Islamic Feminism and Muslim Women’s Rights Activism in India: From Transnational Discourse to Local Movement - or Vice Versa?

The very recent phenomenon called Islamic feminism receives quite a lot of attention from academia and media alike. Although it is basically a discourse whose strategy and praxis is primarily script related, there seems to be an overt tendency to equate Islamic feminism with an ideology for a transnational social or political movement. As a perceived singular movement, Islamic feminism is often distinguished from two other supposedly singular movements, namely “Muslim feminism” and “Islamist feminism.” With regard to India, however, these ideal types don’t seem to be very helpful as analytical categories, as the growing influence and reference to Islamic feminism there simply cannot be associated with one distinct group of proponents or one movement exclusively. Therefore, I will argue here that a clear distinction should rather be made between Islamic feminism as a discursive movement, and the distinct local, national or transnational social and political movements that are all increasingly referring to this discourse. In India, these movements in many cases precede the emergence of Islamic feminism in the 1990s. So by making this distinction, the focus of analysis can be shifted from the repeated finding of ideological divisions and frictions within a supposedly singular Islamic feminist movement to the focus on the enormous potential that this discourse obviously has for Muslim women’s agency in general as well as for the emergence of new female subjectivities in India (and elsewhere) which in turn seem to challenge and change secular-national gender discourses

Tea for Interreligious Harmony?: Cause Marketing as a New Field of Experimentation with Visual Secularity in India

This working paper is part of a larger research project on emerging visualities and imaginaries of living together in plurality and on equal terms. Against the background of growing majoritarianism in India and the normalization of violence against religious minorities and marginalized communities, the search for new visual forms and aesthetic means to counter increasing divisiveness and conflict has acquired exceptional urgency. It is a search pursued by many and in multiple directions, occasionally even in the realm of marketing and advertising which is the focus of this article. The larger project considers documentaries, fictional films and transmedia interventions in order to understand how different actors seek to create new visualities that are markedly different from earlier form(at)s used to visually mediate the normative project of political secularism for many decades, but nevertheless draw on the idea that secularity is a mode of living together and socially interacting in plural societies

More than a belated Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in India

While TV may still be the dominant medium in India today, and the internet and mobile phone industry are currently growing at a tremendous speed, ‘old’ media such as the press don’t seem to be losing ground as yet. In times of a recurrent debate about the crisis of print media in Europe and the US, the Indian newspaper market still keeps growing and has attracted the interest of multinational corporations. One reason for this is that India is presently one of the largest markets for English-language newspapers and magazines in the world. Notwithstanding the continued growth of the English-language press, it is above all daily newspapers in the major Indian languages which form the motor of this unprecedented press boom. The article shows that in the wake of economic liberalization and the enforcement of the consumption-oriented market economy, the newspaper market in India can be said to be changing from a linguistically ‘split public’, which was characterized by many asymmetries for decades, to an integrated multilingual ‘consumer sphere’. It can thus be argued that in this new consumer sphere, the old existing and imaginary boundaries between ‘English-language’, ‘Indian-language’ or ‘regional newspapers’ are becoming increasingly fuzzy, whereas the new geographies of the ‘regional’ are now very important for the expansion and consolidation of daily newspapers. In order to de-westernize the current debate about the ‘newspaper crisis’, it would thus be important to look at different historical as well as contemporary trajectories of newspaper developments in the framework of changing media configurations in the so-called global South, which may differ significantly from the European or North American context

Die Neuauflage der indischen Zivilrechtsdebatte 2003 und ihre Darstellung in der englischsprachigen Presse

"Wie gefährlich ist der Islam?", fragte die Wochenzeitung Die Zeit anlässlich der Terroranschläge vom 7. Juli 2005 in London und veröffentlichte hierzu unter anderem eine Polemik des britisch-indischen Schriftstellers Salman Rushdie gegen die Institutionen der islamischen Rechtsprechung in Indien und Pakistan. Ohne ihren geschichtlichen Hintergrund näher zu erläutern, nimmt Rushdie darin auch auf den jüngsten Streit über das islamische Personenstandsrecht in Indien Bezug, der die indische Medienöffentlichkeit gegenwärtig beschäftigt. Über die Frage, ob das Fortbestehen religiöser Familienrechte ein Hindernis für die Demokratie und "nationale Einheit" bzw. ganz allgemein für den "Fortschritt" in Indien darstellt oder vielmehr als Garant für die Pluralität der indischen Gesellschaft zu sehen ist, kam es seit dem berühmten Fall Shah Bano Mitte der 1980er-Jahre immer wieder zu heftigen Kontroversen, die wesentlich zur Polarisierung der indischen Gesellschaft beigetragen haben. Je stärker die Zivilrechtsdebatte von den Vertretern eines hegemonialen Hindunationalismus auf der einen und den Repräsentanten eines islamischen Minderheitennationalismus auf der anderen Seite als politische Debatte vereinnahmt wurde, umso deutlicher verschärfte sich der Antagonismus zwischen der Hindumehrheitsgesellschaft und der muslimischen Minderheit. Entscheidenden Einfluss auf den Verlauf und die Virulenz der Debatte hatte und hat dabei nach wie vor die Art und Weise, wie sie von den indischen Medien - und hier insbesondere der englischsprachigen Presse - aufgegriffen und dargestellt wird. Entsprechend legt dieser Beitrag zunächst die Kernproblematik der indischen Zivilrechtsdebatte dar und erörtert im Anschluss daran die Frage, ob und in welche Richtung die englischsprachige Presse die Diskussion gegenwärtig zu steuern versucht bzw. inwieweit sie einer erneuten Verhärtung der Fronten vorzubeugen versucht

ClinOmicsTrailbc: a visual analytics tool for breast cancer treatment stratification

Motivation: Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women. Tumors, even of the same histopathological subtype, exhibit a high genotypic diversity that impedes therapy stratification and that hence must be accounted for in the treatment decision-making process. Results: Here, we present ClinOmicsTrailbc, a comprehensive visual analytics tool for breast cancer decision support that provides a holistic assessment of standard-of-care targeted drugs, candidates for drug repositioning and immunotherapeutic approaches. To this end, our tool analyzes and visualizes clinical markers and (epi-)genomics and transcriptomics datasets to identify and evaluate the tumor’s main driver mutations, the tumor mutational burden, activity patterns of core cancerrelevant pathways, drug-specific biomarkers, the status of molecular drug targets and pharmacogenomic influences. In order to demonstrate ClinOmicsTrailbc’s rich functionality, we present three case studies highlighting various ways in which ClinOmicsTrailbc can support breast cancer precision medicine. ClinOmicsTrailbc is a powerful integrated visual analytics tool for breast cancer research in general and for therapy stratification in particular, assisting oncologists to find the best possible treatment options for their breast cancer patients based on actionable, evidence-based results. Availability and implementation: ClinOmicsTrailbc can be freely accessed at https://clinomicstrail. bioinf.uni-sb.de

Associations between depressive symptoms and disease progression in older patients with chronic kidney disease: results of the EQUAL study

Background Depressive symptoms are associated with adverse clinical outcomes in patients with end-stage kidney disease; however, few small studies have examined this association in patients with earlier phases of chronic kidney disease (CKD). We studied associations between baseline depressive symptoms and clinical outcomes in older patients with advanced CKD and examined whether these associations differed depending on sex. Methods CKD patients (>= 65 years; estimated glomerular filtration rate <= 20 mL/min/1.73 m(2)) were included from a European multicentre prospective cohort between 2012 and 2019. Depressive symptoms were measured by the five-item Mental Health Inventory (cut-off <= 70; 0-100 scale). Cox proportional hazard analysis was used to study associations between depressive symptoms and time to dialysis initiation, all-cause mortality and these outcomes combined. A joint model was used to study the association between depressive symptoms and kidney function over time. Analyses were adjusted for potential baseline confounders. Results Overall kidney function decline in 1326 patients was -0.12 mL/min/1.73 m(2)/month. A total of 515 patients showed depressive symptoms. No significant association was found between depressive symptoms and kidney function over time (P = 0.08). Unlike women, men with depressive symptoms had an increased mortality rate compared with those without symptoms [adjusted hazard ratio 1.41 (95% confidence interval 1.03-1.93)]. Depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with a higher hazard of dialysis initiation, or with the combined outcome (i.e. dialysis initiation and all-cause mortality). Conclusions There was no significant association between depressive symptoms at baseline and decline in kidney function over time in older patients with advanced CKD. Depressive symptoms at baseline were associated with a higher mortality rate in men

Combined searches for the production of supersymmetric top quark partners in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A combination of searches for top squark pair production using proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb(-1) collected by the CMS experiment, is presented. Signatures with at least 2 jets and large missing transverse momentum are categorized into events with 0, 1, or 2 leptons. New results for regions of parameter space where the kinematical properties of top squark pair production and top quark pair production are very similar are presented. Depending on themodel, the combined result excludes a top squarkmass up to 1325 GeV for amassless neutralino, and a neutralinomass up to 700 GeV for a top squarkmass of 1150 GeV. Top squarks with masses from 145 to 295 GeV, for neutralino masses from 0 to 100 GeV, with a mass difference between the top squark and the neutralino in a window of 30 GeV around the mass of the top quark, are excluded for the first time with CMS data. The results of theses searches are also interpreted in an alternative signal model of dark matter production via a spin-0 mediator in association with a top quark pair. Upper limits are set on the cross section for mediator particle masses of up to 420 GeV

Measurement of t(t)over-bar normalised multi-differential cross sections in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV, and simultaneous determination of the strong coupling strength, top quark pole mass, and parton distribution functions

Peer reviewe

Measurement of the top quark forward-backward production asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric and chromomagnetic moments in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV

Abstract The parton-level top quark (t) forward-backward asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric (d̂ t) and chromomagnetic (μ̂ t) moments have been measured using LHC pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected in the CMS detector in a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The linearized variable AFB(1) is used to approximate the asymmetry. Candidate t t ¯ events decaying to a muon or electron and jets in final states with low and high Lorentz boosts are selected and reconstructed using a fit of the kinematic distributions of the decay products to those expected for t t ¯ final states. The values found for the parameters are AFB(1)=0.048−0.087+0.095(stat)−0.029+0.020(syst),μ̂t=−0.024−0.009+0.013(stat)−0.011+0.016(syst), and a limit is placed on the magnitude of | d̂ t| < 0.03 at 95% confidence level. [Figure not available: see fulltext.