23 research outputs found
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Sociology Students as Storytellers: What Narrative Sociology and C. Wright Mills Can Teach Us about Writing in the Discipline
The Writing in the Disciplines approach encourages writing instruction in specific majors so that students learn the writing conventions of their discipline. As writing instructors, however, the role of the sociologist is problematic. Not only has standard sociological writing been jargon laden, it has privileged a clinical style of writing. Thus, we ask whether learning sociology also means learning how to write poorly or at least narrowly. Drawing from narrative sociology, we suggest that mainstream sociological writing should be viewed as a writing genreâone of many genres that students, and sociologists themselves, can choose from. Framing sociologists as both truth tellers and storytellers, we invite sociology instructors to consider at least three alternative genres for assignment in the classroom: life stories, fiction stories, and visual stories. Finally, we offer C. Wright Mills as a model for how to think like a sociologist while still writing well
The New Normal? Work, Family, and Higher Education under COVID-19
Accounts of the social and economic changes brought on by COVID-19 describe these changes as the ânew normal.â I argue that these changes are actually an extension of existing trends. For five decades, neoliberal reforms have resulted in the privatization and corporatization of everyday life, reshaping social institutions in the process. Of these institutions, the contemporary university is particularly important because it is both a workplace and a training ground in which neoliberal norms around competition, achievement, and individualism are enforced and promoted. This situation has socialized a new class of professionals to be productive workers who expect very little from their government, which is particularly problematic for women attempting to balance work and family life. To explore what this means under pandemic conditions, I draw on the life of Angelica, a woman who traded a life of drug addiction and welfare dependency for college attainment and professional work. College should have liberated her; instead, it has left her with a demanding job and little to no institutional help. I compare what is expected of Angelica as a college-educated working mother under the pandemic and what was expected of me as a professor and mother before the pandemic, suggesting important continuities in the pace of work, the nature of care, and the expectations of the self and others
The impact of donor and recipient common clinical and genetic variation on estimated glomerular filtration rate in a European renal transplant population
Genetic variation across the HLA is known to influence renalâtransplant outcome. However, the impact of genetic variation beyond the HLA is less clear. We tested the association of common genetic variation and clinical characteristics, from both the donor and recipient, with postâtransplant eGFR at different timeâpoints, out to 5âyears postâtransplantation.
We conducted GWAS metaâanalyses across 10,844 donors and recipients from five European ancestry cohorts. We also analysed the impact of polygenic risk scores (PRS), calculated using genetic variants associated with nonâtransplant eGFR, on postâtransplant eGFR.
PRS calculated using the recipient genotype alone, as well as combined donor and recipient genotypes were significantly associated with eGFR at 1âyear postâtransplant. 32% of the variability in eGFR at 1âyear postâtransplant was explained by our model containing clinical covariates (including weights for death/graftâfailure), principal components and combined donorârecipient PRS, with 0.3% contributed by the PRS. No individual genetic variant was significantly associated with eGFR postâtransplant in the GWAS.
This is the first study to examine PRS, composed of variants that impact kidney function in the general population, in a postâtransplant context. Despite PRS being a significant predictor of eGFR postâtransplant, the effect size of common genetic factors is limited compared to clinical variables
A framework for human microbiome research
A variety of microbial communities and their genes (the microbiome) exist throughout the human body, with fundamental roles in human health and disease. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Human Microbiome Project Consortium has established a population-scale framework to develop metagenomic protocols, resulting in a broad range of quality-controlled resources and data including standardized methods for creating, processing and interpreting distinct types of high-throughput metagenomic data available to the scientific community. Here we present resources from a population of 242 healthy adults sampled at 15 or 18 body sites up to three times, which have generated 5,177 microbial taxonomic profiles from 16S ribosomal RNA genes and over 3.5 terabases of metagenomic sequence so far. In parallel, approximately 800 reference strains isolated from the human body have been sequenced. Collectively, these data represent the largest resource describing the abundance and variety of the human microbiome, while providing a framework for current and future studies
Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group. The definitive version was published in Nature 486 (2012): 207-214, doi:10.1038/nature11234.Studies of the human microbiome have revealed that even healthy individuals differ remarkably in the microbes that occupy habitats such as the gut, skin and vagina. Much of this diversity remains unexplained, although diet, environment, host genetics and early microbial exposure have all been implicated. Accordingly, to characterize the ecology of human-associated microbial communities, the Human Microbiome Project has analysed the largest cohort and set of distinct, clinically relevant body habitats so far. We found the diversity and abundance of each habitatâs signature microbes to vary widely even among healthy subjects, with strong niche specialization both within and among individuals. The project encountered an estimated 81â99% of the genera, enzyme families and community configurations occupied by the healthy Western microbiome. Metagenomic carriage of metabolic pathways was stable among individuals despite variation in community structure, and ethnic/racial background proved to be one of the strongest associations of both pathways and microbes with clinical metadata. These results thus delineate the range of structural and functional configurations normal in the microbial communities of a healthy population, enabling future characterization of the epidemiology, ecology and translational applications of the human microbiome.This research was supported in
part by National Institutes of Health grants U54HG004969 to B.W.B.; U54HG003273
to R.A.G.; U54HG004973 to R.A.G., S.K.H. and J.F.P.; U54HG003067 to E.S.Lander;
U54AI084844 to K.E.N.; N01AI30071 to R.L.Strausberg; U54HG004968 to G.M.W.;
U01HG004866 to O.R.W.; U54HG003079 to R.K.W.; R01HG005969 to C.H.;
R01HG004872 to R.K.; R01HG004885 to M.P.; R01HG005975 to P.D.S.;
R01HG004908 to Y.Y.; R01HG004900 to M.K.Cho and P. Sankar; R01HG005171 to
D.E.H.; R01HG004853 to A.L.M.; R01HG004856 to R.R.; R01HG004877 to R.R.S. and
R.F.; R01HG005172 to P. Spicer.; R01HG004857 to M.P.; R01HG004906 to T.M.S.;
R21HG005811 to E.A.V.; M.J.B. was supported by UH2AR057506; G.A.B. was
supported by UH2AI083263 and UH3AI083263 (G.A.B., C. N. Cornelissen, L. K. Eaves
and J. F. Strauss); S.M.H. was supported by UH3DK083993 (V. B. Young, E. B. Chang,
F. Meyer, T. M. S., M. L. Sogin, J. M. Tiedje); K.P.R. was supported by UH2DK083990 (J.
V.); J.A.S. and H.H.K. were supported by UH2AR057504 and UH3AR057504 (J.A.S.);
DP2OD001500 to K.M.A.; N01HG62088 to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research;
U01DE016937 to F.E.D.; S.K.H. was supported by RC1DE0202098 and
R01DE021574 (S.K.H. and H. Li); J.I. was supported by R21CA139193 (J.I. and
D. S. Michaud); K.P.L. was supported by P30DE020751 (D. J. Smith); Army Research
Office grant W911NF-11-1-0473 to C.H.; National Science Foundation grants NSF
DBI-1053486 to C.H. and NSF IIS-0812111 to M.P.; The Office of Science of the US
Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 for P.S. C.; LANL
Laboratory-Directed Research and Development grant 20100034DR and the US
Defense Threat Reduction Agency grants B104153I and B084531I to P.S.C.; Research
Foundation - Flanders (FWO) grant to K.F. and J.Raes; R.K. is an HHMI Early Career
Scientist; Gordon&BettyMoore Foundation funding and institutional funding fromthe
J. David Gladstone Institutes to K.S.P.; A.M.S. was supported by fellowships provided by
the Rackham Graduate School and the NIH Molecular Mechanisms in Microbial
Pathogenesis Training Grant T32AI007528; a Crohnâs and Colitis Foundation of
Canada Grant in Aid of Research to E.A.V.; 2010 IBM Faculty Award to K.C.W.; analysis
of the HMPdata was performed using National Energy Research Scientific Computing
resources, the BluBioU Computational Resource at Rice University
WiD for What?
âWiD for What?â (Susie Mannon, Sociology) â While acknowledging that a Writing in the Disciplines approach to composition pedagogy allows programs to better cultivate disciplinary expertise, Susie will examine some unintended consequences and their impacts on our students and on ourselves