Reimagining the State

What does it mean to re-imagine the state? In political theory the exercise has involved telling and re-telling the story of the contract. Accounts of this foundational agreement establish the basis for the state’s just constitution and define the limits of legitimate protest, empowering those who are purported to agree, namely the citizens, to act when the terms of the agreement are breached. This chapter asks how far contract is a master’s tool or, as Audre Lorde once argued in another context, a device that allows ‘only the most narrow perimeters of change’ (Lorde 2007 [1984]: 111). Moving between contemporary political theory and the history of ideas, it outlines the work of two leading critics of contract, Charles Mills and Carole Pateman. Mills subversively re-frames John Rawls’s Theory of Justice to defend contract as a ‘master’s tool’ that can be used by disadvantaged groups against ‘master’s’ to redress historic and current injustices. Pateman rejects contract entirely and proposes an alternative idea of free agreement to support radical transformation. To consider the implications of their critiques for political action, I develop a model of prefigurative politics. This is used to show how Mills and Pateman differently construe the ownership of the tools available to marginalised and disadvantaged groups. The argument is that Pateman’s rejection of contract reveals the limits of Mills’s subversive reframing. Relating a story of contract that Mills by-passes, Pateman’s work describes a fluid, plural condition of anarchic politics that imagines citizens negotiating their own justice claims in prefigurative direct actions. Free agreement represents a full reclamation of the tools that masters’ claim as their own. Re-imagined through free agreement, the state is also transformed

Self-assembled peptide as a long-acting drug formulation

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and obesity are widespread and associated metabolic diseases with worldwide rising prevalence [1]. The gut hormone Oxyntomodulin induces satiety and normalizes hyperglycaemia without risk of hypoglycaemic excursions [2]. However, native incretin hormones are quickly degraded by peptidases and renally excreted, which has so far impaired pharmaceutical exploitation of anorectic and glucose-homeostatic activities [3]. It is known that many – if not all – peptides can be converted to self-assembled nanostructures [4]. Amyloid fibrils are characterized by enhanced chemical, biological and mechanic stability compared to soluble peptides, and allow a controlled release by dissociation of monomers from the fibril termini [5]. Here I propose self-assembled peptides as a prolonged-activity, self-mediated drug delivery system for subcutaneous injection of pharmaceutically active drugs. Oxyntomodulin is used as a model peptide due to previously futile attempts at finding long-acting analogues, and Oxyntomodulin’s so far unreported self-assembly behaviour. This thesis shows a method to reproducibly form subcutaneously injectable Oxyntomodulin fibrils with high conversion yield and low polydispersity, as well as methods to characterize morphology, kinetics and thermodynamics of Oxyntomodulin self-assembly. Oxyntomodulin fibrils display amyloid-like characteristics and release soluble peptide in a peptide-deprived environment. Association and dissociation kinetics and thermodynamics are sensitively dependent on salts and temperature, with an association temperature optimum at room temperature that is unique in amyloid-type self-assembly. An alternative fibril type forms under different conditions and displays altered fibrillation kinetics and thermodynamics. The specificity of fibrillation to the peptide sequence is shown in presence of Oxyntomodulin’s sister peptide glucagon and the analogue Aib-2-Oxyntomodulin. Extended release of active peptide from a subcutaneous Oxyntomodulin fibril depot has been proved in rodent studies at MedImmune [6]. As amyloid-like self-assembly is a generic feature of the peptide chain, the strategies and methods described in this project can be applied to other pharmaceutically active peptides and proteins.This project was fully funded by MedImmune, LLC under grant number RG77937

When Kropotkin met Lenin

When Kropotkin met Leni

The mirror of anarchy: the egoism of John Henry Mackay and Dora Marsden

The mirror of anarchy: the egoism of John Henry Mackay and Dora Marsde

Resources

Guide to resources (libraries, archives, films, blogspots etc.) on anarchism

Guy Aldred: rebel with a cause

Guy Aldred: rebel with a caus

Great anarchists

No description supplie

Ideologies, cognitive orientations

Ideology is typically associated with the classification of belief systems and the construction of social meaning, the development of political traditions – formal ideologies – and their function. In protest movement literature the significance of ideology as a discrete area of analysis is contested. At the heart of the debate is an argument about the role ideology plays in mobilizing action: in encouraging or securing the alignment of social movement organizational values with non-movement belief systems and/or in shaping and re-shaping activist understandings. Some scholars argue that emotions play a key role in this process; ideology focuses attention on what individuals know, or think they know about the world – on cognitive factors – in forging alignments and orienting actions

Morris, Watts, Wilde and the democratization of art

Morris, Watts, Wilde and the democratization of ar

Domination

Dominatio