Immer unter Verdacht? – Identitätszuschreibungen im Kontext des Kleinhandels an der Außengrenze der Europäischen Union

The harmonized, uniform Schengen border regime that secures the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" has led to remarkable changes of conditions for border crossing in Eastern Europe. Morover, its assemblage of documents, procedures, techniques, locations etc. of control and surveillance controls and governs the identities of travellers. The article analyses how small-scales traders at the Polish-Belarusian border, the Polish-Ukrainian border and the Romanian-Ukrainian border who operate on the edges of the legal and the formal (and even beyond) are being confronted with these new ascriptions of identities, the ways they feel being governed by the new border and their reactions to. The fieldwork focuses a period shortly after the Schengen border was shifted towards Eastern Europe in 2007

Neuronal CaMKK2 promotes immunosuppression and checkpoint blockade resistance in glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is notorious for its immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) and is refractory to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB). Here, we identify calmodulin-dependent kinase kinase 2 (CaMKK2) as a driver of ICB resistance. CaMKK2 is highly expressed in pro-tumor cells and is associated with worsened survival in patients with GBM. Host CaMKK2, specifically, reduces survival and promotes ICB resistance. Multimodal profiling of the TME reveals that CaMKK2 is associated with several ICB resistance-associated immune phenotypes. CaMKK2 promotes exhaustion in CD8+ T cells and reduces the expansion of effector CD4+ T cells, additionally limiting their tumor penetrance. CaMKK2 also maintains myeloid cells in a disease-associated microglia-like phenotype. Lastly, neuronal CaMKK2 is required for maintaining the ICB resistance-associated myeloid phenotype, is deleterious to survival, and promotes ICB resistance. Our findings reveal CaMKK2 as a contributor to ICB resistance and identify neurons as a driver of immunotherapeutic resistance in GBM

Boundary spanning in social and cultural geography

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social and Cultural Geography on 6 February 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649365.2015.1126628.This article situates interactions between German- and English-language social and cultural geographies since the mid-20th century within their wider intellectual, political and socioeconomic contexts. Based on case study examples, we outline main challenges of international knowledge transfer due to nationally and linguistically structured publication cultures, differing academic paradigms and varying promotion criteria. We argue that such transfer requires formal and informal platforms for academic debate, the commitment of boundary spanners and supportive peer groups. In German-language social and cultural geography, these three aspects induced a shift from a prevalent applied research tradition in the context of the modern welfare state towards a deeper engagement with Anglophone debates about poststructuralist approaches that have helped to critique the increase of neoliberal governance since the 1990s. Anglophone and especially British social and cultural geography, firmly grounded in poststructuralist and critical approaches since the 1980s, are increasingly pressurized through the neoliberal corporatization of the university to develop more applied features such as research impact and students’ employability

Grenzgeographien der COVID-19-Pandemie

Als im Dezember 2019 erstmalig von einem neuartigen Coronavirus in China berichtet wurde, war noch nicht absehbar, in welch kurzer Zeit und wie rasant ,COVID-19‘ globale Auswirkungen entfalten würde. Im Januar 2020 wurde Wuhan, die Hauptstadt von Hubei, unter Quarantäne gestellt und nur zwei Monate später hatte sich das Virus in Mitteleuropa ausgebreitet, gefolgt von einer steigenden Infektionswelle unter anderem in den USA. Damit verbunden erodierten vermeintliche Gewissheiten: Bewegungsfreiheiten wurden eingeschränkt, Einreisebeschränkungen verhängt und paradoxerweise genau 25 Jahre nach dem Inkrafttreten des Schengener Abkommens auch viele EU-Binnengrenzen geschlossen. Der Beitrag fokussiert diese Grenzschließungen, beschäftigt sich aber auch mit sozialen Grenzziehungen im Zuge der Pandemie. Die betrachteten ,Grenzgeographien‘ reichen damit von der Subjektebene bis zur globalen Ebene und werden mit den eingeführten Sicherheitsmaßnahmen, eingesetzten (Ver-)Ordnungen, politischen Renationalisierungsreflexen und zivilgesellschaftlichen Widerständen in Zusammenhang gebracht. Der Beitrag endet mit einem Ausblick auf einige weiterführende Themen- und Fragestellungen aus Sicht der Border Studies mit und nach der COVID-19-Pandemie