Civic Nationalism and Language-in-Education Policies in the United Arab Emirates

A founding principle of the United Arab Emirates is the belief that tolerance promotes peace, while isolation encourages division and conflict. With more than 200 nationalities residing in the UAE, Emiratis constitute only 10% of the population, making them a minority in their own country. Despite the government promoting diversity and tolerance as the norm, such demographic imbalance come with a cost to the Arabic language, the national identity and culture, and the education system. This chapter addresses those concerns through a series of recent government initiatives. The author classifies neo-nationalist movements into different types, arguing that the one in the UAE largely fits within the civic type with its non-hostile, overall welcoming attitude toward foreigners. At the end of the chapter, she discusses the impact of neo-nationalism on education and calls for clearer policies that take into account language(s) as a right and as a resource

Barcoded reciprocal hemizygosity analysis via sequencing illuminates the complex genetic basis of yeast thermotolerance

Decades of successes in statistical genetics have revealed the molecular underpinnings of traits as they vary across individuals of a given species. But standard methods in the field cannot be applied to divergences between reproductively isolated taxa. Genome-wide reciprocal hemizygosity mapping (RH-seq), a mutagenesis screen in an interspecies hybrid background, holds promise as a method to accelerate the progress of interspecies genetics research. Here, we describe an improvement to RH-seq in which mutants harbor barcodes for cheap and straightforward sequencing after selection in a condition of interest. As a proof of concept for the new tool, we carried out genetic dissection of the difference in thermotolerance between two reproductively isolated budding yeast species. Experimental screening identified dozens of candidate loci at which variation between the species contributed to the thermotolerance trait. Hits were enriched for mitosis genes and other housekeeping factors, and among them were multiple loci with robust sequence signatures of positive selection. Together, these results shed new light on the mechanisms by which evolution solved the problems of cell survival and division at high temperature in the yeast clade, and they illustrate the power of the barcoded RH-seq approach