Undocumented mothers raising citizens: a study with lone undocumented migrant women in their interactions with childcare, school and home

This paper is exploring the practices of raising child(ren) by undocumented migrants mothers on their citizenship potentials. The case study concerns an in-depth ethnographic study of the lives of seven undocumented mothers living on Belgian soil. I consider their daily interactions and discourses in the context of childcare, school and practices of homemaking and identity. The mothers demonstrate an expertise in combining various logistic and moral resources on local and transnational level in raising their child. Despite their unequal position, they engage themselves in their children’s school context and negotiate between their personal and cultural values and society’s normative discourses and practices of child raising. In the context of home they are reproducing but also creating new feelings of belonging, with a place for their perceived differences. Therefore their mothering is not merely limited to the private domain, but extends to public and political spheres, recasting and challenging traditional understandings of citizenship

Extracellular ATP drives systemic inflammation, tissue damage and mortality

Systemic inflammatory response syndromes (SIRS) may be caused by both infectious and sterile insults, such as trauma, ischemia-reperfusion or burns. They are characterized by early excessive inflammatory cytokine production and the endogenous release of several toxic and damaging molecules. These are necessary to fight and resolve the cause of SIRS, but often end up progressively damaging cells and tissues, leading to life-threatening multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS). As inflammasome-dependent cytokines such as interleukin-1 beta are critically involved in the development of MODS and death in SIRS, and ATP is an essential activator of inflammasomes in vitro, we decided to analyze the ability of ATP removal to prevent excessive tissue damage and mortality in a murine LPS-induced inflammation model. Our results indeed indicate an important pro-inflammatory role for extracellular ATP. However, the effect of ATP is not restricted to inflammasome activation at all. Removing extracellular ATP with systemic apyrase treatment not only prevented IL-1 beta accumulation but also the production of inflammasome-independent cytokines such as TNF and IL-10. In addition, ATP removal also prevented systemic evidence of cellular disintegration, mitochondrial damage, apoptosis, intestinal barrier disruption and even mortality. Although blocking ATP receptors with the broad-spectrum P2 purinergic receptor antagonist suramin imitated certain beneficial effects of apyrase treatment, it could not prevent morbidity or mortality at all. We conclude that removal of systemic extracellular ATP could be a valuable strategy to dampen systemic inflammatory damage and toxicity in SIRS