The Violence of the Image Kennedy, Liam; Patrick, Caitlin
2014, 2014-07-23, 2020-09-13, Letnik:
15
eBook
Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. ...Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as witnessing, the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of compassion fatigue.
Ruins and Traces Patrick, Caitlin
The Violence of the Image,
2014
Book Chapter
This chapter considers a long-standing social 'investment' in documentary photography and photojournalism their perceived value as critical tools to advocate for political and social change. It ...explores a current element within this larger issue, an abiding sense of anxiety regarding the 'critical potential' of 'late photography', a relatively new style of predominantly gallery-based work. Additionally, documentary's predominant styles and modes of display were seen as counterproductive to meaningful social change. The chapter argues the cross-historical comparisons encouraged by the series in part prevent it from complicating predominant Western conceptions of the African continent on a level beyond the visual. Living human subjects do feature in many of the photos and are depicted more like standard photojournalistic or documentary subjects in the latter third of the exhibition, to be discussed below in more depth.
Introduction Kennedy, Liam; Patrick, Caitlin
The Violence of the Image,
2014
Book Chapter
Photography has been instrumentally involved in the visualisation of international relations and conflicts since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout much of the twentieth century, ...photojournalism was the premier visual genre in news media framing of international affairs and it provides a core focus for many of the writings in The Violence of the Image. A key tenet of the visual philosophy of mid-century photojournalism was its commitment to a democratising vision of human affiliations and an imaginary globalisation of conscience. The proliferation and convergence of new media technologies-satellite, the internet, digital image production - has greatly expanded the media sphere in which imagery of contemporary conflict circulates, and also expanded the global capacities for visually documenting abuses and violations. Running throughout The Violence of the Image is an inquiry into the high value that continues to be placed on the power of visual media to bear witness and to stimulate social change.
Mass media images and narratives have an important role to play in the workings of international and domestic politics. Technological developments, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth ...centuries, have enabled a rapidly- growing 'economy' of images, information and means of communicating. These new commodities are circulated in an international sphere defined by shifting and unequal power relations. With this context in mind, this work undertakes an analysis of media representations of place and people in selected coverage of the Somalia intervention of 1992-1993 and the American sieges of Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, looking at both media narrative and imagery. Despite technological changes and differences in political context, coverage content for each case study illustrates many similarities in representations of places and people. Both case studies highlight the continuing resonance and use of long-standing racial and colonial stereotypes to describe, or to 'disappear', 'other' people and places. The aim of this project has been to recognise and problematize these powerful dichotomizations between a primarily Western 'us' and Others', illustrating the political nature of such attempts, their failings, and the consequences of these efforts at division. Exploration and exposure of the political nature of categorizations can assist in provoking a re-thinking not only of how 'others' are seen but of how 'we' construct our own identities.
Mass media images and narratives have an important role to play in the workings of international and domestic politics. Technological developments, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth ...centuries, have enabled a rapidly- growing 'economy' of images, information and means of communicating. These new commodities are circulated in an international sphere defined by shifting and unequal power relations. With this context in mind, this work undertakes an analysis of media representations of place and people in selected coverage of the Somalia intervention of 1992-1993 and the American sieges of Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, looking at both media narrative and imagery. Despite technological changes and differences in political context, coverage content for each case study illustrates many similarities in representations of places and people. Both case studies highlight the continuing resonance and use of long-standing racial and colonial stereotypes to describe, or to 'disappear', 'other' people and places. The aim of this project has been to recognise and problematize these powerful dichotomizations between a primarily Western 'us' and Others', illustrating the political nature of such attempts, their failings, and the consequences of these efforts at division. Exploration and exposure of the political nature of categorizations can assist in provoking a re-thinking not only of how 'others' are seen but of how 'we' construct our own identities.
Pathogenic H7N9 avian influenza viruses continue to represent a public health concern, and several candidate vaccines are currently being developed. It is vital to assess if protective antibodies are ...induced following vaccination and to characterize the diversity of epitopes targeted. Here we characterized the binding and functional properties of twelve H7-reactive human antibodies induced by a candidate A/Anhui/1/2013 (H7N9) vaccine. Both neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies protected mice in vivo during passive transfer challenge experiments. Mapping the H7 hemagglutinin antigenic sites by generating escape mutant variants against the neutralizing antibodies identified unique epitopes on the head and stalk domains. Further, the broadly cross-reactive non-neutralizing antibodies generated in this study were protective through Fc-mediated effector cell recruitment. These findings reveal important properties of vaccine-induced antibodies and provide a better understanding of the human monoclonal antibody response to influenza in the context of vaccines.
Display omitted
•Generation and characterization of human monoclonal antibodies after H7N9 vaccination•Neutralizing and non-neutralizing protective antibodies are induced by H7N9 vaccine•Neutralizing antibodies target known and novel epitopes on the hemagglutinin protein•Non-neutralizing antibodies mediate protection through Fc-FcγR interactions
Henry Dunand et al. characterize the antibodies induced following H7N9 influenza vaccination and identify three categories of H7-reactive protective antibodies. These antibodies target various epitopes on the HA head and stalk domains. Cross-reactive non-neutralizing antibodies recruit effector cells through Fc-FcγR interactions to mediate protection.
ABSTRACT
Mountains have a long history in the study of diversity. Like macroscopic taxa, soil microbes are hypothesized to be strongly structured by montane gradients, and recently there has been ...important progress in understanding how microbes are shaped by these conditions. Here, we summarize this literature and synthesize patterns of microbial diversity on mountains. Unlike flora and fauna that often display a mid-elevation peak in diversity, we found a decline (34% of the time) or no trend (33%) in total microbial diversity with increasing elevation. Diversity of functional groups also varied with elevation (e.g. saprotrophic fungi declined 83% of the time). Most studies (82%) found that climate and soils (especially pH) were the primary mechanisms driving shifts in composition, and drivers differed across taxa—fungi were mostly determined by climate, while bacteria (48%) and archaea (71%) were structured primarily by soils. We hypothesize that the central role of soils—which can vary independently of other abiotic and geographic gradients—in structuring microbial communities weakens diversity patterns expected on montane gradients. Moving forward, we need improved cross-study comparability of microbial diversity indices (i.e. standardizing sequencing) and more geographic replication using experiments to broaden our knowledge of microbial biogeography on global gradients.
Patterns of diversity vary across elevation, but unlike plants and animals, which often show a mid-elevation peak, the majority of studies in this review find that soil microbial diversity declines or shows no trend with increasing elevation.
Abstract
Some recent literature has claimed there to be an evolution in galaxies’ dust temperatures toward warmer (or colder) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) between low and high redshift. These ...conclusions are driven by both theoretical models and empirical measurement. Such claims sometimes contradict one another and are prone to biases in samples or SED fitting techniques. What has made direct comparisons difficult is that there is no uniform approach to fitting galaxies’ infrared/millimeter SEDs. Here we aim to standardize the measurement of galaxies’ dust temperatures with a python-based SED fitting procedure, MCIRSED.
1
1
Publicly available at
github.com/pdrew32/mcirsed
.
We draw on reference data sets observed by Infrared Astronomical Satellite, Herschel, and
Scuba-2
to test for redshift evolution out to
z
∼ 2. We anchor our work to the
L
IR
–
λ
peak
plane, where there is an empirically observed anticorrelation between IR luminosity and rest-frame peak wavelength (an observational proxy for luminosity-weighted dust temperature) such that
λ
peak
=
λ
t
(
L
IR
/
L
t
)
η
where
η
= −0.09 ± 0.01, L
t
= 10
12
L
⊙
, and
λ
t
= 92 ± 2
μ
m. We find no evidence for redshift evolution of galaxies’ temperatures, or
λ
peak
, at fixed
L
IR
from 0 <
z
< 2 with >99.99% confidence. Our finding does not preclude evolution in dust temperatures at fixed stellar mass, which is expected from a nonevolving
L
IR
–
λ
peak
relation and a strongly evolving SFR–M
⋆
relation. The breadth of dust temperatures (
σ
log
λ
peak
) at a given
L
IR
is likely driven by variation in galaxies’ dust geometries and sizes, and it does not evolve. Testing for
L
IR
–
λ
peak
evolution toward higher redshift (
z
∼ 5−6) requires better sampling of galaxies’ dust SEDs near their peaks (observed ∼200–600
μ
m) with ≲1 mJy sensitivity. This poses a significant challenge to current instrumentation.
As global temperatures rise, large amounts of carbon sequestered in permafrost are becoming available for microbial degradation. Accurate prediction of carbon gas emissions from thawing permafrost is ...limited by our understanding of these microbial communities. Here we use metagenomic sequencing of 214 samples from a permafrost thaw gradient to recover 1,529 metagenome-assembled genomes, including many from phyla with poor genomic representation. These genomes reflect the diversity of this complex ecosystem, with genus-level representatives for more than sixty per cent of the community. Meta-omic analysis revealed key populations involved in the degradation of organic matter, including bacteria whose genomes encode a previously undescribed fungal pathway for xylose degradation. Microbial and geochemical data highlight lineages that correlate with the production of greenhouse gases and indicate novel syntrophic relationships. Our findings link changing biogeochemistry to specific microbial lineages involved in carbon processing, and provide key information for predicting the effects of climate change on permafrost systems.
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