Immersive Practices: Dilemmas of Power and Privilege in Community Engagement with Students in a Rural South African Village

Power is manifested in many ways within immersive study abroad experiences. One of the paradoxes of this reality is that structures of power simultaneously create the conditions necessary for immersive community engagement programs to exist as well as limit the action, voice, and autonomy of the actors involved in the community engagement. Unequal power relations are an enduring dilemma of this kind of work even when the intention is to “join in community” with others to learn, create, and build relationships side by side for mutually beneficial purposes. In this paper we offer lessons we have learned, and continue to learn, in a rural South African community called Makuleke. We focus on strategies that we have found effective for mitigating the power differential between ourselves and our community partners in Makuleke. One is arriving without an agenda and another is intentional cross-cultural exchanges that demonstrate our respect for village knowledge and language. These lessons arguably extend well beyond the boundaries of this small village

The contested and contingent outcomes of Thatcherism in the UK

The death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 sparked a range of discussions and debates about the significance of her period in office and the political project to which she gave her name: Thatcherism. This article argues that Thatcherism is best understood as a symbolically important part of the emergence of first-phase neoliberalism. It engages with contemporary debates about Thatcherism among Marxist commentators and suggests that several apparently divergent positions can help us now reach a more useful analysis of Thatcherism’s short- and long-term outcomes for British political economy. The outcomes identified include: an initial crisis in the neoliberal project in the UK; the transformation of the party political system to be reflective of the politics of neoliberalism, rather than its contestation; long-term attempts at the inculcation of the neoliberal individual; de-industrialisation and financial sector dependence; and a fractured and partially unconscious working class. In all long-term outcomes, the contribution of Thatcherism is best understood as partial and largely negative, in that it cleared the way for a longer-term and more constructive attempt to embed neoliberal political economy. The paper concludes by suggesting that this analysis can inform current debates on the left of British politics about how to oppose and challenge the imposition of neoliberal discipline today

Population Differences in Death Rates in HIV-Positive Patients with Tuberculosis.

SETTING: Randomised controlled clinical trial of Mycobacterium vaccae vaccination as an adjunct to anti-tuberculosis treatment in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive patients with smear-positive tuberculosis (TB) in Lusaka, Zambia, and Karonga, Malawi. OBJECTIVE: To explain the difference in mortality between the two trial sites and to identify risk factors for death among HIV-positive patients with TB. DESIGN: Information on demographic, clinical, laboratory and radiographic characteristics was collected. Patients in Lusaka (667) and in Karonga (84) were followed up for an average of 1.56 years. Cox proportional hazard analyses were used to assess differences in survival between the two sites and to determine risk factors associated with mortality during and after anti-tuberculosis treatment. RESULTS: The case fatality rate was 14.7% in Lusaka and 21.4% in Karonga. The hazard ratio for death comparing Karonga to Lusaka was 1.47 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.9-2.4) during treatment and 1.76 (95%CI 1.0-3.0) after treatment. This difference could be almost entirely explained by age and more advanced HIV disease among patients in Karonga. CONCLUSION: It is important to understand the reasons for population differences in mortality among patients with TB and HIV and to maximise efforts to reduce mortality

Modematching an optical quantum memory

We analyse the off-resonant Raman interaction of a single broadband photon, copropagating with a classical `control' pulse, with an atomic ensemble. It is shown that the classical electrodynamical structure of the interaction guarantees canonical evolution of the quantum mechanical field operators. This allows the interaction to be decomposed as a beamsplitter transformation between optical and material excitations on a mode-by-mode basis. A single, dominant modefunction describes the dynamics for arbitrary control pulse shapes. Complete transfer of the quantum state of the incident photon to a collective dark state within the ensemble can be achieved by shaping the control pulse so as to match the dominant mode to the temporal mode of the photon. Readout of the material excitation, back to the optical field, is considered in the context of the symmetry connecting the input and output modes. Finally, we show that the transverse spatial structure of the interaction is characterised by the same mode decomposition.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures. Brief section added treating the transverse spatial structure of the memory interaction. Some references added. A few typos fixe

The political economy of competitiveness and social mobility

Social mobility has become a mainstream political and media issue in recent years in the United Kingdom. This article suggests that part of the reason for this is that it can serve as a mechanism to discuss policy concerns that appear to be about social justice without questioning important aspects of neo-liberal political economy. The article charts the policy rhetoric on social mobility under both New Labour and the current Coalition Government. It is argued first that under New Labour the apparent commitment to social mobility was in fact subsumed beneath the pursuit of neo-liberal competitiveness, albeit imperfectly realised in policy. Second, the article suggests that under the Coalition Government the commitment to raising levels of social mobility has been retained and the recently published Strategy for Social Mobility promises that social mobility is what the Coalition means when it argues that the austerity programme is balanced with ‘fairness’. Third, however, the Strategy makes clear that the Coalition define social mobility in narrower terms than the previous government. It is argued here that in narrowing the definition the connection with the idea of competitiveness, while still clearly desirable for the Coalition, is weakened. Fourth, a brief analysis of the Coalition's main policy announcements provides little evidence to suggest that even the narrow definition set out in the Strategy is being seriously pursued. Fifth, the international comparative evidence suggests that any strategy aimed at genuinely raising the level of social mobility would need to give much more serious consideration to narrowing levels of inequality. Finally, it is concluded that when considered in the light of the arguments above, the Strategy for Social Mobility – and therefore ‘Fairness’ itself – is merely a discursive legitimation of the wider political economy programme of austerity

Raman Quantum Memory with Built-In Suppression of Four-wave Mixing Noise

Quantum memories are essential for large-scale quantum information networks. Along with high efficiency, storage lifetime and optical bandwidth, it is critical that the memory add negligible noise to the recalled signal. A common source of noise in optical quantum memories is spontaneous four-wave mixing. We develop and implement a technically simple scheme to suppress this noise mechanism by means of quantum interference. Using this scheme with a Raman memory in warm atomic vapour we demonstrate over an order of magnitude improvement in noise performance. Furthermore we demonstrate a method to quantify the remaining noise contributions and present a route to enable further noise suppression. Our scheme opens the way to quantum demonstrations using a broadband memory, significantly advancing the search for scalable quantum photonic networks.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures plus Supplementary Materia

Interfacing GHz-bandwidth heralded single photons with a room-temperature Raman quantum memory

Photonics is a promising platform for quantum technologies. However, photon sources and two-photon gates currently only operate probabilistically. Large-scale photonic processing will therefore be impossible without a multiplexing strategy to actively select successful events. High time-bandwidth-product quantum memories - devices that store and retrieve single photons on-demand - provide an efficient remedy via active synchronisation. Here we interface a GHz-bandwidth heralded single-photon source and a room-temperature Raman memory with a time-bandwidth product exceeding 1000. We store heralded single photons and observe a clear influence of the input photon statistics on the retrieved light, which agrees with our theoretical model. The preservation of the stored field's statistics is limited by four-wave-mixing noise, which we identify as the key remaining challenge in the development of practical memories for scalable photonic information processing