Too Much or Too Little? Paradoxes of Disability and Care Work in India

The notion of care often normalizes within it violence that can have devastating effects on the lives of disabled people. Cripping care critiques the normalization of such notions of care. This paper articulates this paradox of care within the lived experiences of disabled girls and their mothers as primary carers. Through extensive case studies of young, disabled girls and their carers in villages of West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Odisha in India—where abject poverty, lack of resources, and a dearth of sensitized social relationships remain entrenched—this paper problematizes care relationships, moving beyond social model approaches to include understandings from the Global South of what it might mean to crip care. The paper explores care relationships within the family, which valorize the emotional and physical labor of women in the garb of motherhood while negating the personhood of disabled daughters. While the care relationship between mother and daughter is enhanced by the affective bonds of empathy, emotional responsiveness, and perceptual attentiveness that transform intimate tasks into relationships of trust and demonstrations of trustworthiness, in the unforgiving realities of rural poverty in India the collective act of survival of such families needs to be contextualized within the debates about cripping care

Introduction. Debating Intersectionalities: Challenges for a Methodological Framework

Intersectionality is primarily an organizing principle which calls for reflexivity in the study of social characteristics, such that one marginality is not substituted for another and lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated. Critiques of intersectionality have feared that intersectionality results in the fragmentation of the opposition to structural oppression. We argue for the potentialities of a reflexive use of intersectionality rather than its rejection, for this intersectionality has to be applied as a method of research. Lived experiences provide the possibility to explore how intersectionality works in practice. By mapping the fractured nature of the everyday, a lived-experience approach allows us to be open to competing interpretations, thereby not only illustrating the multi-dimensionality of what is constructed as hegemonic fact, but also can in fact script some resistance to it. Consequently, this article thus argues in addition in favor of a radical intersectional praxis as a means of building coalitions across marginalities

Elasticity of Stiff Biopolymers

We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension relations and compare these with numerical treatments. We note the important role of boundary conditions in determining force-extension relations. The theoretical predictions presented here can be tested against single molecule experiments on neurofilaments and cytoskeletal filaments like actin and microtubules. Our work is motivated by the buckling of the cytoskeleton of a cell under compression, a phenomenon of interest to biology.Comment: Submitted for publication, five pages, three figure

Let's not forget plants.

'Many physicists see the interface with biology as an exciting place to be'. Athene Donald provides a personal perspective on working at the interface between the physical and biological sciences.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IOP at http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/11/5/053008

Tops and Writhing DNA

The torsional elasticity of semiflexible polymers like DNA is of biological significance. A mathematical treatment of this problem was begun by Fuller using the relation between link, twist and writhe, but progress has been hindered by the non-local nature of the writhe. This stands in the way of an analytic statistical mechanical treatment, which takes into account thermal fluctuations, in computing the partition function. In this paper we use the well known analogy with the dynamics of tops to show that when subjected to stretch and twist, the polymer configurations which dominate the partition function admit a local writhe formulation in the spirit of Fuller and thus provide an underlying justification for the use of Fuller's "local writhe expression" which leads to considerable mathematical simplification in solving theoretical models of DNA and elucidating their predictions. Our result facilitates comparison of the theoretical models with single molecule micromanipulation experiments and computer simulations.Comment: 17 pages two figure

Euler buckling in red blood cells: An optically driven biological micromotor

We investigate the physics of an optically-driven micromotor of biological origin. A single, live red blood cell, when placed in an optical trap folds into a rod-like shape. If the trapping laser beam is circularly polarized, the folded RBC rotates. A model based on the concept of buckling instabilities captures the folding phenomenon; the rotation of the cell is simply understood using the Poincar\`e sphere. Our model predicts that (i) at a critical intensity of the trapping beam the RBC shape undergoes large fluctuations and (ii) the torque is proportional to the intensity of the laser beam. These predictions have been tested experimentally. We suggest a possible mechanism for emergence of birefringent properties in the RBC in the folded state