Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance

This paper expands on the quotidian perspectives of ‘ordinary cities’ and ‘everyday resistance’ and explores the migrant urbanisms that emerge out of movement, mixing and exchange. The paper argues for a shift beyond a focus on encounter across racial and ethnic difference, to engage with whether everyday social practice can effectively contaminate political practice. The question is raised within the understanding that everyday life is rooted in inequality, and extends to an analysis of migrant participation in city life as creative expression and everyday resistance. Against a pernicious migrancy problematic in the UK that defines migration as an external force assaulted on national integrity from the outside, I explore migrant urbanisms as participatory practices of reconfiguration within ordinary cities, where diversity and innovation intersect. At the core of this exploration is how migrants are active in the making of urban space and urban politics

Mooring ‘super-diversity’ to a brutal migration milieu

The migration milieu in which ‘super-diversity’ locates is not a crisis of human mobility, but the crisis of political imagination to engage with mobility as integral to twenty-first century citizenship. The migration milieu of Western capitalism actively requires and refutes the migrant, making a volatile life-world of migration in public discourse, policy and everyday life. Rather than focus on the current conceptual reach of super-diversity, my paper directly engages with whether super-diversity has explanatory cogency for this brutal migration milieu. Vertovec’s original outline of super-diversity points to accelerated migrations in which the elaboration of borders and circumventions have become ‘more multiple’, ‘more stratified’ (Vertovec 2007). While migration processes have discernible scale, breadth and pace, I argue that it is the milieu of history, atmosphere and ideology that is formative. My aim is to relate processes of diversitymaking to the punitive effects of the Europe

Animating the urban vortex: new sociological urgencies

The current era of global urbanization is defined by a convergence of economic and political crises, which requires urgent sociological reflection on the meaning of the ‘urban’ today. This paper responds to the current rethinking of worldwide processes of urbanization sparked off by Brenner and Schmid (2013) and Brenner (2013), and argues for a renewed sociological approach to urban formations that probe beyond the economic logic of urban “de-territorialization”, towards the capricious life-worlds and forms of planetary organization that are of the urban. We pursue a theory of the urban vortex to capture the maelstrom of a disorienting milieu of crisis since 2008, and expand on the social formations of the urban to explicate the constructed, materialized and practised presence of power and transgression. Our aim is to consider what forms of social change emerge in a volatile, intense and centralized dynamism (the urban vortex), and how this might relate to global arrangements of interconnectivity, particularity and variegation (the planetary). Our paper highlights three prominent processes of urban social formation including accumulation, stratification and hyperdiversity - re-instating the need to theorize the centrality of the city as a means of comprehending the condition of urban crises and the crisis of urban definition

A brief report on the development of a theoretically-grounded intervention to promote patient autonomy and self-management of physiotherapy patients: Face validity and feasibility of implementation

Background Clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of low back pain suggest the inclusion of a biopsychosocial approach in which patient self-management is prioritized. While many physiotherapists recognise the importance of evidence-based practice, there is an evidence practice gap that may in part be due to the fact that promoting self-management necessitates change in clinical behaviours. Evidence suggests that a patient’s motivation and maintenance of self-management behaviours can be positively influenced by the clinician’s use of an autonomy supportive communication style. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop and pilot-test the feasibility of a theoretically derived implementation intervention to support physiotherapists in using an evidence-based autonomy supportive communication style in practice for promoting patient self-management in clinical practice. Methods A systematic process was used to develop the intervention and pilot-test its feasibility in primary care physiotherapy. The development steps included focus groups to identify barriers and enablers for implementation, the theoretical domains framework to classify determinants of change, a behaviour change technique taxonomy to select appropriate intervention components, and forming a testable theoretical model. Face validity and acceptability of the intervention was pilot-tested with two physiotherapists and monitoring their communication with patients over a three-month timeframe. Results Using the process described above, eight barriers and enablers for implementation were identified. To address these barriers and enablers, a number of intervention components were selected ranging from behaviour change techniques such as, goal-setting, self-monitoring and feedback to appropriate modes of intervention delivery (i.e. continued education meetings and audit and feedback focused coaching). Initial pilot-testing revealed the acceptability of the intervention to recipients and highlighted key areas for refinement prior to scaling up for a definitive trial. Conclusion The development process utilised in this study ensured the intervention was theory-informed and evidence-based, with recipients signalling its relevance and benefit to their clinical practice. Future research should consider additional intervention strategies to address barriers of social support and those beyond the clinician level

Teacher Identity in the Context of Literacy Teaching: Three Explorations of Classroom Positioning and Interaction in Secondary Schools

This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in the U.S. that explore the social functions of language, specifically focused on the identity development of literacy learners and teachers. Each study offers a detailed account of how literate identities are constructed and enacted and the positive and negative consequences that occur for teachers and students when they are enacted. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate how teachers’ and students’ understandings of identity can promote or inhibit literacy teaching and learning

Full genome re-sequencing reveals a novel circadian clock mutation in Arabidopsis

Map based cloning in Arabidopsis thaliana can be a difficult and time-consuming process, specifically if the phenotype is subtle and scoring labour intensive. Here, we have re-sequenced the 120-Mb genome of a novel Arabidopsis clock mutant early bird (ebi-1) in Wassilewskija (Ws-2). We demonstrate the utility of sequencing a backcrossed line in limiting the number of SNPs considered. We identify a SNP in the gene AtNFXL-2 as the likely cause of the ebi-1 phenotype

Feasibility of Implementing a School Nutrition Intervention That Addresses Policies, Systems, and Environment

We conducted a process evaluation of the Shaping Healthy Choices Program, a multicomponent school-based nutrition program, when implemented in partnership with University of California (UC) CalFresh and UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE). There were positive impacts on participating students, but results varied across counties, possibly due to variation in fidelity to the curriculum and implementation of program components. Our evaluation identified the strength of UCCE in delivering nutrition education and a need for additional support and training for building capacity to effect change in school policies, systems, and environment. Because educators throughout Extension are working to integrate programs addressing policies, systems, and environment, our results may have applicability in other Extension programs