Teaching the City: Exploring Pedagogies of Urban Becoming

This article explores how teaching Urban Anthropology can engender new relationships between cities, students, and classrooms. We discuss the generative connections between these actors as processes of becoming, which connect students with practices and theories for understanding urban life. Serving also as an introduction to a Special Issue on “Teaching the City,” this article introduces the issue’s pieces, which discuss teaching and learning across three continents. It also reflects on their collective contributions as an opportunity to think anew about the city through teaching. The four authors of this piece contributed equal labor.&nbsp

“Whole” vs. “fragmented” approach to EAACI pollen season definitions: A multicenter study in six Southern European cities

Background: The adequate definition of pollen seasons is essential to facilitate a correct diagnosis, treatment choice, and outcome assessment in patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis. A position paper by the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) proposed season definitions for Northern and Middle Europe. Objective: To test the pollen season definitions proposed by EAACI in six Mediterranean cities for seven pollen taxa. Methods: As part of the @IT.2020 multi-center study, pollen counts for Poaceae, Oleaceae, Fagales, Cupressaceae, Urticaceae (Parietaria spp.), and Compositae (Ambrosia spp., Artemisia spp.) were collected from January 1 to December 31, 2018. Based on these data, pollen seasons were identified according to EAACI criteria. A unified monitoring period for patients in AIT trials was created and assessed for feasibility. Results: The analysis revealed a great heterogeneity between the different locations in terms of pattern and length of the examined pollen seasons. Further, we found a fragmentation of pollen seasons in several segments (max. 8) separated by periods of low pollen counts (intercurrent periods). Potential monitoring periods included often many recording days with low pollen exposure (max. 341 days). Conclusion: The Mediterranean climate leads to challenging pollen exposure times. Monitoring periods for AIT trials based on existing definitions may include many intermittent days with low pollen concentrations. Therefore, it is necessary to find an adapted pollen season definition as individual solution for each pollen and geographical area

The Infrastructure of Politics: Participatory Urbanism, Professional Strategies, and the Production of the Built Environment in Post-Revolution Cairo

This dissertation investigates the sociospatial and sociopolitical impact of the so-called Arab Spring by focusing on urban transformations in Cairo after the January 25th Revolution. In the wake of the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s capital witnessed a remarkable fluorescence of research, activism, and intervention, much of it undertaken by newly empowered “professional elites.” These non-state actors seized on the post-uprising farāgha–or opening–created by the country’s ongoing political turmoil to launch a range of urban-focused initiatives that would have once been impossible to pursue given the government’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and systematic repression of “civil society.” While some offered sociocultural explorations of historic or contemporary changes in urban life, others sought to improve the city and the lives of its residents through “rehabilitation” projects in public space, housing, heritage management, and infrastructure. Many, however, shared a commitment to fostering cross-class collaboration and “community participation.” Through an ethnographic analysis of four such initiatives scattered across central Cairo, I make a two-fold argument about the sociopolitical implications of this post-uprising activity: first, I contend that these projects constituted novel forms and spaces of political action, whose organizers harnessed the reconfiguration of urban space to facilitate new ways of “being in common” among the city’s residents. In this way, the organizers used their initiatives to “imagine and enact radically different futures” in the present (Larner 2014, 204). At the same time, I argue that these activities were shot through with ambiguities and inconsistencies, relating to the broader political context as well as the actors involved and their interactions with each other. In short, they were compromised sites of political engagement. Yet instead of concluding that this pervasive indeterminacy signaled the “failure” of these initiatives as “political acts,” I suggest that it was a resource that various actors used in order to advance their aims or agendas. I expand on this idea to argue that ambiguity is not simply an inevitable byproduct of political processes; rather, it is the raw material out of which political action is formed

"Whole" vs "fragmented" approach to EAACI pollen season definitions: A multicenter study in six Southern European cities

Background The adequate definition of pollen seasons is essential to facilitate a correct diagnosis, treatment choice, and outcome assessment in patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis. A position paper by the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) proposed season definitions for Northern and Middle Europe.Objective To test the pollen season definitions proposed by EAACI in six Mediterranean cities for seven pollen taxa.Methods As part of the @IT.2020 multi-center study, pollen counts for Poaceae, Oleaceae, Fagales, Cupressaceae, Urticaceae (Parietaria spp.), and Compositae (Ambrosia spp., Artemisia spp.) were collected from January 1 to December 31, 2018. Based on these data, pollen seasons were identified according to EAACI criteria. A unified monitoring period for patients in AIT trials was created and assessed for feasibility.Results The analysis revealed a great heterogeneity between the different locations in terms of pattern and length of the examined pollen seasons. Further, we found a fragmentation of pollen seasons in several segments (max. 8) separated by periods of low pollen counts (intercurrent periods). Potential monitoring periods included often many recording days with low pollen exposure (max. 341 days).Conclusion The Mediterranean climate leads to challenging pollen exposure times. Monitoring periods for AIT trials based on existing definitions may include many intermittent days with low pollen concentrations. Therefore, it is necessary to find an adapted pollen season definition as individual solution for each pollen and geographical area