The power of quiet: Re-making affective amateur and professional textiles agencies

This article is part of a special issue on textiles and intersecting identities. The article was developed from a paper given at the Association of Fashion & Textiles Courses (FTC) Conference, Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities (Glasgow School of Art, November 2015.This article advocates an enlarged understanding of the benefits of manual creativity for critical thinking and affective making, which blurs the boundaries, or at least works in the spaces between or beyond amateur and professional craft practices and identities. It presents findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (https://cocreatingcare.wordpress.com). CARE worked with community groups (composed of amateur and professional textile makers) in a variety of amateur contexts: the kitchen table, the community cafe, the library, for instance, to explore how critical creative making might serve as a means to co-produce community agency, assets and abilities. The research proposes that through ‘acts of small citizenship’ creative making can be powerfully, if quietly, activist (Orton Johnson 2014; Hackney 2013a). Unlike more familiar crafts activism, such ‘acts’ are not limited to overtly political and public manifestations of social action, but rather concern the micro-politics of the individual, the grass roots community and the social everyday. The culturally marginal, yet accessible nature of amateur crafts becomes a source of strength and potential as we explore its active, dissenting and paradoxically discontented aspects alongside more frequently articulated dimensions of acceptance, consensus and satisfaction. Informed by Richard Sennett’s (2012) work on cooperation, Matt Ratto and Megan Bolar (2014) on DIY citizenship and critical making, Ranciere’s (2004) theory of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, and theories of embodied and enacted knowledge, the authors interpret findings from selected CARE-related case studies to explicate various ways in which ‘making’ can make a difference by: providing a safe space for disagreement, reflection, resolution, collaboration, active listening, questioning and critical thinking, for instance, and offer quiet, tenacious and life-enhancing forms of resistance and revision to hegemonic versions of culture and subjectivity

Making: Archives/Making: Impact - The Creative use of Archives within Textile Design Education and Practice.

This paper reports on Making: Archives, a 2nd year Falmouth University Textile Design project co-created by Senior Lecturer Hannah Maughan and Senior Archivist Sarah.C.Jane. The project is designed to encourage students to reconnect with primary research materials and physical artefacts to counteract the over-reliance on digital resources, whilst showcasing the potential of archive collections as conceptual and creative stimulus for textile design development and innovation. Falmouth’s Penryn campus houses University of Exeter in Cornwall, creating a unique shared archival service and eclectic range of collections. The project seeks to challenge the perceived notions of archives, and to promote the Universities often underused archival resources to new audiences (Jane and Maughan 2020). Expanding on its case study as an exemplar of pedagogic good practice in The National Archives and History UK’s Guide to Collaboration for Archives and Higher Education, (McNauty and O’Rourke 2018) the paper disseminates and reflects on extensive research and data drawn from student participants of the Making:Archives project during its 7 years period, illustrating the breadth of experience, engagement and response, whilst examining in particular the value of using non discipline specific archives and curriculum embedded archival pedagogy. With the COVID pandemic disrupting the 19/20 cycle mid project, shutting down access to archive and studio workshops, the paper considers the reaction to the specific challenges faced and the emerging opportunities, which subsequently shifts the project’s focus, adapting to an evolved, more inclusive, and diverse iteration. The paper shares perspectives on archive working strategies in the context of education, industry, and archive sectors. Keywords: Archives Textiles Collaboration Pedagogy Narrative

The problems, promise and pragmatism of community food growing:Introduction to Special Issue: 'Critical Foodscapes'

Alongside associated forms of socially and politically conscious food production, community food growing is routinely connected to a wide range of social and environmental benefits. However, robust evidence in support of these associations remains scant, and while the conversation has shifted in recent years to take account of the sometimes unintended or negative aspects of these activities, no consensus has been reached about how such forms of food growing should adapt to new conditions, or be scaled up to maximize their positive impacts. A July 2016 conference was organized to address this strategic shortfall. This themed issue presents the papers resulting from the conference

Making: Archives - a case study of creative collaboration

Abstract This paper reports on an undergraduate project, Making: Archives - Narrative Artefact, as an exemplar of collaborative good practice, expanding on its case study in the National Archives and History UK's Guide to Collaboration for Archive and Higher Education. The paper examines the expected and unexpected impacts of the Making: Archives collaborative project for the stakeholders involved: the Institution, the Archive Service, its depositors and in particular the students. Students have both struggled and excelled in this project, with the most engaged developing a range of creative and transferrable skills that have been repurposed in the creation of work beyond Making:Archives. The paper also reflects on the challenges faced, and numerous opportunities presented, during the co-creation, delievery and evalution of the project, drawing extensive data gathered from student participants. The project is presented in the context of relevant literature from both the textile education, indusrty and archives sectors. Keywords: archives; pedagogy; learning; teaching; higher educatio

The Power of Quiet: Re-making Affective Amateur and Professional Textiles Agencies

This article advocates an enlarged understanding of the benefits of manual creativity for critical thinking and affective making, which blurs the boundaries, or at least works in the spaces between or beyond differential definitions of amateur and professional craft practices and identities. It presents findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (https://cocreatingcare.wordpress.com). CARE worked with community groups (composed of amateur and professional textile makers) in a variety of amateur contexts: the kitchen table, the community cafe, the library, for instance, to explore how critical creative making might serve as a means to co-produce community agency, assets and abilities. The research proposes that through “acts of small citizenship” creative making can be powerfully, if quietly, activist. Unlike more familiar crafts activism, such “acts” are not limited to overtly political and public manifestations of social action, but rather concern the micro-politics of the individual, the grass roots community and the social everyday. The culturally marginal, yet accessible nature of amateur crafts becomes a source of strength and potential as we explore its active, dissenting and paradoxically discontented aspects alongside more frequently articulated dimensions of acceptance, consensus and satisfaction. Informed by work on cooperation, DIY citizenship, critical making, and theories of embodied and enacted knowledge, the authors interpret findings from selected CARE-related case studies to explicate various ways in which “making” can make a difference by: providing a safe space for disagreement, reflection, resolution, collaboration, active listening, questioning and critical thinking, and offer quiet, tenacious and life-enhancing forms of resistance and revision to hegemonic versions of culture and subjectivity

Relationship between 233 colorectal cancer risk loci and survival in 1926 patients with advanced disease

Background: Genome, transcriptome and methylome-wide association studies have identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or genes at 258 loci associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk. We studied the relationship between these and patient outcome. Methods: We studied 1926 unrelated patients with advanced CRC from COIN and COIN-B. Of 205 CRC-risk SNPs, 19 were directly genotyped and 162 were imputed, and of 53 risk genes, 52 were tested. An additive Cox model for overall survival was adjusted for known prognostic factors. For nominally significant SNPs or genes, we considered a recessive model with a Bonferroni corrected threshold of P = 2.1 × 10−4. We examined SNPs as expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) and the relationship between gene expression in colorectal tumours and survival in 597 unrelated patients. Results: Eleven SNPs or genes were nominally associated with survival under an additive model. Only rs117079142 mapping to UTP23 and EIF3H (Hazard Ratio [HR] = 2.79, 95% Confidence Intervals [CI] = 1.70–4.58, P = 4.7 × 10−5) and rs9924886 mapping to CDH1 and CDH3 (HR = 1.24, 95% CI = 1.12–1.38, P = 5.2 × 10−5) passed the multiple testing threshold under a recessive model. rs117079142 was an eQTL for UTP23 and rs9924886 for CDH1, CDH3 and ZFP90. Decreased CDH1 expression in CRCs was associated with worse survival (HR = 2.18, 95% CI = 1.3–3.5, P = 1.8 × 10−3). Conclusion: rs117079142 and rs9924886 may represent potential prognostic biomarkers for CRC

Genome-wide association studies of toxicity to oxaliplatin and fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy with or without cetuximab in 1800 patients with advanced colorectal cancer

Chemotherapies administered at normal therapeutic dosages can cause significant side-effects and may result in early treatment discontinuation. Inter-individual variation in toxicity highlights the need for biomarkers to personalise treatment. We sought to identify such biomarkers by conducting 40 genome-wide association studies, together with gene and gene set analyses, for any toxicity and 10 individual toxicities in 1800 patients with advanced colorectal cancer treated with oxaliplatin and fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy ± cetuximab from the MRC COIN and COIN-B trials (385 patients received FOLFOX, 360 FOLFOX + cetuximab, 707 XELOX and 348 XELOX + cetuximab). Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), genes and gene sets that reached genome-wide or suggestive significance were validated in independent patient groups. We found that MROH5 was significantly associated with neutropenia in MAGMA gene analyses in patients treated with XELOX (P = 6.6 × 10−7) and was independently validated in those receiving XELOX + cetuximab; pooled P = 3.7 × 10−7. rs13260246 at 8q21.13 was significantly associated with vomiting in patients treated with XELOX (odds ratio = 5.0, 95% confidence interval = 3.0-8.3, P = 9.8 × 10−10) but was not independently replicated. SNPs at 139 loci had suggestive associations for toxicities and lead SNPs at five of these were independently validated (rs6030266 with diarrhoea, rs1546161 with hand-foot syndrome, rs9601722 with neutropenia, rs13413764 with lethargy and rs4600090 with nausea; all with pooled P's < 5.0 × 10−6). In conclusion, the association of MROH5 with neutropenia and five other putative biomarkers warrant further investigation for their potential clinical utility. Despite our comprehensive genome-wide analyses of large, well-characterised, clinical trials, we found a lack of common variants with modest effect sizes associated with toxicities

Risk factors for Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) death in a population cohort study from the Western Cape province, South Africa

Risk factors for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) death in sub-Saharan Africa and the effects of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and tuberculosis on COVID-19 outcomes are unknown. We conducted a population cohort study using linked data from adults attending public-sector health facilities in the Western Cape, South Africa. We used Cox proportional hazards models, adjusted for age, sex, location, and comorbidities, to examine the associations between HIV, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 death from 1 March to 9 June 2020 among (1) public-sector “active patients” (≥1 visit in the 3 years before March 2020); (2) laboratory-diagnosed COVID-19 cases; and (3) hospitalized COVID-19 cases. We calculated the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) for COVID-19, comparing adults living with and without HIV using modeled population estimates.Among 3 460 932 patients (16% living with HIV), 22 308 were diagnosed with COVID-19, of whom 625 died. COVID19 death was associated with male sex, increasing age, diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease. HIV was associated with COVID-19 mortality (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 2.14; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.70–2.70), with similar risks across strata of viral loads and immunosuppression. Current and previous diagnoses of tuberculosis were associated with COVID-19 death (aHR, 2.70 [95% CI, 1.81–4.04] and 1.51 [95% CI, 1.18–1.93], respectively). The SMR for COVID-19 death associated with HIV was 2.39 (95% CI, 1.96–2.86); population attributable fraction 8.5% (95% CI, 6.1–11.1)

Stitched Together: Community Learning, Collaborative Making

From book 'Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities'.Arts & Humanities Research Counci

Analyses of 7,635 Patients with Colorectal Cancer Using Independent Training and Validation Cohorts Show That rs9929218 in CDH1 Is a Prognostic Marker of Survival

Purpose: Genome-wide association studies have identified numerous loci associated with colorectal cancer risk. Several of these have also been associated with patient survival, although none have been validated. Here, we used large independent training and validation cohorts to identify robust prognostic biomarkers for colorectal cancer. Experimental Design: In our training phase, we analyzed 20 colorectal cancer-risk SNPs from 14 genome-wide associated loci, for their effects on survival in 2,083 patients with advanced colorectal cancer. A Cox survival model was used, stratified for treatment, adjusted for known prognostic factors, and corrected for multiple testing. Three SNPs were subsequently analyzed in an independent validation cohort of 5,552 colorectal cancer patients. A validated SNP was analyzed by disease stage and response to treatment. Results: Three variants associated with survival in the training phase; however, only rs9929218 at 16q22 (intron 2 of CDH1, encoding E-cadherin) was significant in the validation phase. Patients homozygous for the minor allele (AA genotype) had worse survival (training phase HR, 1.43; 95% confidence intervals; CI, 1.20–1.71, P = 5.8 × 10−5; validation phase HR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.01–1.37, P = 3.2 × 10−2; combined HR, 1.28; 95% CI, 1.14–1.43, P = 2.2 × 10−5). This effect was independent of known prognostic factors, and was significant amongst patients with stage IV disease (P = 2.7 × 10−5). rs9929218 was also associated with poor response to chemotherapy (P = 3.9 × 10−4). Conclusions: We demonstrate the potential of common inherited genetic variants to inform patient outcome and show that rs9929218 identifies approximately 8% of colorectal cancer patients with poor prognosis. rs9929218 may affect CDH1 expression and E-cadherin plays a role in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition providing a mechanism underlying its prognostic potential