Minerva Elements (Restricted Access: Repository Staff Only)
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 130
-
ItemApathy: Disaffection, Enthusiasm, Fanaticism(C. Hurst and Co., 2023)Charity, community, duty, and struggle are good – not only sanctified and rewarding but also good in themselves. And yet the evidence is that society at large is losing and devaluing commitment to others: we live in times diagnosed as consisting of social pathologies and a-pathologies – where, curiously, apathy is taken as a variant of, rather than existing in opposition to, pathology. Fascinated, for obvious reasons, with their diminishing share of trust, older print and broadcast news media have exhaustively analysed the rise of social media bubbles and echo chambers, trolls, and splenetic outbursts, discovering that the profitability of these emergent media forums depends on the speed and energy of their communications, and that unsurprisingly, anger sells. Aggrieved fury would appear to be a dominant emotional state of our times. More reflective commentators, including William Davies in the UK and Joseph Vogl in Germany – both acknowledging the same condition where ‘knowledge becomes more valued for its speed and impact than for its cold objectivity, and emotive falsehood often travels faster than fact’ – observe that it can generate an emotional state in which ‘otherwise peaceful situations can come to feel dangerous, until eventually they really are’.
-
ItemCult of the Archaic: The Swindle of Fascist Fulfilment(Australian Review of Books, 2024-03-01)Review of ‘Late Fascism: Race, capitalism and the politics of crisis’ by Alberto Toscano
-
ItemPosthumous Sound and the General Imagination(Duke University Press, 2024-03-01)Abstract The 1997 discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old flute made from the femur of a cave bear, with its intimation of reanimating nonhumans, and the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft carrying an eclectic set of sound recordings intended to be heard in the distant future by nonhuman others: two sonic events that frame the possible meanings of posthumous. Together these examples and others question whether everything audible is already over—the bear's lost life, electronic recording procedures—or indefinitely deferred until an act of listening that may never occur. An ecological address to the problems of making sonic culture at a historical turning point at or beyond terminal risk prompts a politics of the commons grounded in a general imagination (modeled on Marx's general intellect). Against earlier modernist claims for both rationality and its failure, sound cultures enact a drama of melancholy and hope in the ecological continuity of body and world at the moment of their end.
-
ItemRecalibrating Minimum Force: Some Unintended Consequences of Tom Swift's 'Electronic Rifle'(Springer Nature, 2024-05-29)This book comprehensively examines five key areas of concern across the field of policing.
-
ItemEpigenetic Changes in Diabetes and Cardiovascular Risk(LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS, 2016-05-27)Cardiovascular complications remain the leading causes of morbidity and premature mortality in patients with diabetes mellitus. Studies in humans and preclinical models demonstrate lasting gene expression changes in the vasculopathies initiated by previous exposure to high glucose concentrations and the associated overproduction of reactive oxygen species. The molecular signatures of chromatin architectures that sensitize the genome to these and other cardiometabolic risk factors of the diabetic milieu are increasingly implicated in the biological memory underlying cardiovascular complications and now widely considered as promising therapeutic targets. Atherosclerosis is a complex heterocellular disease where the contributing cell types possess distinct epigenomes shaping diverse gene expression. Although the extent that pathological chromatin changes can be manipulated in human cardiovascular disease remains to be established, the clinical applicability of epigenetic interventions will be greatly advanced by a deeper understanding of the cell type-specific roles played by writers, erasers, and readers of chromatin modifications in the diabetic vasculature. This review details a current perspective of epigenetic mechanisms of macrovascular disease in diabetes mellitus and highlights recent key descriptions of chromatinized changes associated with persistent gene expression in endothelial, smooth muscle, and circulating immune cells relevant to atherosclerosis. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges associated with pharmacological targeting of epigenetic networks to correct abnormal or deregulated gene expression as a strategy to alleviate the clinical burden of diabetic cardiovascular disease.
-
ItemEZH2 inhibitors promote β-like cell regeneration in young and adult type 1 diabetes donors(SPRINGERNATURE, 2024-01-01)β-cells are a type of endocrine cell found in pancreatic islets that synthesize, store and release insulin. In type 1 diabetes (T1D), T-cells of the immune system selectively destroy the insulin-producing β-cells. Destruction of these cells leads to a lifelong dependence on exogenous insulin administration for survival. Consequently, there is an urgent need to identify novel therapies that stimulate β-cell growth and induce β-cell function. We and others have shown that pancreatic ductal progenitor cells are a promising source for regenerating β-cells for T1D owing to their inherent differentiation capacity. Default transcriptional suppression is refractory to exocrine reaction and tightly controls the regenerative potential by the EZH2 methyltransferase. In the present study, we show that transient stimulation of exocrine cells, derived from juvenile and adult T1D donors to the FDA-approved EZH2 inhibitors GSK126 and Tazemetostat (Taz) influence a phenotypic shift towards a β-like cell identity. The transition from repressed to permissive chromatin states are dependent on bivalent H3K27me3 and H3K4me3 chromatin modification. Targeting EZH2 is fundamental to β-cell regenerative potential. Reprogrammed pancreatic ductal cells exhibit insulin production and secretion in response to a physiological glucose challenge ex vivo. These pre-clinical studies underscore the potential of small molecule inhibitors as novel modulators of ductal progenitor differentiation and a promising new approach for the restoration of β-like cell function.
-
ItemPersistent epigenetic signals propel a senescence-associated secretory phenotype and trained innate immunity in CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells from diabetic patients.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-03-29)BACKGROUND: Diabetes-induced trained immunity contributes to the development of atherosclerosis and its complications. This study aimed to investigate in humans whether epigenetic signals involved in immune cell activation and inflammation are initiated in hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) and transferred to differentiated progeny. METHODS AND RESULTS: High glucose (HG)-exposure of cord blood (CB)-derived HSPCs induced a senescent-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) characterized by cell proliferation lowering, ROS production, telomere shortening, up-regulation of p21 and p27genes, upregulation of NFkB-p65 transcription factor and increased secretion of the inflammatory cytokines TNFα and IL6. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assay (ChIP) of p65 promoter revealed that H3K4me1 histone mark accumulation and methyltransferase SetD7 recruitment, along with the reduction of repressive H3K9me3 histone modification, were involved in NFkB-p65 upregulation of HG-HSPCs, as confirmed by increased RNA polymerase II engagement at gene level. The differentiation of HG-HSPCs into myeloid cells generated highly responsive monocytes, mainly composed of intermediate subsets (CD14hiCD16+), that like the cells from which they derive, were characterized by SASP features and similar epigenetic patterns at the p65 promoter. The clinical relevance of our findings was confirmed in sternal BM-derived HSPCs of T2DM patients. In line with our in vitro model, T2DM HSPCs were characterized by SASP profile and SETD7 upregulation. Additionally, they generated, after myeloid differentiation, senescent monocytes mainly composed of proinflammatory intermediates (CD14hiCD16+) characterized by H3K4me1 accumulation at NFkB-p65 promoter. CONCLUSIONS: Hyperglycemia induces marked chromatin modifications in HSPCs, which, once transmitted to the cell progeny, contributes to persistent and pathogenic changes in immune cell function and composition.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableLocating Care in curating queer performance in Belfast and Manchester:Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe, interviewed by Alyson Campbell, Meta Cohen and Stephen Farrier(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023)An interview with Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe, queer performance makers and activists in Belfast and Manchester, respectively. Published in Interventions, the online Open Access site connected with Contemporary Theatre Review. The interview is part of the work undertaken by Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier as co-editors of a special edition of Contemporary Theatre Review (33.1-2), called What’s Queer about Queer Performance now? In the interview we ask Gemma and Greg what is queer work in the particular context in which they make it. We talk about who’s making queer performance, who’s watching it, and how’s that happening, and about what they think the future of queer performance might be, what it might look like and what it might do. For both, questions of care in the context of queer performance communities was foremost in their work.
-
Item
-
ItemLet’s Talk About Writing Support for Plurilingual Graduate Students(TESL Canada Federation, )Academic writing is an inseparable aspect of graduate school (Holmes et al., 2018) as students’ academic writing is the primary basis for assessment (Turner, 2011). The high-stakes nature of academic writing is magnified for plurilingual students, whose attendance at English medium universities is growing exponentially (Fenton-Smith & Humphreys, 2017). However, there is a scarcity of research that addresses how faculty support writing as an essential practice for plurilingual graduate students, particularly in English-medium universities where English is implicated in structures of power and privilege. Employing a critical analytic collaborative autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Kempny, 2022) this research uses polyvocal conversations among seven researcher/practitioners to consider the question of how faculty members perceive and respond to the academic writing needs of plurilingual graduate students. Informed by intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017; Hankivsky, 2014), these conversations illuminate the ways both educator identities and epistemological turns in education theory impact approaches to writing support for plurilingual graduate writers. Importantly, these discussions are implicated in the socio-political contexts of Canadian and Australian universities where systems of inequality act to marginalise plurilingual writers. These contextualised conversations then aim to problematise and revise existent, dominant deficit discourses and pedagogies of writing support for plurilingual students. Findings illuminate the capacity of educators, who are cognisant of their power and place, to generate alternative practices to support plurilingual graduate writers in service of more asset-orientated and inclusive spaces that take advantage of students’ plurilingual repertoires in English-dominant universities.