British Chinese or British ESEA? Articulating creativity and care across scales and disciplines

This position paper advocates for more scholarship on British Chinese and ESEA communities in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It briefly outlines our vision for future research in relation to visual arts and other forms of creativity but also presents some thoughts that could inspire new research directions for scholars with other disciplinary backgrounds and interests

The Quest for Environmental Justice in China: Citizen Participation and the Rural-Urban Network Against Panguanying’s Waste Incinerator

Environmental distribution conflicts (EDCs) related to the construction and operation of waste incinerators have become commonplace in China. This article presents a detailed case study of citizen opposition to an incinerator in the village of Panguanying, Hebei Province. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, we show how this case was notable, because it transcended the local arena to raise bigger questions about environmental justice, particularly in relation to public participation in siting decisions, after villagers exposed fraudulent public consultation in the environmental impact assessment. An informal network between villagers and urban environmental activists formed, enabling the Panguanying case to exert influence far beyond the village locality. This network was critical in creating wider public debate about uneven power and substandard public participation in siting disputes, a central feature in many Chinese EDCs. By transcending local specificities and exposing broader, systemic inadequacies, this case became instrumental in supporting “strong sustainability”

Between waste and profit:Environmental values on the Central African Copperbelt

Industrial mining activity has transformed the environment of the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. Copper extraction and processing altered the urban landscape, generated much waste, and caused severe long-term pollution. This article examines changing environmental values among diverse Copperbelt actors, including mine engineers, government officials, mineworkers, doctors, and farmers. Why were air and water pollution long accepted as ‘negative externalities’ of copper production? How have the environmental dynamics of mining on the Copperbelt been ‘naturalised’ over time? By focusing on topics such as air, water, health, cleanliness, and pollution, the tensions between the profit-oriented motives of mining companies, the technocratic solutions proposed by engineers, and popular concerns over human and environmental wellbeing are revealed. Although resignation towards industrial pollution on the Copperbelt prevailed for most of the twentieth century, views of environmental change were always contested and have changed recently. Relying on unique archival sources and interviews, this article shows changing attitudes towards copper mining in the Anthropocene

PDBe: improved accessibility of macromolecular structure data from PDB and EMDB

© 2015 The Authors. Published by OUP. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkv1047The Protein Data Bank in Europe (http://pdbe.org) accepts and annotates depositions of macromolecular structure data in the PDB and EMDB archives and enriches, integrates and disseminates structural information in a variety of ways. The PDBe website has been redesigned based on an analysis of user requirements, and now offers intuitive access to improved and value-added macromolecular structure information. Unique value-added information includes lists of reviews and research articles that cite or mention PDB entries as well as access to figures and legends from full-text open-access publications that describe PDB entries. A powerful new query system not only shows all the PDB entries that match a given query, but also shows the 'best structures' for a given macromolecule, ligand complex or sequence family using data-quality information from the wwPDB validation reports. A PDBe RESTful API has been developed to provide unified access to macromolecular structure data available in the PDB and EMDB archives as well as value-added annotations, e.g. regarding structure quality and up-to-date cross-reference information from the SIFTS resource. Taken together, these new developments facilitate unified access to macromolecular structure data in an intuitive way for non-expert users and support expert users in analysing macromolecular structure data.The Wellcome Trust [88944, 104948]; UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/J007471/1, BB/K016970/1, BB/M013146/1, BB/M011674/1]; National Institutes of Health [GM079429]; UK Medical Research Council [MR/L007835/1]; European Union [284209]; CCP4; European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Funding for open access charge: The Wellcome Trust.Published versio

We follow reason, not the law: disavowing the law in rural China

Recent debates about the moral climate in China have focused on its citizens’ purported loss of traditional values and interest in the public good. Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, is described in terms of a moral vacuum: the absence of shared values through which citizens’ public behavior might contribute to the nation's greater good. The Chinese state is reforming its judicial system with the aim of making it more accessible to its citizenry, so that law and legal rights create bonds between individuals and the collectivity. This approach envisions legal mediation as a vehicle to bring law to the countryside. This article, however, shows that in rural Yunnan, the law and legal rights are seen as instruments of disenfranchisement. This article demonstrates that Yunnanese rural society is better described as a moral “plenum” than as a “vacuum.” It also shows that Chinese law, via temporary use rights to local resources, is ousting alternative regimes of resource management. These alternative regimes are predicated on local villagers’ participation in and responsibility for the public good

A village perspective of rural healthcare in China

This research brief was produced as part of the China Environment Forum's partnership with Western Kentucky University on the US AID-supported China Environmental Health Project

Plural forms of evidence and uncertainty in environmental health: a comparison of two Chinese cases

This paper examines the plural forms of evidence of harm presented by the residents of two Chinese villages affected by severe pollution. Conversely, it scrutinises how and why the antonym to evidence - uncertainty - is emphasised and with what effects. It argues that their uncertainty surrounding environmental health harm is a result of the contexts in which evidence is embedded