Feeling Status: What Emotion Reveals About Immigrant Relationships With The United States

Traditional understandings of legal status focus on its role as a mechanism for state function without adequately acknowledging the emotional component of how it feels to navigate it, especially for immigrants. Drawing on the embodied wisdom of immigrants to better understand what legal status is and what role it plays in society, this study utilizes 13 semi-structured interviews conducted with immigrants now permanently documented in the United States as legal permanent residents or naturalized citizens, who previously lived undocumented in the country, to identify several patterns that highlight the limit of conventional notions of citizenship. By employing a person-centered approach to emotion and prioritizing the context of global inequality within which citizenship is distributed, my data draws upon existing literature on the complexity of citizenship to emphasize that even as legal barriers lift, emotional marginalization remains or grows more complex over time. Despite this, immigrants demonstrate agency as they use their legal status to navigate their relationships with the state in meaningful and empowered ways despite hostile aspects of the receiving context. Understanding legal status through immigrants’ emotional experience can prompt theoretical conversations to be more committed to those most intimately involved with citizenship, and help support calls for policy that prioritizes pathways to legal status

Afrocentrism, Hip-Hop, and the “Black Queen”: Utilizing Hip-Hop Feminist Methods to Challenge Controlling Images of Black Women

Afrocentrism is a political framework that has aided Black intellectuals and scholars in re-conceptualizing a world with Blackness at its center. However, Afrocentrism has left the most marginalized people in the Black community—Black women, Black queer individuals and Black trans women—invisible and exploited. Hip-Hop Feminism, a Black feminist movement that emerged in the 1980s, developed a powerful framework to refute the oppressive language and sexually-exploitive images of women in mainstream hip-hop. Inaccurate and stereotypical images of Black women continue to plague Black social media, recreating toxic and controlling images of Black womanhood. This paper examines the multifaceted framework of Hip-Hop Feminism and discusses its relevance in dismantling the negative and reductive images of Black women that dominate social media

DNA damage and repair proteins in cellular response to sulfur mustard in Iranian veterans more than two decades after exposure

Delayed effects of sulfur mustard (SM) exposure on the levels of five important damage/repair proteins were investigated in 40 SM-exposed veterans of Iran-Iraq war and 35 unexposed controls. A major DNA damage biomarker protein – phosphorylated H2AX – along with four DNA repair proteins in cell response to the genome damage MRE11, NBS1, RAD51, and XPA were evaluated in blood lymphocytes from the veterans and controls using western blotting. Mean levels of XPA, MRE11, RAD51 and NBS1 were lower in SM-exposed patients and the decrease in NBS1 was significant. Even though the raised level of phosphor-H2AX in SM-poisoned group compared to the controls was not significant it was consistent with DNA damage findings confirming the severity of damage to the DNA after exposure to SM. There were correlations between the values of RAD51 and NBS1 proteins as well as XPA and MRE11 proteins. More than two decades after exposure to SM, there is still evidences of DNA damage as well as impaired repair mechanisms in cells of exposed individuals. Such disorders in cellular level may contribute to long term health problems of the SM veterans

Sub-acute Toxicological Effects of Jobelyn® on Pregnant Albino Rats

The aim of the present study was to investigate the sub-acute toxicological effects of Jobelyn® on pregnant albino rats by employing biochemical, haematological and histopathological methods. A total of 32 pregnant female rats were randomly assigned to four different groups of eight rats each. The control group received distilled water and different doses of Jobelyn®; 250, 500, 1000 mg kg-1were administered orally once a day for 2 weeks to the other groups. Biochemical analysis revealed a significant decrease (p<0.05) in the levels of alanine aminotransferase, albumin, urea, PCV and Hb in the treatment groups when compared to the control. However, the significant decrease in PCV and Hb was observed solely in the group treated with 1000 mg kg-1body weight, suggesting that this decrease could be dosedependent. Alkaline phosphatase, total protein, triglycerides, cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, eosinophils, basophils, neutrophils, monocytes, lymphocytes, WBC count, revealed no significant difference (p<0.05) when compared to the control. The results show that at an appropriate dosage, the use of Jobelyn® during pregnancy may have no adverse effect on the liver and kidney tissues and may possess hepatoprotective and nephroprotective properties however the histopathological studies revealed that very high levels of Jobelyn may be hepatotoxi

From victims to actors:the role of children and young people in flood recovery and resilience

Following a series of recent devastating storms across England with large numbers of homes and businesses evacuated, and despite widespread consensus that further severe flooding is expected, a large section of the population continues to be excluded from developments in flood risk management. We argue that the absence of children and young people from assessments of both the effects of flooding and ways in which it can be mitigated, undermines the effectiveness and legitimacy of policy making. Drawing on in-depth participative research with two groups of flood-affected children and young people we show the range of ways in which they are affected by flooding, some ways they can be better supported, and then how their valuable experience can help shape positive change in policy and practice before, during and after floods. Children developed Flood Manifestos for Change in a direct challenge to their omission from flood governance. The Manifestos and the steps children took to advocate for them can be seen as acts of citizenship, highlighting the capacities of children and young people as flood actors, rather than flood victims

The time horizon and its role in multiple species conservation planning

Survival probability within a certain time horizon T is a common measure of population viability. The choice of T implicitly involves a time preference, similar to economic discounting: Conservation success is evaluated at the time horizon T, while all effects that occur later than T are not considered. Despite the obvious relevance of the time horizon, ecological studies seldom analyze its impact on the evaluation of conservation options. In this paper, we show that, while the choice of T does not change the ranking of conservation options for single species under stationary conditions, it may substantially change conservation decisions for multiple species. We conclude that it is of crucial importance to investigate the sensitivity of model results to the choice of the time horizon or other measures of time preference when prioritizing biodiversity conservation efforts.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Minor changes to v1. This version corredponds to the final publication in Biological Conservatio

Hepatic effects of tartrazine (E 102) after systemic exposure are independent of oestrogen receptor interactions in the mouse

Tartrazine is a food colour that activates the transcriptional function of the human oestrogen receptor alpha in an in vitro cell model. Since oestrogens are cholestatic, we hypothesised tartrazine will cause periportal injury to the liver in vivo. To test this hypothesis, tartrazine was initially administered systemically to mice resulting in a periportal recruitment of inflammatory cells, increased serum alkaline phosphatase activity and mild periportal fibrosis. To determine whether an oestrogenic effect may be a key event in this response, tartrazine, sulphonated metabolites and a food additive contaminant were screened for their ability to interact with murine oestrogen receptors. In all cases, there were no interactions as agonists or antagonists and further, no oestrogenicity was observed with tartrazine in an in vivo uterine growth assay. To examine the relevance of the hepatic effects of tartrazine to its use as a food additive, tartrazine was orally administered to transgenic NF-κB-Luc mice. Pre- and concurrent oral treatment with alcohol was incorporated given its potential to promote gut permeability and hepatic inflammation. Tartrazine alone induced NF- κB activities in the colon and liver but there was no periportal recruitment of inflammatory cells or fibrosis. Tartrazine, its sulphonated metabolites and the contaminant inhibited sulphotransferase activities in murine hepatic S9 extracts. Given the role of sulfotransferases in bile acid excretion, the initiating event giving rise to periportal inflammation and subsequent hepatic pathology through systemic tartrazine exposure is therefore potentially associated an inhibition of bile acid sulphation and excretion and not on oestrogen receptor-mediated transcriptional function. However, these effects were restricted to systemic exposures to tartrazine and did not occur to any significant effect after oral exposure

Converting Endangered Species Categories to Probabilities of Extinction for Phylogenetic Conservation Prioritization

Categories of imperilment like the global IUCN Red List have been transformed to probabilities of extinction and used to rank species by the amount of imperiled evolutionary history they represent (e.g. by the Edge of Existence programme). We investigate the stability of such lists when ranks are converted to probabilities of extinction under different scenarios.Using a simple example and computer simulation, we show that preserving the categories when converting such list designations to probabilities of extinction does not guarantee the stability of the resulting lists.Care must be taken when choosing a suitable transformation, especially if conservation dollars are allocated to species in a ranked fashion. We advocate routine sensitivity analyses