'It was suddenly hard winter':John Burnside's Crossings

John Burnside’s poetry and fiction presents the reader with an awkward, uncanny sense of Being. It achieves this through forcing on the reader moments of suspension—epoché in the sense given this word by German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl—which both present and enact shifts in perception of the relationship between self and other, subject and world, memory and the past, which discomforts in its suspension of narrative time as it opens up a phenomenological apperception of Being through the multiple figure of the act of crossing—between past and present, self and other, memory and forgetfulness. In each example there is an irreversible transformation of human understanding that foregrounds the condition of Being in its materiality

S-Geranylgeranyl-L-glutathione is a ligand for human B cell-confinement receptor P2RY8.

Germinal centres are important sites for antibody diversification and affinity maturation, and are also a common origin of B cell malignancies. Despite being made up of motile cells, germinal centres are tightly confined within B cell follicles. The cues that promote this confinement are incompletely understood. P2RY8 is a Gα13-coupled receptor that mediates the inhibition of migration and regulates the growth of B cells in lymphoid tissues1,2. P2RY8 is frequently mutated in germinal-centre B cell-like diffuse large B cell lymphoma (GCB-DLBCL) and Burkitt lymphoma1,3-6, and the ligand for this receptor has not yet been identified. Here we perform a search for P2RY8 ligands and find P2RY8 bioactivity in bile and in culture supernatants of several mouse and human cell lines. Using a seven-step biochemical fractionation procedure and a drop-out mass spectrometry approach, we show that a previously undescribed biomolecule, S-geranylgeranyl-L-glutathione (GGG), is a potent P2RY8 ligand that is detectable in lymphoid tissues at the nanomolar level. GGG inhibited the chemokine-mediated migration of human germinal-centre B cells and T follicular helper cells, and antagonized the induction of phosphorylated AKT in germinal-centre B cells. We also found that the enzyme gamma-glutamyltransferase-5 (GGT5), which was highly expressed by follicular dendritic cells, metabolized GGG to a form that did not activate the receptor. Overexpression of GGT5 disrupted the ability of P2RY8 to promote B cell confinement to germinal centres, which indicates that GGT5 establishes a GGG gradient in lymphoid tissues. This work defines GGG as an intercellular signalling molecule that is involved in organizing and controlling germinal-centre responses. As the P2RY8 locus is modified in several other types of cancer in addition to GCB-DLBCL and Burkitt lymphoma, we speculate that GGG might have organizing and growth-regulatory roles in multiple human tissues

COVID-19 and International Child Abduction: Children's Stories

This paper considers two recent High Court cases conducted remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown that concern international parental child abduction which is governed by the Hague Convention on Child Abduction 1980 (The Convention). The cases shed some light on the currency of the rights of children to participate in decisions around whether they should be returned to where they were living prior to the abduction. The Convention’s purpose (stated in Article 1) is to secure the prompt return of a child if they have been wrongfully removed or retained by a parent

Shaping a New Type of Hearing: Training Future Lawyers in Online Mediation - insights from a pilot Project

The objective of the session is to provide an insight into the design and delivery of a wholly online mediation training suite that we have developed, written and delivered for our final year LLB Open University undergraduate law students. This interactive workshop will model aspects of the teaching methods and explore opportunities and challenges presented by exposing students to mediation training in an online environment. Shaping a new type of Hearing: Training Future Lawyers in Online Mediation - insights from a pilot project The objective of the session is to provide an insight into the design and delivery of a wholly online mediation training suite that we have developed, written and delivered for our final year LLB Open University undergraduate law students. The project forms part of Justice in Action, our distance learning clinical legal education module which supports students in the delivery of practical legal activities. Clinical legal education is both experiential and participatory. Added to this, online mediation transcends geographic hurdles. We hope that our law students will become reflective professionals and this bite-size course aimed to encourage this. As mediation is increasingly embraced internationally and we move away from the traditional polarised litigated disputes, it is hoped that our future legal practitioners can work to produce fair outcomes that are owned and crafted by the disputants themselves. This project was designed to shape future lawyers’ aspirations and contributions to a just society by scaffolding effective online communication. This interactive workshop will model aspects of this innovative teaching methodology and explore opportunities and challenges presented by exposing students to mediation training in an online environment. Objectives To describe the content of the three mediation training sessions in overview and the different approaches of lawyers and mediators - benefits/disadvantages identified by our students - To demonstrate how we explored the ethical issues - To explain how we incorporated a future focus - To explain the design of the sessions themselves and the underlying pedagogy - To explore the communication techniques considered in the sessions - To share student insights into their experiences in the role play simulated mediation sessions - To share the student observations on the advantages of online mediation - To discuss how perceived barriers to online mediation such as the inability to read body language can be an advantage for participant

Dickens's London

Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as an inspiration, Dickens's London offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - Dickens's novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from Dickens's interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens's London presents in twenty-six episodes (from Banking and Breakfast via the Insolvent Court, Melancholy and Poverty, to Todgers and Time, Voice and Waking) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both

Introduction: transgressions or, beyond the obvious

Introduction: transgressions or, beyond the obviou