bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Housing Retrofit for Post-Carbon Inclusion
Authors: Horne Ralph , Kleyn Lisa de
Published: January 2025

Housing retrofit for decarbonization occupies a central project in addressing the climate emergency, and this is made even more pressing by rising pressure on access to decent affordable housing. Contributing factors include conflict, trade wars, financialized housing systems, COVID-19 and complexities in retrofit services of provision. While fitting extra insulation and choosing efficient appliances may seem modest and achievable, in reality, housing retrofit is affective, place-specific, socio-material, and reflects dynamic and heterogeneous norms and standards. Added to this are contemporary structural inequities in housing, homemaking, property condition, tenure, typology and histories of refurbishment. Conventional discourses of energy paybacks, behaviour and market-based action are insufficient. Policies that incentivize individual home improvements and consumption are part of the problem, not the solution, and only demote ideas of community-wide retrofit for the planetary commons. This chapter explores inclusive and decommodified approaches to post-carbon housing retrofit grounded in people’s socio-material experiences. Drawing upon a large four-year project involving over 100 interviews with householders in Australia, it aims to contribute to an agenda of housing retrofit for post-carbon inclusion. Ways of shifting industry practices are contrasted with local self-organized approaches to examine how to scale-up retrofit in heterogeneous socio-material conditions.
Racial Justice and Law: The 1900s and 2000s
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

As the British Empire disintegrated in the aftermath of the world wars in the first half of the 1900s, immigration laws were developed which replicated the effect of colonial rule. These laws maintained the two-tiered legal system that had developed during colonial rule, ensuring that people racialized as something other than ‘White British’ were denied the full protection of the law. Yet at the same time, laws to promote good race relations were introduced, which appeared to make the legal system a tool for racial justice, rather than racial injustice. It is with this in mind that we can better understand racial injustices today, in education, criminal justice, employment, housing, and healthcare systems.
Introduction
Authors: Huey Laura , Buil-Gil David
Published: January 2025

This chapter first sets out the book’s structure, content and purpose, namely to provide researchers, students and practitioners with the latest state-of-the-art knowledge of the range of crime data sources, tools, techniques and topics now available. The book is divided into four parts: Part 1, titled ‘Crime Data Sources’, comprises seven chapters that examine the strengths and limitations of conventional sources of crime data as well as other types of public data can be used to provide insights into both crime and the criminal justice system. Part 2, ‘Using Crime and Criminal Justice Data’, explores quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methodological approaches to working with a diverse array of data types to shed light on public safety issues and on various criminal justice responses. Part 3, ‘Crime Data in Theory, Policy and Practice’, explores conceptual and theoretical issues related to crime data and its use to build and test theories of crime and deviance, and for everyday policy making and crime-prevention practice. Finally, Part 4, ‘Comparing, Contrasting and Combining Crime Data’, provides opportunities for readers to learn more about the possibilities that can arise through comparing, contrasting and/or combining different forms of data to improve our understanding of crime phenomena.
Police Involvement in Mental Health Call-Outs
Authors: Thomas Stuart D.M.
Published: January 2025

International estimates of the frequency, nature and outcomes of police responses to mental health-related call-outs vary quite considerably. In common, is the position that considerable time and resources are expended by police services in responding to mental health-related situations. Some of the differences in estimated contact rates across published studies can be attributed to methodological variations, including definitions used, diverse geographies and differential sampling strategies. However, reported contact rates also depend on a number of individual and situational factors, including the ability of police to identify mental disorder, officer perceptions of the relevance of identifying/recording mental health-related issues with respect to the encounter at hand, and positions on the merits and purposes of collecting and recording police contact data. This chapter will argue for the utility and significant benefits of a consistent approach to police recording of mental health-related incidents. It will explore international perspectives on means and methods to record mental health calls for service and appraise their merits and limitations and make some practical recommendations for policing services to adopt a common approach so as to more satisfactorily inform academic debate and practice reform.
Exploring Unsolved Homicides in Great Britain through the FOIA: Implications for Practitioner Approaches to Investigations
Authors: Bennett Kirsty
Published: January 2025

The implications of unsolved homicides (UHs) are wide-reaching and impactful for society. Yet, there is limited academic exploration of this phenomenon thus far. The prevalence of UHs, and which victims and homicide circumstances are more common, is also missing from academic discussions. This is a crucial first step in exploring and understanding this crime. Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), data was requested from all forces in Great Britain (GB), returning a 95 per cent response rate. There are 2,748 UHs across GB and the analyses of 1,160 cases demonstrate areas where research is needed. Males aged between 25 to 35 years, killed in a public location during the hours of 6 pm to 6 am, with injuries consistent with blunt-force trauma, shootings or sharp-force injuries are the most prevalent scenarios within GB’s UHs. These patterns are akin to the yearly homicide rates. However, the Two-Step Cluster Analysis demonstrates that there are several investigative challenges that may be preventing the resolution of all homicides. Five clusters were identified within the UH population, and these primarily centre on the investigative outcome of a case (whether a prosecution was possible or not). Shootings, body disposal attempts and excessive injuries were identified as clusters and indicate where investigators may be presented with challenges. However, this analysis is only a preliminary introduction to this phenomenon, to support further research endeavours. Much more work is required to understand how the identified challenges in this study can be mitigated by investigators and incorporated into their procedural guidance to resolve UHs.
Using Financial Transaction Data to Analyse, Detect and Disrupt Technologically Facilitated Crime
Authors: Cubitt Timothy I.C.
Published: January 2025

Technologically facilitated crime is particularly difficult to detect and disrupt using traditional policing methodologies. This chapter considers how financial transactions data may be used in isolation, and when joined with criminal history and demographic data, to assist detection and disruption of online crime types. We consider the use of these data, and analytical methodologies that are particularly suited to analyse online offending. We discuss the ways in which findings of these analyses can be implemented by law enforcement, financial services and internet service providers to detect offences. Using a case study involving the live streaming of child sexual abuse (CSA), we examine how multi-agency approaches, featuring law enforcement and the financial sector, may assist in the disruption of offences. Live streaming of CSA features the procurement and viewing of sexual abuse of children across the internet in real time, in exchange for money. The nature of this offence type results in barriers to monitoring by law enforcement, as there is little tangible evidence of the offence beyond a financial transaction, and locally stored metadata from the streaming session. This chapter explores how financial transaction data, joined with demographic and criminal history data, may significantly improve insight into the behaviour of these offenders. Joining these data may inform emerging detection methodologies, particularly in partnerships with financial sector organizations. Using financial transaction data provides an opportunity to disrupt a crime type that currently has limited prospects of detection with traditional methodologies.
The Dark Figure of Prison Violence in Uruguay: An Exploratory Mixed-Method Study
Authors: Trajtenberg Nicolás , Ribera Olga Sánchez de
Published: January 2025

Prisons are concerned with safety. One key piece of information is how much violence takes place in prison. This is important from a micro perspective – will this new inmate be at risk of victimization? And from a macro one too – are more resources needed in a prison to reduce the potential for violence? Yet our knowledge about the ‘dark figure’ of prison violence is limited by the nature of the act and our ability to research it. We use a mixed-methods project in the Penitentiary Unit 4 (Uruguay) that combines: official records of prison incidents; survey data in a convenience sample of inmates (n=209); qualitative interviews with inmates, prison staff and key informants (n=33); and non-participant unstructured and structured observation. Our findings show that in two months only 12 violent incidents were officially recorded, compared to 82 incidents recorded in our observations. Of the total inmates that answered our survey (42 per cent of the module), 60 per cent were victimized but only 22 per cent of victims reported to authorities. Reasons for not reporting were not wanting to break prison codes, fear of retaliation, lack of trust in the prison system and the perception of lack of punishment. Under-reporting was also associated with institutional conditions related to lack of resources, irrelevance of reporting in guard role, lack of trust in the importance of reporting, poor knowledge of how to report and ‘naturalization’ of violence. We finish by discussing the limitations of our study, and making suggestions for estimation of dark figure and policy implications.
Queering Reproduction: Changing Moral Dilemmas for Chinese Non-heterosexual People
Authors: Tao Han
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores queer reproductive choices within the evolving landscape of kinship conventions and moral personhood in urban China. The analysis commences by examining the motivations and timing behind the decisions of individuals from diverse age groups and backgrounds to either have children or remain childless. The chapter advocates for a re-evaluation of the symbolic significance of children in the context of reproductive studies. It proceeds to document the existing practices surrounding parenthood among Chinese non-heterosexual individuals and couples, shedding light on the moral dilemmas that often arise. These practices encompass various methods, including having children from prior zhihun (heterosexual) marriages, xinghun (contract) marriages, guoji adoptions (primarily from relatives), and the utilization of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). The chapter further delves into the evolving moral discourses within queer communities, assessing how these communities evaluate pathways to parenthood.
Queering Parenting: Raising ‘Our Children’
Authors: Tao Han
Published: January 2025

This chapter delineates how queer parents in Guangdong use their understanding and language of blood kin, biology, and parental love to distinguish between ‘my children’, ‘my partner’s children’, and ‘our children’. Through an examination of how these distinctions are integrated into their social spheres, it uncovers the intricate process of demarcating boundaries between blood relatives and queer kin. The cases of single queer parents and queer couples having children together amplify their understanding of blood ties and children’s position in sustaining conjugal love and a protected future. The chapter also delves into how expressions of parental love are closely intertwined with their socio-economic resources. It has found that the idea of blood and biology still holds its centrality in Chinese family life, while it has also been proved to have elastic potentialities for queer couples who desire joint parenthood.
Conclusion: Queering Chinese Kinship and Futures
Authors: Tao Han
Published: January 2025

This chapter comes back to summarize the themes of this work, which are queer intimate love, queer reproduction and parenting, queer family, and queer futurity. The practices of queer conjugal relationships, parenting, and family formation documented in this book suggest innovative and diverse forms of belonging, family, and relatedness beyond blood ties and the heterosexual nuclear family; at the same time, class stratification and gender inequalities are often reproduced during these processes. Queer relationships and families have emerged both within and outside the dominant kinship norms co-constructed by the existing state policy and patrilineal familism. Consequently, this book proposes an approach to comprehending queer families and relationships that challenges the dominant discourse surrounding Chinese kinship and queer modernity. It makes it clear that the ‘queering’ of kinship extends beyond the realm of non-normative sexual desires and permeates various aspects of society at large.
At the End of Property
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

Why does property so often fall short of our expectations? And why do we nevertheless keep proposing property as the solution to our problems, from personal data to cultural heritage? At the End of Property tries to answer this question by exploring the crises of property in the plant breeding industry. For the last 30 years, property has been a contentious issue in the seed sector – and yet, ever-new forms of property are created to fix existing ones. The book follows the making and remaking of property in plants: from the initial success of plant variety protection in fixing the seed market to the patenting of transgenic plants to recent disputes over genetic resources and seed reuse. Drawing from socio-legal studies, anthropology and science and technology studies, it develops a concept of property as a particular legal, practical and material way of relating people to things. Despite its contentiousness, property has historically been a successful way of organizing objects and subjects. But there are only so many things and relations that can be turned into property before property falls apart legally, practically or materially. Therefore, the more we rely on property, the more problems we will summon. In overstretching the institution of property, we thus risk sacrificing its achievements.
From Rights to Scripts
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

This chapter develops a more-than-legal concept of property. It starts from a discussion of three competing understandings of property: as a thing, as a person-thing relation and as a relation between people mediated by things. While each of these understanding have their merits, they also have specific drawbacks and blind spots and are usually formulated as mutually exclusive. The chapter argues that a synthesis between them is needed that allows to highlight different dimensions of property without defining what it is made of from the outset. For this purpose, the notion of the ‘bundle of rights’ is introduced and subsequently expanded to also exclude social practices and technologies. Illustrating this conceptual expansion through the ethnographic example of a wheat harvest, the text makes the case for understanding property pragmatically: as a ‘bundle of scripts’, which are identified through their effects on property relations, subjects and objects, rather than their materiality as texts, practices or devices.
Property and the Market
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

Alienability is often cited as a key characteristic of private property. As such, however, it is all too often taken for granted: when property is sold in a market transaction, the implication is that is also appropriated by someone else. Drawing from the past and present of commercial seed development in Germany, this chapter seeks to provide the reader with an understanding of applied plant breeding and the particular difficulties seed companies encounter when they try to sell their seeds. Alienating seed as a commodity presupposes a product that can be appropriated by farmers, that is, practically and materially made part of farm operations. At the same time, breeders must not alienate to much but retain one crucial script, that is, the ability to multiply and sell seed. The chapter details how European plant varieties were turned into ‘quasi-commodities’ in the years after World War II, resulting in seed that could be sold and appropriated but was never fully alienated. The new property regime of plant variety protection thus allowed two distinct groups – farmers and breeders – to own the same object in different ways.
Too Much Property
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

In discussing two other forms of property that have recently emerged as problematic, this chapter makes the case that the seed industry is not just suffering from a misapplication of patent law but a much wider ‘property condition’. It follows the German seed industry’s attempts to renegotiate the post-war arrangement between breeders and farmers: as the preconditions for the success of plant variety protection started to fade in the 1990s, seed companies sought to extend their property claims to farm-saved seed, leading to a clash with farmers. Although the industry’s lobbying efforts succeeded in revising European PVP law, the state and other actors in the seed industry refused to enforce it. To stop farmers from reproducing self-fertilized varieties, breeders thus sought to remodel the biology of their plants, with limited success. Meanwhile, seed producers suddenly face property claims by countries all over the world who demand their share in genetic resources under the Nagoya Protocol. The chapter argues that these clashes cannot be overcome by financial compensation alone: property is used by owners to reassert themselves and demand respect from others; a fact that stands in the way of simply getting rid of property.
Tracing Molecular Lines: Encounters with ‘Micropolitics’ of Professionals, Activists and Carers
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the local practices and ‘micropolitics’ of the adults who support, care for and protect unaccompanied migrants. It examines how the actions, activities and attitudes of these adults contribute to the configurations of the belonging of unaccompanied young people. To do so, it moves on to spaces of care, sports clubs and youth clubs, bringing to the fore different roles taken on by or attributed to adults whose performances and counter-politics surface to play a key role in constituting the belonging of young people. Deleuze and Guattari’s main concepts of ‘molecular lines’ and ‘smooth spaces’ resource this chapter particularly. The main argument and conclusion of this chapter are that while the belonging of unaccompanied migrants is constrained, unsettled and rejected by molar forces, it is simultaneously encouraged and made possible by molecular flows, movements and subjects and ‘smooth spaces’.
Tracing Nomadic Lines: Nomadic Subjectivities and the Belonging of Unaccompanied Young People
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws on the data on the nature and functioning of belonging of unaccompanied young people by following a series of moments, relationships, sites and passages of time. It brings in the analysis of the data from all chapters. Through the focus on the notions of ‘nomadic lines’ and ‘rhizome’ and by following Braidotti’s ideas of subjectivity as nomadic, it further maps several important components and key features of unaccompanied young people’s belonging. A key argument of this chapter – and this book overall – is that belonging needs to be viewed as nomadic/rhizomatic assemblages. It utilizes this understanding in this chapter as a way of foregrounding the active subjectivities of unaccompanied young people who are often portrayed negatively within the media and dominant public and political discourses. Another important argument made here is that belonging exists in its potentiality and actuality, which are both viewed as real, challenging the dualism of ‘belonging/unbelonging’ or ‘personal/political’ belonging, and introducing a new angle on the absences and inconsistencies of belonging.
The Digital Transformation of the European Border Regime
Authors: Trauttmansdorff Paul
Published: January 2025

The Digital Transformation of the European Border Regime offers an in-depth investigation into the digitization processes of Europe’s border regime. It shows how envisioning future borders drives forward the expansion of databases in the European governance of human mobility. In particular, the study provides a detailed analysis of the sites, operations, and projects of one of the fastest-growing actors in the border regime: the European Union Agency known as eu-LISA. Focusing on eu-LISA as the overseeing body for large-scale IT systems in migration and border control, this book serves as a gateway to understanding the key agents, visions, technologies and practices at work. The Digital Transformation of the European Border Regime investigates how infrastructure encodes and transmits shared visions of future borders. Therefore, the book explores the social desires, hopes, and future promises—alongside imagined threats and perils—that are embodied in eu-LISA’s approaches to border security. Collective imaginations emerge as subtle compositions that lie at the core of the border regime: they articulate the rationale and justifications behind reshaping mobility governance, underpin the policies that render migration as a digitized, actionable, and governable object, and encode the principles of exclusion and dehumanization in today’s European approaches to migration control. Asking broader questions about discrimination, violence, and mobility rights, this book is an original contribution to our understanding of the evolving landscape of digital borders in Europe.
Interoperability: Making a New Policy Fiction
Authors: Trauttmansdorff Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter investigates current efforts to establish an interoperable biometric border regime. It explores how the technical concept of interoperability is performed and translated into a powerful policy for infrastructuring borders in Europe. Furthermore, it suggests that policymaking has been dominated by enacting solutionist ways of seeing and speaking about borders and migration. The complex concept of interoperability is thereby proposed as a convenient set of solutions to renewed problem-constructions, including the EU’s lack of authority in border policymaking, the complexity of the database landscape, and the uncertainty around capturing and fixing mobile identities. Interoperability has thus emerged as a necessary fiction in the border regime, directing visions, political discourse and epistemic orientations toward a collectively imagined future of border (in)security.
Justification, Techno-Determinism, and Sanitized Realities: The Perils of Imagining Future Borders
Authors: Trauttmansdorff Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter, rather than concluding with an exhaustive summary of all empirical findings, aims to succinctly draw together some of the core arguments in this book. Its purpose is to emphasize some of the problematic implications and risks associated with these findings, serving as a foundation for further reflection on countering the worrying trends and developments in contemporary digital border management. This includes, for instance, the severe power imbalances and forms of automated suspicion introduced and reinforced by digital technologies at the border. In summary, this chapter suggests engaging with three primary critiques of the digital transformation of the European border regime: the emergent modes of justification, the variant forms of techno-determinism, and the perils stemming from imagining future borders as sanitized and dehumanizing realities.
White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America
Authors: Montalva Barba Miguel
Published: January 2025

In this study, set in one of the most progressive neighborhoods in Boston and the US, Miguel Montalva Barba asks self-proclaimed progressive White people questions about their understanding of gentrification to arrive at a new, historized understanding of race, place, and space. The book is grounded in ideas about private property that animate a settler colonial world that White progressives use to rationalize racialized systemic inequality. By focusing on private property, Montalva Barba can bring into conversation a wide variety of disciplines to broaden our understanding of gentrification, Whiteness, and settler colonialism. Based on a decade of living in the borough of Jamaica Plain, interviews, participant observation, historical and media analysis, what is revealed is the narratives that White people use to rationalize White supremacy and, indirectly, reconstitute a settler colonial emplacement. Montalva Barba focuses on what is at the center of gentrification, the displacement of some to emplace a White-middle-class ethos, and offers gensociocide to address the idea that gentrification is genocide. Gensociocide addresses the limitation of the United Nation’s conception of genocide to include the social, cultural, emotional, and political ways that White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nations use to cement into race, place, and space. What is uncovered is that progressive White residents use settler colonial narratives to justify exploitation, exclusions, and dispossessions, to center the needs of their White children and families to ultimately center exclusive White futures.
Jamaica Plain and Gentrification in Motion
Authors: Montalva Barba Miguel
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides a short history of Jamaica Plain, MA and elaborates on key historical moments that gave this borough the progressive label, while at the same time embedding White supremacy and settler colonialism in place. The chapter shows how the modern characterization of Jamaica Plain can be traced to an active settler colonial emplacement visible throughout the borough. In particular, the chapter shows how the racial Other is constructed and used to constantly help solidify a White settler character and city.
Contextualizing Intersectionality: Equality Policy, Austerity and Relations with the State
Authors: Christoffersen Ashlee
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses the context in which equality NGOs conceptualize and operationalize intersectionality, namely: (i) equality policy and discourse; (ii) austerity; and (iii) the sector’s relationships to the state. Equality organizations’ work is situated within public discourses arising from UK and Scottish equality policy, and the implications of equality policy for intersectionality are analysed. The chapter introduces equality work and discourse as being distinct to the discourse of social ‘inequality’; analyses intersectionality’s take-up, uses and meanings in equality policy documents; and analyses the external barriers that equality organizations face when seeking to operationalize intersectionality. It is argued that in equality policy, there are a range of definitions of intersectionality which thus leaves it underdetermined. Its deployment is largely individualized; merely descriptive; additive; and superficial. Moreover, meaningful engagement with race as a central category of intersectionality theory is lacking in policy. The meanings and uses of intersectionality in equality policy are both influenced by and influence understandings of intersectionality among NGOs. Finally, equality organizations are significantly hampered in their attempts to operationalize intersectionality by the low status they occupy vis-à-vis the state and by neoliberal austerity contexts.
Conclusion: Intersectional Practice – Ideas, Politics and Policy
Authors: Christoffersen Ashlee
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the implications and contributions of the book. Competing concepts of intersectionality serve distinct interests and are thus championed by particular actors; this politics is evident in conflicts about and in the arenas of representation and coalition. The chapter reflects on recommendations arising for policy and practice. While there are few ideal solutions to the problems of intersectionality’s conceptualization and operationalization in siloed policy and practice, from the perspective of thinking through the implications for intersectionally marginalized groups, some compromises and imperfections may be deemed more acceptable than others. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the way that ‘intersectionality’ is mobilized in competing and contradicting ways in policy and practice suggests that, in this context, new, more specific and more transformative concepts are required, and offers some thoughts arising from the research findings on what intersectional practice for intersectional justice might involve.
Introduction
Authors: Yates Shaun S.
Published: January 2025

This chapter sets the stage for a comprehensive analysis of efficiency in the summary justice process. It introduces a theoretical and conceptual framework that builds on the work of Packer (1968), MacDonald (2008), and Ward (2016). In doing so, this chapter makes clear that ideas of efficiency (cost-saving, waste-mitigation, time-trimming, and so on) can contribute to a substantiated, quality justice process. Importantly, however, the criminal justice process must also prioritize values that relate to philosophies of social justice and procedural due process. Indeed, when efficiency does not have this secondary status, the quality of the summary justice process is eroded: the process becomes overly-efficient. Additionally, this chapter outlines the present work’s case-study methodology and its main objective: to sensitize readers to the problems of a justice process that is uncritically committed to efficiency.
Finding, Following, Fluids
Authors: Hobbs Jenn
Published: January 2025

Chapter 6 discusses the book’s methodology of ‘following the fluid’. The chapter narrates a chronological story of the book’s research methodology, beginning with a story of failure and difficulty in the project’s early stages. The chapter explores how a queerfeminist gut sense was vital in building a ‘fluid method/ology’; a method/ology that is focused on experimentation, change, and acknowledges contradictions and messiness. Finally, the chapter outlines the practice of ‘following the fluid’ that informs this book. The chapter shows how following a fluid requires us to understand fluids as agential actors within international politics, which can help us map the points of connection and rupture between security assemblages.
Changing Terrains: The General and Feminist General Strikes in Spain
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

The general strike stands out as a form of labour unrest because of its openly visible class dimension. It calls the entire labour force across a society to stop work. By definition, stoppages only count as general strikes if they are based on cross-sectional, inclusive solidarity. Sometimes this is done exclusively for political aims, for example when people protest against an authoritarian government. But often, general strikes are organic strikes: They articulate economic and political demands and formulate a general, class-based agenda. In so doing, they usually concern the organization of work across the whole of society and create a divide between workers on one side and capital and the government on the other. Consequently, they are of particular interest when one examines working-class formation. The Spanish state is a useful test case for examining the demands, constituencies and dynamics of general strikes. Since la Transición, there have been ten union-led, national, general strikes (1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2002, 2003, 2010, 2012 [March] and 2012 [November]); two general national strikes with mass participation led by feminist organizations (2018 and 2019); and a number of regional mobilizations. In what follows, I will focus on the two most recent cycles of struggle and explore their connection: the cycle spanning the beginning of the Great Crisis and the sovereign debt crisis from 2008 until 2014, which includes three general strikes against austerity, and the subsequent cycle encompassing the two feminist general strikes against violence against women, the precarity of women workers, the disregard for care work and the effects of austerity on the social infrastructure.
A Imponderável Finitude Humana
Authors: Moraes Alfredo de Oliveira
Published: January 2025

O autor, partindo de uma reflexão sobre a imponderável finitude humana, apresenta em resumo, sua tese de que a metafísica de base material, que é tomada como a metafísica tradicional ou simplesmente a Metafísica, é o fundamento de todas as hegemonias vigentes, de modo que somente a sua suprassunção numa metafísica de base relacional poderá prover uma nova fundamentação que possa atender a premissa de Einstein de que o pensamento que nos conduziu até aqui é incapaz de nos tirar daqui, para tanto é necessário romper os limites do sistema de crenças dominante, tanto na religião, quanto na economia e na política. Bem como, acentua a imbricação entre Ética e Metafísica na apreensão da realidade humana e suas consequências para o existir humano, significa dizer que por constituir algo essencial para o existir humano a Metafísica não pode ser compreendida como um mero discurso sobre um imaginário ser, bem como a Ética não pode ser reduzida a um conjunto de normas, princípios e imperativos condicionantes da tolerância nas relações sociais e ecossistêmicas.
Xavier Albó: el compromiso teológico, la política y la academia. Itinerario de un misionero jesuita en Bolivia
Authors: Alvizuri Verushka
Published: January 2025

Uno de los aspectos más conocidos del itinerario del antropólogo y sacerdote jesuita Xavier Albó es su compromiso a favor de los pueblos indígenas.
Dos periódicos homónimos, dos redactores, un mismo espacio político: El Independiente de Manuel Moreno (1815) y el de Pedro José Agrelo (1816-1817)
Authors: Eiris Ariel Alberto
Published: January 2025

Manuel Moreno y Pedro José Agrelo fueron políticos y eruditos del proceso revolucionario rioplatense. Ambos redactaron dos periódicos homónimos, titulados El Independiente. Mientras que el de Moreno sería publicado en 1815, el de Agrelo lo haría entre 1816 y 1817. Dos momentos muy diferentes en cuanto al contexto político, pero también en cuanto a su legislación sobre la prensa. Si bien ambos medios eran autónomos, con numeración y autores diferentes, es singular que se llamaran igual y que sus redactores integraran los mismos espacios políticos, aspecto que no ha sido trabajado más allá de estudios específicos de cada uno en forma individual.
«Ha cumplido con su deber, ha salvado la República». Sobre la revolución y la dictadura en la Bolivia de 1848.
Authors: Irurozqui Victoriano Marta
Published: January 2025

Este texto reflexiona sobre la concomitancia ente revolución y dictadura en el siglo xix a través de un caso puntual boliviano. Con un análisis centrado en la generación de opinión pública partidaria, se defenderá que, tras el triunfo de la Revolución de 1847, la administración de José Miguel de Velasco no fue solo un estado de excepción constitucionalmente autorizado, sino también el resultado de un poder constituyente revolucionario. Las críticas públicas recibidas no atañeron a la legalidad y a la legitimidad de esa modalidad de gobierno, sino a una interpretación partidista de su uso, basada en ambiciones políticas, laborales, profesionales y territoriales.
La inteligibilidad y la comprensibilidad en la pronunciación del español L2
Authors: Santamaría Busto Enrique
Published: January 2025

El presente trabajo ofrece un exhaustivo análisis sobre dos dimensiones fundamentales de la pronunciación, la inteligibilidad y la comprensibilidad, que apenas han recibido atención en el campo del español L2. El estudio nace, por tanto, de la necesidad de ampliar el conocimiento sobre estas dimensiones, resaltar su importancia y subrayar las implicaciones que ofrecen los resultados de las investigaciones para la enseñanza y la evaluación de la pronunciación del español. Con este fin, el trabajo está dividido en tres secciones. Las dos primeras están dedicadas respectivamente a la inteligibilidad y a la comprensibilidad, con especial referencia al español L2. El trabajo describe aquí las características de ambas dimensiones y aborda aspectos estrechamente relacionados con ellas, como la variabilidad que puede producirse en la percepción de la señal en función del tipo de oyente, los estudios sobre inteligibilidad mutua en lengua franca o la teoría de la carga funcional. Finalmente, cierra el trabajo una tercera sección dedicada al análisis de las principales vías de investigación que, sobre estas dimensiones, quedan abiertas en el ámbito del español L2.
Palabras clave: Inteligibilidad; Comprensibilidad; Pronunciación; Evaluación; Español L2
Beyong pitch: Exploring Duration, Intensity and Silence in Japanese Focus Marking
Authors: Nagao Jun , Ortega-Llebaria Marta
Published: January 2025

Building on Jun’s prosodic typology (2005, 2014), this study examines how head and edge languages differ in their strategies for expressing focus. While head languages like English rely on pitch expansion in focus and post-focal compression, edge languages like Japanese are thought to emphasize boundary cues. Inspired by the framework proposed by Mizuguchi and Tateishi (2023), we hypothesized that in educated standard Japanese, focus marking extends beyond pitch modulation to include the boundary cues such as duration and silence insertions. To test this, we analyzed recordings of native speakers of educated standard Japanese producing noun phrases under broad and narrow focus conditions, examining duration, F0 maxima, intensity, and silence insertion at both the word and morpheme levels. The results demonstrate that while F0 maxima cue focus, duration and silence insertion play dominant roles in marking focus and focus position, especially at the word level. Intensity, in contrast, primarily cues accent, though it also signals focus position at the morpheme level in contexts with unaccented initial words, a particularly challenging environment for focus marking. These findings reveal a hybrid prosodic system in educated standard Japanese, where temporal and boundary cues dominate but pitch modulation remains an auxiliary tool. This system reflects the typological distinctions between head and edge languages, with educated standard Japanese relying on a flexible combination of global and local cues to signal focus. Future research should investigate how these cues are processed in perception and whether similar strategies are employed in other syntactic structures, offering broader insights into the prosodic systems of edge languages.
Keywords: Narrow Focus vs. Broad Focus; Japanese; Pitch; Duration; Silence
Critical Reflections on Participatory Art. "The Counterfeit Crochet Project" by Stephanie Syjuco
Authors: Schröder Gerald
Published: January 2025

Through the in-depth analysis of a complex participatory work by US artist Stephanie Syjuco, this essay shows how contemporary art can critically reflect on its own problematic proximity to the values of post-Fordist work and the global economy. At the same time, the activist potential of this work is highlighted in regard to feminist goals. Finally, it is argued that Stephanie Syjuco’s work can be understood as a critical contribution to a certain canonization of relational art.
Disability's Abstraction in Tristram Shandy and Persuasion
Authors: Thulin Lesley
Published: January 2025

Abstract: This article considers the figural alongside the material in a reading of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) and Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817)—novels that displace wartime disability through deictic pointing and syllepsis, on the one hand, and euphemism and indirect narration, on the other. Drawing on historical-materialist disability studies, I argue that Sterne primes us to understand these techniques of displacement as figurations of disability's materialist dimension, underscoring, in Austen's case, disability's imbrication with a capitalist political economy and, in turn, a traumatized historical present.
Differential Artery–Vein Analysis in OCTA for Predicting Anti-VEGF Treatment Outcome of Diabetic Macular Edema
Authors: Yao Xincheng , Abtahi Mansour , DADZIE ALBERT , Ebrahimi Behrouz , Huang Boda , Hsieh Yi-Ting
Published: January 2025

This study evaluates the role of differential artery-vein (AV) analysis in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) for treatment outcome prediction of diabetic macular edema (DME). Deep learning AV segmentation in OCTA enabled the robust extraction of quantitative AV features, including perfusion intensity density (PID), blood vessel density (BVD), vessel skeleton density (VSD), vessel area flux (VAF), blood vessel caliber (BVC), blood vessel tortuosity (BVT), and vessel perimeter index (VPI). Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were employed to predict changes in best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and central retinal thickness (CRT). Comparative analysis revealed that incorporating differential AV analysis significantly enhanced prediction performance, with BCVA improvement accuracy increasing from 70.45% to 86.36% and CRT improvement accuracy rising from 68.18% to 79.55% compared to traditional OCTA analysis. These findings underscore the potential of AV analysis as a transformative tool for advancing personalized therapeutic strategies and improving clinical decision-making in managing DME.
Doppler OCT Verifies Pulsation-Induced Anisotropic Vessel Lumen Dynamics in the Human Retina
Authors: Yao Xincheng , Adejumo Tobiloba , Son Taeyoon , Ma Guangying , Rahimi Mojtaba , DADZIE ALBERT , Ding Jie
Published: January 2025

This study verifies anisotropic vessel pulsatility in human retinas. Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) was utilized for dynamic monitoring of peripapillary vessel lumen dynamics. Quantitative analysis consistently revealed larger axial compared to lateral lumen changes, with an axial-to-lateral pulsation change ratio of 1.29 ± 0.08. These findings highlight the anisotropic biomechanical properties of retinal tissue, which contribute to direction-dependent vascular dynamics. Quantitative assessment of anisotropic vascular biomechanics offers promising insights for improving the detection of vascular alterations associated with ocular conditions.
The direct emissions related to Global Warming Potential of different types of diagnostic tests at different phases of the COVID pandemic: A climate-focused life-cycle assessment
Authors: Courdier Sarah , Bouchet Alexandre , Karlen Maxime , Boucher Julien , D’Acremont Valérie , Vernez David
Published: January 2025

The healthcare sector is a major consumer of energy and consumables. This is particularly striking in crisis situations, such as COVID 19, which required the massive deployment of testing and vaccination measures, which have a deleterious effect on the environment. In this paper, we assess the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of COVID19 community testing (aimed at mitigating the spread of the virus) using different diagnostic methods and scenarios. A climate-focused Life Cycle Assessment was conducted to assess the Global Warming Potential of self-testing at home and health worker-performed antigen-based rapid diagnostic tests (RDT), as well as laboratory-based PCR tests. The GWP100 indicator and DALYS were used to compare their respective greenhouse gas emissions and expected health impact. Several scenarios were considered, varying the type of test, transport conditions, and pandemic phase. The expected direct emissions GWP of the tests for the same usage scenario is 0.12, 0.23, 0.69 and 0.73 kg CO2 eq per self-testing RDT, health worker-performed RDT, multiple wells PCR and single PCR respectively. The differences are mainly due to consumables (e.g., protective equipment) and local transport rather than the test itself. The emissions generated by the detection of a true positive is estimated at 1 kg CO2 eq in the high transmission phase of the pandemic, but at 100 and 2.000 kg CO2 eq for RDT and PCR respectively in the low transmission phase. When considering the GWP of COVID tests, RDTs are a better option than PCR in all scenarios. For community testing, this is all the more true as there is no clear health benefit either of using PCR rather than RDT. Our results also highlight the disproportionate impact of systematic testing during low transmission phases, due to the very high number of tests needed to detect true contagious cases. It is time to consider not only efficiency but also environmental criteria when designing public health interventions.
A versatile site-directed gene trap strategy to manipulate gene activity and control gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans
Authors: Khan Haania , Huang Xinyu , Raj Vishnu , Wang Han
Published: January 2025

The ability to manipulate gene activity and control transgene expression is essential to study gene function. While several genetic tools for modifying genes or controlling expression separately are available for Caenorhabditis elegans, there are no genetic approaches to generate mutations that simultaneously disrupt gene function and provide genetic access to the cells expressing the disrupted gene. To achieve this, we developed a versatile gene trap strategy based on cGAL, a GAL4-UAS bipartite expression system for C. elegans. We designed a cGAL gene trap cassette and used CRISPR/Cas9 to insert it into the target gene, creating a bicistronic operon that simultaneously expresses a truncated endogenous protein and the cGAL driver in the cells expressing the target gene. We demonstrate that our cGAL gene trap strategy robustly generated loss-of-function alleles. Combining the cGAL gene trap lines with different UAS effector strains allowed us to rescue the loss-of-function phenotype, observe the gene expression pattern, and manipulate cell activity spatiotemporally. We show that, by recombinase-mediated cassette exchange (RMCE) via microinjection or genetic crossing, the cGAL gene trap lines can be further engineered in vivo to easily swap cGAL with other bipartite expression systems’ drivers, including QF/QF2, Tet-On/Tet-Off, and LexA, to generate new gene trap lines with different drivers at the same genomic locus. These drivers can be combined with their corresponding effectors for orthogonal transgenic control. Thus, our cGAL-based gene trap is versatile and represents a powerful genetic tool for gene function analysis in C. elegans, which will ultimately provide new insights into how genes in the genome control the biology of an organism.