Meeting report : 1st international functional metagenomics workshop May 7–8, 2012, St. Jacobs, Ontario, Canada

This report summarizes the events of the 1st International Functional Metagenomics Workshop. The workshop was held on May 7 and 8 in St. Jacobs, Ontario, Canada and was focused on building a core international functional metagenomics community, exploring strategic research areas, and identifying opportunities for future collaboration and funding. The workshop was initiated by researchers at the University of Waterloo with support from the Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the University of Waterloo

The Kurdish Diaspora : Transnational Ties, Home and Politics of Belonging

Peer reviewe

Sweden’s protests against Islamophobia highlight the polarised views of Swedish citizens toward Muslims

Protests took place in Sweden at the turn of the year following a number of arson attacks on mosques in the country. Jenny Berglund writes on Sweden’s Muslim community and the varying attitudes among the Swedish population toward Islam. She notes that while there is evidence of increasing numbers of hate crimes against Swedish Muslims, the picture is complex, with a strong body of public opinion existing which is supportive of religious freedom and immigration

A sociolinguistic analysis of swear word offensiveness

The methodology of the present study, designed for the purpose of collecting quantitative and qualitative data, reflects a sociolinguistic approach to swearing, allowing for an investigation of the relationship between swear word usage and social context. Previous research had established swearing as both a frequently occurring speech behavior within the university speech community and a highly offensive one. The resulting \u27swearing paradox\u27; represents the question of how frequency and offensiveness can be directly related. The results of the present study explicate the swearing paradox by providing evidence of a discrepancy between the type of swearing that is most characteristic of social interaction within the university speech community and the type of swearing which is typically presented in offensiveness ratings tasks

Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?

This thematic issue presents the outcome of the 2015 ECREA Communication and Democracy Section Conference “Political Agency in the Digital Age” that was held at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. It problematizes changes in the configurations of political agency in the context of digital media. The articles represent a shift from an exclusive focus on political elites to the interrelation between institutionalised politics and political processes in other societal spheres in the field of media and politics research. Political agency as the main notion of the thematic issue draws attention at the (media) practices through which social actors reproduce, reorganise and challenge politics. At the same time, the issue poses questions about the structures—economic, political and social—that allow for, define and also limit these practices. The contributions gathered here suggest an understanding of agency as constituted through the use of knowledge and resources, themselves embedded within structural contexts; at the same time, agency is transformative of the structures within which it is embedded by making use of knowledge and resources in creative and often radical ways. In that context the development of digital media marks a rupture or critical juncture that allows and requires a rethinking of conditions of political agency. Accordingly the contributions critically scrutinize the role of digital media moving beyond celebratory accounts of democratizing potential of digital media. The rethinking of the grammar of political agency is at the heart of this thematic issue

Auschwitz mitt ibland oss: Om Peter Weiss "Min hemvist" och Rannsakningen. Oratorium i 11 sånger

The essay explores Peter Weiss's play "Die Ermittlung" (1965) and public reactions to it in BRD, DDR and Sweden

E-Democracy Postponed: Public Policy Design the Key to UK E-Voting

This chapter presents a survey study on attitudes towards political campaigning in social media. During the national election in Sweden in 2010, a considerable amount of resources was invested in online communication with the constituency, not least in social media. Whereas several studies have focused on e-democracy at a macro level, there is a lack of studies examining the phenomenon of campaigning 2.0 as it is perceived by the actual voters. This chapter, therefore, asks the question whether the voters noticed the political campaigning in social media at all, and if so, how they perceived it. The main findings are that respondents who were already interested and politically engaged considered campaigning 2.0, in line with the politicians' rhetoric, as a way to enhance democracy. Respondents who were neither interested nor engaged in politics, on the other hand, showed little interest in this kind of communication. Consequently, the study confirms assumptions about digital divide and continued fragmentation of the citizenry.

Immigrant reproductive dysfunction facilitates ecological speciation

The distributions of species are not only determined by where they can survive – they must also be able to reproduce. Although immigrant inviability is a well-established concept, the fact that immigrants also need to be able to effectively reproduce in foreign environments has not been fully appreciated in the study of adaptive divergence and speciation. Fertilization and reproduction are sensitive life-history stages that could be detrimentally affected for immigrants in non-native habitats. We propose that “immigrant reproductive dysfunction” is a hitherto overlooked aspect of reproductive isolation caused by natural selection on immigrants. This idea is supported by results from experiments on an externally fertilizing fish (sand goby, Pomatoschistus minutus). Growth and condition of adults were not affected by non-native salinity whereas males spawning as immigrants had lower sperm motility and hatching success than residents. We interpret these results as evidence for local adaptation or acclimation of sperm, and possibly also components of paternal care. The resulting loss in fitness, which we call “immigrant reproductive dysfunction,” has the potential to reduce gene flow between populations with locally adapted reproduction, and it may play a role in species distributions and speciation

Economic growth, rural assets and prosperity: exploring the implications of a 20-year record of asset growth in Tanzania

Measures of poverty based on consumption suggest that recent economic growth in many African countries has not been inclusive, particularly in rural areas. We argue that measures of poverty using assets may provide a different picture. We present data based on recent re-surveys of Tanzanian households first visited in the early 1990s. These demonstrate a marked increase in prosperity from high levels of poverty. It does not, however, follow that these improvements derive from GDP growth. We consider the implications of this research for further explorations of the relationship between economic growth and agricultural policy in rural areas

The politics of Estonia’s offshore wind energy programme: Discourse, power and marine spatial planning

There is growing recognition that Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is an inherently political process marked by a clash of discourses, power and conflicts of interest. Yet there are very few attempts to make sense of and explain the political practices of MSP protests in different contexts, especially the way that planners and developers create the conditions for the articulation of objections, and then develop new strategies to negotiate and mediate community resistance. Using poststructuralist discourse theory, the article analyzes the politics of a proposed offshore wind energy (OWE) project in Estonia within the context of the country’s MSP processes. First, through the lens of politicization, it explores the strategies of political mobilization and the rival discourses of expertise and sustainability through which residents and municipal actors have contested the OWE project. Secondly, through the lens of depoliticization, it explains the discursive and legalistic strategies employed by developers, planners and an Administrative Court to displace – spatially and temporally – the core issues of contestation, thus legitimizing the OWE plan. We argue that the spaces created by the pre-planning conjuncture offered the most conducive conditions for residents to voice concerns about the proposed project in a dialogical fashion, whereas the MSP and post-planning phases became mired in a therapeutic-style consultation, set alongside rigid and unreflexive interpretations and applications of legality. We conclude by setting out the limits of the Estonian MSP as a process for resolving conflicts, while offering an alternative model of handling such public controversies, which we call pragmatic adversarialism