Law, Culture, and Community at the Borders of the state

This thesis explores the conditions under which the immediate and local narratives of communities might produce a culture of resistance. Focussing primarily on research with the Chakma people of Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), it recounts the complex role of legal pluralism in sustaining communities as political units in the postcolonial state, exploring how law’s framing narratives produce different iterations of communitarian legal practice ostensibly within the same postcolonial legal form. This exploration uses a conceptual frame of ‘critical communitarianism’, which draws specific attention to the parallels between political identity and legal culture, and community and legal mobilisation within a legally plural setting. Using legal culture and mobilisation as analytical tools, this thesis unpacks the relationship between law, power and resistance in a context where community and state are inherently unstable. In the post-conflict CHT, it appears that the processes of colonisation and de-colonisation have caused the boundaries and ideations of community to be highly mutable and contested, yet these very instabilities appear to diffuse power more equally across the community, and subvert the colonial legacy of feudal hierarchies. To further illustrate this hypothesis, the brief contrast drawn between the CHT and an Indian Chakma community demonstrates how a rigid system of constitutional recognition under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution has an ossifying effect on communitarian law; recognition reinforces an elderly and conservative customary elite and ultimately pushes communitarian legal practice to the margins of community. The thesis concludes that conditions of crisis appear to diffuse power across communities, causing dynamic and resistant interpretations of law and culture to emerge from within non-state communities

Comparación del impacto de los valores de género en el trabajo no remunerado en dos tipos de Estado del Bienestar: Reino Unido y España

This study aimed to compare the gap between gender role values and domestic practice in the UK and Spain. The data were drawn from a sample of British and Spanish male and female respondents to the International Social Survey Programme’s (ISSP) ‘Family and Changing Gender Roles’ module (2002, 2012) and used to create multivariate mod­els using ordinary least-squares regression techniques. The findings suggest that gender role values impacts domestic practice: more time is devoted to housework by egalitar­ian than non-egalitarian men and less by egalitarian than non-egalitarian women. That effect was not observed for care-giving, however. The impact of gender values on the division by sex of household chores was found to be similar in the UK and Spain. A gradual move to more egalitarian ideals was also observed in both countries over the 10 year period studied.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo comparar la brecha entre los valores de género y la práctica doméstica en el Reino Unido y España. Los datos se obtuvieron de una muestra de encuestados británicos y españoles, hombres y mu­jeres, en el módulo “Familia y cambio de roles de género” del Programa Internacional de Encuestas Sociales (ISSP 2002; 2012) y se utilizaron para crear modelos multivari­antes utilizando técnicas de regresión de mínimos cuadra­dos ordinarios. Los hallazgos sugieren que los valores de género afectan a las prácticas domésticas. Sin embargo, este efecto no se observó para el cuidado. Se encontró que el impacto de los valores de género en la división por sexo de las tareas domésticas era similar en el Reino Unido y España. También se observó un movimiento gradual ha­cia ideales más igualitarios en ambos países durante el período de 10 años estudiado

Decreased myometrial p160 ROCK-1 expression in obese women at term pregnancy

Background: Obesity is becoming an increasing problem in obstetric practice; it has led to an increase in the risk of caesarean delivery, prolonged pregnancy and dysfunctional labour. It has been postulated that many of these problems are as a result of abnormal myometrial contractility. The RhoA/Rho kinase pathway is involved in calcium sensitisation in the myometrium during labour and contributes to the phosphorylation of myosin phosphatase and thus continued myosin light chain activity, during uterine contractility. The aim of this study therefore, was to investigate the effect of obesity on the expression of various components of the RhoA/ROCK pathway in human myometrium at term pregnancy. Methods: Protein was isolated from myometrial biopsies obtained at elective caesarean section, at term pregnancy from obese women and from those with a normal body mass index. Western blotting was performed using specific primary antibodies to RhoA/Rho kinase associated proteins. Results: The protein expression of p160 ROCK-1 was significantly decreased (P < 0.001) in the myometrium from women in the obese cohort (n = 22) at term pregnancy, compared to women of those of normal body mass index (n = 15). No alteration in expression of the other proteins investigated was noted. Conclusions: The significant decrease in p160 ROCK-1 protein expression observed in the myometrium of obese women at late gestation may contribute to an inhibitory effect on contractility at labour, due to its contribution to calcium sensitisation and possibly other signalling pathways. These findings are relevant to the concept of compromised myometrial function in obese parturients

Enhancing the FAIRness of Arctic Research Data Through Semantic Annotation

The National Science Foundation’s Arctic Data Center is the primary data repository for NSF-funded research conducted in the Arctic. There are major challenges in discovering and interpreting resources in a repository containing data as heterogeneous and interdisciplinary as those in the Arctic Data Center. This paper reports on advances in cyberinfrastructure at the Arctic Data Center that help address these issues by leveraging semantic technologies that enhance the repository’s adherence to the FAIR data principles and improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of digital resources in the repository. We describe the Arctic Data Center’s improvements. We use semantic annotation to bind metadata about Arctic data sets with concepts in web-accessible ontologies. The Arctic Data Center’s implementation of a semantic annotation mechanism is accompanied by the development of an extended search interface that increases the findability of data by allowing users to search for specific, broader, and narrower meanings of measurement descriptions, as well as through their potential synonyms. Based on research carried out by the DataONE project, we evaluated the potential impact of this approach, regarding the accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of measurement data. Arctic research often benefits from having additional data, typically from multiple, heterogeneous sources, that complement and extend the bases – spatially, temporally, or thematically – for understanding Arctic phenomena. These relevant data resources must be ‘found’, and ‘harmonized’ prior to integration and analysis. The findings of a case study indicated that the semantic annotation of measurement data enhances the capabilities of researchers to accomplish these tasks

The development of children’s early memory skills

A multi-task battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children’s Elicited Imitation performance, and whether the patterns of association varied across the different ages. Language ability emerged as a predictor of immediate Elicited Imitation performance by 24 months and predicted delayed performance at each age. In addition to the contributions of language, the children’s abilities to search for and retrieve toys in the deliberate memory task were associated with their immediate Elicited Imitation performance at each age. In addition to language, working memory was positively associated with aspects of both immediate and delayed performance at all ages. The extent to which it was possible to replicate and extend previous cross-sectional work in this longitudinal study is discussed