The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project

The digital content created by Pathways to Freedom students and faculty will feature a variety of media, artifacts, and documents with a primary focus on local civil rights oral histories mapped to archival documents and specific Brooklyn locations. It will be produced by undergraduate students and their professors in Pathways to Freedom as well as undergraduate and graduate Computer Science and/or Media Arts students, with the support of faculty and IT specialists, and will have enduring value to the academic and broader public, including middle and high school groups as well as other college students. Through an innovative use of existing digital tools and technologies, the prototype will combine oral history interviews with images of archival documents and interactive maps, enabling those artifacts to be seamlessly integrated on a variety of platforms including the Internet, a digital repository, and mobile devices

The Right Time: Building the Learning Community Movement

The author argues that the current conjuncture is a kairotic moment for their own learning community program as well as the national movement to support the development of learning communities in universities and colleges and the array of pedagogical approaches associated with them. With Barbara Leigh Smith (2013), they recognize a link between the social justice movements of the 1960s and the learning community movement both in their commitments to democracy and their organizing strategies. Through relating the story of their own experience as co-directors of the LIU Brooklyn Learning Community program, specifying different inventions, audiences, and purposes driving that initiative, they further suggest that learning communities have the potential not only to reinvigorate teaching and learning but also to contribute to struggles for a more democratic, compassionate society

Write. Persist. Struggle: Sponsors of Writing and Workers’ Education in the 1930s

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role

Whole genome analysis of linezolid resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae reveals resistance and compensatory mutations

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Several mutations were present in the genome of <it>Streptococcus pneumoniae </it>linezolid-resistant strains but the role of several of these mutations had not been experimentally tested. To analyze the role of these mutations, we reconstituted resistance by serial whole genome transformation of a novel resistant isolate into two strains with sensitive background. We sequenced the parent mutant and two independent transformants exhibiting similar minimum inhibitory concentration to linezolid.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Comparative genomic analyses revealed that transformants acquired G2576T transversions in every gene copy of 23S rRNA and that the number of altered copies correlated with the level of linezolid resistance and cross-resistance to florfenicol and chloramphenicol. One of the transformants also acquired a mutation present in the parent mutant leading to the overexpression of an ABC transporter (spr1021). The acquisition of these mutations conferred a fitness cost however, which was further enhanced by the acquisition of a mutation in a RNA methyltransferase implicated in resistance. Interestingly, the fitness of the transformants could be restored in part by the acquisition of altered copies of the L3 and L16 ribosomal proteins and by mutations leading to the overexpression of the spr1887 ABC transporter that were present in the original linezolid-resistant mutant.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results demonstrate the usefulness of whole genome approaches at detecting major determinants of resistance as well as compensatory mutations that alleviate the fitness cost associated with resistance.</p

Topoisomerase Inhibitors Addressing Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Gram-Negative Bacteria.

Since their discovery over 5 decades ago, quinolone antibiotics have found enormous success as broad spectrum agents that exert their activity through dual inhibition of bacterial DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV. Increasing rates of resistance, driven largely by target-based mutations in the GyrA/ParC quinolone resistance determining region, have eroded the utility and threaten the future use of this vital class of antibiotics. Herein we describe the discovery and optimization of a series of 4-(aminomethyl)quinolin-2(1H)-ones, exemplified by 34, that inhibit bacterial DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV and display potent activity against ciprofloxacin-resistant Gram-negative pathogens. X-ray crystallography reveals that 34 occupies the classical quinolone binding site in the topoisomerase IV-DNA cleavage complex but does not form significant contacts with residues in the quinolone resistance determining region

The Nature of the City

As an academic, I believe it is my responsibility to incorporate political economic and ecological concepts and histories into my research, teaching, and community involvement. To avert a worstcase scenario already unfolding, we collectively need to understand and overcome the pressing, interrelated crises of our time of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and obscene levels of social and economic inequality worldwide. I aim broadly in this quilt square to express “the nature of the city,” playing on the double entendre of “nature” as character or quality of urban spaces and “nature” as all the life and elements surrounding human beings and the built environment. However, I also want to represent the problem of centuries of humanity’s attempts to conquer, master, and control nature, which has catapulted us into a new epoch of the Anthropocene. The large hawk and small city skyline represent what Marx called an “irreparable rift” in the social metabolism between nature and society. The challenge for humanity in the 21st century is to mend the rift by ceasing to extract fossil fuels and other natural resources from the earth and building egalitarian societies based on human need for the many rather than exorbitant profits for a very few.https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cusp_usquilt_2022/1000/thumbnail.jp