The Global Environmental Novel And The Politics Of Food

Consumption drives both global capitalism and the lives of literary texts, which may be consumed in two senses: they are purchased and they are read. Most literally, consumption means ingesting food. To consume is also to use environmental resources. In this dissertation, I scrutinize the entanglement of these several modes of consumption. I focus on food systems in an emergent literary genre, the “global environmental novel”: the contemporary novel that illuminates the intertwining of globalization and the environment. Such fictions come from both global South and North. I discuss contemporary authors from South Africa (Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb), South Asia (Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy), and the US (Ruth Ozeki), as well as predecessors from South Asia (Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay) and Ghana (Ama Ata Aidoo). Operating at the intersection of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and food studies, I situate novels in relation to social movements that invoke food, globalization, and environment. I also engage with ecofeminism, queer theory, modernist studies, and theories of the contemporary novel. The project explores the multifaceted social and environmental injustices, as well as possibilities for resistance, that are encapsulated or indexed by food. Food politics, I argue, are key to the global environmental novel: both in the realist sense that environmental justice struggles cluster around food, and in informing novelistic strategies to manage the scalar challenges of globalization and global environment. Such mammoth objects provoke a representational crisis: how can we picture (let alone save) something as large as the globe? To resort to abstraction or generalization is to universalize, to flatten out the unevenness of contributions and vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophe among different populations. To instead keep local particularity present while representing globality, global environmental novels synthesize the polyscalar facility of narrative fiction with the polyscalar nature of food politics. Food is immediate, somatic, quotidian, and intimate. Eating cultures and food access are also key to community and cultural identity. And food systems are expressions of power under global capitalism. Resonating across all these scales, food politics are an avenue to global yet specific narratives of entanglement between globalization and the environment

Activating Aroha

Brooke Fiafia reflects on her experiences attending the social movements conference with a group of fierce and loving women. While critiquing conference spaces, she talks about the aroha that drew her to this particular conference. Aroha, as she writes, is necessary for our shared humanity. It is what was activated in the creation of the conference and what was explored in conference conversations and sharings about transformation, connection, relationship, and showing up as our authentic selves

What Do Reviewers Want? Reflections on Editing the Journal for the Past Year

The peer review process can be challenging. In this essay, the journal’s editor and editorial assistant present a summary of reviewers’ comments to authors from the past year. In presenting themes across 79 reviews, this essay arms authors with knowledge about reviewers’ expectations for manuscripts submitted to the journal. A secondary aim of this essay is to encourage reviewers to continue providing supportive and helpful feedback. As the journal heads into its third year of publishing, we are well on our way to creating the first home for high-quality risk and crisis communication research from around the globe

The Nominating Committee As An Antecedent of Effective Corporate Governance

In this paper, we examine a possible antecedent to board effectiveness – the presence of a nominating committee. We argue that director cooptation by CEOs, and therefore ineffectual governance, may result from allowing CEOs to appoint sympathetic directors. Thus, because outside independent board members are more likely to be effective in their roles as monitors of the CEO, and because such members are more likely to have been selected by nominating committees, measures of board effectiveness should be positively associated with the presence of a nominating committee. Our results are largely consistent with our hypotheses, and are thus instructive in the design of optimal governance mechanisms. We find that firm profitability, frequency of compensation committee meetings, compensation committee size, and CEO experience of compensation committee members are all higher among firms with nominating committees

Two essays on incentives

I examine two sets of incentives faced by corporate CEOs to determine how they respond to those incentives. I compare firms that restate financial statements to firms that do not restate to test the hypotheses that bank monitoring should provide incentives to deter misreporting. For relatively less (more) severe misreporting, I find the likelihood of misreporting is positively related (unrelated) to bank borrowing, and that ex ante changes in bank debt are positive (unrelated) for misreporting firms versus control firms. These results suggest that bank monitoring is insufficient to deter or detect misreporting, rather that it may provide incentives for managers to engage in relatively less severe misreporting, consistent with the "debt covenant hypothesis". I next examine the incentives that CEOs have to increase firm value that result from their compensation packages and opportunities for advancement in the managerial labor market. Traditional methods for estimating pay-performance sensitivity exclude incentives that derive from opportunities for advancement in the managerial labor market and assume a linear relation between changes in pay and changes in performance. But results in recent literature imply that advancement opportunities may be a significant source of incentives and that the relation between changes in pay and changes in performance may depend upon the level of performance. I estimate payperformance sensitivities that incorporate these results. I find that although performance may be positively related to opportunities for advancement, the contribution to a CEO's total pay-performance sensitivity is too small to be economically significant. I also find that pay-performance sensitivities vary depending on the level of performance and may be higher or lower than estimates from linear models suggest. In sum, observed CEO pay packages may not be as suboptimal as some prior studies suggest

Large cardinals and gap-1 morasses

We present a new partial order for directly forcing morasses to exist that enjoys a significant homogeneity property. We then use this forcing in a reverse Easton iteration to obtain an extension universe with morasses at every regular uncountable cardinal, while preserving all n-superstrong (0<n<omega+1), hyperstrong and 1-extendible cardinals. In the latter case, a preliminary forcing to make the GCH hold is required. Our forcing yields morasses that satisfy an extra property related to the homogeneity of the partial order; we refer to them as mangroves and prove that their existence is equivalent to the existence of morasses. Finally, we exhibit a partial order that forces universal morasses to exist at every regular uncountable cardinal, and use this to show that universal morasses are consistent with n-superstrong, hyperstrong, and 1-extendible cardinals. This all contributes to the second author's outer model programme, the aim of which is to show that L-like principles can hold in outer models which nevertheless contain large cardinals.Comment: 49 page

Balance assessment in Multiple Sclerosis and cerebellar ataxia: rationale, protocol and demographic data

A core set of standardized balance measures are required for use in rehabilitation among people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and cerebellar ataxia. An earlier systematic review and Delphi survey identified the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), the Timed Up and Go test (TUG), Posture and Gait sub-component of the International Co-operative Ataxia Rating Scale (PG of ICARS) and the gait, sitting and stance sub-components of the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA Bal) as suitable balance measures. This study aims to estimate the reliability, validity and interpretability of these measures. This study will recruit 60 participants with multiple sclerosis with secondary cerebellar involvement across four centres in New Zealand and the United States of America. Participants will be assessed and videotaped performing the BBS, TUG, SARA Bal and PG of ICARS by trained physiotherapists. Barthel Index, Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), Disease duration, ICARS and SARA will also be assessed to determine validity. A second assessment to determine reliability will be conducted by assessors watching the video-recording. Data collection is in progress, 44 samples have been collected and the demographic data are presented. The findings of this study will recommend a core set of reliable, valid and interpretable measures that are suitable for clinical practice and research for the assessment of balance among adults with MS and cerebellar ataxia. Minimal Clinically Important Difference (MCID) and cut-off scores to predict the use of assistive walking device will be established

A Psychometric Analysis of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents Among Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Caregiver–Adolescent Agreement, Factor Structure, and Validity

Social anxiety is common among adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). An ongoing challenge for both research and clinical practice in ASD is the assessment of anxious symptomatology. Despite its widespread use in samples of youth with ASD, the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A) has not received psychometric evaluation within this population; thus, the validity of its use in research and clinical practice for ASD remains unclear. The present study conducted a psychometric analysis of caregiver and adolescent SAS-A forms in a sample of adolescents with ASD (N = 197). Results revealed (1) poor caregiver–adolescent item-level agreement, (2) a two-factor structure, (3) lack of measurement invariance between reporters, and (4) modest evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. Overall, findings suggest that this measure demonstrates reasonable psychometric properties in an ASD sample. Lack of measurement invariance, however, calls for careful interpretation of research involving the SAS-A in ASD samples, particularly when the primary goal is to compare adolescent and caregiver reports. The implications of these findings for future research and clinical practice are discussed

Leishmania donovani-induced expression of signal regulatory protein α on Kupffer cells enhances hepatic invariant NKT-cell activation

Signal regulatory protein α (SIRPα) and its cognate ligand CD47 have been documented to have a broad range of cellular functions in development and immunity. Here, we investigated the role of SIRPα–CD47 signalling in invariant NKT (iNKT) cell responses. We found that CD47 was required for the optimal production of IFN-γ from splenic iNKT cells following exposure to the αGalCer analogue PBS-57 and in vivo infection of mice with Leishmania donovani. Surprisingly, although SIRPα was undetectable in the liver of uninfected mice, the hepatic iNKT-cell response to infection was also impaired in CD47−/− mice. However, we found that SIRPα was rapidly induced on Kupffer cells following L. donovani infection, via a mechanism involving G-protein-coupled receptors. Thus, we describe a novel amplification pathway affecting cytokine production by hepatic iNKT cells, which may facilitate the breakdown of hepatic tolerance after infection

MicroRNA-510 mediated negative regulation of Caveolin-1 in fibroblasts promotes aggressive tumor growth

IntroductionIn the US, despite the recent decline in breast cancer deaths, a persistent mortality disparity exists between black and white women with breast cancer, with black women having a 41% higher death rate. Several studies are now reporting that racial disparities can exist independent of socioeconomic and standard of care issues, suggesting that biological factors may be involved. Caveolin-1 (Cav1) loss in the tumor stromal compartment is a novel clinical biomarker for predicting poor outcome in breast cancer including triple negative subtype, however the mechanism of Cav1 loss is unknown. We previously identified miR-510-5p as a novel oncomir and propose here that the high levels observed in patients is a novel mechanism leading to stromal Cav1 loss and worse outcomes.MethodsCav1 was identified as a direct target of miR-510-5p through luciferase, western blot and qPCR assays. Stromal cross talk between epithelial cells and fibroblasts was assessed in vitro using transwell co-culture assays and in vivo using xenograft assays.ResultsWe found that Cav1 is a direct target of miR-510-5p and that expression in fibroblasts results in an ‘activated’ phenotype. We propose that this could be important in the context of cancer disparities as we also observed increased levels of circulating miR-510-5p and reduced levels of stromal Cav1 in black women compared to white women with breast cancer. Finally, we observed a significant increase in tumor growth when tumor cells were co-injected with miR-510-5p expressing cancer associated fibroblasts in vivo.ConclusionWe propose that miR-510-5p mediated negative regulation of Cav1 in fibroblasts is a novel mechanism of aggressive tumor growth and may be a driver of breast cancer disparity