability worldwide. There is evidence for regional structural brain adaptation in CLBP. Most studies have investigated middle-aged adults and show decreased grey matter density in pain processing regions. It is not clear if these adaptations are evident early in the lifespan of individuals with CLBP. The purpose of the study was to compare sensorimotor gray matter density in young adults with a history of CLBP with back-healthy controls. 53 young adults with a greater than 1-year history of CLBP and 29 young adults with no history of LBP participated. Clinical characteristics of the LBP group were quantified with measures of pain duration and intensity as well as pain-related fear and disability. Gray matter density was quantified with voxel-based morphometry. Whole brain and sensorimotor region of interest (ROI) comparisons between groups were made after covarying for age, sex, and total intracranial volume. ROIs were determined a priori. Associations between clinical characteristics and average gray matter density in sensorimotor ROI comparisons were explored with Pearson\u27s correlation coefficients. Individuals with CLBP reported an average duration of pain of 4.9 (+/- 2.2 years) and average pain intensity of 5.0/10. The LBP group had greater gray matter in the right primary somatosensory cortex, right inferior parietal lobule, and right midcingulate cortex (all p \u3c 0.05 FWE corrected). There were significant positive associations between average gray matter and clinical characteristics in the anterior, mid, and posterior cingulate cortices, the supramarginal gyrus, superior parietal lobule and supplementary motor area (all p \u3c 0.05). We demonstrate that in young adults, CLBP is associated with structural neuroplasticity in regions involved in sensory processing, motor control, and the sensory and emotional aspects of pain experience. Increased grey matter density early in the lifespan of individuals with CLBP may reflect an adaptation to ongoing nociceptive input

    Hosts and hostages: Mass immigration and the power of hospitality in post-war British and Caribbean literature

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    This article examines the challenge to colonialist centre-periphery relations in post-war novels by white British and Caribbean writers. Concentrating on the relationship between political debates surrounding mass immigration and the marginalization of non-white migrants within British communities, I analyse texts that depict the threshold of the home as the politicized site of racial tension, namely Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer (1960). In varying ways, these texts depict the durability of centre-periphery relations at local levels through the informal segregation of the colonizer and the colonized. In doing so they point to what Jacques Derrida has outlined, in Of Hospitality (2000), as the power relationship inherent in policies of immigration, whereby the host-nation remains in control of the conditions upon which hospitality rests

    Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

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    In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

    Postcolonial Contraventions - Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism

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    Laura Chrisman's Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader was published in 1993. It quickly became a landmark of postcolonial studies. This timely new book offers insights into the field she helped establish. Both polemical and scholarly, Postcolonial contraventions is challenging in its analysis of black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. She provides important new paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness, and black transnationalism. Her concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Chinua Achebe; from utopian discourse in Benita Parry to Frederic Jameson's theorisation of empire. Chrisman also critically engages with postcolonial intellectuals Paul Gilroy, David Lloyd, Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young, uncovering conservatism from unexpected quarters. The book joins a growing chorus of materialist voices within postcolonial studies, and addresses an urgent need for greater attention to the political, historical and socio-economic elements of cultural production. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and teachers of postcolonial studies, theory and literature; black diaspora and Atlantic studies; imperialism and Victorian literature of empire, and British literature of the nineteenth century

    Postcolonial contraventions: Cultural readings of race, imperialism and transnationalism

    Full text link
    Laura Chrisman's Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader was published in 1993. It quickly became a landmark of postcolonial studies. This timely new book offers insights into the field she helped establish. Both polemical and scholarly, Postcolonial contraventions is challenging in its analysis of black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. She provides important new paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness, and black transnationalism. Her concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Chinua Achebe; from utopian discourse in Benita Parry to Frederic Jameson's theorisation of empire. Chrisman also critically engages with postcolonial intellectuals Paul Gilroy, David Lloyd, Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young, uncovering conservatism from unexpected quarters. The book joins a growing chorus of materialist voices within postcolonial studies, and addresses an urgent need for greater attention to the political, historical and socio-economic elements of cultural production. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and teachers of postcolonial studies, theory and literature; black diaspora and Atlantic studies; imperialism and Victorian literature of empire, and British literature of the nineteenth century

    Postcolonial contraventions: Cultural readings of race, imperialism and transnationalism

    Full text link
    Laura Chrisman's Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader was published in 1993. It quickly became a landmark of postcolonial studies. This timely new book offers insights into the field she helped establish. Both polemical and scholarly, Postcolonial contraventions is challenging in its analysis of black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. She provides important new paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness, and black transnationalism. Her concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Chinua Achebe; from utopian discourse in Benita Parry to Frederic Jameson's theorisation of empire. Chrisman also critically engages with postcolonial intellectuals Paul Gilroy, David Lloyd, Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young, uncovering conservatism from unexpected quarters. The book joins a growing chorus of materialist voices within postcolonial studies, and addresses an urgent need for greater attention to the political, historical and socio-economic elements of cultural production. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and teachers of postcolonial studies, theory and literature; black diaspora and Atlantic studies; imperialism and Victorian literature of empire, and British literature of the nineteenth century

    Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Salience in Family Firms

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    The notion of stakeholder salience based on attributes (e.g., power, legitimacy, urgency) is applied in the family business setting. We argue that where principal institutions intersect (i.e., family and business); managerial perceptions of stakeholder salience will be different and more complex than where institutions are based on a single dominant logic. We propose that (1) whereas utilitarian power is more likely in the general business case, normative power is more typical in family business stakeholder salience; (2) whereas in a general business context legitimacy is socially constructed; for family stakeholders, legitimacy is based on heredity; and (3) whereas temporality and criticality are somewhat independent in general-business urgency, they are linked in the family business case because of family ties and family-centered non-economic goals. We apply this theoretical framework to position and integrate the contributions to this special section of Business Ethics Quarterly on "Stakeholder Theory, Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Family Enterprise.
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