OBJECTIVE: High concentrations of circulating glucose are believed to contribute to defective insulin secretion and beta-cell function in diabetes and at least some of this effect appears to be caused by glucose-induced beta-cell apoptosis. In mammalian cells, apoptotic cell death is controlled by the interplay of proapoptotic and antiapoptotic members of the Bcl-2 family. We investigated the apoptotic pathway induced in mouse pancreatic islet cells after exposure to high concentrations of the reducing sugars ribose and glucose as a model of beta-cell death due to long-term metabolic stress. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Islets isolated from mice lacking molecules implicated in cell death pathways were exposed to high concentrations of glucose or ribose. Apoptosis was measured by analysis of DNA fragmentation and release of mitochondrial cytochrome c. RESULTS: Deficiency of interleukin-1 receptors or Fas did not diminish apoptosis, making involvement of inflammatory cytokine receptor or death receptor signaling in glucose-induced apoptosis unlikely. In contrast, overexpression of the prosurvival protein Bcl-2 or deficiency of the apoptosis initiating BH3-only proteins Bim or Puma, or the downstream apoptosis effector Bax, markedly reduced glucose- or ribose-induced killing of islets. Loss of other BH3-only proteins Bid or Noxa, or the Bax-related effector Bak, had no impact on glucose-induced apoptosis. CONCLUSIONS: These results implicate the Bcl-2 regulated apoptotic pathway in glucose-induced islet cell killing and indicate points in the pathway at which interventional strategies can be designed.

Digital technologies and pre/peri-natal apps are transforming maternity care as women use consumer-oriented communications technologies to obtain information and support. These technologies have introduced a new set of politics into health communication, as information asymmetries embedded into apps and their platforms disrupt traditional concepts of health literacy and consumer participation that have been key concepts in community health advocacy. The development of cultural safety and cultural competence has been one impetus for health professionals to adapt their models of care to address information and support gaps for service users from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, by asking clinicians to address the operations of power at work in their cultural norms of practice. However, consumer apps appropriate the cultural interface that has historically been managed by clinicians, raising questions about how participatory these technologies can be for women from marginalised groups. Given the black-boxed nature of many health technologies that by design do not enable adequate description by end users, new modes of research are necessary to both stimulate dialogue on health literacy and health participation as a part of a discovery process around CALD women’s experiences and perceptions.

Artistic research has sought to gain academic legitimacy through adapting to scientific methods, while also retaining the mandate of the humanities in the reproduction of culture. In both cases, Western epistemologies have structured what constitutes knowledge and how it is circulated and shared. The contemporary university is far more connected to its local environment, bringing the potential of engaging broad publics in the life of the institution. Innovation and experimentation with local artistic forms is one way that artistic research can powerfully animate the 21st century university mission in the Asia Pacific.

Maenad is an aleatoric musical composition, written in the form of instructions for an improvisation. It imaginatively follows the trajectory of Sylvia Plath’s seven-part “Poem for a Birthday” (1959), which, in its mystical density and complexity, prefigures the narrative of alchemical self-transformation that propels the later Ariel. Maenad is composed in seven episodes, each of which is named, in sequence, after one of the parts of Plath’s “Poem for a Birthday,” and each of which seeks freely to unknot and unravel one or more element in Plath’s extraordinarily rich weave of imagery and associative meaning. The title of the improvisation as a whole—Maenad—takes its name from the third poem in Plath’s sequence, which the female speaker is instructed to declaim in its entirety. Maenad is conceived with the members of Melbourne-based new music ensemble Forest Collective in mind.

The term ‘artistic research’ shadowed the growth of graduate study in studio arts in the late twentieth century, including the integration of many art schools and polytechnics into a tightly integrated and networked higher education sector, and an accompanying interest in art’s relationship to traditional academic disciplines. As the art education sector grew, the key debates were concerned with what the future of artistic research should look like as it expands. However, given the impact of neoliberal austerity measures and funding cuts that have resulted in programme closures and declining enrolments, we now consider the likelihood of artistic research contracting. What if artistic research is now approaching the end of its university life, a fate shared by the humanities and critical social sciences? This essay considers the potential ways artistic research may end.

Colonisation, industrialisation and new policies have brought massive changes to the lives and languages of Indigenous peoples in the west Pilbara region through the twentieth century. Solo-performed songs, composed and performed by Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Palyku, Martuthunira, Kurrama, Nyiyaparli, Banyjima, Yinhawangka, Kariyarra, Nyamal and Ngarla speakers, provide a window into these histories of change, upheaval and innovation. This paper presents a preliminary account of the thematic content and musical style of Tabi songs that were composed and/or performed by Robert Churnside (Dowding’s maternal grandfather) in the 1950s and 60s. Transcribed by linguist Carl Georg von Brandenstein (Brandenstein 1975), the song lyrics composed by Churnside and his associates record experiences of the emerging industries, new forms of transportation and travel, infrastructure and people in his and neighbouring countries, and present an intriguing insight into a region and period of musical innovation. The paper considers the ways in which Tabi songs, and legacy records of them, are used as tools to manage environmental change.

In this chapter, based on interview with performer Ross Anderson-Doherty, the authors examine the ways in which the panto form might be queered – an especially charged project in the particular locality of Belfast, North of Ireland.4 The chapter focuses on how Anderson-Doherty works to queer panto, largely in the role of the dame, through casting, rehearsal processes and in performance. In the Cabaret Supper Club and in panto, Anderson-Doherty is performing to largely heterosexual audiences, and he highlights some of the challenges he has faced, but also the sorts of queer interventions he has been able to make through performance. His approach to gender and his lived experience, coupled with the range of his work, have often clashed with the culture he works within, leading him to identify and adopt a set of strategies we might see as queering the spaces and artforms he engages with.

Is it possible to make a surf-film without humans? Sounds of Unridden Waves is the world’s first feature length surf film without any human surfers. Its accompanying original soundtrack is produced by The Ghosts of Nothing— a fictional rock band formed in 2014 as a conceptual vehicle through which a diverse range of objects and activities can be produced. Taken together, these different objects and activities are understood to collectively point to, yet do not constitute, the work itself. This new work was developed as a collaboration between The Ghosts of Nothing (aka Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre) and over a dozen renowned surf film makers. It also includes contributions from over a dozen renowned surf film makers. The result, we argue, provides an example of contemporary post-conceptual art. Significantly, some forms of post-conceptual art do not manifest as a singular materialisation. Instead, they might be accessed in numerous ways or as an aggregate of medial elements. Presented as an unfolding series of speculative and immersive journeys across time and space, Sounds of Unridden Waves seeks to revive romantic ambitions historically associated with the so-called “total work of art”. Although fragmentary glimpses of recognisable surf breaks are occasionally apparent, the specific time and place at which Sounds of Unridden Waves is located is deliberately fluid. Far more than a straightforward moving image experience, its Dionysian omnivorousness occasionally veers towards the outermost limits of unbounded maximalism and conceptual chaos. In this respect, it is partly reminiscent of the content-saturated psychotropic dream states of early Surrealism, 1960s psychedelia, 1970s surf iconography, together with some recent examples of romantic conceptualism and neo-Baroque currents in contemporary art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyrzNDRtRJQ&feature=youtu.be

The widespread growth of Broadway and West End musicals, especially after World War II, has produced a global market in need of industry-ready performers and writers resulting in an exponential growth in training programmes. This chapter offers a global snapshot of the rise of systematic training looking at how innovations in the musical artform reinforce, in writing, collaborative training built primarily on the paradigm of close-knitted, sophisticated dramaturgies of canonical exemplars, and in integrative performance training, a versatility characterised by a seamless fusion of singing, acting and dancing (otherwise ubiquitously trademarked as the ‘triple threat’), which emerged alongside the rise of the choreographerdirector. Towards new writing, there is arguably a creative tension between global and local (‘glocal’) socio-economics and culture, played out as both an appropriation and resistance to the transmitted principles of Broadway-style musicals, in as much as foreign markets may develop the next Filipina Kim or Chinese Cats for the ‘megamusical’ trade whilst fostering an indigenous talent base for their own burgeoning markets. A summary of the global status quo considers the vexed challenges of vocational training in context of integration, industryfacing aims, and current social issues.

WAHAWAEWAO is a Moving Image Installation developed as a VR Mozilla Hub Exhibition for the Ars Electronica Festival 2020 In Kepler's Gardens. Movement and landscape in flux, five figures wander across the landscape of Central Otago. Between the rocks and crevices, they move. The work explores our persistent longing for belonging in an age of virtual travel. Filmed in the raw physical landscapes of Central Otago and the Motion Capture Studio of CoLab AUT in Auckland, it maps between radically different scapes. The consolations of landscape dissolve as fractures and junctures open between the memory and affect of these different atmospheres, altering the performers transit. In this new cartography, that is here and everywhere; their bodies take on the rhythms of an altered place. Tracked in all dimensions, they become trackers, navigating travel to unknown and ungraspable places.