Environmental Dis-ease. Co-productions of Toxic Politics

In the winter semester of 2022, the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology hosts four film screenings in the presence of the filmmakers. Discussions will address the anthropology of the body, peace, art, wildlife conservation, and the role of documentary film as a form of anthropological work. Tuesday, October 25, 2022 6pm/Seminarraum A Workshop Environmental Dis-ease Screening of The Body Blow (2022) followed by Q&

Persistent afterimages: The living structure of bodies, and archives

Through moving-image, discursive events, text and publication, this research critically explores the spatial connections between ideology, bodies and buildings, exploring the powerful tensions at play within the architecture of health for social and civic improvement. Through practice-led enquiry and archival analysis, I reflect on the tenets of modernism inherent in public design and common assets, critically examining what is activated through my intervention within this discourse. A central question being: How do we ‘observe’ such radical social experiments in the production of health and wellbeing from the locus of the present? At the core of this enquiry are two extensive case studies, The Peckham Pioneer Health Centre (1931-1950) and Park Hill Estate Sheffield (1961-2004). These contrasting schemes are the cornerstones of my practice-based research and thesis. Both buildings and their respective archives offer a snapshot in time, representative of two crucial moments in health and social reform in the interwar and post-war periods. The Pioneer Health Centre, built before the foundation of the Welfare State and 20 years prior to the formation of the NHS, and Park Hill Estate, active at the peak of the welfare state, coming into decline in the 1980s. By utilising my practice-based methodologies, this research critically unpicks how bodies perform the architecture of power and consequently, in what way embodiment becomes the catalyst for a variety of forms of mapping, metaphor, analogy and blurring – both within the realisation of utopic architectural health proposals for social remodeling, and as a method of navigation, experimentation and provocation within my own practice. The survey, the body and its attendant technologies become key tools to test and provoke the boundaries active within the archive, between observed and observer, body and building, modernity and obsolescence. The gaps and omissions left open and slippery in both archives, materialise the question of observation: who is being watched and what is the apparatus of the observer? Who is invisible? In examining the ideological implications of architecture as an embodied instrument, and data as a diagnostic tool driving a solutionist approach to complex social problems, images and their afterlife become central to every aspect of the research. Whether the trace left in an archive, the production of medical diagnostic images, or the realisation of an architectural plan, I am thinking through notions of afterimage. What is an image, how can it be used to navigate archival, present, and speculative societal space? Not only an optical phenomenon or purely a metaphorical tool, afterimage in this context describes both a method of technological surveillance and acts as a historical interface between the eye of the researcher and the material of their research. What anchors this enquiry is an interest in both case studies as sites in flux – archives perpetually unsettled and unfixed. Whether through change of use or falling into dereliction, it is in their uncertain state between past vision and present reality that they speak to the ongoing issues they come to represent. Using methods of co-inquiry, I set out to find a shared language that sits in-between, connecting architectural materiality with embodied knowledges, archives, entangled and physically sited in on-going lived experience and encounter. In tracing the decay, maintenance is exposed both in its utility and as a discourse. What are we protecting? What are we being asked to remember? This practiceled research draws out architecture not only as governmental agent, but an actor in its own right, asking in what way the historical apparatus of publicly activated architecture as an instrument of health becomes a critical tool and witness

Canonical and Atypical E2Fs Regulate the Mammalian Endocycle

SUMMARY The endocycle is a variant cell cycle consisting of successive DNA synthesis and Gap phases that yield highly polyploid cells. Although essential for metazoan development, relatively little is known about its control or physiologic role in mammals. Using novel lineage-specific cre mice we identified two opposing arms of the E2F program, one driven by canonical transcription activation (E2F1, E2F2 and E2F3) and the other by atypical repression (E2F7 and E2F8), that converge on the regulation of endocycles in vivo. Ablation of canonical activators in the two endocycling tissues of mammals, trophoblast giant cells in the placenta and hepatocytes in the liver, augmented genome ploidy, whereas ablation of atypical repressors diminished ploidy. These two antagonistic arms coordinate the expression of a unique G2/M transcriptional program that is critical for mitosis, karyokinesis and cytokinesis. These results provide in vivo evidence for a direct role of E2F family members in regulating non-traditional cell cycles in mammals

I care by...

The Care research group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) was conceived in the last week of June 2020, a month after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, an act which catalysed global protests on systemic racism and police brutality. In the UK, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to show solidarity with demonstrators in the US. Coinciding with the easing of the lockdown restrictions imposed to manage the coronavirus, the marches shone a light on the government’s failure to protect Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people from the disproportionate risk posed by COVID- 19, and on the police’s increased use of stop and search in areas with large BAME populations. The pandemic has shone the harshest of lights on the question of care in the age of neoliberalism: who gets it; who needs it; who does it; who controls it. The Care research group, comprising staff and postgraduate researchers within the School of Arts and Humanities at the RCA, works in this light. Over the course of a year, as the inequalities of the virus were becoming all too clear, the group regularly came together via Zoom to reflect on: the question of how to care for the human body in the technical-patriarchal societies the virus has re-inscribed; the ‘un-doing’ of what Judith Butler describes as the binary of vulnerability and resistance; the politically-transformative potential of prioritising care (rooted in empathy, solidarity, kinship) over capitalist gain; the activation of creative research practices (including but by no means limited to writing, looking, painting, drawing, filming, performing, collecting, assembling, curating, making public) as means of caring/transforming. The group’s activities through the year of trying, failing, and trying again to care for its work and members are gathered in a co-authored Declaration of Care, published here, and expanded upon with attention to some of the methods group members developed in their research through practice. The Declaration was recited in a participatory performance with invited artist Jade Montserrat on 10 March 2021. Over the course of a two-hour webinar, participants including members of the public were invited to draw alongside Montserrat with whatever materials they had to hand as they listened to texts on the vulnerabilities of bodies, the structuring of care within institutions, and the tactile, sensory, healing qualities of creative practice. This book includes a selection of the participants’ drawings, a Reader comprising the texts that were shared, and Montserrat’s drawings created through the performance. Ahead of the performance, Montserrat delivered an address to the Care research group which looked back on a lifetime of calling for a kind of care that was never provided. Excerpts from Montserrat’s address are included here too, alongside a text and image which reflect on the group’s affective reactions to the experience of listening to it, titled Episode. The Declaration is a list of methods (approaches, processes, techniques), an enumeration of how Care research group members have worked, and would like to work: ‘I care by…’. This is a statement which has reverberated throughout the year, which bears repeating, which resounds still. Gemma Blackshaw, Care research group convenor, 2020–202

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

An Anatomy of Maintenance

The harshest of lights shines on the question of care in the age of neo-liberalism and globalisation: who gets it, who needs it, who does it, who controls it. Reflecting on the care phenomenon of 2020/21, the group invited the editors of ON CARE (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020) to return to their book conceived before the pandemic. As part of that discussion, the group was asked to consider what is lack of care and what lacks in care. Their responses form this supplement to ON CARE, working with what was at hand, with what was missed, forgotten, neglected, ignored: CARE(LESS)

How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change

This book is an invitation to arts educators, cultural workers, facilitators, organisers and those who are interested in working collectively with others, who want to use creative practice to work towards change, through personal and social transformation. Drawing directly from projects generated by artists and groups of people over a decade of Serpentine Education and Civic programmes, How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change gathers together project notes and documentation, conversations, commissioned texts and exercises to ask: Where do we go when things fall apart, when home has been taken away, when the cracks appear? How do we find moments of rest, joy and pleasure within ongoing crisis? How do we organise? Designed to be used both within organisations and as a tool to critique them, How We Hold supports dissenting and oppositional conversations, and offers pragmatic challenges to neoliberal and colonial models of education and administration still found in museums, arts organisations and other institutions today. The book uplifts and celebrates the creativity and resistance of artists and organisers, and the many people have shaped these projects—from children in nursery to labour organisers, educators and carers, young people in academy schools and those navigating the immigration system—who find hope, possibility and life in the most difficult of circumstances. How We Hold is edited by Jemma Egan, Layla Gatens, Elizabeth Graham, Amal Khalaf and Alex Thorp. How We Hold Contributors Abdullah, ACT ESOL Research Group, agency for agency, Nelly Alfandari, Anti Raids Network, Barby Asante, Ain Bailey, Camille Barton, Khairani Barokka, Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance, Zahra Bei, Bedfellows, Beverley Bennett, Jay Bernard, Becontree Broadcasting Station, Birmingham Asylum and Refugee Association, Blak Outside, Sonia Boyce, Clare Butcher, Helen Cammock, Carlton Dene Care Home, Centre for Urban Pedagogy, Teresa Cisneros, Chloe Cooper, Collective Creativity, Cradle Community, Sam Curtis, Phoebe Davies, Kim Dhillon, English for Action, Patrick Farmer, FerArts, Andrea Francke, Christine Gasper, Gateway Academy, Joon-Lynn Goh, Green Shoes Arts, Jess Harrington, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, bell hooks, Adelita Husni Bey, Evan Ifekoya, Implicated Theatre, Interfaith Sanctuary Shelter, Invisible Spaces of Parenthood, Adam James, Rae Johnson, Jacob V Joyce, Raisa Kabir, Anton Kats, Jasleen Kaur, Farzana Khan, Suzanne Lacy, Latin American Workers Association, Taylor Le Melle, Gail Lewis, John Lockhart, London Asbestos Awareness Group, Paul Maheke, Kadeem Marshall-Oxley, Emma McGarry, Meenadchi, Micro Rainbow, Migrants Resource Centre, Jenny Moore, Nawi Collective, New Town Culture, no.w.here, Harold Offeh, Omikemi, Other Cinemas, Pause, PEARL, Rory Pilgrim, Albert Potrony, Portman Early Childhood Centre, Raju Rage, Nisha Ramayya, RESOLVE Collective, Frances Rifkin, Ilona Sagar, Azad Ashim Sharma, Beverley Skeggs, Skin Deep, Unite’s Hotel Workers union, Daniella Valz Gen, Nicolas Vass, Voices for Domestic Workers, Voices That Shake!, Jackie Wang, Adam J B Walker, Ed Webb-Ingall, Westminster Academy, Westmead Elderly Resource Centre, Becky Winstanley, Chris X, Abbas Zahedi, Rehana Zaman, and others

Art & the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA

three-day workshop, co-convened by Confabulations and the Health & Care Research Cluster at the RCA