Reading the geographies of post-war British film culture through the reception of French film

This paper examines the ways in which British specialist film culture anticipated and received the resumed supply of French films at the end of the Second World War. It finds that in serious film journalism and within the rapidly expanding film society movement, new French cinema was the focus of at least as much British attention as Italian neo-realism – the European cinema more famously associated with the era. The paper posits that a number of factors, including anti-Americanism, combined to position the delayed wartime and immediate post-war French releases as a site of impossible expectations and subsequent interpretative difficulty for British cinephiles. In particular, through a case study of the local mediation of French cinema in the English city of Nottingham, this paper considers the role of published criticism for setting the local viewing frame within the provincial film society movement. By tracing the tensions surrounding the circulation of film prints, information, and opinion relating to these prestigious cultural imports, it becomes possible to gain greater insight into both the range of nationally specific meanings attributed to the imported films and the geographic and cultural inequalities at work within the film culture of the country of reception

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Civil Society and Urban Food Insecurity: Analyzing the Roles of Local Food Organizations in Johannesburg

Food security civil society organizations (FSCSOs) have emerged as important institutions in the battle against food insecurity in the Global South. However, little attention has so far been paid to their organizational structure, institutional roles, and governance configurations. To fill this gap, in this paper I used surveys, semi-structured interviews, and place-based case studies to analyze the landscape of Johannesburg’s FSCSOs. Results indicate that while they fulfill many important roles, an uneven distribution of resources, institutional instability, and underdevelopment of food security social movements nevertheless weakens their ability to be effective service providers and vehicles of broader social change. Thus, despite a growing literature on alternative food and food justice movements that heralds FSCSOs as a solution to urban food insecurity, this paper argues that their conceptualization has, so far, been poorly developed; and as a consequence, their transformative potential remains weakly theorized