On the frontline: what are these places for? Calais Cap and Grande Synthe, France’s official refugee camps

No abstract available

Refugee and asylum seeker organisations in Scotland since 2012: reflections and future directions

No abstract available

Refugee and asylum seeker organisations in Scotland since 2012: reflections and future directions

No abstract available

Solidarity and struggle: an ethnography of the associational lives of African asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow

Since 2000, Glasgow has received thousands of asylum seekers, forcibly dispersed to the city through the implementation of the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act. Over the years, many of those individuals have organised into what have gone on to become formally constituted voluntary associations. This thesis explores the social meanings and lived realities of association life, and the nature of associational practices, as they emerge and develop over time amongst dispersed African asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow. Based upon fieldwork undertaken over a twenty-six month period involving participant-observation, the thesis locates members’ micro-level understandings, experiences, and definitions of associational life within the wider macro context of broader political, social and cultural change. In so doing, the thesis analyses the complex and differentiated ways in which associational lives are experienced, and explores their intersection with a wide range of collective and individual identities beyond those connected to migrant status and ‘refugeeness’. The thesis thus seeks to challenge dominant definitions of associational forms as ‘refugee community organisations’, arguing that these contribute to constraining groups within fixed boundaries, and to perpetuating their position as an ‘unsettled’ population. Moreover, it is argued that the focus on ‘refugeeness’ fails to attend to the combination of internal and external factors affecting association emergence and continuity. Combining perspectives from social theory on migrant and minority associations and social movements with an anthropological approach that integrates internal processes with external forces, the thesis presents nuanced accounts of solidarity and struggle within groups. In contrast to representations that construct asylum seeker and refugee-led associations as fixed in time and space and defined by migrant status, this thesis argues for an understanding of group life that is sensitive to the fluidity of social relations in multiple social contexts which change and evolve over time. This requires an analysis of both the conditions that encourage the founding of groups and of the factors which support or inhibit their continued existence, and is crucial to ‘moving beyond refugeeness’

The human Cranio Facial Development Protein 1 (Cfdp1) gene encodes a protein required for the maintenance of higher-order chromatin organization

The human Cranio Facial Development Protein 1 (Cfdp1) gene maps to chromosome 16q22.2-q22.3 and encodes the CFDP1 protein, which belongs to the evolutionarily conserved Bucentaur (BCNT) family. Craniofacial malformations are developmental disorders of particular biomedical and clinical interest, because they represent the main cause of infant mortality and disability in humans, thus it is important to understand the cellular functions and mechanism of action of the CFDP1 protein. We have carried out a multi-disciplinary study, combining cell biology, reverse genetics and biochemistry, to provide the first in vivo characterization of CFDP1 protein functions in human cells. We show that CFDP1 binds to chromatin and interacts with subunits of the SRCAP chromatin remodeling complex. An RNAi-mediated depletion of CFDP1 in HeLa cells affects chromosome organization, SMC2 condensin recruitment and cell cycle progression. Our findings provide new insight into the chromatin functions and mechanisms of the CFDP1 protein and contribute to our understanding of the link between epigenetic regulation and the onset of human complex developmental disorders

Refugees, political bounding and the pandemic: Material effects and experiences of categorisations amongst refugees in Scotland

From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications RouterScholars are increasingly interested in and concerned with both the way various migrant populations are categorised, and the lived impacts of that categorisation. In this article, we examine how categorisation was experienced by people at various stages of the refugee journey during the biggest public health crisis for generations. We argue, using original interview data, that the way refugees are categorised, or politically bound, has material impacts on the way they experience their lives, and that this was evident in extremis during the Covid-19 lockdown in Scotland. As populations attempted to traverse public health messaging, this is shown to interact with longstanding state proclivities to control, marginalise and stratify. Consequently, how people experienced and managed the request to ‘stay home and save lives’ varied markedly by where they were in their refugee journey and how they arrived in the UK.Funder: Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorate; FundRef: 10.13039/100011529; Grant(s): COV/GLA/20/12, COV/QMU/20/02aheadofprintaheadofprin

Herpes Simplex Virus type-1 infection induces synaptic dysfunction in cultured cortical neurons via GSK-3 activation and intraneuronal amyloid-β protein accumulation

Increasing evidence suggests that recurrent Herpes Simplex Virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection spreading to the CNS is a risk factor for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) but the underlying mechanisms have not been fully elucidated yet. Here we demonstrate that in cultured mouse cortical neurons HSV-1 induced Ca 2+ -dependent activation of glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)-3. This event was critical for the HSV-1-dependent phosphorylation of amyloid precursor protein (APP) at Thr668 and the following intraneuronal accumulation of amyloid-β protein (Aβ). HSV-1-infected neurons also exhibited: i) significantly reduced expression of the presynaptic proteins synapsin-1 and synaptophysin; ii) depressed synaptic transmission. These effects depended on GSK-3 activation and intraneuronal accumulation of Aβ. In fact, either the selective GSK-3 inhibitor, SB216763, or a specific antibody recognizing Aβ (4G8) significantly counteracted the effects induced by HSV-1 at the synaptic level. Moreover, in neurons derived from APP KO mice and infected with HSV-1 Aβ accumulation was not found and synaptic protein expression was only slightly reduced when compared to wild-type infected neurons. These data further support our contention that HSV-1 infections spreading to the CNS may contribute to AD phenotype

Manifesto for Change: Critical pedagogy for teaching and researching migration in the political now!

No abstract available