25 research outputs found
Lost on the way home
Magister Artium - MAThis is a novella about homelessness, and the forms of exile, loss and displacement that it
creates. Based in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, it is a story about four men who all find
themselves alienated and marginalised and who, in their different ways, find themselves lost
in their search for a place to belong.
Reuben is the primary character. Estranged from the Jewish community into which he is
born, he turns his back on apartheid South Africa, expecting to find an alternative home in
Israel. But when he arrives there he encounters once again the same dark side of humankind
that he thought he had left behind.
He is not the first of his family to be driven from a place he calls home. His grandfather,
Sam, who has already passed away by the time this story takes place, experienced
homelessness after Nazism forced him to flee. The novella opens at the moment when
Reuben takes his son Dov to Israel as a young child. But a growing estrangement between
father and son emerges over time, as Dov is fiercely loyal to Israel while Reuben becomes
bitterly disillusioned. They find themselves pitted against each other politically, until the
pathology of Israeli militarism drives Dov to a breakdown. Following Dov's own eventual
personal escape into exile, when he decides he must dissociate himself from the Israeli
Defence Force, he calls out to his father to rescue him and take him home. Finally there is
Haroom, a young Israeli Palestinian whom Reuben befriends, who has his own story of
rootlessness and the absence of belonging.
In Lost on the Way Home, the politics of oppression, discrimination, dispossession, and
violent victimisation underpins each of the four men's individual stories. And despite their
differences, all share the experience of being driven from their "homes", or the communities
or places from which they originated. It is through their individual relationships that they
reach out to each other to find a place to share and establish an alternative to the homes they
have lost. In the end it is left to Reuben and Dov to struggle to find a way of finding each
other when they set off together on a desert hike with no destination and only the goal of
escaping their pasts
PGE<sub>2</sub> production at sites of tissue injury promotes an anti-inflammatory neutrophil phenotype and determines the outcome of inflammation resolution in vivo
Neutrophils are the first immune cells recruited to a site of injury or infection, where they perform many functions. Having completed their role, neutrophils must be removed from the inflammatory site—either by apoptosis and efferocytosis or by reverse migration away from the wound—for restoration of normal tissue homeostasis. Disruption of these tightly controlled physiological processes of neutrophil removal can lead to a range of inflammatory diseases. We used an in vivo zebrafish model to understand the role of lipid mediator production in neutrophil removal. Following tailfin amputation in the absence of macrophages, neutrophillic inflammation does not resolve, due to loss of macrophage-dependent handling of eicosanoid prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) that drives neutrophil removal via promotion of reverse migration. Knockdown of endogenous PGE synthase gene reveals PGE2 as essential for neutrophil inflammation resolution. Furthermore, PGE2 is able to signal through EP4 receptors during injury, causing an increase in Alox12 production and switching toward anti-inflammatory eicosanoid signaling. Our data confirm regulation of neutrophil migration by PGE2 and LXA4 (lipoxin A4) in an in vivo model of inflammation resolution. This pathway may contain therapeutic targets for driving inflammation resolution in chronic inflammatory disease
25th annual computational neuroscience meeting: CNS-2016
The same neuron may play different functional roles in the neural circuits to which it belongs. For example, neurons in the Tritonia pedal ganglia may participate in variable phases of the swim motor rhythms [1]. While such neuronal functional variability is likely to play a major role the delivery of the functionality of neural systems, it is difficult to study it in most nervous systems. We work on the pyloric rhythm network of the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) [2]. Typically network models of the STG treat neurons of the same functional type as a single model neuron (e.g. PD neurons), assuming the same conductance parameters for these neurons and implying their synchronous firing [3, 4]. However, simultaneous recording of PD neurons shows differences between the timings of spikes of these neurons. This may indicate functional variability of these neurons. Here we modelled separately the two PD neurons of the STG in a multi-neuron model of the pyloric network. Our neuron models comply with known correlations between conductance parameters of ionic currents. Our results reproduce the experimental finding of increasing spike time distance between spikes originating from the two model PD neurons during their synchronised burst phase. The PD neuron with the larger calcium conductance generates its spikes before the other PD neuron. Larger potassium conductance values in the follower neuron imply longer delays between spikes, see Fig. 17.Neuromodulators change the conductance parameters of neurons and maintain the ratios of these parameters [5]. Our results show that such changes may shift the individual contribution of two PD neurons to the PD-phase of the pyloric rhythm altering their functionality within this rhythm. Our work paves the way towards an accessible experimental and computational framework for the analysis of the mechanisms and impact of functional variability of neurons within the neural circuits to which they belong
Book review: Voices from the Underground: Eighteen life stories from Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment
Edited by Shirley Gunn and Shanil Haricharan
Published by Penguin. 400 pp
Book Review: The man who tried to kill apartheid
Book Title: The man who tried to kill apartheidBook Author: Harris DousemetzisPublisher: Jacana Books: Johannesburg. 2018. 483 pg
Parliament and the Auditor General: The accountability gap and what can be done about it?
Dr Nicol is consulting as the senior researcher on this project. Also participating in the Checks and Balances Project are staff members of the Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA), Bruce Kadalie, who is responsible for IFAA’s events and research, and Moira Levy, production manager of New Agenda