Electrophoresis simulated with the cage model for reptation

The cage model for polymer reptation is extended to simulate DC electrophoresis. The drift velocity v of a polymer with length L in an electric field with strength E shows three different regions: if the strength of field is small, the drift velocity scales as E/L; for slightly larger strengths, it scales as E^2, independent of length; for high fields, but still E much smaller than 1, the drift velocity decreases exponentially to zero. The behaviour of the first two regions are in agreement with earlier reports on simulations of the Duke-Rubinstein model and with experimental work on DNA polymers in agarose gel.Comment: 14 pages, 9 pictures, 2 table

Compulsive geographies and desire

In order to understand ‘human being’, human geographers have engaged with the spatialities and geographies of the human body in how it constitutes the ways humans engage with place. They have done so by situating the corporeal as affected by a multiplicity of extracorporealities producing a conceptualisation of engagements with place as intentional and reflective in nature. Whilst this captures the vast majority of human engagement with place, vital elements that tend to occur beyond our immediate attention seem to escape these conceptualisations, because they happen in-between more charismatic gestures. These bodily engagements with place are to a large extent less or even unintentional, not goal-oriented, involuntary and pre-reflexive. This renders the body agential in the production of geographies in ways this paper engages with through the notion of compulsivity. It does so by examining a particular kind of body that has strong compulsive tendencies; a body affected by Tourette syndrome. This phenomenon urges the body into physical interactions (e.g. compulsive touching, ordering) with affective environments. By reimagining Tourette syndrome through the Deleuzean rhetoric of desire, this papers aims to explore how the human body produces a geography of compulsivity, and what this means for human enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Additionally, it contributes to ways of ‘alternative’ engagements with the world (Hansen & Philo, 2007) through human conditions that potentially through their medicalisation have been marginalised. References: Hansen & Philo (2007) The normalcy of doing things differently: bodies, spaces and disability geography. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 98 (4): 493–506

Implementing Legal Information Literacy: A Challenge for the Curriculum

Dutch law faculties usually change their curriculum due to pressure from external factors, such as inspection reports, accreditation procedures or educational innovations dictated by general university policy. Course subjects are changed each semester or academic year to bring them more into line with each other. Sometimes there are substantive reasons for change, such as the imposition of an international perspective. Courses are seldom altered in response to internal curricular pressure, as this leads to tension in personal relationships. The policy on appointing chairs is another thorny issue. Occasionally the need to change or adapt the curriculum arises from both external and internal developments. Legal information skills have remained a somewhat neglected part of the curriculum. As a branch of academic or legal skills, they exist independently on the periphery. University libraries, which are becoming increasingly adept at Information Literacy, are digitalizing and globalizing at an accelerating rate. Thus, when necessary, legal degree courses must catch up and revise legal curricula in this regard

Towards compulsive geographies

This paper presents a spatial imagining of compulsivity. Deconstructing its medicalised conceptualisation and its rendition through the diagnostic system, the paper offers a performative analysis of compulsive body–world formation. It does so by introducing compulsivity as urging the performance of acts that are unwanted, purposeless, and meaningless, and that nevertheless enlace the corporeal with and through the extracorporeal on unchosen terms. This analysis of compulsions not only develops the dimension of urgency to nonrepresentational theory in cultural geography. It also develops the critical performative understanding of medicalised phenomena in disability and health geography by considering compulsivity as a more-than-human condition. Indeed, reporting on interviews, participant observations, and mobile eye-tracking sessions with 15 people diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, compulsions seem to emerge from particularly volatile compositions of bodies, objects and spaces. The paper then conceives of compulsivity as articulating the material sensibilities emerging with the body’s unfolding situation, and propels it beyond the diagnosable in a broader humanity engaging in material interactions that are felt, rather than known. In addition to a geography of compulsivity, a geographical rendering and ontological centring of compulsions creates a compulsive geography. Ultimately, it situates geographical analysis as crucial to understanding this medicalised performance and as potentially generative of therapeutic outcomes