The work of beauty—in disciplining bodies, imagining nations, driving globalized commodity networks, and fostering booming tourist industries, for example, is a vibrant area of research across the ...Humanities and Social Sciences. However, an understanding of the complex ideologies, material objects, and practices of beauty remain undeveloped in our field. In this article we call on geographers to take beauty, and its spatialities, seriously. We center the powerful work of beauty in three connected arenas, each of long‐held interest to political geographers: nationalism, militarism, and development. For each we engage analyses of beauty from beyond our discipline. Drawing on our own research and that of a limited, but growing, body of geographers, we point to the instructive openings a feminist geographic approach to beauty, widely imagined but always grounded in power, offers.
Building on calls for "slow scholarship," we highlight the importance of time and care in producing rigorous, ethical research through our advising practices. We describe how feminist ethics and ...epistemologies shape each of our research clusters: the Hydro-Feminist Lab at West Virginia University and the Feminist Geography Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. We show a couple of ways that feminist geographers can adopt the "lab model" and use it to build meaningful mentoring networks, fostered through time and care, and in a way that both meets and transgresses the demands of academic neoliberalism. We then show how this approach extends into our fieldwork, recounting instances where the importance of mentoring through a caring ethic emerged. Unfolding over weeks, months, and years we show the value of time and care, both in deepening the quality of advising relationships and in creating mentoring relationships of trust and support. We contend that this better prepares students for the intellectual and emotional challenges of feminist research and, in turn, strengthens that research. In the face of neoliberalism's quickening drives, we highlight the benefits and the contradictions of this kind of slow and caring "lab-field" feminist mentoring for geographic research.
A Darling® of the beauty trade Faria, Caroline V; Jones, Hilary
Cultural geographies,
01/2020, Volume:
27, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article pushes for a postcolonial geography of care, through hair. Working with the ‘imperial debris’ of care as a disciplinary racial logic, we show how it is renewed, remade, and resisted in ...the present through the travels, narratives, and practices of the African synthetic hair trade. Here we interrogate Lebanese business expansion, entrepreneurialism, manufacture, and styling, tracing in each case how contemporary narratives of care mirror, entrench, and rework colonial ideals and subjectivities of Whiteness. Disrupting these logics, we close by attending to the influences of Ugandan stylists and consumers who draw on Caribbean, US-American, and other diasporic circuits of Blackness, along with locally rooted innovations. Our work demonstrates how racial power travels through time and across space, asserting the important and sustained insights of a postcolonial geography of care.
In this article, we put critical geographic information systems (GIS) methods into conversation with feminist political and economic geographies, mapping the Ugandan wedding industry across the body, ...city, and the global. In doing so, we ground macro geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts in the lived experiences of women involved in the wedding industry, revealing some of the cross-scalar political economies of the trade. We develop a form of “global intimate mapping” to ask, empirically: how are new transnational trade networks reflected in the cityscape and the bodies of brides? And conceptually: what productive insight does feminist GIS offer for feminist political and economic geographies?
•Resistance curves for cellular beams subjected to the lateral-torsional buckling.•Description and validation of finite element models at room and elevated temperatures.•Parametric study totaling ...14,307 analyses.•Unified procedure to evaluate the moment resistance at room and elevated temperatures.
This research deals with the structural behavior of cellular steel beams, focusing on the lateral-torsional buckling limit state at room temperature and fire situation. First, a finite element model was proposed using ABAQUS and validated with experimental results available in the literature. The numerical model was used to perform a parametric study of cellular beams simply supported and subjected to uniform bending. The parametric study assessed twenty hot-rolled parent sections, six groups of diameter and spacing of openings, different values of slenderness, two structural steels, the room temperature case, and seven more target temperatures between 200 °C and 800 °C, totaling 12,306 analyses. Based on the parametric study, a unified procedure was proposed in order to evaluate the lateral-torsional buckling resistance of cellular steel beams at room temperature and fire situation. The proposed resistance curves were also evaluated with the results of 2001 additional analyses of cellular beams subjected to uniformly distributed loads, and mid-span concentrated loads. Compared to other procedures available in the literature, the new proposals presented a better agreement with all ranges of geometries, steel grades, temperatures, and loads investigated.
NADPH oxidase enzymes (NOX) are involved in all stages of carcinogenesis, but their expression levels and prognostic value in breast cancer (BC) remain unclear. Thus, we aimed to assess the ...expression and prognostic value of NOX enzymes in BC samples using online databases. For this, mRNA expression from 290 normal breast tissue samples and 1904 BC samples obtained from studies on cBioPortal, Kaplan-Meier Plotter, and The Human Protein Atlas were analyzed. We found higher levels of NOX2, NOX4, and Dual oxidase 1 (DUOX1) in normal breast tissue. NOX1, NOX2, and NOX4 exhibited higher expression in BC, except for the basal subtype, where NOX4 expression was lower. DUOX1 mRNA levels were lower in all BC subtypes. NOX2, NOX4, and NOX5 mRNA levels increased with tumor progression stages, while NOX1 and DUOX1 expression decreased in more advanced stages. Moreover, patients with low expression of NOX1, NOX4, and DUOX1 had lower survival rates than those with high expression of these enzymes. In conclusion, our data suggest an overexpression of NOX enzymes in breast cancer, with certain isoforms showing a positive correlation with tumor progression.
In clinical practice, pleural and peritoneal effusions are usual diagnosis. We evaluated the performance of a hybrid panel of biomarkers in the diagnosis of the main diseases affecting pleura and/or ...peritoneum.
Samples of pleural/ peritoneal fluid from 120 patients were evaluated for: CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen), VEGF-A (vascular endothelial growth factor A), PD-L1/B7-H1 (programmed death-ligand 1), NGAL (neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin), TREM-1 (triggering receptor expressed in myeloid cells type-1) and IFNγ (gamma-interferon) by Luminex®; CALP (Calprotectin) by ELISA, and ADA (adenosine deaminase) by enzymatic deamination.
For malignant effusion (ME) diagnosis, CEA and NGAL presented superior performance than VEGF-A, PD-L1 and CALP. A CEA-NGAL association showed good sensitivity (86.6%) and accuracy (79.2%). For non-tuberculous infectious effusion (NTBIE), NGAL presented the best performance with sensitivity (75.0%), specificity (62.0%) and accuracy (65.0%) higher than TREM-1 and CALP; however, when associated, although with good sensitivity, there was important decrease in specificity. For tuberculous pleural effusion (TPE), IFNy-ADA presented excellent sensitivity (100%), specificity (87.6%), NPV (100%) and accuracies (~90%).
CEA, NGAL, ADA and IFNy were useful in discriminating ME and TPE. However, for NTBIE diagnosis, the hybrid panel did not demonstrate advantages over the classic parameters.
•CEA, NGAL, IFNγ and ADA is useful in discriminating between ME and TPE, both lymphocytic effusions•CEA and NGAL presented the best performance for the diagnosis of ME•For NTBIE, the hybrid panel did not show diagnostic advantages over classic lab parameters•The association IFNγ-ADA showed 100% sensitivity for TPE diagnosis
NOX/DUOX enzymes are transmembrane proteins that carry electrons through biological membranes generating reactive oxygen species. The NOX family is composed of seven members, which are NOX1 to NOX5 ...and DUOX1 and 2. DUOX enzymes were initially called thyroid oxidases, based on their high expression level in the thyroid tissue. However, DUOX expression has been documented in several extrathyroid tissues, mostly at the apical membrane of the salivary glands, the airways, and the intestinal tract, revealing additional cellular functions associated with DUOX-related H2O2 generation. In this review, we will briefly summarize the current knowledge regarding DUOX structure and physiological functions, as well as their possible role in cancer biology.
Lung fibrosis is a major concern in severe COVID-19 patients undergoing mechanical ventilation (MV). Lung fibrosis frequency in post-COVID syndrome is highly variable and even if the risk is ...proportionally small, many patients could be affected. However, there is still no data on lung extracellular matrix (ECM) composition in severe COVID-19 and whether it is different from other aetiologies of ARDS.
We have quantified different ECM elements and TGF-β expression in lung tissue of 28 fatal COVID-19 cases and compared to 27 patients that died of other causes of ARDS, divided according to MV duration (up to six days or seven days or more). In COVID-19 cases, ECM elements were correlated with lung transcriptomics and cytokines profile.
We observed that COVID-19 cases presented significant increased deposition of collagen, fibronectin, versican, and TGF-β, and decreased decorin density when compared to non-COVID-19 cases of similar MV duration. TGF-β was precociously increased in COVID-19 patients with MV duration up to six days. Lung collagen was higher in women with COVID-19, with a transition of upregulated genes related to fibrillogenesis to collagen production and ECM disassembly along the MV course.
Fatal COVID-19 is associated with an early TGF-β expression lung environment after the MV onset, followed by a disordered ECM assembly. This uncontrolled process resulted in a prominent collagen deposition when compared to other causes of ARDS. Our data provides pathological substrates to better understand the high prevalence of pulmonary abnormalities in patients surviving COVID-19.
PDF
