South African men's engagement in a feminist ethic of care: an extended case study

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2022.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Women in South Africa spend eight times more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men. Motivated by this unequal distribution of care, I aimed to investigate how men in South Africa participate in household child care and subsequently conducted an extended case study to explore how men who live in affluent neighbourhoods in Stellenbosch, South Africa, carry out the care of their young children. The dissertation includes documented social encounters, semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted at participants’ homes or during family activities. The extended case study method provides a framework for research that is grounded in reflexive science. It allows for contribution to theory from empirical work, and for the consideration of macro-structural social forces such as policies and customs and micro-structural observations with families. Both the method and the theory of the case study were anchored in a post-structural feminist perspective that draws on discourses related to care, critical masculinities, engagements of men in gender equality, and fatherhood-focused psychology. The overarching theoretical framework that was used for the extended case study is based on Joan Tronto’s political argument for an ethic of care. For the theoretical lens through which the study was conducted, I complemented Tronto’s theory with contemporary post-structural feminist, critical masculinities, and fatherhood psychology literature. The empirical observations and findings are structured in accordance with the political framework that Tronto provided of the four phases of an ethic of care, namely caring about, caring for, giving care, and receiving care. In each instance, the findings are supplemented with more specific sociological and psychological theory related to the phase, drawing on the theoretical lens that was established in the initial theory chapter. The penultimate chapter describes the macro-structural forces that influenced men’s care interactions, including policies, kinship expectations and social norms. The study concludes with the argument that ‘men’s care interactions can contribute to democratic citizenship, and expand fathering beyond patriarchy’. I support this claim by describing how men’s care interactions expanded social norms of fathering, and provide suggestions for future theoretical avenues of research and intervention development.AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Vroue in Suid-Afrika bestee deurlopend meer tyd aan onbetaalde huishoudelike en versorgingswerk as mans. Aangevuur deur hierdie ongelyke verdeling van versorging, het ek beoog om ondersoek in te stel na hoe mans in Suid-Afrika aan die huishoudelike versorging van kinders deelneem en gevolglik ʼn uitgebreide gevallestudie onderneem om na te vors hoe mans van welgestelde buurte in Stellenbosch, Suid-Afrika die versorging van hulle jong kinders in doen. In die navorsing is van gedokumenteerde sosiale ontmoetings, semi-gestruktureerde onderhoude en deelnemende waarneming wat by deelnemers se huise of gedurende gesinsaktiwiteite plaasgevind het, gebruik gemaak. Die uitgebreide gevallestudiemetode verskaf ʼn raamwerk vir navorsing wat in refleksiewe wetenskap gefundeer is. Dit maak voorsiening vir bydraes vanuit empiriese werk tot teorie en vir die inagneming van makro-strukturele sosiale kragte soos beleide en gebruike asook mikro-strukturele waarnemings van gesinne. Beide die metode en die teorie van die gevallestudie was veranker in ʼn post-strukturele feministiese perspektief wat gebruik maak van diskoerse wat met versorging, kritiese manlikhede-studies, betrokkenheid van mans by geslagsgelykheid, en sielkunde wat op vaderskap fokus, verband hou. Die oorkoepelende teoretiese raamwerk wat gebruik is vir die uitgebreide gevallestudie is gebaseer op Joan Tronto se politieke argument vir ʼn etiek van versorging. Vir die teoretiese lens waardeur die navorsing gedoen is, het ek Tronto se teorie aangevul met kontemporere post-strukturele feministiese, kritiese manlikhede-studies, en sielkundeliteratuur ten opsigte van vaderskap. Die empiriese waarnemings en bevindinge is gestruktureer in ooreenstemming met die politieke raamwerk van die vier fases van ʼn etiek van versorging soos deur Tronto verskaf, naamlik omgee vir, sorg vir, versorging bied, en versorging ontvang. In elke geval is die bevindinge aangevul met meer spesifieke sosiologiese en sielkundige teorie wat met die fase verband hou deur van die teoretiese lens in die aanvanklike teoriehoofstuk uiteengesit, gebruik te maak.Doctora

The HIV Blind Spot: Men and HIV Testing, Treatment and Care in Sub?Saharan Africa

Evidence shows that men are significantly underrepresented in HIV and AIDS testing and treatment services – both in sub?Saharan Africa and globally. HIV policies within sub?Saharan Africa also have insufficient focus on ensuring national HIV responses encourage men to test, access anti?retroviral treatment and support the disproportionate burden of HIV care on women. Addressing these challenges is important for everyone's sake and must be approached within a context of addressing power differentials between men and women at all levels. This includes challenging the broader patriarchal power structures in which gender plays out, such as the assumption that care work is ‘women's work’ and therefore less valued, and the rigidity of gender norms that encourage men to participate in risk?taking behaviours that put their life and the life of those around them in jeopardy

RUG-1-Pegasussers at SemEval-2022 Task 3:Data Generation Methods to Improve Recognizing Appropriate Taxonomic Word Relations

This paper describes our system created for the SemEval 2022 Task 3: Presupposed Taxonomies - Evaluating Neural-network Semantics. This task is focused on correctly recognizing taxonomic word relations in English, French and Italian. We develop various data generation techniques that expand the originally provided train set and show that all methods increase the performance of models trained on these expanded datasets. Our final system outperforms the baseline from the task organizers by achieving an average macro F1 score of 79.6 on all languages, compared to the baseline's 67.4.</p

Improving men's participation in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV as a maternal, neonatal, and child health priority in South Africa

Wessel van den Berg and colleagues outline how increasing male partner involvement in efforts to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission in South Africa may improve maternal and infant outcomes

Stress imaging in patients with a Fontan circulation:A systematic review

Introduction: The aims of this study were to provide an overview of the cardiac stress response in Fontan patients and of the use, safety and clinical value of stress imaging in Fontan patients. Methods: Studies evaluating cardiac function using stress imaging in Fontan patients published up until 12 December 2021 were included in this review. Results: From 1603 potential studies, 32 studies met the inclusion criteria. In total, stress imaging tests of 728 Fontan patients were included. Cardiac function was most often measured using physical stress (61%), all other studies used dobutamine-induced stress. Stroke volume (SV) increased in most studies (71%), mean SV at rest ranged from 27 mL/m2 to 60 mL/m2 versus 27 mL/m2 to 101 mL/m2 during stress, and increased with an average of 4%. Ejection fraction increased in almost all studies, whereas both end-systolic volume and end-diastolic volume decreased during stress. Higher heart rates were obtained with physical stress (82–180) compared to dobutamine induced stress (73–128). Compared to controls, increases in heartrate and SV were lower and end-diastolic volume decreased abnormally in 75% of reporting studies. No major adverse events were reported. Poorer cardiac stress response was related to decreased exercise capacity and higher risk for long-term (adverse) outcomes in Fontan patients. Discussion: Cardiac stress response in Fontan patients differs from healthy subjects, reflected by lower increases in heart rate, diminished preload and decreased cardiac output, especially during higher levels of exercise. Stress imaging is safe, however the added clinical value needs to be investigated in more detail.</p

Teaching design engineering in an interdisciplinary programme

ATLAS, the Academy of Technology and Liberal Arts & Sciences, is an interdisciplinary three-year Bachelor of Science honours programme for talented students that opened its doors in September 2013. This international programme uses the concept of project-led education to teach students to integrate both technical and social perspectives into a new engineering approach. It aims to educate the so-called ‘new engineer’: a generalist who can combine technological and societal approaches with design solutions that can be implemented in a range of technical, social, and cultural contexts. The programme has a thematic structure, in which a large project is the foundation of every semester. At the start of the semester the students write their own personal development plan framed by three domains (Engineering, Mathematics and Social Sciences) and six learning lines (Research, Design, Organization, Communication, Learning Capacity and Interdisciplinarity). In an interdisciplinary programme like ATLAS students have to learn to use knowledge from different disciplines and integrate it. This is also demanded by the project description, which is always a complex open-ended interdisciplinary problem. Design models from both engineering and social sciences are combined to develop new solutions for boundary-crossing problems. In this paper we will describe the programme and its underlying educational principles in detail. We will show the interdisciplinary design-engineering model that we use in our programme. We will reflect upon our first experiences with the programme and define a set of challenges for teaching design engineering in an interdisciplinary programme

Stress imaging in patients with a Fontan circulation: A systematic review

INTRODUCTION: The aims of this study were to provide an overview of the cardiac stress response in Fontan patients and of the use, safety and clinical value of stress imaging in Fontan patients. METHODS: Studies evaluating cardiac function using stress imaging in Fontan patients published up until 12 December 2021 were included in this review. RESULTS: From 1603 potential studies, 32 studies met the inclusion criteria. In total, stress imaging tests of 728 Fontan patients were included. Cardiac function was most often measured using physical stress (61%), all other studies used dobutamine-induced stress. Stroke volume (SV) increased in most studies (71%), mean SV at rest ranged from 27 mL/m 2 to 60 mL/m 2 versus 27 mL/m 2 to 101 mL/m 2 during stress, and increased with an average of 4%. Ejection fraction increased in almost all studies, whereas both end-systolic volume and end-diastolic volume decreased during stress. Higher heart rates were obtained with physical stress (82-180) compared to dobutamine induced stress (73-128). Compared to controls, increases in heartrate and SV were lower and end-diastolic volume decreased abnormally in 75% of reporting studies. No major adverse events were reported. Poorer cardiac stress response was related to decreased exercise capacity and higher risk for long-term (adverse) outcomes in Fontan patients. DISCUSSION: Cardiac stress response in Fontan patients differs from healthy subjects, reflected by lower increases in heart rate, diminished preload and decreased cardiac output, especially during higher levels of exercise. Stress imaging is safe, however the added clinical value needs to be investigated in more detail

Branched Chain Amino Acids Are Associated with Physical Performance in Patients with End-Stage Liver Disease

Decreased circulating branched chain amino acids (BCAA) represent a prominent change in amino acid profiles in patients with end-stage liver disease (ESLD). These alterations are considered to contribute to sarcopenia and hepatic encephalopathy and may relate to poor prognosis. Here, we cross-sectionally analyzed the association between plasma BCAA levels and the severity of ESLD and muscle function in participants of the liver transplant subgroup of TransplantLines, enrolled between January 2017 and January 2020. Plasma BCAA levels were measured by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Physical performance was analyzed with a hand grip strength test, 4 m walking test, sit-to-stand test, timed up and go test, standing balance test and clinical frailty scale. We included 92 patients (65% men). The Child Pugh Turcotte classification was significantly higher in the lowest sex-stratified BCAA tertile compared to the highest tertile (p = 0.015). The times for the sit-to-stand (r = −0.352, p &lt; 0.05) and timed up and go tests (r = −0.472, p &lt; 0.01) were inversely correlated with total BCAA levels. In conclusion, lower circulating BCAA are associated with the severity of liver disease and impaired muscle function. This suggests that BCAA may represent a useful prognostic marker in the staging of liver disease severity.</p

Evidence for Regulated Interleukin-4 Expression in Chondrocyte-Scaffolds under In Vitro Inflammatory Conditions

OBJECTIVE: To elucidate the anti-inflammatory and anabolic effects of regulated expression of IL-4 in chondrocyte-scaffolds under in vitro inflammatory conditions. METHODS: Mature articular chondrocytes from dogs (n = 3) were conditioned through transient transfection using pcDNA3.1.cIL-4 (constitutive) or pCOX-2.cIL-4 (cytokine-responsive) plasmids. Conditioned cells were seeded in alginate microspheres and rat-tail collagen type I matrix (CaReS®) to generate two types of tissue-engineered 3-dimensional scaffolds. Inflammatory arthritis was simulated in the packed chondrocytes through exogenous addition of recombinant canine (rc) IL-1β (100 ng/ml) plus rcTNFα (50 ng/ml) in culture media for 96 hours. Harvested cells and culture media were analyzed by various assays to monitor the anti-inflammatory and regenerative (anabolic) properties of cIL-4. RESULTS: cIL-4 was expressed from COX-2 promoter exclusively on the addition of rcIL-1β and rcTNFα while its expression from CMV promoter was constitutive. The expressed cIL-4 downregulated the mRNA expression of IL-1β, TNFα, IL-6, iNOS and COX-2 in the cells and inhibited the production of NO and PGE(2) in culture media. At the same time, it up-regulated the expression of IGF-1, IL-1ra, COL2a1 and aggrecan in conditioned chondrocytes in both scaffolds along with a diminished release of total collagen and sGAG into the culture media. An increased amount of cIL-4 protein was detected both in chondrocyte cell lysate and in concentrated culture media. Neutralizing anti-cIL-4 antibody assay confirmed that the anti-inflammatory and regenerative effects seen are exclusively driven by cIL-4. There was a restricted expression of IL-4 under COX-2 promoter possibly due to negative feedback loop while it was over-expressed under CMV promoter (undesirable). Furthermore, the anti-inflammatory /anabolic outcomes from both scaffolds were reproducible and the therapeutic effects of cIL-4 were both scaffold- and promoter-independent. CONCLUSIONS: Regulated expression of therapeutic candidate gene(s) coupled with suitable scaffold(s) could potentially serve as a useful tissue-engineering tool to devise future treatment strategies for osteoarthritis

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far