Cholo Citizens: Negotiating Personhood and Building Communities in El Alto, Bolivia

This thesis addresses the dialectic between collective and individual senses ofself and political agency, and the implications of that dialectic for how residents of Rosas Pampa, in the city of EI Alto, Bolivia, experience their citizenship. It examines the ways in which citizenship is performed, practiced, and constructed by rural-urban migrants living in a peripheral urban area in Bolivia, and interrogates this central concept in political theory using anthropological theories and methods. It is based upon a year's fieldwork in Rosas Pampa, a poor neighbourhood whose adult residents are predominantly first or second generation Aymara-speaking migrants of rural origin. In contrast to the abstract way citizenship is generally understood in the national and international context, and purveyed as a key policy by a multitude of NGOs and governmental agencies operating in poor urban areas of Bolivia, the people of Rosas Pampa experience citizenship in intensely physical and embodied ways, and within several different political spheres, at personal, local and national levels. This thesis explores the nature of political action, and highlights the values that thereby emerge to shape political agency. It argues that there is a dynamic interaction between academic and policy-based notions of citizenship and selfhood and those rooted in people's urban experiences and rural backgrounds. The first part of the thesis outlines the citizenship practices of the residents of Rosas Pampa, and explores how they constitute themselves in various ways as collective political subjects, covering community politics, voting, the annual fiesta and religiosity. The second part focuses on citizenship as a negotiation of personhoood, through exploring how relational senses of self operate in Rosas Pampa and then outlining governmental citizenship projects that seek to modify those senses of self. Throughout it emphasises the citizens' own responses to those projects

The 'politics of the everyday': populism, gender and the media in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia. GARP6

Condepa was, until 1999, a relatively successful populist politica party with a strong base of support among rural-urban migrants, particularly women, living in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia. In this paper I assess the reasons for Condepa's appeal, through an examination of the link between Condepa and its power base, an extremely popular TV and radio programme. Both the programme and the political party have been successful because of their direct, and often emotional, appeal to their core constituency, focussing on issues of daily concern. They created a sense of family and community, which coalesced around the figure of Condepa's founder, Carlos Palenque

Uma antropologia do 'parentesco na política'

En este artículo propongo una antropología del parentesco en la política, entendida como un análisis que hace foco en las imbricaciones cotidianas entre parentesco y política que se producen en un espacio político dado, y sus implicancias para la construcción de sujetos políticos. Describo el lugar del parentesco en las delegaciones sindicales de trabajadores/as estatales en Argentina de tres maneras: primero, los lenguajes del parentesco movilizados para describir filiaciones y disposiciones políticas, en especial el lenguaje de la herencia; segundo, las relaciones familiares en el ingreso de trabajadores/as al Estado y en la militancia; y tercero, las prácticas de creación de parentesco (kinning) en tanto relacionalidades (relatedness). La combinación de estos tres modos de parentesco crea al sindicato como grupo de parientes y le permite actuar políticamente sobre el mundo con el objetivo de transformarlo.In this article I argue for a kinship anthropology of politics, understood as a focus on the day-to-day imbrications of kinship and politics in a given political space, and the implications of that for the construction of political subjects. I describe kinship within shop-floor-level trade union delegations of state employees in Argentina in three different ways: first, languages of kinship mobilized to describe political allegiance and dispositions, especially inheritance; second, family connections in recruitment and activism; and, third, practices of kinning as relatedness. The combination of these three kinship modes creates the union as kin group, and enables it to act on the world politically in order to transform it.Neste artigo proponho uma antropologia do parentesco na política, entendida como uma análise que se debruça sobre as sobreposições cotidianas entre parentesco e política que ocorrem num determinado espaço político e suas implicações para a construção dos sujeitos políticos. Descrevo o lugar do parentesco nas delegações sindicais dos trabalhadores estatais na Argentina de três maneiras: primeiro, as linguagens de parentesco mobilizadas para descrever filiações e disposições políticas, especialmente a linguagem de herança; segundo, as relações familiares na entrada dos trabalhadores no Estado e na militância; e terceiro, as práticas de criação de parentesco (kinning) como relações (relatedness). A combinação desses três modos de parentesco cria o sindicato como um grupo de parentes e permite que eles atuem politicamente sobre o mundo com o objetivo de transformálo

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester

The production of a cause for activism in Argentina:Labour organization in call centers

This paper focuses on activist labor organizing in call centers in Argentina. Following a strong tradition in anthropology that has debated the nature of resistance, it discusses previous explanations for labor organizing in call centers, critiquing the common assumption that labor conditions, work processes, and the relations that take place on the shop floor constitute the seed from which forms of resistance, protest, or activism progressively emerge. Instead, this paper describes the relations, practices, and tensions through which multiple actors came together to turn call center working conditions into a cause for political action in Argentina and the collaborations that made that process possible. Based on fieldwork with call center activists between 2012 and 2013, this paper reconstructs the forms of collective organization that established the problem of poor working conditions in call centers as a cause for political action.Fil: Wolanski, Sandra Ileana. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts