Childhood publics in search of an audience: reflections on the children’s environmental movement

The essay reflects on the children's environmental movement from the perspective of cultural theory, as well as the authors' own and others’ research on children’s encounters, experiences and engagement in public life. The concepts of political knowingness, childhood publics, and listening publics are evoked to think through the surprise that the children's environmental movement generated in the public sphere. The idiom is positioned as an audience ‘hearing aid’ for turning babbling into political messages. In so doing we find that the messages from the children’s environmental movement are not out of place in the current humanities and social sciences literatures on the Anthropocene

Data intimacies: building infrastructures for intensified embodied encounters with air pollution

The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in the light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of these data is considered crucial for citizens to manage their own health, and a proliferation of new informational forms and apps have been created to achieve this. And yet, beyond everyday decisions (when to use a mask or when to do sports outdoors), it is not clear whether current methods of engaging citizens produce behavioural change or stronger citizen engagement with air pollution. Drawing on the design, construction and ethnography of an urban infrastructure to measure, make visible and remediate particulate matter (PM2.5) through a water vapour cloud that we installed at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, we examined the effects and affects of producing a public space that allows for physical interaction with data. In Yellow Dust, data from PM2.5 were translated into mist, the density of which was responsive to the number of particles suspended in the air. Data were made sense/ible by the changing conditions of the air surrounding the infrastructure, which can be experienced in embodied, collective and relational ways: what we call ‘molecular intimacies’. By reflecting on how the infrastructure facilitated new modes of sensing data, we consider how ‘data intimacies’ can re-specify action by producing different forms of engagement with air pollution

Staying with the trouble of institutions

This paper provides a commentary on the theme section entitled “Troubling Institutions at the Nexus of Care and Control.” Using the recent book Matters of Care (2017) by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa as a reference point, the authors of the commentary introduce the project of exploring how care and control admix across a range of institutional geographies, reflecting complex assemblages of places, peoples, practices and problems. Taking seriously the prompt by the section editors to think about the “troubling” of institutions, the authors draw provisional distinctions between those that are “troubled” and those that are “troublesome,” mapping across to the range of more‐or‐less institutional – more‐or‐less carceral – spaces considered in the papers comprising the theme section. The commentary concludes with attention, inspired by Donna Haraway's notion of “staying with the trouble,” to the task of staying both with the troubles bundled up in institutional landscapes and, indeed, with the very idea and practice of institutions themselves

Blue space as caring space – water and the cultivation of care in social and environmental practice

This paper studies three sites or ‘landscapes of care’ in Leeds, Bristol and London where water and associated built and natural environments are used to co-construct and facilitate forms of social and environmental care. Our research narrates the ways in which blue spaces are cultivated for the production of particular forms of caring bodies and sensibilities. Interpreting care as both a doing (caring for) and emotion (caring about), we draw attention to the diverse practices and distributed nature of care in these environments. Our paper has three main insights. First, we draw attention to the role of water as both a material and site of care. Second, we identify a range of more-than-human benefits associated with blue spaces and how these emerge via collaborative, non-linear and reciprocal forms of care. Third, we argue that by understanding how care works in everyday social practice, new forms of ecological care and pro-environmental ways of living with the world can emerge

Community-Acquired Pneumococcal Pneumonia in Virologically Suppressed HIV-Infected Adult Patients: A Matched Case-Control Study

Background: The study aimed to investigate whether the clinical presentations and outcomes (length of stay, ICU admission, and 30-day mortality) of pneumococcal pneumonia in virologically suppressed patients who were HIV-infected on ART with a CD4+ T-cell count > 350 cells/mm3 are comparable to those seen in patients with HIV, using a case-control design. Methods: A case-control study was carried out in Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain (2001-2016). Control patients were matched by age (±10 years), sex, comorbidities, and pneumonia diagnosis in the same calendar period. Clinical presentation and outcomes of pneumococcal pneumonia in patients who were and were not infected with HIV were compared. Results: Pneumococcal pneumonia was studied in 50 cases (HIV infection) and 100 control patients (non-HIV infection). Compared with the control patients, case patients had higher rates of influenza (14% vs 2%, P = .007) and pneumococcal vaccination (10% vs 1%, P = .016). The group of cases also presented a higher rate of coinfection with hepatitis B virus (6% vs 0%, P = .036). Both groups presented similar ICU admission (18% vs 27%, P = .22), need for mechanical ventilation (12% vs 8%; P = .43), length of stay (7 days vs 7 days, P = .76), and 0% of 30-day mortality. No evidence was found of a more severe presentation or a worse clinical outcome in cases than in control patients. Conclusions: Pneumococcal pneumonia episodes requiring hospitalization in virologically suppressed patients with HIV with > 350 CD4+ T-cell count/mm3 were neither more severe nor had worse prognosis compared with uninfected patients. These results support the fact that such patients do not need treatment, admission, or care sites different to the general population

Affective practices, care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Scientific knowledge-making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell 2012) which can be understood together as 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organisational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives

PrEP (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis) and its possibilities for clinical practice

In this article, we reflect on the possibilities that PrEP (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis) raises for HIV specialist clinicians. Often neglected, yet a direct participant at the intersection of a complex tension within public health debates on how to reduce HIV transmission and the sexual sociability of individuals, we reflect on current thinking of health practitioners involved in the day-to-day practice of prescribing PrEP. Drawing on interviews with practitioners in the context of UK sexual health and HIV specialist medicine, while bearing in mind neoliberal critiques and process studies of medical science, we propose that PrEP invites the possibility for reconstituting approaches to sex and risk

Violence and creation: the recovery of the body in the work of Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain justly deserves it place as one the pivotal works that opened up the field of ‘body studies’. The text needs to be evaluated in the retrospective terms of the field it established, and also with respect to the changing status of both ‘torture’ and ‘war’ in contemporary state politics. Scarry’s analysis of the relationship between making and unmaking, tools and weapons, under-estimates the reversibility and the situated relational character of these processes and artefacts. The changing nature of modern conflict, and the rising concern with global terrorism rather than ‘conventional’ and ‘nuclear’ war, makes the ‘referential instability’ of the body difficult to recuperate in post-conflict discourse. At the same, the normalisation of the logic of torture in the contemporary governance of the bodies of the most vulnerable in society makes Scarry’s analysis all the more prescient

Doing a transversal method: developing an ethics of care in a collaborative research project

Beck and Sznaider call for ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences doing a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in Science and Technology Studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a ‘transversal method’. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and in our ethnography gave rise to three practical challenges: 1) going beyond the individual project; 2) using each other’s field notes; 3) working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges we reflect on how this method required that we practice three modes of care: thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within