All le moto a ces droits: Notes on Hervé Youmbi’s Translation of the Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme (DUDH)

The following photo essay considers Hervé Youmbi’s 2017 artwork DUDH in the context of the current political crisis in Cameroon. For DUDH, Youmbi translated five articles from the Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme into Camfranglais and installed them on signs in the quartiers of New Bell Ngangue and Ndogpassi III in Douala, Cameroon. He printed one set of the five articles on a blue background for New Bell and the same articles on green for installation in Ndogpassi III. Youmbi unveiled the signs in December 2017 as part of the Salon Urbain de Douala (SUD) triennial

Sensing approaches for the discrimination of small molecules and multivalent analytes

Differential arrays, composed of receptors that are capable of generating unique patterns of responses, have been shown to be useful for discrimination of molecular analytes. Herein, differential arrays have been developed and utilized for the discrimination of small molecule and multivalent biological analytes using cross-reactive receptors. A variety of carboxylate-binding guanidinium-based receptors were tested for their ability to discriminate carboxylate enantiomers. Lanthanide complexes showed the most promising enantiodifferentiation. A dynamic receptor for multivalent biological analytes was developed using self-assembling components designed to target cancer cell lines in a cross-reactive manner. Using this differential array, cancer cell lines of different tissue origin were classified using principal component analysis. The receptors in the array responded to targets as hypothesized but also behaved in a cross-reactive manner that allowed for analyte differentiation. The classification response of the array was reproducible. Boronic acid receptors and receptor arrays were also developed for discrimination of cell surface glycans. In this work, the success of cross-reactive receptors with designed components in differential sensing for small molecules as well as complex multivalent analytes is demonstrated.Chemistr

"A Just and Honest Valuation": paper money and the body politic in colonial America, 1640-1765

My dissertation argues that paper money created a new regime of value in early America, inscribed on the money itself and expressed in the political ordering of society. The radical ideas about money and value that inspired the colonial currencies originated in Commonwealth England. Those ideas spread to the North American colonies after the Restoration, where they conveyed changing notions about membership in the political community. Paper money, its proponents believed, constituted not only the “sinews” of trade and key to limitless wealth but also the “blood” that nourished the body politic. Ironically, the expansion of paper money in early America after 1710 both reflected and helped kindle broader material and cultural changes throughout the wider English Atlantic world that strained the bonds of the provincial political community. Ultimately, however, it was not these changes, but British attempts to control paper money in the mid-eighteenth century, that became corrosive to the imperial order. Disagreements over the prerogative to create money and value, I contend, occupied a key role in the crisis leading to the American Revolution.2020-02-14T00:00:00

Social Protection for the 21st Century: Towards a New Politics of Care

Warnings that the UK is facing a ‘crisis of care’ are growing in volume. NHS wait times have reached a record high, and staff shortages across the social care workforce are predicted to rise to 500,000 by the end of 2030, as poor working conditions and the lowest wages of almost any sector in the UK make these careers increasingly unsustainable. The shortfall is being met by the most vulnerable, and over 350,000 people aged 16-25 in England and Wales now provide unpaid care to a loved one (BMA, 2022). This IGP working paper unpicks the UK’s care crisis, using London’s tuberculosis (TB) rate as a case study. We argue that the crisis extends beyond health and social care: the UK is experiencing a breakdown of its social protection system, as the state fails to fulfil its duty of car

Barring Freedom: Art, Abolition and the Museum in Pandemic Times

Barring Freedom, a travelling exhibition featuring artworks engaging the histories and current conditions of prisons and policing in the United States, was to open in April 2020. While COVID-19 disrupted that plan, the realities of inequity in the United States placed into stark relief by the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020 brought urgency to rethinking the curatorial vision of the exhibition to reach audiences beyond the gallery walls. Buoyed by the idea that, in the words of Angela Davis, art can ‘propel people towards social emancipation’, the exhibition and related programming was reconceived as an ongoing, interdisciplinary, public scholarship initiative reaching across the borders normally perceived between museums, prisons and universities. Opportunities arose for expanded forms of community building and participation that welcomed different forms of knowledge, furthering the political and aesthetic aims of the project to shift the social attachment to prisons

Addressing the UK's livelihood crisis: beyond the price of energy

The UK is suffering a sustained crisis, as the cost of living and energy prices soar. In recent months, and across successive changes in leadership, the government has announced various policies to mitigate the effects, yet they have failed to act systemically. The government’s response so far has reflected a reactive fixation on the rising price of energy; but the UK is ultimately facing a deeper livelihood crisis, that exists at the nexus of rising food, transport and energy prices, high levels of inequality, and an unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels. This crisis demands a whole systems approach, underpinned by the principles of equality and sustainability. The Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) has a plan for the UK. Since its inception, the IGP has been developing novel approaches to livelihood security. At the core of this work is Universal Basic Services (UBS), an expanded social protection system for the 21st century. This working paper analyses the cost of living crisis through a livelihood lens: exploring what the implementation of UBS could mean for the cost of living crisis, and how it could ultimately work to secure livelihoods in the long-term

Social protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: A whole-systems approach to prosperity

Social protection is a central function of modern welfare states, yet it is defined and enacted differently across contexts, shaped by respective histories, political climates and institutions. Broadly, the term refers to the mechanisms and policies designed to mitigate vulnerability and shocks (Ellis, Devereux & White, 2009; ILO, 2020; World Bank, 2021; FAO, 2017; European Commission, 2020). A formal call for universal social protection by 2030, in support of Sustainable Development Goal 1.3, was made in 2019 by a coalition of national and multi-lateral partners including the African Union, the ILO, USAID and UNICEF (USP2030). This IGP working paper addresses social protection from a whole-systems perspective, exploring case studies from sub-Saharan African countries with their own histories of welfare policy and practice. The intersection of the climate emergency with changes in demographics, urban/rural life, technology and population health is creating a new landscape of vulnerability across the region, that presents social protection policymakers with a complex set of challenges. While there is a growing body of literature that explores how income support in particular can reduce vulnerability to climate-related risk, (Costella et al, 2023; Ulrichs, Slater & Costella, 2019; Etoka et al, 2021; Weingartner et al, 2019), we argue for a transformative approach. In response to new, intersecting vulnerabilities, and in light of historical injustice in the delivery of social protection, the mechanisms we implement today must be different. Social protection for the 21st century must not only mitigate risk but deliver the necessary conditions for prosperity. To do so, and to deliver sustainable justice on a social and planetary level, social protection systems must ultimately begin from a different perspective, operate proactively, and address the intersections between precarities

'Let Us Begin with a Smaller Gesture': An Ethos of Human Rights and the Possibilities of Form in Chris Abani's Song for Night and Becoming Abigail

This essay intervenes in current debates over human rights-oriented approaches to literature through a reading of Chris Abani's two novellas.  As opposed to critics who want either to embrace or unmask human rights in literature, we argue that Abani mediates between these two poles through close attention to the ways in which literary form and aesthetic can craft a shared ethos between reader and text.  In depicting the short lives of a child soldier and sex trafficked young girl, he emphasizes the limits of the law: the gap between the human subject and the legal person whose legal claims are recognizable.  At the same time, his narratives are not sentimental, and they challenge readers to extend a recognition of shared humanity across easy divides of right or wrong behavior.  If, as Abani posits, we cannot become fully human without the courage to unmask ourselves, then too the endeavor of human rights must submit to a similar unmasking (of its foundational paradoxes, its limitations, its pretentions, its complicities) precisely in order to live into, to embrace, the fuller manifestation of justice toward which it gestures.  More specifically, we examine the interplay of lyric and narrative voices within the context of the novella in order to show how Abani deploys temporal and aesthetic constructions to respond to the limits within normative human rights (legal instruments and official discourses). This delicate balance of lyric and narrative, instead of calling upon the reader's responsibility toward the human rights violations he depicts and fostering literary humanitarianism (which has been extensively critiqued as paternalistic by scholars such as Slaughter and Anker), generates a more complicated ethos of reciprocity between reader and text