Critical ethnography for school and community renewal around social class differences affecting learning

Understanding and exploring complex and protracted social questions requires sophisticated investigative approaches. In this article we intend looking at a research approach capable of providing a better understanding of what is going on in schools, students and communities in "exceptionally challenging contexts" (Harris et al., 2006)-code for schools and communities that have as a result of wider social forces, been historically placed in situations of disadvantage.C

Suited for Success? : Suits, Status, and Hybrid Masculinity

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Men and Masculinities, March 2017, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17696193, published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reserved.This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions—body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity—which allowed us to look at the influence of men’s intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. While they wore the suit to embody hegemonic masculine configurations of practice—power, status, and rationality—most of these men were simultaneously marginalized by the gender hierarchy. We explain this disjuncture by using the concept of hybrid masculinity and illustrate that changes in the style of hegemonic masculinity leave its substance intact. Our findings expand thinking about hybrid masculinity by revealing the ways subordinated masculinities appropriate and reinforce hegemonic masculinity.Peer reviewe

Rapamycin Regulates Autophagy and Cell Adhesion in Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Background Cellular reprogramming is a stressful process, which requires cells to engulf somatic features and produce and maintain stemness machineries. Autophagy is a process to degrade unwanted proteins and is required for the derivation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). However, the role of autophagy during iPSC maintenance remains undefined. Methods Human iPSCs were investigated by microscopy, immunofluorescence, and immunoblotting to detect autophagy machinery. Cells were treated with rapamycin to activate autophagy and with bafilomycin to block autophagy during iPSC maintenance. High concentrations of rapamycin treatment unexpectedly resulted in spontaneous formation of round floating spheres of uniform size, which were analyzed for differentiation into three germ layers. Mass spectrometry was deployed to reveal altered protein expression and pathways associated with rapamycin treatment. Results We demonstrate that human iPSCs express high basal levels of autophagy, including key components of APMKα, ULK1/2, BECLIN-1, ATG13, ATG101, ATG12, ATG3, ATG5, and LC3B. Block of autophagy by bafilomycin induces iPSC death and rapamycin attenuates the bafilomycin effect. Rapamycin treatment upregulates autophagy in iPSCs in a dose/time-dependent manner. High concentration of rapamycin reduces NANOG expression and induces spontaneous formation of round and uniformly sized embryoid bodies (EBs) with accelerated differentiation into three germ layers. Mass spectrometry analysis identifies actin cytoskeleton and adherens junctions as the major targets of rapamycin in mediating iPSC detachment and differentiation. Conclusions High levels of basal autophagy activity are present during iPSC derivation and maintenance. Rapamycin alters expression of actin cytoskeleton and adherens junctions, induces uniform EB formation, and accelerates differentiation. IPSCs are sensitive to enzyme dissociation and require a lengthy differentiation time. The shape and size of EBs also play a role in the heterogeneity of end cell products. This research therefore highlights the potential of rapamycin in producing uniform EBs and in shortening iPSC differentiation duration

In Vitro Models for Studying Secondary Plant Metabolite Digestion and Bioaccessibility

There is an increased interest in secondary plant metabolites, such as polyphenols and carotenoids, due to their proposed health benefits. Much attention has focused on their bioavailability, a prerequisite for further physiological functions. As human studies are time consuming, costly, and restricted by ethical concerns, in vitro models for investigating the effects of digestion on these compounds have been developed and employed to predict their release from the food matrix, bioaccessibility, and assess changes in their profiles prior to absorption. Most typically, models simulate digestion in the oral cavity, the stomach, the small intestine, and, occasionally, the large intestine. A plethora of models have been reported, the choice mostly driven by the type of phytochemical studied, whether the purpose is screening or studying under close physiological conditions, and the availability of the model systems. Unfortunately, the diversity of model conditions has hampered the ability to compare results across different studies. For example, there is substantial variability in the time of digestion, concentrations of salts, enzymes, and bile acids used, pH, the inclusion of various digestion stages; and whether chosen conditions are static (with fixed concentrations of enzymes, bile salts, digesta, and so on) or dynamic (varying concentrations of these constituents). This review presents an overview of models that have been employed to study the digestion of both lipophilic and hydrophilic phytochemicals, comparing digestive conditions in vitro and in vivo and, finally, suggests a set of parameters for static models that resemble physiological conditions

The Socially Just School: Making Space for Youth to Speak Back

What has to be struggled against? What is unjust about the way schools are currently being (de)formed? What does a democratic alternative look like? What needs to be done to create this alternative

Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal: Social Justice in Exploitative Times

This book brings together knowledge and literature around school reform and community renewal through authentic ethnographic stories of real schools and communities. The book describes and analyzes a courageous struggle for a more socially jyst world, around notions of relational solidarity that speak back to ideas that continue to privilege the already advantaged. This book provides some desperately needed new storylines a a basis for school and community renewal for the most excluded groups in society. It provides a new social imagination for 'doing school' in contexts that stand to benefit from school and communuty voiced approaches

Doing Critical Educational Research: A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth

John Smyth's remarkable body of writing, research and scholarship has spanned four decades, and the urgency of our times makes it imperative to look in some depth at the breadth of his research and its trajectory, in order to see how we can connect, extend, build and enrich our understandings from it. Possibly the single most unique aspect to Smyth's version of critical research is his passion for living and 'doing' what it means to be a critical pedagogue. For him, 'doing' is a verb that gives expression to what he believes it means to be a critical scholar. This necessitates actively listening to lives; taking on an advocacy position with informant groups; displaying a commitment to praxis; and being activist in celebrating 'local responses' to global issues. Smyth's research is pursued with vigour through the lives he researches, as he interrupts and punctures 'bad' theory, supplanting it with more democratic alternatives, which, by his own admission, makes his research (and all research), political

The Socially Just School : Making Space for Youth to Speak Back

IX, 195 p. 3 illus.online resource