Genomic surveillance enables the identification of co-infections with multiple SARS-CoV-2 lineages in equatorial Guinea

COVID-19 disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 represents an ongoing global public health emergency. Rapid identification of emergence, evolution, and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) would enable timely and tailored responses by public health decision-making bodies. Yet, global disparities in current SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance activities reveal serious geographical gaps. Here, we discuss the experiences and lessons learned from the SARS-CoV-2 monitoring and surveillance program at the Public Health Laboratory on Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea that was implemented as part of the national COVID-19 response and monitoring activities. We report how three distinct SARS-CoV-2 variants have dominated the epidemiological situation in Equatorial Guinea since March 2020. In addition, a case of co-infection of two SARS-CoV-2 VOC, Beta and Delta, in a clinically asymptomatic and fully COVID-19 vaccinated man living in Equatorial Guinea is presented. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a person co-infected with Beta and Delta VOC globally. Rapid identification of co-infections is relevant since these might provide an opportunity for genetic recombination resulting in emergence of novel SARS-CoV-2 lineages with enhanced transmission or immune evasion potential

(Re)Storying Obama: An Examination of Recently Published Informational Texts

American publishers have published numerous children’s books about Barack Obama over the past several years; most take the form of informational biographies. This article reports on a research project aimed at how these books incorporate sociohistorical narratives, particularly those related to the civil rights movement. Though the features of the books might cause the reader to presume political neutrality, the books link readers to distinct Discourses (Gee, 1996), suggesting particular ideologies. In this article, we identified the following differences: (1) specific happenings from Obama’s life were included in some texts while omitted in others; (2) when the events were included, how they were framed differed; and (3) the narrative constructions of the events varied. We use the differences amongst these texts to argue for the importance of critical literacy in elementary classrooms

'A foundation-hatched black elite’: Obama, the US establishment and foreign policy

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power. The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies during Obama’s two-term presidency

Interpol and the Emergence of Global Policing

This chapter examines global policing as it takes shape through the work of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Global policing emerges in the legal, political and technological amalgam through which transnational police cooperation is carried out, and includes the police practices inflected and made possible by this phenomenon. Interpol’s role is predominantly in the circulation of information, through which it enters into relationships and provides services that affect aspects of governance, from the local to national, regional and global. The chapter describes this assemblage as a noteworthy experiment in developing what McKeon called a frame for common action. Drawing on Interpol publications, news stories, interviews with staff, and fieldwork at the General Secretariat in Lyon, France, the history, institutional structure, and daily practices are described. Three cases are analyzed, concerning Red Notices, national sovereignty, and terrorism, in order to explore some of the problems arising in Interpol’s political and technical operating arrangements. In conclusion, international and global policing are compared schematically, together with Interpol’s attempts to give institutional and procedural direction to the still-evolving form of global policing

Career Resourcing and the Process of Professional Emergence

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by: 1) a process of accretion, where people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or 2) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates

Emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.620 with variant of concern-like mutations and deletions

Distinct SARS-CoV-2 lineages, discovered through various genomic surveillance initiatives, have emerged during the pandemic following unprecedented reductions in worldwide human mobility. We here describe a SARS-CoV-2 lineage - designated B.1.620 - discovered in Lithuania and carrying many mutations and deletions in the spike protein shared with widespread variants of concern (VOCs), including E484K, S477N and deletions HV69Delta, Y144Delta, and LLA241/243Delta. As well as documenting the suite of mutations this lineage carries, we also describe its potential to be resistant to neutralising antibodies, accompanying travel histories for a subset of European cases, evidence of local B.1.620 transmission in Europe with a focus on Lithuania, and significance of its prevalence in Central Africa owing to recent genome sequencing efforts there. We make a case for its likely Central African origin using advanced phylogeographic inference methodologies incorporating recorded travel histories of infected travellers

Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies

Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodisation and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial