Using Community Based Participatory Action Research as Service-learning for Tribal College Students

This work reports the methodological approach used in a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project that incorporated Northern Plains tribal college students from four different communities as data gatherers and co-researchers in their communities. We report preliminary findings of perceptions of service learning among the participating tribal college students based on reflective interviews

Dual Use of Veterans Health Administration and Indian Health Service: Healthcare Provider and Patient Perspectives

Many American Indian and Alaska Native veterans are eligible for healthcare from Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and from Indian Health Service (IHS). These organizations executed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2003 to share resources, but little was known about how they collaborated to deliver healthcare. To describe dual use from the stakeholders’ perspectives, including incentives that encourage cross-use, which organization’s primary care is “primary,” and the potential problems and opportunities for care coordination across VHA and IHS. VHA healthcare staff, IHS healthcare staff and American Indian and Alaska Native veterans. Focus groups were conducted using a semi-structured guide. A software-assisted text analysis was performed using grounded theory to develop analytic categories. Dual use was driven by variation in institutional resources, leading patients to actively manage health-seeking behaviors and IHS providers to make ad hoc recommendations for veterans to seek care at VHA. IHS was the “primary” primary care for dual users. There was little coordination between VHA and IHS resulting in delays and treatment conflicts, but all stakeholder groups welcomed future collaboration. Fostering closer alignment between VHA and IHS would reduce care fragmentation and improve accountability for patient care

Random Matrix Theories in Quantum Physics: Common Concepts

We review the development of random-matrix theory (RMT) during the last decade. We emphasize both the theoretical aspects, and the application of the theory to a number of fields. These comprise chaotic and disordered systems, the localization problem, many-body quantum systems, the Calogero-Sutherland model, chiral symmetry breaking in QCD, and quantum gravity in two dimensions. The review is preceded by a brief historical survey of the developments of RMT and of localization theory since their inception. We emphasize the concepts common to the above-mentioned fields as well as the great diversity of RMT. In view of the universality of RMT, we suggest that the current development signals the emergence of a new "statistical mechanics": Stochasticity and general symmetry requirements lead to universal laws not based on dynamical principles.Comment: 178 pages, Revtex, 45 figures, submitted to Physics Report

A Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

dentification of sequence variants robustly associated with predisposition to diabetic kidney disease (DKD) has the potential to provide insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms responsible. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DKD in type 2 diabetes (T2D) using eight complementary dichotomous and quantitative DKD phenotypes: the principal dichotomous analysis involved 5,717 T2D subjects, 3,345 with DKD. Promising association signals were evaluated in up to 26,827 subjects with T2D (12,710 with DKD). A combined T1D+T2D GWAS was performed using complementary data available for subjects with T1D, which, with replication samples, involved up to 40,340 subjects with diabetes (18,582 with DKD). Analysis of specific DKD phenotypes identified a novel signal near GABRR1 (rs9942471, P = 4.5 x 10(-8)) associated with microalbuminuria in European T2D case subjects. However, no replication of this signal was observed in Asian subjects with T2D or in the equivalent T1D analysis. There was only limited support, in this substantially enlarged analysis, for association at previously reported DKD signals, except for those at UMOD and PRKAG2, both associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate. We conclude that, despite challenges in addressing phenotypic heterogeneity, access to increased sample sizes will continue to provide more robust inference regarding risk variant discovery for DKD.Peer reviewe

Traditional Native American Foods: Stories from Northern Plains Elders

An understanding of traditional Native American food patterns is needed to develop efforts for decreasing chronic disease that include traditional Native American foods in culturally relevant ways. Via oral history-focused in-depth interviews, I explored traditional food and dietary practices among Native American Elders in the Northern Plains. In addition to staple foods discussed, five primary themes included hunger, sharing, gathering, medicine, and religion. Barriers to use of Native foods primarily concerned knowledge, convenience and availability

Foreign policy internationalism and political possibility

While many of the contributions to this special issue focus on the content of internationalism and the dilemmas of ethical (state) action in world politics, this article focuses on the possibilities for internationalism to be meaningfully incorporated into state foreign policy. Here, my concern is with the extent to which a commitment to internationalism might be conceived as legitimate at the domestic level. In international relations, constructivists have come closest to directly addressing the domestic constraints and possibilities associated with foreign policy agenda. Theorists working in this tradition, however, have largely worked with binary logics (structure/agency, material/ideational, continuity/change) that emphasise one set of factors over another. Building on insights from the recent 'practice turn' in international relations, this article employs the work of Pierre Bourdieu in an attempt to transcend these binaries and develop a more nuanced and sophisticated sociological account of political possibility. I suggest the utility of his conceptions of field, habitus, capital and symbolic power in coming to terms with both possibilities for and limits to internationalism as a foreign policy orientation. I illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of Australia's retreat from internationalism under the Rudd Government from 2007 to 2010