Life under Siege: The Jews of Magdeburg under Nazi Rule

This regional study documents the life and the destruction of the Jewish community of Magdeburg, in the Prussian province of Saxony, between 1933 and 1945. As this is the first comprehensive and academic study of this community during the Nazi period, it has contributed to both the regional historiography of German Jewry and the historiography of the Shoah in Germany. In both respects it affords a further understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Commencing this study at the beginning of 1933 enables a comprehensive view to emerge of the community as it was on the eve of the Nazi assault. The study then analyses the spiralling events that led to its eventual destruction. The story of the Magdeburg Jewish community in both the public and private domains has been explored from the Nazi accession to power in 1933 up until April 1945, when only a handful of Jews in the city witnessed liberation. This study has combined both archival material and oral history to reconstruct the period. Secondary literature has largely been incorporated and used in a comparative sense and as reference material. This study has interpreted and viewed the period from an essentially Jewish perspective. That is to say, in documenting the experiences of the Jews of Magdeburg, this study has focused almost exclusively on how this population simultaneously lived and grappled with the deteriorating situation. Much attention has been placed on how it reacted and responded at key junctures in the processes of disenfranchisement, exclusion and finally destruction. This discussion also includes how and why Jews reached decisions to abandon their Heimat and what their experiences with departure were. In the final chapter of the community’s story, an exploration has been made of how the majority of those Jews who remained endured the final years of humiliation and stigmatisation. All but a few perished once the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ reached Magdeburg in April 1942. The epilogue of this study charts the experiences of those who remained in the city, some of whom survived to tell their story

Life under siege: the jews of Magdeburg under Nazi rule

This regional study documents the life and the destruction of the Jewish community of Magdeburg, in the Prussian province of Saxony, between 1933 and 1945. As this is the first comprehensive and academic study of this community during the Nazi period, it has contributed to both the regional historiography of German Jewry and the historiography of the Shoah in Germany. In both respects it affords a further understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Commencing this study at the beginning of 1933 enables a comprehensive view to emerge of the community as it was on the eve of the Nazi assault. The study then analyses the spiralling events that led to its eventual destruction. The story of the Magdeburg Jewish community in both the public and private domains has been explored from the Nazi accession to power in 1933 up until April 1945, when only a handful of Jews in the city witnessed liberation. This study has combined both archival material and oral history to reconstruct the period. Secondary literature has largely been incorporated and used in a comparative sense and as reference material. This study has interpreted and viewed the period from an essentially Jewish perspective. That is to say, in documenting the experiences of the Jews of Magdeburg, this study has focused almost exclusively on how this population simultaneously lived and grappled with the deteriorating situation. Much attention has been placed on how it reacted and responded at key junctures in the processes of disenfranchisement, exclusion and finally destruction. This discussion also includes how and why Jews reached decisions to abandon their Heimat and what their experiences with departure were. In the final chapter of the community’s story, an exploration has been made of how the majority of those Jews who remained endured the final years of humiliation and stigmatisation. All but a few perished once the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ reached Magdeburg in April 1942. The epilogue of this study charts the experiences of those who remained in the city, some of whom survived to tell their story

What spaces? Designing authentic, sustainable online learning spaces for children with diabetes

This paper presents a work-in-progress of how social networking, Web 2.0 and emerging communication technologies might be successfully used to support authentic self-management education for children aged 11-13 years who are living with Type 1 diabetes. The study employs a mixed-method approach that has been adopted within a Design Based Research framework. This paper explains the research problem, the theoretical framework that will underpin the study and the overall research design

Classroom Discussions in Education, edited by P Karen Murphy (2018), Routledge, New York and London.

We hear a lot about bubbles and echo chambers these days. People talk only to others who have similar ideas to themselves. Supporters of political parties, believers in conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), members of many other groups continually talk to fellow believers, and seldom seriously consider what outsiders say. However, we need to acknowledge that we ourselves also exist within bubbles. While perhaps not in the same league as the examples above, philosophy for/with children (P4/wC) advocates and researchers can also fall into the trap of listening only to others within our field. In many ways, this is understandable. Over more than 50 years, the P4/wC literature has ballooned, and it is unlikely that any one person has had the time to be able to read it all, let alone chasing down other literature. Yet we are not the only people who are interested in classroom discussions. For example, when I was doing my PhD, I read a fascinating and informative book by JT Dillon—Using Discussion in Classrooms—which I have never seen referenced in the P4/wC literature. The book under review here is another example. Published in the Ed Psych Insights series by Routledge, it is edited by P Karen Murphy, the Harry and Marion Royer Eberly Faculty Fellow and Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Of the eight other contributors to this book, seven are doctoral students, and one a post-doc, at either The Pennsylvania State University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is quite a tight little bubble: the Quality Talk bubble. Quality Talk (QT) is the name of the approach to classroom discussions devised by Murphy and her collaborators

Determinants of a transcriptionally competent environment at the GM-CSF promoter

Granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) is produced by T cells, but not B cells, in response to immune signals. GM-CSF gene activation in response to T-cell stimulation requires remodelling of chromatin associated with the gene promoter, and these changes do not occur in B cells. While the CpG methylation status of the murine GM-CSF promoter shows no correlation with the ability of the gene to respond to activation, we find that the basal chromatin environment of the gene promoter influences its ability to respond to immune signals. In unstimulated T cells but not B cells, the GM-CSF promoter is selectively marked by enrichment of histone acetylation, and association of the chromatin-remodelling protein BRG1. BRG1 is removed from the promoter upon activation concomitant with histone depletion and BRG1 is required for efficient chromatin remodelling and transcription. Increasing histone acetylation at the promoter in T cells is paralleled by increased BRG1 recruitment, resulting in more rapid chromatin remodelling, and an associated increase in GM-CSF mRNA levels. Furthermore, increasing histone acetylation in B cells removes the block in chromatin remodelling and transcriptional activation of the GM-CSF gene. These data are consistent with a model in which histone hyperacetylation and BRG1 enrichment at the GM-CSF promoter, generate a chromatin environment competent to respond to immune signals resulting in gene activation

'Space alone persistently determines' : the roles and relations of time and space in Kant and Meillassoux

This thesis addresses the criticism of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant put forward by Quentin Meillassoux under the charge of ‘correlationism.’ It uses Meillassoux’s interpretation of Kant as a starting point to develop an alternative interpretation in which space plays a central role within Kant’s thought, thus contributing to the wider philosophy of space. The argument progresses through an analysis of the three stages of dogmatism, skepticism and Criticism, which are central to Kant’s thought and which Meillassoux attempts to circumvent. It demonstrates how Kant develops his Critical philosophy through a rejection of dogmatism as a commitment to the principle of sufficient reason, which is reconfigured using the insights of Hume’s skepticism. Thus the system outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason is at heart a temporal philosophy, in which the principle of sufficient reason is reconceptualized in terms of the issue of timedetermination. Meillassoux’s alternative system of ‘speculative materialism,’ it is argued, proceeds along the same path: Criticizing the principle of sufficient reason and reconfiguring it through the insights of Hume’s skeptical problematization of induction, in order to assert a temporal philosophy based upon the ‘hyper-chaos’ of the ‘principle of unreason.’ However, with this unexpected parallel between Kant and Meillassoux in regard to the issue of time, the problematic role of space also becomes apparent. Meillassoux’s temporal philosophy is disrupted by his use of the spatial metaphor to fully express the features of time that he sets out, and thus space becomes a point of tension within his temporal system of ‘speculative materialism.’ Working back through the parallel between Meillassoux and Kant reveals that the role of space and its connection to time is also a problematic point of tension within Kant’s Critical philosophy and one that is central to his reworking of the Critique of Pure Reason for the 1787 B-Edition. Thus, through a detailed interpretation of the Critical philosophy, and especially its role in the Refutation of Idealism added to the B-Edition, the centrality of space within Kant’s system is reasserted and evaluated. This recognition of the importance of space and its relation to time within Kant’s system also provides the means to reassess Meillassoux’s criticism of Kant as a ‘correlationist’ and recast the debate between idealism and realism in the history of post-Kantian philosophy terms of the roles and relations of time and space

Stratospheric loading of sulfur from explosive volcanic eruptions

This paper is an attempt to measure our understanding of volcano/atmosphere interactions by comparing a box model of potential volcanogenic aerosol production and removal in the stratosphere with the stratospheric aerosol optical depth over the period of 1979 to 1994. Model results and observed data are in good agreement both in magnitude and removal rates for the two largest eruptions, El Chicho´n and Pinatubo. However, the peak of stratospheric optical depth occurs about nine months after the eruptions, four times longer than the model prediction, which is driven by actual SO2 measurements. For smaller eruptions, the observed stratospheric perturbation is typically much less pronounced than modeled, and the observed aerosol removal rates much slower than expected. These results indicate several limitations in our knowledge of the volcano-atmosphere reactions in the months following an eruption. Further, it is evident that much of the emitted sulfur from smaller eruptions fails to produce any stratospheric impact. This suggests a threshold whereby eruption columns that do not rise much higher than the tropopause (which decreases in height from equatorial to polar latitudes) are subject to highly efficient self-removal processes. For low latitude volcanoes during our period of study, eruption rates on the order of 50,000 m3/s (dense rock equivalent) were needed to produce a significant global perturbation in stratospheric optical depth, i.e., greater than 0.001. However, at high (.40°) latitudes, this level of stratospheric impact was produced by eruption rates an order of magnitude smaller