Irish disability: Postcolonial narratives of stunted development

In his 1941 poem The Great Hunger, a scathing critique of rural idealism in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, Patrick Kavanagh defines his Irish anti-hero by the ???impotent worm on his thigh,??? a ???no-target gun??? that represents his purposeless masculinity as life becomes ???dried in [his] veins.??? Twenty years later, Edna O???Brien???s The Country Girls Trilogy presents the coming-of-age tale of Caithleen Brady, an Irish colleen deemed ???mad in one eye??? by her foreign suitor before having herself sterilized and committing suicide. Both bring to mind Samuel Beckett???s grotesquely disfigured and confined narrators who prefigure Francie Brady, the mentally ill and murderous villain-hero of Patrick McCabe???s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy. In this first decade of the twenty-first century, Jamie O???Neill and Roddy Doyle look back one hundred years to the fight for Irish Independence and pen nationalist soldiers fueled by the bitterness and suffering that attend their disability and disenfranchisement???Doyler Doyle of At Swim, Two Boys walks with a limp and Henry Smart of A Star Called Henry fights British soldiers and abusive Irish clerics with his father???s wooden leg. As this catalogue attests, physical and mental disabilities permeate colonial and postcolonial Ireland in the wake of a surge of Irish nationalism demanding, as W.B. Yeats writes in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, that a true Irishman ???must give [Ireland] all??? to the point of martyrdom. In bringing together disability studies and postcolonial Irish literature, I investigate the creation of a standard national narrative for accepted ability and development, the breakdown of these categories, and the role of national discourse in isolating the ???disabled??? as it simultaneously allies physical and mental disability with moral and intellectual deviancy and corruption. The proliferation of physical impairment, spiritual frustration, and social unrest displayed in modern Irish literature critiques the nationalist banner that promised a cure for Irish cultural and political imprisonment. I argue that rather than championing a middle-class triumph over deviancy and demonstrating the development of Irish stability, postcolonial Irish literature exposes Irish development???religious, national, cultural, and individual???as inevitably stunted by both imperial narratives of Irish disability and the equally oppressive nationalist narratives that came to replace them in the Irish postcolonial imaginary. By reading postcolonial Irish narratives through the framework of disability, I venture beyond a critical reliance on the oppression of colonialism to examine the stunting effects of an Irish Catholic nationalism developed by adherence to a pure ideal that rejects sexual, religious, and cultural difference as disabling to an Irish nation. Rather than simply emphasizing an Irish postcolonial triumph over imperial narratives of Irish disability, my dissertation yields a fresh approach that reveals the inevitable stunting of Irish narratives of progress both by imperial policy and the compounding oppression of normative Irish nationalism that further ???disables??? and marginalizes those deemed physically and mentally unfit for national inclusion

Effects of temperature variability on community structure in a natural microbial food web

Climate change research has demonstrated that changing temperatures will have an effect on community-level dynamics by altering species survival rates, shifting species distributions, and ultimately, creating mismatches in community interactions. However, most of this work has focused on increasing temperature, and still little is known about how the variation in temperature extremes will affect community dynamics. We used the model aquatic community held within the leaves of the carnivorous plant, Sarracenia purpurea, to test how food web dynamics will be affected by high temperature variation. We tested the community response of the first (bacterial density), second (protist diversity and composition), and third trophic level (predator mortality), and measured community respiration. We collected early and late successional stage inquiline communities from S. purpurea from two North American and two European sites with similar average July temperature. We then created a common garden experiment in which replicates of these communities underwent either high or normal daily temperature variation, with the average temperature equal among treatments. We found an impact of temperature variation on the first two, but not on the third trophic level. For bacteria in the high-variation treatment, density experienced an initial boost in growth but then decreased quickly through time. For protists in the high- variation treatment, alpha-diversity decreased faster than in the normal-variation treatment, beta-diversity increased only in the European sites, and protist community composition tended to diverge more in the late successional stage. The mortality of the predatory mosquito larvae was unaffected by temperature variation. Community respiration was lower in the high-variation treatment, indicating a lower ecosystem functioning. Our results highlight clear impacts of temperature variation. A more mechanistic understanding of the effects that temperature, and especially temperature variation, will have on community dynamics is still greatly needed

The effects of species properties and community context on establishment success

Understanding whether factors important for species establishment in a local community are predictable or context- dependent is key for determining the features that affect community stability and species coexistence. A major challenge for scientists addressing this question is that natural systems are complex. This makes it difficult to test multiple properties of species and features of the resident community simultaneously to determine what factors are most important for establishment success of a species into a novel community. We used the model aquatic system inside the leaves of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea to test whether properties predicted to be important for establishment success of a species (initial density, competitive ability, body size) are generalizable across communities varying in resource availability and the presence of a top predator. For intermediate trophic-level species, we found that both competitive dominance and initial density were important for establishment success. Although a less competitive species was also able to successfully establish in the communities, high resource availability and high initial density were important for its establishment success. Body size of the introduced species, although correlated with competitive ability, was not an important characteristic for establishment success. The presence of a top predator significantly decreased the densities of the introduced species when resources were low, but did not completely inhibit establishment success. The relative importance of each of these factors, and interactions among them, could not have been discerned through single hypothesis testing. The results from this work show the need for detailed experiments that focus on combinations of factors to understand if mechanisms determining community assembly and species establishment can be generalized across systems

The effects of temperature and dispersal on species diversity in natural microbial metacommunities

Dispersal is key for maintaining biodiversity at local- and regional scales in metacommunities. However, little is known about the combined effects of dispersal and climate change on biodiversity. Theory predicts that alpha-diversity is maximized at intermediate dispersal rates, resulting in a hump-shaped diversity-dispersal relationship. This relationship is predicted to flatten when competition increases. We anticipate that this same flattening will occur with increased temperature because, in the rising part of the temperature performance curve, interspecific competition is predicted to increase. We explored this question using aquatic communities of Sarracenia purpurea from early- and late-successional stages, in which we simulated four levels of dispersal and four temperature scenarios. With increased dispersal, the hump shape was observed consistently in late successional communities, but only in higher temperature treatments in early succession. Increased temperature did not flatten the hump-shape relationship, but decreased the level of alpha- and gamma- diversity. Interestingly, higher temperatures negatively impacted small-bodied species. These metacommunity-level extinctions likely relaxed interspecific competition, which could explain the absence of flattening of the diversity-dispersal relationship. Our findings suggest that climate change will cause extinctions both at local- and global- scales and emphasize the importance of intermediate levels of dispersal as an insurance for local diversity

Top predators affect the composition of naive protist communities, but only in their early-successional stage

Introduced top predators have the potential to disrupt community dynamics when prey species are naive to predation. The impact of introduced predators may also vary depending on the stage of community development. Early-succession communities are likely to have small-bodied and fast-growing species, but are not necessarily good at defending against predators. In contrast, late-succession communities are typically composed of larger-bodied species that are more predator resistant relative to small-bodied species. Yet, these aspects are greatly neglected in invasion studies. We therefore tested the effect of top predator presence on early- and late-succession communities that were either naive or non-naive to top predators. We used the aquatic community held within the leaves of Sarracenia purpurea. In North America, communities have experienced the S. purpurea top predator and are therefore non-naive. In Europe, this predator is not present and its niche has not been filled, making these communities top-predator naive. We collected early- and late-succession communities from two non-naive and two naive sites, which are climatically similar. We then conducted a common-garden experiment, with and without the presence of the top predator, in which we recorded changes in community composition, body size spectra, bacterial density, and respiration. We found that the top predator had no statistical effect on global measures of community structure and functioning. However, it significantly altered protist composition, but only in naive, early-succession communities, highlighting that the state of community development is important for understanding the impact of invasion

IL-10 permits transient activation of dendritic cells to tolerize T cells and protect from central nervous system autoimmune disease

Dendritic cells (DCs) are key players in the development of immunity. They can direct both the size and the quality of an immune response and thus are attractive tools to mediate immunotherapy. DC function has been thought to reflect the cells' maturation, with immunosuppressive agents such as IL-10 understood to retain DCs in an immature and tolerogenic state. Here we report that DC activated in the presence of IL-10 do show functional and phenotypic maturation. Their activation is transient and occurs earlier and more briefly than in cells matured with LPS alone. Despite initially equivalent up-regulation of surface MHC and co-stimulation, the IL-10-treated DCs expressed little IL-12 and failed to stimulate T cell proliferation both in vitro and in vivo. Interaction with IL-10-treated DCs rendered antigen-specific T cells unresponsive to subsequent challenge and their injection reduced the severity of experimental autoimmune disease. Our data suggest that IL-10 acts not by inhibiting maturation but instead by controlling the kinetics and the quality of DC activation. This alternative pathway of DC differentiation offers significant therapeutic promise

The bacterial composition within the Sarracenia purpurea model system: local scale differences and the relationship with the other members of the food web

The leaves of the carnivorous pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, contain a microscopic aquatic food web that is considered a model system in ecological research. The species identity of the intermediate and top trophic level of this food web, as well the detritivore midge, are highly similar across the native geographic range of S. purpurea and, in some cases, appear to have co-evolved with the plant. However, until recently, the identity, geographic variation, and diversity of the bacteria in the bottom trophic level of this food web have remained largely unknown. This study investigated bacterial community composition inside the leaves of S. purpurea to address: 1) variation in bacterial communities at the beginning of succession at the local scale in different areas of the plant’s native geographic range (southern and mid-regional sites) and 2) the impacts of bacterial consumers and other members of the aquatic food web (i.e., insects) on bacterial community structure. Communities from six leaves (one leaf per plant) from New York and Florida study sites were analyzed using 16S ribosomal RNA gene cloning. Each pitcher within each site had a distinct community; however, there was more overlap in bacterial composition within each site than when communities were compared across sites. In contrast, the identity of protozoans and metazoans in this community were similar in species identity both within a site and between the two sites, but abundances differed. Our results indicate that, at least during the beginning of succession, there is no strong selection for bacterial taxa and that there is no core group of bacteria required by the plant to start the decomposition of trapped insects. Co-evolution between the plant and bacteria appears to not have occurred as it has for other members of this community

Examined Lives: The Transformative Power of Active Interviewing in Narrative Approach

An unexamined life is not worth living Socrates (470-399 BC) In this article I reveal transformative experiences stemming from non-verbal communication in the context of active interviewing in narrative research. Drawing upon my recent experience interviewing positive veteran teachers about the relationships they believe vital in maintaining their passion and enthusiasm for teaching, I explore the unique nature of narrative research in fostering intra-personal transformation. The goal of the article is to highlight transformation as an outcome in narrative research, with particular focus upon non-verbal communication in active interviewing. The article is constructed to examine transformation in thinking and understanding within the relational nature of narrative research in education; to highlight the complexity of non-verbal communication in the context of narrative research; and, to consider the nature of personal reflective practice in examining one\u27s ontological and epistemological framework for establishing respectful and ethical relationships between researcher and participants in narrative research

Reappraising the AITSL Professional Engagement Domain: Clarifying Social Capacity Building for School Leaders to Enhance Overall Teacher Job Satisfaction and Career Longevity

The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2018) stipulate what teachers should know and do through each career stage. School leaders are complicit in promoting the Standards are met by all staff, including Professional Engagement (Standards Six and Seven). While the Standards emphasise content and pedagogical capacity building, we contend that teaching is a social enterprise. Although social capacity building is implied in the Professional Engagement domain through terms such as ‘collegiality, collaboration and dialogue’, we question the degree to which it is understood by school leaders. We ask this in light of influential studies by Waldinger (2010) and Vaillant (1977) which highlight the importance of workplace social connection in terms of job satisfaction and career longevity. Using an Appreciative Inquiry lens, we interviewed a number of positive school leaders about social capacity building among their staff against the Professional Engagement domain. While interviews affirmed many inspiring examples of its application, we also uncovered a degree of uncertainty, lack of clarity and practical difficulties experienced by these exemplary leaders. As per our research approach, we do not suggest that there is any fundamental problem with the Professional Engagement domain per se. However, findings indicate value for AITSL in reappraising this domain in relation to its wording, implications and application. A more explicit emphasis on the social context may in turn help address some of the issues confronting Australia’s aging teaching workforce