Collective Quest Research Articles

Be(y)on(d) the map: Collaboratively activating Geographies of (De)CO2loniality/H2Ope in the Ecuadorian Chocó borderlands

This article is positioned within the Chocó borderlands of Ecuador and Colombia. I delve into the historical and contemporary everyday struggles of two communities within the Santiago-Cayapas Watershed—the Afro-descendant community of La Chiquita and the Awá Indigenous community of Guadualito. Yet, I also discuss the methodological aspects of “us-formation”: the multi-dimensional trials and tribulations of a collective quest for justice. The goal: to situate their largely invisibilized 20+ years of legal struggles against two oil palm companies ‘on the map' and demand reparations. The oil palm companies violate Human Rights and Nature's Rights by contaminating rivers and destroying the sustenance of ancestral communities’ lives. Through honing into the entanglements of collaboratively activating five dimensions of Geographies of Hope-in-Praxis—place, alliances, the (un)thinkable, perseverance/resilience, and the (im)possible—the paper traverses a multi-dimensional journey-destination of interdependent processes: 1) (De)CO 2 loniality: decolonizing research, “official” versions of history, and now, “climate change mitigation development”, that attempt to silence and choke out Indigenous and ancestral peoples and territories; and 2) H 2 Ope: carving out new relational spaces bound together by establishing networks to revindicate human/ancestral rights to water and the rights of La Chiquita River. Geographizing hope reveals that the route toward hope-with-justice is a nonlinear, constantly shifting, unpredictable pluriverse of possibilities ripe for action.

No one is self-made: Evolving iterations of giving and shaping of transnational Kamma caste subjectivities

This article focuses on the transnational giving practices of Kammas (a dominant caste in Coastal Andhra, South India) by examining their records, standing myths and evolving iterations around the practice. While Kammas date their giving practices to the 1700s, written records trace community giving to the late colonial period, where a few elites instituted and patronized caste associations. The practice was reconstituted in the late 1990s, with many affluent Kamma professionals in the US embracing the role of community welfare organizers. In its transnational moment, expressed through the idiom of donations, horizontal giving has become one of the key embodied markers of Kamma selfhood, recursively produced as a group trait of a globally dispersed community of professionals. Despite the evolving iterations and modernizing impulses, the article argues that historically, giving for the Kammas has engendered an interiority and exteriority and is intimately tied to their collective quest for upward social mobility.

Correctional rehabilitation and positive psychology: Opportunities and challenges

AbstractAt this point it is clear that the pursuit of the rehabilitative ideal is stitched into the DNA of American corrections. However, in our collective quest to establish and defend ‘what works,’ correctional rehabilitation has lingered in a state of preoccupation with risks, deficits, and individual pathology. The framework of Positive Psychology provides an alluring blueprint for an approach to correctional rehabilitation where people are not considered different humans who are reduced to their deficits and their worst decisions. In the current paper we explore the possibilities of incorporating the principles of Positive Psychology into correctional rehabilitation to help promote a notion of correctional success that is more dynamic, humanizing, and inclusive. We begin by discussing the development, progression, and current state of correctional rehabilitation. We then turn to discussing the development, progression, and current state of Positive Psychology, suggesting that there is a missed opportunity in applying its principles to people who are impacted by the criminal justice system. We conclude with a section discussing the opportunities and challenges of bringing correctional rehabilitation and Positive Psychology together.

Heterogeneity of Diabetes: β-Cells, Phenotypes, and Precision Medicine: Proceedings of an International Symposium of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

One hundred years have passed since the discovery of insulin-an achievement that transformed diabetes from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition. The decades since that momentous achievement have brought ever more rapid innovation and advancement in diabetes research and clinical care. To celebrate the important work of the past century and help to chart a course for its continuation into the next, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recently held a joint international symposium, bringing together a cohort of researchers with diverse interests and backgrounds from both countries and beyond to discuss their collective quest to better understand the heterogeneity of diabetes and thus gain insights to inform new directions in diabetes treatment and prevention. This article summarizes the proceedings of that symposium, which spanned cutting-edge research into various aspects of islet biology, the heterogeneity of diabetic phenotypes, and the current state of and future prospects for precision medicine in diabetes.

Heterogeneity of Diabetes: β-Cells, Phenotypes, and Precision Medicine: Proceedings of an International Symposium of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

One hundred years have passed since the discovery of insulin-an achievement that transformed diabetes from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition. The decades since that momentous achievement have brought ever more rapid innovation and advancement in diabetes research and clinical care. To celebrate the important work of the past century and help to chart a course for its continuation into the next, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recently held a joint international symposium, bringing together a cohort of researchers with diverse interests and backgrounds from both countries and beyond to discuss their collective quest to better understand the heterogeneity of diabetes and thus gain insights to inform new directions in diabetes treatment and prevention. This article summarizes the proceedings of that symposium, which spanned cutting-edge research into various aspects of islet biology, the heterogeneity of diabetic phenotypes, and the current state of and future prospects for precision medicine in diabetes.

Heterogeneity of Diabetes: β-Cells, Phenotypes, and Precision Medicine: Proceedings of an International Symposium of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

One hundred years have passed since the discovery of insulin—an achievement that transformed diabetes from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition. The decades since that momentous achievement have brought ever more rapid innovation and advancement in diabetes research and clinical care. To celebrate the important work of the past century and help to chart a course for its continuation into the next, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes and the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recently held a joint international symposium, bringing together a cohort of researchers with diverse interests and backgrounds from both countries and beyond to discuss their collective quest to better understand the heterogeneity of diabetes and thus gain insights to inform new directions in diabetes treatment and prevention. This article summarizes the proceedings of that symposium, which spanned cutting-edge research into various aspects of islet biology, the heterogeneity of diabetic phenotypes, and the current state of and future prospects for precision medicine in diabetes.

Therapeutic strategies to target RAS-mutant cancers.

RAS genes are the most commonly mutated oncogenes in cancer, but effective therapeutic strategies to target RAS-mutant cancers have proved elusive. A key aspect of this challenge is the fact that direct inhibition of RAS proteins has proved difficult, leading researchers to test numerous alternative strategies aimed at exploiting RAS-related vulnerabilities or targeting RAS effectors. In the past few years, we have witnessed renewed efforts to target RAS directly, with several promising strategies being tested in clinical trials at different stages of completion. Important advances have also been made in approaches designed to indirectly target RAS by improving inhibition of RAS effectors, exploiting synthetic lethal interactions or metabolic dependencies, using therapeutic combination strategies or harnessing the immune system. In this Review, we describe historical and ongoing efforts to target RAS-mutant cancers and outline the current therapeutic landscape in the collective quest to overcome the effects of this crucial oncogene.

Memory, archives, and activism in Montreal: a collective quest

Memory, archives, and activism in Montreal: a collective quest

Unionization in the American Newsroom, 1930 to 1960

AbstractThis study of the material benefits brought to American news workers from the 1930s through the 1960s builds on previous work by media labor‐studies scholars such as Bonnie Brennen, Daniel Leab, Phillip Glende and Sam Kuczun, among others, who have examined the history of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG) in great detail. Their work has focused on legal and policy developments under the Roosevelt administration and in U.S. labor law. My study, as part of a larger project, looks at some of the ground‐level impacts of unionization. It does so examining Editor & Publisher, The Quill and The Guild Reporter, among other publications, and references to the material benefits in pay, time off, work‐life balance, health insurance, job security and other, practical and positive ancillary effects brought by the uneven unionization of the newsroom. The arrival of white‐collar unions for new workers was not a panacea to their problems. But it did help them in their collective quest in the United States during the interwar and then post‐World War Two‐eras for better working conditions and a firmer sense of their professionalized identity.

The evolution of process-based hydrologic models: Historical challenges and the collective quest for physical realism.

The diversity in hydrologic models has historically led to great controversy on the "correct" approach to process-based hydrologic modeling, with debates centered on the adequacy of process parameterizations, data limitations and uncertainty, and computational constraints on model analysis. In this paper, we revisit key modeling challenges on requirements to (1) define suitable model equations, (2) define adequate model parameters, and (3) cope with limitations in computing power. We outline the historical modeling challenges, provide examples of modeling advances that address these challenges, and define outstanding research needs. We illustrate how modeling advances have been made by groups using models of different type and complexity, and we argue for the need to more effectively use our diversity of modeling approaches in order to advance our collective quest for physically realistic hydrologic models.

The Asian-African Conference (Bandung) and Pan-Africanism: the challenge of reconciling continental solidarity with national sovereignty

ABSTRACTThe 1955 Asian-African Conference (Bandung) has been hailed as a turning point in the emergence of the Global South solidarity movement and a pivotal moment in southerners’ collective quest both to liberate themselves from colonialism and to reforge the international order on more inclusive and emancipatory foundations. In this article, the author demonstrates how, in Africa, these aspirations were undermined by nationalist ambitions that privileged self-contained sovereign statehood over potentially more progressive continental solidarity under the Pan-African spirit. The author does so by analysing how the absorption of the Bandung spirit within the Pan-African movement reinforced opportunities for the pursuit of national interests, the affirmation of colonial geographies and economies, and the intensification of forms of solidarities built on the imagined fruits of independence at the expense of a shared history of colonialism. For many African countries, the enduring lessons of the Bandung spirit reside in the challenges of resolving the tensions over the appropriate context for pursuing self-determination and transforming the international order. Thus, while the Bandung spirit delivered the means for newly independent states to engage in international politics through interstate solidarities, it also helped to accelerate the foreclosure of alternative possibilities for intervening in and reshaping the prevailing international order.

Medicine in 2055.

Good morning, and thank you all for being here today. It’s a true honor to address this esteemed group and to follow in the footsteps of so many outstanding leaders in academic medicine who have delivered this address over the past 130 years. Before I begin, I wanted to note how privileged I have felt over the years to work with so many outstanding people in our field. I sometimes worry we lose sight of the talent and commitment of those around us. There are few, if any, other fields that we would be surrounded by those whose lives are committed to improving the lives of the world around us and are willing to work countless hours to achieve this goal. In planning today’s talk, I took some time to listen to past AAP presidential speeches and found them informative and refreshingly varied. The talks that I found most engrossing were those that took a somewhat narrow theme — the practice of humanistic medicine or communicating about science to the public — and really delved into the nuances of the issue with telling data points and smart insights. Well, today I am going to do the opposite of that. No, I don’t mean that the talk will be insight-free, although I can’t make any promises! Instead of carving out a focused, manageable theme, I’ve decided to tackle the “big picture.” The stated purpose of the AAP is “the advancement of scientific and practical medicine” (1). So I thought, why not assess “the advancement of scientific and practical medicine” — both in terms of how far we’ve come and where we may be going in the future. It seemed a tad ambitious to start at the very beginning of modern medicine, so instead, I’ll go back to the early days of my own career. I’ll start by touching on a few of the major triumphs I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing over the past 40 years of biomedical science — areas where discovery has revolutionized clinical practice. Then, I’ll spotlight some of the current advances being driven by academic medical centers around the country in our collective quest to eradicate disease and help people around the globe lead longer, healthier lives. Finally, I’ll look ahead to the next 10–20 years. Today’s scientists are making staggering progress in many disease areas, but I’m going to focus on just a handful of conditions that are being dramatically changed through new technologies, new discoveries, and emerging treatment options — areas where I truly believe we will be able to offer new hope for patients over the next decade or two. For this portion of the talk, I asked all of my department chairs at Johns Hopkins Medicine to weigh in, so the predictions reflect their views as well as my own. Finally, when it comes to the pursuit of cures, we are in the midst of an era of unprecedented opportunities in science, but we’re also butting up against unprecedented challenges in the environment for doing science. I’ll spend a little time addressing these barriers to innovation and what we can do to overcome them.

Religion, Space Exploration, and Secular Society

This article concerns the efforts of Reverend John M. Stout and the Apollo Prayer League to land microfilm copies of the Christian Bible on the lunar surface during the Apollo era. The efforts of Stout, a NASA information scientist and industrial chaplain who orchestrated the years-long undertaking, underscored manned spaceflight not only as a technological and geopolitical achievement, but as a collective spiritual quest. The venture was countered at the time by the renowned head of the American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who insisted that religious artifacts and observances had no place on state-sponsored, taxpayer–funded missions. Stout believed that the astronauts themselves had rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The rancorous debate between Stout and O'Hair, which was played out in the media, laid bare the innate conflict between personal religious freedom and the specter of state-sponsored religion in a secular society making its first expeditions into deep space.

L’autre Allemagne dans l'Allemagne unifiée. Réflexions sur l'unification allemande (Note)

The serious economic problems that the unified Germany has to face — as must other industrialized countries - cannot by themselves account for the growing disenchantment that is perceptible in the New Länder, where the utopian dreams of the fall of 1989 have been steadily unravelling. Why is it that the people of the GDR, who had pushed aside the lethargy of politicians in order to impose a speedy unification of the two German states, now seem to be adopting a radical attitude of defiance towards the federal government ? The author postulates that, in implementing the unification process, people overestimated the capability of the West German federal model to integrate the territories of the GDR and underestimated the permanence of the political consciousness specific to East German citizens, the weight of their historical experience, and their profound yearning to assume their destiny within a unified Germany. Had an autonomous East German chamber been created, with a time-limited mandate, it might have been possible to give meaning to the collective quest for identity now being expressed in the New Länder, a quest which for the time being, and in the absence of any alternative, finds an outlet in a party incarnating the region's specificity - the PDS.

The perfect mile: three athletes, one goal, and less than four minutes to achieve it

There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be entirely beyond the limits of human foot speed. And in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three world-class runners set out individually to break this formidable barrier. Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur -- still driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged son of a genteel Australian family, who as a boy preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly in an almost spiritual attempt to shape his mind and body to this singular task. Then there was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm boy and natural athlete who believed he was just plain better than everybody else. Santee was the first to throw down the gauntlet in what would become a three-way race of body, heart, and soul. Each young man endured thousands of hours of training, bore the weight of his nation's expectations on his shoulders, and still dared to push to the very limit. Their collective quest captivated the world and stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, and such legendary figures as Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, and Ben Hogan. Who would be the first to achieve the unachievable? And who among them would be the best when they raced head to head? In the answer came the perfect mile. In the tradition of Seabiscuit and Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves us with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.

Physician of the soul, healer of the cosmos: Isaac Luria and his kabbalistic fellowship

Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria's students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?

Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (review)

Reviewed by: Book Reviews Mary Kate McGowan Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. By DENISE RILEY. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Denise Riley's Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect is a collection of provocative essays on a wide variety of language-related topics. With colorful, but sometimes challenging, prose, Riley tackles such subjects as the functioning of hateful speech and how one ought to deal with it; the peculiar sensation of feeling like a liar even when one knows that one is telling the truth; the potentially paradoxical fact that language is both impersonal and general and yet partially constructs who we are; the curious fact that we somehow manage to use language effectively even though so much of it is beyond our control; what is problematic about our collective quest for social inclusiveness; how awkward and even paradoxical it is to think about one's past beauty; and the coercive and phenomenological aspects of language use. [End Page 221] What I liked most about the book is Riley's introduction of new questions and complication of accepted phenomena that other theorists have not yet acknowledged. In this regard, she has a real talent for identifying what is mysterious about seemingly ordinary linguistic occasions. For example, most people have never stopped to think about how the expression "Why me?" really functions linguistically. Who is being addressed and what would count as an adequate answer? Is this expression really a question or is it a lament? Another strength of the book is Riley's talent for describing what it feels like to use and understand language. Unlike most other theorists, she concerns herself with the phenomenology of language use and she gets that phenomenology right. For example, there is a peculiar feeling associated with using the latest words for talking about sex. It is often uncomfortable to do so and one is often additionally uncomfortable with that very discomfort. There is also a peculiar sensation associated with feeling like one is lying even though one is telling the (whole) truth. Suppose, for instance, that I truthfully tell an acquaintance that I cannot attend her party (which I had previously committed to attending) because I am not feeling well. Riley contends that I will feel like I am lying even though I know that I am telling the truth. Note that this feeling of lying is not the same as the feeling (or the fearing) of not being believed. I will feel like a liar and I will also feel (at least initially) confused by my feeling like a liar. After all, why should I feel this way when I am telling the truth? Riley diagnoses the case thus: When one uses an expression that is a conventional and polite way to lie, one feels like one is lying when using such expressions even when one does so truthfully. Many interesting themes run through the book. First, Riley stresses how language constructs us. Being categorized as an X, for example, can affect how we think of ourselves, how we behave, and how others treat us. Such "looping" is not limited to cases where X is a socially important category (for example, 'woman,' 'welfare recipient,' or 'victim'), it occurs, according to Riley, even with the use of seemingly innocuous first names. Names often carry associations with them and these associations can affect us our entire lives. Second, Riley stresses how we adjust our language use to those around us and she points out that such "linguistic accommodation" can be (or at least feel) coercive. When speaking with young people about sex, for example, one might feel pressured to use the latest lingo. She also points out that the costs of such linguistic accommodation are often borne unequally. In "Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy," for example, she discusses how socially awkward it is to ask about protection during a sexual encounter. The awkwardness inhibits speech (that is the asking about protection) and this inhibition has greater cost for a woman because she runs the risk of becoming pregnant (by not asking). In this way, Riley hints at ways in which facts about social power affect language use and thereby gestures toward...

Symbolic Space, Communal Rituals, and The Surreality of The Urban Ghetto: Harlem in Black Literature From The 1920s to The 1960s

Since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, black literature of the city has been intensely debated and often judged by mistaken standards. Have black writers more or less failed to reflect the urban experience of the common black people and sadly lagged behind social scientists or political activists in their efforts to understand the social and cultural changes brought about by black Americans' large-scale exposure to an urbanized and industrialized modern since the Great Migration of the 1910s and the formation and later deterioration of the urban ghettoes? Have they betrayed the brutal reality and indulged in exotic worlds of the imagination? Or has black literature helped in unique way to communicate, dramatize, and orchestrate the collective quest for cultural and communal identity of the black minority of the cities? Which literary strategies did black writers develop in order to create images, sounds, rhythms, and visions of new black urban culture and community; which of words achieving form did they work out for expressing a naked whose reality was hitherto unimaginable? How did these literary strategies or patterns change in response to the transformation of Harlem from the Negro capital of the world of the 1920s to the ghetto on the edge of hell of the 1950s and 1960s? And, more generally, how can we as critics adequately grasp the complex, often contradictory interrelationship of society, community, culture, and literature, and deor reconstruct it in our interpretation of literary texts?

At the Center of Attention: The Decisions of the CPSU

Particularly characteristic features of the sociopolitical atmosphere in which our people live and work these days, remarked Comrade Konstantin U. Chernenko, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, at a meeting with Moscow metallurgical workers, are a creative, collective quest for solutions to compelling questions, competent efficiency, and uncompromising strictness. The decisions taken at the April 1984 Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee and the first session of the USSR Supreme Soviet (eleventh convocation) have done much to affirm that atmosphere everywhere. Those decisions attune Soviet people to the need for concerted and strenuous effort in all areas of communist construction.

Lead-taking creative groups in a collective quest

Lead-taking creative groups in a collective quest