The use of DNA stabilizing solution to enable room temperature storage and transportation of buccal and trace sample swabs

It is proposed that a DNA stabilizing solution (DNA Genotek Inc.) designed to preserve DNA in saliva samples at room temperature can be extrapolated to the storage of swab heads. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution for the preservation of reference swabs (buccal) and trace samples (facial swabs). To this end, the solution was used during a twin-site DNA transfer project assessing background levels of carer DNA present in children. Tubes containing 400 μl of solution were used to store and transport swab heads. At the laboratory, samples were extracted using the QIAamp DNA Mini Kit (Qiagen), quantified using the Quantifiler Duo Kit and profiled using the AmpF?STR^® SGM Plus^® PCR Amplification Kit (both Applied Biosystems). Twenty-eight PCR cycles were applied to all samples. Thirty-four cycles or a longer electrophoresis injection time was applied to trace samples where necessary. All Reference swabs produced high quantities of DNA and full DNA profiles after 28 cycles. Profile morphology indicated good quality DNA with no degradation. Of the trace samples, sufficient profiles were achieved to study the transfer of carer DNA making the solution fit for continued use in this project. DNA stabilizing solution enables the storage and transportation of swabs without freezing. This is convenient, reduces transportation costs and enables instant analysis of samples upon arrival at the laboratory. This is a useful alternative for a multi-site research project as well as a reliable storage tool for use in remote areas.     

When Development Is Not Enough: Structural Change,Conflict and Gendered Insecurity

Despite two decades of rapid global economic growth and social modernisation, including increases in gender equity, levels of violence against women remain stubbornly high. Moving beyond conventional liberal views, a growing literature has identified how structural change and conflict associated with economic development can exacerbate women’s physical insecurity. We examine the relationship between development patterns and variation in the Physical Security of Women index—the best available cross-national indicator—to fill the gap in emerging ethnographic, case and survey-based accounts with systematic cross-country assessment. We find that, after controlling for standard explanatory variables, income inequality, urban crowding, corruption, political violence, autocracy and unequal representation of women in politics are associated with more physical insecurity, confirming the relevance of structural change and conflict approaches to development. Correcting the conventional wisdom, high national incomes are associated with greater security for women only if they are well distributed, and the relationship with female labour force participation weakens as women’s work rises. These relationships are robust to the year in which they are measured, and to the introduction of region and time fixed effects. We also demonstrate that gender-based violence has different correlates than generic insecurity.     

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

Aesthetic Vertigo and the Jurisprudence of Disgust

This article engages with the intersection of law, legitimation and aesthetics by examining the controversies surrounding the exhibition in 1997 of two artworks: Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, andMyra by Marcus Harvey. The article is less concerned with issues such as freedom of expression or the rights of display, which by now are well-known in debates on censorship and the arts; rather, its focus is on the consequences for an artwork's exhibition when it is deemed to be `disgusting'. The judgment of the two selected artworks as disgusting is traced in public discourse, through newspaper reports, public protest, and in socio-legal responses to the artwork such as a civil suit for possible obscenity, in decency or blasphemy. The argument suggests that the jurisprudence of disgust in its response to a sensation of ‘aesthetic vertigo’ can provide a key means of understanding aesthetic controversies, and their legal regulation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Postmaternal Times and Radical Feminist Thinking

ABSTRACT

Linking the postmaternal to postfeminism as products of late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism, postmaternal thinking is defined in this article by its historical time period, from the early 1980s onwards, and by its legacy of radical feminist thinking which was critical in messing up traditional understandings of maternity. This is demonstrated through research and resources related to the women’s peace movement, with specific reference to the women-only peace camps at Greenham Common (U.K.) and Pine Gap (Australia). The intellectual legacies of these complex and compelling debates around the social practices of maternity, the politics of family, collective domesticity and activism are often occluded in social memory, as Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (2011). This paper extends Stephens’ working definition of postmaternity to argue for an interconnected structural social analysis of postmaternal times, and contests modernist categories of knowing to consider postmaternity as postmodernist in its multiple and shifting array of politics. In this way postmaternity becomes a time in which maternity is open to redefinition through a proliferation of meaning and possibilities, and this is demonstrated by concluding in the form of a manifesto.     

‘Went into raptures’: reading emotion in the ordinary wartime diary, 1941–1946

Despite the emergence of studies attentive to the difference between discourses about emotion and the experience of emotion, particularly within histories of gender and sexuality, social class has been a neglected category. Those historical sources which enable engagement with a subject's emotional life have been largely produced by the elite and middle-classes; it remains notoriously difficult to gain access to the interior lives of ‘ordinary’ people. This article asserts the significance of the ‘ordinary’ diary in enabling exploration of the emotional lives of non-elite women and girls. It focuses on expressions of romantic love and sexual interest, anger and disappointment in the pocket diaries of a working-class scholarship girl from the English East Midlands during the years of the Second World War, to argue that ordinary diaries can help us to move beyond cultural directives concerning appropriate female emotional expression to develop a greater understanding of the daily crafting of the modern self.     

Perceptions of older adult jurors: the influence of aging stereotypes and jury laws

ABSTRACT

The present study examined younger (18–30 years, N?=?100) and older adults’ (66–89 years, N?=?100) responses to a jury duty questionnaire assessing perceptions of jury duty, their capability to serve, and the capability of older adults to serve. We also explored perceptions of the senior jury opt-out law (a law that allows those over a certain age (e.g. 65 years) to opt-out of jury duty). We assessed why participants believe this law is in place and experimentally examined if informing older adults about this law impacted their jury questionnaire responses. Results demonstrated that older adults were significantly more likely to want to serve compared to younger adults; however, younger adults provided lower capability ratings of older adult jurors compared to older adults. Younger adults’ open-ended explanations for these ratings indicated negative aging stereotypes (i.e. in part, believing that older adult jurors are less capable because of declining health and biased beliefs). Older adults also had a significantly lower rate of agreement with the senior jury opt-out law. Although informing older adults about this law did not impact their perceptions of themselves as potential jurors, it did enforce more negative attitudes towards older adult jurors as a whole.     

Hybrid accountabilities and managerial agency in the third sector

This article investigates how the dynamics of conflicting accountabilities are managed within the context of the third sector; specifically in organizations providing services for people with learning difficulties. Multiple accountability relationships create organizational settings that are subject to multiple constraints and risks but also offer resources for agency. We analyse how managers take up agency to enable them to enact, resist or reconcile multiple accountabilities. Our study's contribution lies in our elucidation of the far-reaching hybridity of the third sector and the complex forms of actorhood it cultivates, in which managers are able to handle resources with great dexterity, in pursuit of settlements which may only be contingent and temporary.