'A vision for the future': Professional ethos as boundary work in Mozambique's public sector

Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through globalised markers of consumption and individual social advancement. However, as this ethnographic material from Mozambique's mining and hydrocarbons sector suggests, even under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, alternative imaginings of middle-classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, work ethos and professionalism as contributing to a larger narrative of national progress persist as echoes of socialist technical assistance among the technocrats managing the sector. This article explores how professionalism is constructed across regime changes, from a socialist, high modernist socio-political project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, to the current, neoliberal economic and political dispensation that requires of public administrators to promote a business-friendly climate. Professionalism, I show, cuts across generations despite considerable differences, indexing this class's shifting claims on the state

Disrupted Dreams of Development: Neoliberal Efficiency and Crisis in Angola

Thanks to oil revenues, since the end of the war in 2002, Angola has largely eschewed the usual donor conditionalities in its state-led reconstruction process; the 2014 oil price drop, however, revealed the limits of this economic miracle. Coupled with a long-overdue political transition inside the ruling party, this moment of designated crisis has opened up spaces for elites to inject their continued projects of accumulation with the moralizing language of neoliberalism – talk of efficiency, responsibility, and the proverbial tightening of the belt. Based on fieldwork around the recently modernized transport hub of Lobito, the article examines how these tropes have been deployed and adapted, first to position Angola as a ‘business-friendly’ environment, and then to justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures. By examining the everyday working of real existing neoliberalism through the eyes of the port’s users, the article suggests that Angola’s turbulent history provides a fertile ground to advance, in this moment of crisis, agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of common-sensical reasonableness and national solidarity

Engineering the middle classes: State institutions and the aspirations of citizenship

The 'middle class' has become the subject of euphoric narratives of growth and improving standards of living around the globe, and the object of government interventions and social engineering. Government interventions may be ineffective, have unintended outcomes, or be left barely articulated. Yet the place of the middle classes as embodying national success, stability and modernity has taken on the power of common sense. Modern states have long made middle classes, and in turn been legitimated by them. Indeed, 'state' and 'middle class' are sharply normative concepts - bound up with ideals as much as ideas. They represent interrelated, morally loaded projects of demarcation, distinction and recognition. This special issue examines how state institutions make middle classes through such normative commitments, and how they are made by them in turn

Civil Wars and State Formation: Violence and the Politics of Legitimacy in Angola, Côte d'Ivoire and South Sudan

Dominant narratives and theories developed at the turn of the 21st century to account for civil wars in Africa converged around two main ideas. First that the increase in civil wars across Africa was the expression of the weakness and collapse of state institutions. Second, guerrilla movements, once viewed as the ideological armed wings of Cold War contenders, were seen as roving bandits interested in plundering the spoils left by decaying states and primarily driven by economic or personal interests. However, recent research has challenged such accounts by looking into the day-to-day politics of civil war beyond armed groups' motives to wage war against the established order. Indeed, civil wars, while being the cause of immense suffering, contribute to shaping and producing political orders. Thus, if we are to understand how stable political institutions can be built after civil war, it is essential to study the institutions that regulate political life during conflict. This implies a need to take into account governance institutions and relations in areas beyond the control of the state. This working paper1 thus focuses on political orders put in place by armed groups, their strategies to legitimise their existence and claim to power, and on the extent to which they manage to institutionalise their military power and transform it into political domination. To this end, we take a broad perspective by looking at (dis)continuities between political orders established under rebel rule and post-war state formation. Drawing on a Weberian conception of the making of political orders as the passage from raw power (Macht) to domination (Herrschaft), we interrogate the social fabric of legitimacy in areas under rebel control during conflict and analyse how it relates to state formation in the post-conflict phase. Based on a political anthropology of governance and state practices in three different countries (Angola, Côte d'Ivoire and South Sudan) this paper provides empirical and theoretical insights into state formation in Africa as well as into domination and legitimacy. It also links to current policy debates on statebuilding and peacebuilding in fragile contexts. The paper starts with a review of the literature on civil wars and statebuilding. It then presents the analytical framework that was developed for the three case studies, which constitute the bulk of the paper

Northeast Colorado Extreme Rains Interpreted in a Climate Change Context

The probability for an extreme five-day September rainfall event over northeast Colorado, as was observed in early September 2013, has likely decreased due to climate change

Implementation and Validation of Uncertainty Analysis of Available Energy and Available Power

The Idaho National Laboratory does extensive testing and evaluation of state-of-the-art batteries and ultracapacitors for hybrid-electric vehicle applications as part of the FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program. Significant parameters of interest include Available Energy and Available Power. Documenting the uncertainty analysis of these derived parameters is a very complex problem. The error is an unknown combination of both linearity and offset; the analysis presented in this paper computes the uncertainty both ways and then the most conservative method is assumed (which is the worst case scenario). Each method requires the use of over 134 equations, some of which are derived and some are measured values. This includes the measurement device error (calibration error) and bit resolution and analog noise error (standard deviation error). The implementation of these equations to acquire a closed form answer was done using Matlab (an array based programming language) and validated using Monte Carlo simulations

On the use and abuse of networks in academia

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Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences

We are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this Manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon. We mobilise an extended notion of research output, which encompasses the work of building and maintaining the systems, processes, and relations of production that make scholarship possible. We believe that the humanities and social sciences are too often disengaged from the public and material afterlives of their scholarship. We worry that our fields are sleepwalking into a new phase of control and capitalisation, to include continued corporate extraction of value and transparency requirements designed by managers, entrepreneurs, and politicians. We fervently believe that OA can be a powerful tool to advance the ends of civil society and social movements. But opening up the products of our scholarship without questioning how this is done, who stands to profit from it, what model of scholarship is being normalised, and who stands to be silenced by this process may come at a particularly high cost for scholars in the humanities and social sciences

A human in vitro neuronal model for studying homeostatic plasticity at the network level

Mechanisms that underlie homeostatic plasticity have been extensively investigated at single-cell levels in animal models, but are less well understood at the network level. Here, we used microelectrode arrays to characterize neuronal networks following induction of homeostatic plasticity in human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived glutamatergic neurons co-cultured with rat astrocytes. Chronic suppression of neuronal activity through tetrodotoxin (TTX) elicited a time-dependent network re-arrangement. Increased expression of AMPA receptors and the elongation of axon initial segments were associated with increased network excitability following TTX treatment. Transcriptomic profiling of TTX-treated neurons revealed up-regulated genes related to extracellular matrix organization, while down-regulated genes related to cell communication; also astrocytic gene expression was found altered. Overall, our study shows that hiPSC-derived neuronal networks provide a reliable in vitro platform to measure and characterize homeostatic plasticity at network and single-cell levels; this platform can be extended to investigate altered homeostatic plasticity in brain disorders.The work was supported by funding from the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Programme (H2020/2014–2020) under grant agreement no. 728018 (Eat2beNICE) (to B.F.); ERA-NET NEURON-102 SYNSCHIZ grant (NWO) 013-17-003 4538 (to D.S.); China Scholarship Council 201906100038 (to X.Y.); ISCIII /MINECO (PT17/0009/0019) and FEDER (to A.E.C.); and M.M. was supported by an internal grant from the Donders Centre for Medical Neurosciences of the Radboud University Medical Center

What works to increase charitable donations? A meta-review with meta-meta-analysis

Many charities rely on donations to support their work addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. We conducted a meta-review to determine what interventions work to increase charitable donations. We found 21 systematic reviews incorporating 1339 primary studies and over 2,139,938 participants. Our meta-meta-analysis estimated the average effect of an intervention on charitable donation size and incidence: r = 0.08 (95% CI [0.03, 0.12]). Due to limitations in the included systematic reviews, we are not certain this estimate reflects the true overall effect size. The most robust evidence found suggests charities could increase donations by (1) emphasising individual beneficiaries, (2) increasing the visibility of donations, (3) describing the impact of the donation, and (4) enacting or promoting tax-deductibility of the charity. We make recommendations for improving primary research and reviews about charitable donations, and how to apply the meta-review findings to increase charitable donations