(Re)birthing the maternal

The aim of this essay is to explore the political and ethical potential of (re)birthing through Barad’s conceptualisation of transmateriality. This article puts Barad’s thought on entanglement, emergence, and responsibility into conversation with other work in feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis that has grappled with questions of the maternal, birthing, and ethics. On the one hand, this encounter suggests that there are other ways of posing questions of separation, responsibility, and power through the maternal that might challenge aspects of Barad’s telling. But at the same time, by bringing Barad’s thought into these conversations, I show how Barad’s transpositions of (re)birthing have the potential to radically re-open and trans*figure feminist ethics and politics via a more dispersed, immoderate, and ultimately queer perspective on how the ethics that inheres in the coming into (non)being of the world

Spacetimeunconscious

This article argues for an understanding of material geographies as invested with an unconscious dimension. I put forward the notion of spacetimeunconscious not as an inverse, double, or ‘other’ to Karen Barad's concept of spacetimematter, but as a supplement. Manifesting the spacetimeunconscious through the technique of montage, I draw together a range of phenomena, from the icing of water and the flashing of lightning to the awakenings of traumatised and displaced subjects. Across these juxtaposed parts, I argue that the unfolding of space and time responds to the enigmatic, irreducible message of the unconscious in the real. Spacetimeunconscious arrives as the ambassador of an unknown knowledge remembered for – or in the place of – a forgetful substance: water, dreamer, or electron. In an echo of the analytic method, I use montage to create generative connections, discontinuities, and instabilities between events, poetry, literature, and film, in the interstices of which the spacetimeunconscious may make an appearance

Towards a post-mathematical topology

This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of topology both overstretch topology’s conceptual merit and limit its insights for spatial thinking. We show how topology, with its structuralist and modernist baggage, requires some theoretical reworking to be put to work by poststructuralist geographers. Our purpose is not to consolidate a specific topological approach for geographers, but to call for an ongoing consideration of what topology offers poststructuralist spatial theories

Undoing mastery: With ambivalence?

In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne’s article ‘Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography’. We do so by picking up ambivalence—or more precisely, ambivalence about ambivalence—as a tool with which Ruez and Cockayne leave us. We find this tool somewhat difficult to grasp, but we understand this as part of its design. Ambivalence undoes the subject’s mastery. In doing so, we find that an airing of ambivalence gives other kinds of entangled, indeterminate, and unknowing relations room to breathe

The space of encounter and the making of difference: The entangled lives of Alevi and Sunni neighbours in Turkey

The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also how encounters are conditioned by and productive of relations of power and inequality. Our study contributes to this reworking, and to feminist critiques of space and politics, by centring the spatiality of encounter in the entanglement of neighbours. Drawing on our focus group research (2013–2016) with Alevis and Sunnis in Istanbul and Malatya, we argue that difficult questions of difference, responsibility, and power come to the fore in neighbour relations. While our study underlines how Sunni supremacism and Alevi precarity are constituted in the everyday lives of neighbours, we also find that there is a transformational potential in these encounters that is not fully (re)absorbed into structures of Alevi–Sunni difference. We argue that, across the blurry boundaries of home and neighbourhood spaces, the unbidden intimacies of living in proximity (the drift of smells and sounds, the lines of sight that connect balconies and windows, the presence of neighbours at the thresholds and in the spaces of each other's homes) mean that encounters between neighbours both fuel and trouble the marking out of what is shared and what is separate, what is tolerable and what crosses a line. Our study thereby advances an understanding of the space of encounter, the making of difference, and the political and ethical significance of this entanglement

The Iowa Homemaker vol.4, no.3-4

Table of Contents Canning and Its Bacteriology by Clarissa Clark, page 1 Book Binding for Summer Afternoons by Marvel Secor, page 2 Salads and Sandwiches by Ida Mae Shilling, page 3 Clothes for Tiny Tots by Harriet Allen, page 4 The Food with the Flower’s Flavor by Agnes Sorenson, page 5 “Thirty-five Cents Worth of Food” by Anna Sorenson, page 6 Once Upon a Time by Marvel Secor, page 6 Nutrition Work in Iowa by Viola Jammer, page 7 Pleasant, Practical Porches by Edna Armstrong, page 7 Homemaker as Citizen by Dr. Alice Salomon, page 8 Protein Foods of the Japanese by Sarah Field, page 9 Who’s There and Where by Helen Putnam, page 10 Editorial Page, page 11 The Eternal Question, page 12 National Story Contest by Grace V. Gray, page 13 Bits About Cheese by Katherine Holden, page 1

Encountering Berlant part two: cruel and other optimisms

Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of ‘cruel optimism’. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an ‘object’ holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as ‘crisis ordinariness’ and ‘impasse’, cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm. By writing from diverse encounters with Berlant's work, they move the concept in multiple directions, juxtaposing it with other optimisms across a variety of empirical scenes and locations. The result is a repository of what cruel optimism, and Berlant's mode of thinking-feeling more broadly, offer geographers and others

Distinct phenotypes associated with mangrove and lagoon habitats in two widespread caribbean corals, porites astreoides and porites divaricata.

AbstractAs coral reefs experience dramatic declines in coral cover throughout the tropics, there is an urgent need to understand the role that non-reef habitats, such as mangroves, play in the ecological niche of corals. Mangrove habitats present a challenge to reef-dwelling corals because they can differ dramatically from adjacent reef habitats with respect to key environmental parameters, such as light. Because variation in light within reef habitats is known to drive intraspecific differences in coral phenotype, we hypothesized that coral species that can exploit both reef and mangrove habitats will exhibit predictable differences in phenotypes between habitats. To investigate how intraspecific variation, driven by either local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity, might enable particular coral species to exploit these two qualitatively different habitat types, we compared the phenotypes of two widespread Caribbean corals, Porites divaricata and Porites astreoides, in mangrove versus lagoon habitats on Turneffe Atoll, Belize. We document significant differences in colony size, color, structural complexity, and corallite morphology between habitats. In every instance, the phenotypic differences between mangrove prop root and lagoon corals exhibited consistent trends in both P. divaricata and P. astreoides. We believe this study is the first to document intraspecific phenotypic diversity in corals occupying mangrove prop root versus lagoonal patch reef habitats. A difference in the capacity to adopt an alternative phenotype that is well suited to the mangrove habitat may explain why some reef coral species can exploit mangroves, while others cannot.Published versio

Impact of different mass drug administration strategies for gaining and sustaining control of <i>Schistosoma mansoni</i> and <i>Schistosoma haematobium</i> infection in Africa

This report summarizes the design and outcomes of randomized controlled operational research trials performed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE) from 2009 to 2019. Their goal was to define the effectiveness and test the limitations of current WHO-recommended schistosomiasis control protocols by performing large-scale pragmatic trials to compare the impact of different schedules and coverage regimens of praziquantel mass drug administration (MDA). Although there were limitations to study designs and performance, analysis of their primary outcomes confirmed that all tested regimens of praziquantel MDA significantly reduced local; Schistosoma; infection prevalence and intensity among school-age children. Secondary analysis suggested that outcomes in locations receiving four annual rounds of MDA were better than those in communities that had treatment holiday years, in which no praziquantel MDA was given. Statistical significance of differences was obscured by a wider-than-expected variation in community-level responses to MDA, defining a persistent hot spot obstacle to MDA success. No MDA schedule led to elimination of infection, even in those communities that started at low prevalence of infection, and it is likely that programs aiming for elimination of transmission will need to add supplemental interventions (e.g., snail control, improvement in water, sanitation and hygiene, and behavior change interventions) to achieve that next stage of control. Recommendations for future implementation research, including exploration of the value of earlier program impact assessment combined with intensification of intervention in hot spot locations, are discussed

Evaluation of Urine CCA Assays for Detection of Schistosoma mansoni Infection in Western Kenya

Although accurate assessment of the prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni is important for the design and evaluation of control programs, the most widely used tools for diagnosis are limited by suboptimal sensitivity, slow turn-around-time, or inability to distinguish current from former infections. Recently, two tests that detect circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) in urine of patients with schistosomiasis became commercially available. As part of a larger study on schistosomiasis prevalence in young children, we evaluated the performance and diagnostic accuracy of these tests—the carbon test strip designed for use in the laboratory and the cassette format test intended for field use. In comparison to 6 Kato-Katz exams, the carbon and cassette CCA tests had sensitivities of 88.4% and 94.2% and specificities of 70.9% and 59.4%, respectively. However, because of the known limitations of the Kato-Katz assay, we also utilized latent class analysis (LCA) incorporating the CCA, Kato-Katz, and schistosome-specific antibody results to determine their sensitivities and specificities. The laboratory-based CCA test had a sensitivity of 91.7% and a specificity of 89.4% by LCA while the cassette test had a sensitivity of 96.3% and a specificity of 74.7%. The intensity of the reaction in both urine CCA tests reflected stool egg burden and their performance was not affected by the presence of soil transmitted helminth infections. Our results suggest that urine-based assays for CCA may be valuable in screening for S. mansoni infections