The intimate public as a decolonial lens: "cripping" affect, nationalism and imperial violence

This article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how 'wounds enter politics'.1 In this research, I 'stretch' Berlant's notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus on the Facebook page of the Iranian chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, during Iran's talks with the P5+1 powers over its nuclear programme, under the pressure of what the Obama administration itself termed 'crippling' economic sanctions. Examining Zarif's audience's readings of his back injury during the talks as representing the 'crippled' nation, I trace how subaltern injury is intimately narrated through a racialised framework of disablement and 'recovery', where 'recovery' signifies a desanctioned and deracialised national body. I firstly complicate the prevailing conception of the intimate public as oriented around a 'national fantasy', theorising it as an affective structure that simultaneously locates imperial power, as well as the nation-state, as sources of complaint and hope; secondly, I draw on a critical disability ('crip') lens to understand the intimate public as mediating both the debilitation of racialised underdevelopment, and the fantasy of a normative, 'developed' national body in a post-sanctions future. Through examining the intimate politics of economic sanctions, this study contributes to a decolonial perspective on the entanglements of affect, nationalism and imperial violence

Digital feminism beyond nativism and empire: Affective territories of recognition and competing claims to suffering in iranian women’s campaigns

There has been a growing affective intensity on Farsi social media around Iranian women’s rights protests, particularly mobilizations against the compulsory hijab. This intensity has crystallized into a variety of emotions: the anger, joy, and defiance of Iranian women protesting against the hijab inside the country; the outrage at the injustice these actions communicate; and the anger and anxiety of Iranian critics on both the Right and the Left, among both the Iranian establishment and ordinary people. Yet oversimplified counterpositions between “global” and “local,” West and East, dominate both legacy-media and social-media narratives of women’s rights campaigning, resulting, as I show, in the circulation of binary genres of “authentic” versus “inauthentic” protest that generate anger and anxiety. In this vein, the traumatic experience of economic sanctions, as the master signifier of West-East conflict in Iranian online exchanges, often frames human rights discourses as inauthentic, in that these discourses are positioned as emanating from the West. Understanding the politics of emotion around these mobilizations allows one to attend more closely to the contentions and fissures that traverse women’s struggles within Iran and, I argue, to develop a politics of affective recognition as a basis for constructing feminist solidarities across and within borders. A focus on anger and rage, among other feelings, helps us not only to trace the binary oppositions that characterize online discourses around these protests but to capture their unstable ambivalence between authenticity and inauthenticity, inside and outside, their potential to point beyond existing boundaries and demarcations, and to permit new imaginings of territoriality

Wild Intimacies: Justice-Seeking Mothers in Iran, Networked Activism and the Affective Politics of Mourning

This article analyses the mediated affective practices of the network of #justice-seeking mothers in Iran, who campaign for justice for their children’s deaths at the hands of the state. I situate their melancholic performance of maternal mourning as central to the mediation of a ‘wild’ public intimacy, which contests the state’s attempts to limit and foreclose the spaces of political appearance. This intimate public, I argue, draws on the affordances of visuality and hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to invoke expanded notions of ‘home’ and ‘motherhood’that affectively sustain its political activism. Recent feminist scholarship has emphasised the counter-hegemonic potentials of mourning practices that go beyond the patriarchal family as a reference point, especially in campaigns that seek justice for and recognition of the dead, whether these practices are offline or online. I argue, however, that attention to the ‘relational’ (cultural, social, physical) affordances of digital mourning in this case s reveals that grassroots maternalism may draw its emotional resources from a shifting combination of conventional (familial) and non-conventional forms of kinship. It is this fluid and provisional approach to emotional and political ties that enables the #justice-seeking mothers’ network to mobilise a variety of intimate registers in constructing an affective space of political appearance

A new lifetime model with different types of failure rate

A new class of lifetime distributions, which can exhibit with upside-down bathtub-shaped, bathtub-shaped, decreasing, and increasing failure rates, is introduced. The new distribution is constructed by compounding generalized Weibull and logarithmic distributions, leading to improvement on the lifetime distribution considered in Dimitrakopoulou et al. (2007) by having no restriction on the shape parameter and extending the result studied by Tahmasbi and Rezaei (2008) in the general form. The proposed model includes the exponential-logarithmic and Weibull-logarithmic distributions as special cases. Various statistical properties of the proposed class are discussed. Furthermore, estimation via the maximum likelihood method and the Fisher information matrix are discussed. Applications to real data demonstrate that the new class of distributions is more flexible than other recently proposed classes

Molecular dynamics simulation and experimental study of the surface-display of SPA protein via Lpp-OmpA system for screening of IgG

Staphylococcal protein A (SpA) is a major virulence factor of Staphylococcus aureus. S. aureus is able to escape detection by the immune system by the surface display of protein A. The SpA protein is broadly used to purify immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. This study investigates the fusion ability of Lpp′-OmpA (46–159) to anchor and display five replicate domains of protein A with 295 residues length (SpA295) of S. aureus on the surface of Escherichia coli to develop a novel bioadsorbent. First, the binding between Lpp’-OmpA-SPA295 and IgGFc and the three-dimensional structure was investigated using molecular dynamics simulation. Then high IgG recovery from human serum by the surface-displayed system of Lpp′-OmpA-SPA295 performed experimentally. In silico analysis was demonstrated the binding potential of SPA295 to IgG after expression on LPP-OmpA surface. Surface-engineered E. coli displaying SpA protein and IgG-binding assay with SDS-PAGE analysis exhibited high potential of the expressed complex on the E. coli surface for IgG capture from human serum which is applicable to conventional immune precipitation

Clinical Manifestations, Immunological Characteristics and Genetic Analysis of Patients with Hyper-Immunoglobulin M Syndrome in Iran

BACKGROUND: Hyper-immunoglobulin M (HIGM) syndrome is a rare heterogeneous group of primary immunodeficiency disorders characterized by low or absent serum levels of IgG and IgA along with normal or elevated serum levels of IgM. METHODS: Clinical and immunological data were collected from the 75 patients' medical records diagnosed in Children's Medical Center affiliated to Tehran University Medical Sciences and other Universities of Medical Sciences in Iran. Among 75 selected patients, 48 patients (64%) were analyzed genetically using targeted and whole-exome sequencing. RESULTS: The ratio of male to female was 2.9:1. The median age at the onset of the disease, time of diagnosis, and diagnostic delay were 10.5, 50, and 24 months, respectively. Pneumonia and lower respiratory tract infections (61.3%) were the most common complications. Responsible genes were identified in 35 patients (72.9%) out 48 genetically analyzed patients. Cluster of differentiation 40 ligand gene was the most mutated gene observed in 24 patients (68.5%) followed by activation-induced cytidine deaminase gene in 7 patients, lipopolysaccharide-responsive and beige-like anchor (1 patient), nuclear factor-kappa-B essential modulator (1 patient), phosphoinositide-3-kinase regulatory subunit 1 (1 patient), and nuclear factor kappa B subunit 1 (1 patient) genes. Nineteen (25.3%) patients died during the study period, and pneumonia was the major cause of death occurred in 6 (31.6%) patients. CONCLUSION: Physicians in our country should carefully pay attention to respiratory tract infections and pneumonia, particularly in patients with a positive family history. Further investigations are required for detection of new genes and pathways resulting in HIGM phenotype