Material intimacies and Black hair practice: Touch, texture, resistance

This article explores the socio-materiality of Black hair care practice as an affective surface through which we can understand Black women’s experiences of intimacy and belonging. Texture of hair has often been overlooked in the examination of racialised presentation, even as shade or skin colour has been over-determined. By paying attention to the centrality of touch in negotiating grooming practices in Black hair care, a multi-layered appreciation of the material entanglements in Black intimacies can be explored. Hair is more than part of the body, it is both highly visible, as well as intensely personal and political in terms of the ways it is worn and seen by the observer. Drawing on a sensory ethnography of Afro hair salons in the UK and biographical narrative analysis, this article explores Black women’s relationships with their hair in everyday life, alongside a parallel reading of the classic text “Cassie’s hair” by Susan Bordo. This layering of narratives allows for a new form of listening to emerge, an attunement that forefronts the habitual practices of hair dressing and hair making as ways of ‘becoming black’. In every twist, braid and weave, these biographies highlight the intimate entanglements by which the ambivalence of black belonging is negotiated. Touch in particular, both nurturing and hostile, represents an important socio-cultural ritual through which collective belonging is experienced: evoking memories of inter-generational and transnational intimacies with black communities in another time and another place. This paper offers a novel way of reimagining the role of affect in understanding collective intimacies and sustaining black identity in diasporic contexts

Brexit Logics: Myth and Fact - A Black Feminist Analysis

On June 24, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union in a landmark referendum result. The ‘Brexit’ vote along with Trump’s presidential election in America, the Turkish referendum, the French election and the rise in far-right groups more globally, have been underpinned by certain populist ‘logics’. This comment seeks to agitate these Brexit logics through a Black Feminist perspective that refocuses current debates on power and the intersectional politics of gender, race and class

STATISTICAL ISSUES IN THE NORMALIZATIONOF MULTI-SPECIES MICROARRAY DATA

Several species of bacteria are involved in the production of cheese, including Lactobacillus brevis and Lactococcus lactis. A custom-designed Affymetrix microarray was recently developed to study gene expression in three organisms on a single chip. This array contains only perfect match features for the coding and non-coding regions in the genomes of all three sequences. The multi-species nature of this array version raises interesting questions regarding the preprocessing or normalization strategies for the analysis of gene expression data. We present and evaluate several possible strategies using both cDNA dilution data and experimental expression data from a repeated measures design. The statistical protocols highlighted in this work are applicable to other multi-species microarrays

Winnowing DNA for Rare Sequences: Highly Specific Sequence and Methylation Based Enrichment

Rare mutations in cell populations are known to be hallmarks of many diseases and cancers. Similarly, differential DNA methylation patterns arise in rare cell populations with diagnostic potential such as fetal cells circulating in maternal blood. Unfortunately, the frequency of alleles with diagnostic potential, relative to wild-type background sequence, is often well below the frequency of errors in currently available methods for sequence analysis, including very high throughput DNA sequencing. We demonstrate a DNA preparation and purification method that through non-linear electrophoretic separation in media containing oligonucleotide probes, achieves 10,000 fold enrichment of target DNA with single nucleotide specificity, and 100 fold enrichment of unmodified methylated DNA differing from the background by the methylation of a single cytosine residue

Race, embodiment and later life: Re-animating aging bodies of color

This theoretical essay examines the intersections between race, ethnicity and old age from an inter-disciplinary lens. Drawing on cultural gerontology (especially embodied aging studies) and post-colonial perspectives on aging, it explores how an emphasis on the body and embodiment can serve as a conceptual lens for understanding racialized aging bodies. A tentative framework for analysis is proposed. The concept of exile explores how bodies of color and older bodies are denigrated through the hegemonic (white, youth-centered, masculinist) gaze. Re-animation can take place by transcending double-consciousness: ‘seeing beyond’ the dominant gaze. Othering and otherness are explored in relation to both raced and aging bodies. The limits of ethnic aging are scrutinized at an epistemic level, simultaneously informing, and obscuring the understanding of lived experiences of racialized ethnic minorities in old age. Visible and invisible difference provide a way of unpacking the simultaneous hypervisibility of older (female) bodies of color, and their invisibility in institutional and policy discourses. De-coloniality is considered, by exploring ways to resist hegemonic power through embodied ways of knowing. This article concludes by exploring how recent methodological innovations – especially the visual and sensory turn- can offer new ways of understanding the lived experiences of aging bodies of color

The Balancing Act? : Work-Family Conflict and Balance in Indian Call Centres

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Our approach to developing communities of practice to foster research capacities for the adult social care workforce

Background: Efforts to build and foster adult social care research in England have historically encountered more challenges to its growth and expansion compared with health research, with a sector facing significant barriers in facilitating research activity due to a lack of resourcing, poor valuation or understanding of the profile of social care research. The landscape for supporting research in adult social care has been rather bleak, but in recent years there has been recognition of the need to foster a research community. The National Institute for Health and Care Research in England have committed to investing in social care research capacity by funding six adult social care partnerships, with one based in Southeast England. Process developing Communities of Practice (COPs): Three large online networking events were held in the first year of the project to engage managers and practitioners from the local authority and from the wider adult social care sector. These took place in July and November 2021, with a last event in March 2022. Two COPs were identified, following an ordering and thematising process of feedback from the networking events, of: (a) Supporting people with complex needs throughout the lifespan, and (b) Enhancing, diversifying and sustaining the social care workforce. Whilst it would be premature to identify their long-term impacts, through the facilitation of 20 COP meetings held so far, alongside the engagement platforms and enrichment resources, these have provided a space for regular communication in the sector, knowledge sharing and networking between COP members. Conclusion: The COP framework offers a collaborative approach to initiating research from the grass-roots level in adult social care. This paper focuses on how the COP model offers great promise for knowledge-exchange providing a forum to generate and disseminate knowledge around social care in our two COP domains

Enrichment of EZH2 Y641N mutation from a 1∶1 mixture of wild type (green) and mutant (red) amplicons.

<p>30 ng of each 470 bp target was diluted into a 250 µl solution of 0.9 mM tris, 0.9 mM boric acid and 2 mM NaCl. The sample was placed in a boiling water bath for 5 min to denature the double stranded DNA prior to injection. The targets were injected from a chamber adjacent to the lower right corner of the gel. After injection, focusing and bias fields were applied to simultaneously concentrate the mutant amplicon while washing the wild type amplicon from the gel.</p