Identity Matters Research Articles

Twin Cities—A Matter of Identity and Belonging

Twin Cities—A Matter of Identity and Belonging

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OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Knowing how to deliver culturally responsive care is of increasing importance as the nation’s patient population diversifies. However, unless cultural competence is taught with an emphasis on self-awareness (Wear, 2007) and critical consciousness (Kumagai and Lypson, 2009) learners find this education ineffective (Beagan, 2003). This study examines how physicians perceive their own social identities (eg, race, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation, religion, years of experience) and how these self-perceptions influence physician’s understandings of how to practice culturally responsive care. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: This exploratory study took place at a university in the Intermountain West. We employed a qualitative case study method to investigate how academic physicians think about their identities and approaches to clinical care and research through interviews and observations. In total, 25 participants were enrolled in our study, with efforts to recruit a diverse sample with respect to gender and race as well as years of experience and specialty. Transcriptions of interviews and observations were coded using grounded theory. One major code that emerged was defining experiences: instances where physicians reflected on both personal and professional life encounters that have influenced how they think about themselves, how they understand an aspect of their identity, or why this identity matters. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Two main themes emerged from an analysis of the codes that show how physicians think about their identities and their approaches to practice. (1) Physicians with nondominant identities (women, non-White) could more easily explain what these identities mean to them than those with dominant identities (men, White). For example, women in medicine had much to say about being a woman in medicine, but men had barely anything to say about being a man in medicine. (2) There was a positive trend between the number of defining experiences a physician encountered in life and the number of connections they made between their identities and the manner in which they practiced, both clinically and academically. It appeared that physicians who have few defining experiences made few connections between identity and practice, those with a moderate number of experiences made a moderate number of connections, and those with many experiences made many connections. Physicians who mentioned having many defining experiences were more likely to be able to articulate how those experiences were incorporated into their approaches to patient care. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: (1) According to literature in multicultural education, those with dominant identities do not think about their identities because they do not have to (Johnson, 2001). One privilege of being part of the majority is not having to think about life from a minority perspective. This helps to explain why women and non-White physicians in this study had more anecdotes to share about these identities—because they have had defining experiences that prompt reflection on these identities. (2) We propose that struggles and conflict are what compel physicians to reflect on their practice (Eva et al., 2012). Our findings suggest that physicians are more prepared to apply what they have learned from their own identity struggles in delivering culturally responsive care when they have had more opportunities to reflect on these identities and situations. Findings from this study have implications for transforming approaches to medical education. We suggest that medical education should provide learners with the opportunity to reflect on their life experience, and that providers may need explicit instruction on how to make connections between their experiences and their practice.

Translanguaging Pedagogies for Positive Identities in Two-Way Dual Language Bilingual Education

ABSTRACTResearch suggests that identity matters for school success and that language and identity are powerfully intertwined. A monolingual solitudes understanding of bilingualism undermines children’s bilingual identities, yet in most bilingual education classrooms, academic instruction is segregated by language and children are encouraged to engage in only one language at a time. Few studies have explored how a translanguaging pedagogy supports the development of positive identities when learning through two languages. This article explores the co-construction of identities of emergent bilingual children whose teacher embraced dynamic bilingualism. We carried out a close discourse analysis, drawing on the sociocultural linguistic framework of Bucholtz and Hall of children’s interactions in a two-way bilingual education classroom. Our data revealed that translanguaging offered equitable, empowering educational and language learning opportunities to minoritized, bilingual students. A translanguaging pedagogy resulted in greater metalinguistic awareness, while developing bilingual identities.

Host plant and competitor identity matter in genotype × genotype × environment interactions between vetch and pea aphids

1. Selection does not only operate in a genotype (G) × environment (E) context, but can also be modulated by the activities of organisms interacting with their environment (G × G × E). 2. The influences of aphid clonal identity and host plant (Vicia faba) intraspecific genetic variation on the performance of five genotypes of pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) were investigated – with and without interaction with a competing heterospecific clone of vetch aphid (Megoura viciae) – across three cultivars of V. faba. 3. Pea aphid performance in the presence of a competing vetch aphid clone (G × G × E) compared with the absence of competition (G × E) revealed strong context-dependent, genotype-specific shifts in performance, influenced by plant cultivar, competitor presence and their interaction. 4. The performance of vetch aphid in competition with each pea aphid clone was also compared. Here, competitor's genotype and abundance underlay a remarkably varied response by vetch aphid across interactions. 5. The study shows that aphid genotypes exhibit a varying degree of risk spreading, contingent on competitor identity and the patterns of aggregation across three plant cultivars. Owing to feedback loops between species activities and selective forces acting on them, our findings suggest that there are context-dependent responses by competitors that are shaped via the interplay of the co-occurring species and their biotic environment. 6. This work highlights the complexity of species interactions and the importance of investigating reciprocity between competition and intraspecific genetic variation. A better understanding of the eco-evolutionary interactions between phloem-feeding insects and their host plants can potentially be used to enhance crop protection and pest control.

Community, identity, orientation: sexuality, gender and rights in ASEAN

ABSTRACTThe Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) escalated its community building project significantly over the last decade, culminating in the launch of a reformed and substantially integrated ASEAN Community at the end of 2015. This article considers what might follow from this newly reformed and rhetorically people-focused version of ASEAN for matters of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE). In claiming to be people-oriented and people-centred, and by developing a regional rights regime, ASEAN opens itself to standards by which it can be measured and held to account. We critically review ASEAN 2025: Forging Ahead Together, and consider civil society's response, focusing on the critique offered by the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, the peak civil society organisation for ASEAN SOGIE matters. We focus on three themes: identity, visibility politics, and rights. We argue that while ASEAN falls short of its own rhetorical standards, these same standards support a politics which keeps rights in contestation, enabling civil society to push for accountability to international standards, and a more democratic politics.

Barefoot in Britain – yet again: On multiple identities, intersection(ality) and marginality

Anticipating later debates on multiculturalism and class ‘fractions’, anthropologists in Britain have recognised that migrants and diasporas bear multiple identities, meaning that their cultures cannot and should not be essentialised as homogeneous. For anthropologists, the importance of studying these groups’ multiple identities lies in the recognition that none of the social unities evoked – of identity, diaspora, community, nation, tradition – are consensus-based wholes; all are the products of ongoing debates and political struggles or alliances. This article argues that while multiple identities and intersectionality appear to be linked, in the sense that both concern matters of identity and identity politics, they differ radically. In this respect anthropologists of Britain have differed from sociologists and political scientists in arguing, first, for an understanding that identities can be empowering, valorised and deeply affective, and second, that identities are performed in situ – they are situational, shifting, self-defining and culturally embedded.

Identity matters: Language, practices and the (non)performance of rudeness in a Pupil Referral Unit

Combining linguistic analysis of interactions with tools from the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS) I explore the material-semiotic character of practices to understand how ‘rude’ identities were achieved in Manchester’s Secondary Pupil Referral Unit (England).Using ethnographic methods, I identify three distinct subaltern practices, banter, boyin and chatting shit, and show how their entangled linguistic formats and normative assumptions were incommensurable with the interactional formats of British secondary education classroom practices.I show that when these incompatible practices overlapped people might become rude, but they might also emerge as wits, winners, gibberers, liars or gossips, and which identities came to matter was contingent on the socio-material relations in play. I conclude that one way in which harmony was maintained during precarious moments of difference in a lesson, was through skilled staff who, in being able to participate in both classroom and banter/boyin practices, were able to mediate between the two when it mattered by crafting alternative identities.

Including students as co-enquirers: Matters of identity, agency, language and labelling in an International participatory research study

This paper takes the reader through the methodological development of an international study, which involved 8 academics and 373 students in Departments of Education from 6 universities in Europe, New Zealand and the USA. It explores the uses, benefits and critical tensions within participatory research methodology when used in a study addressing questions of undergraduate student diversity and inclusion. Issues when linking the views and interests of the various project parties, a core element of participatory research, are considered. Alongside this is a discussion on how this led to shifts in participant role identities, a reconfiguration of research ownership and insights into the complexities of participants’ education. The work addresses a niche area in terms of participants as co-researchers, in particular matters of identity, agency, language and labelling, thus adding to developments in this field.

“The Queer Feeling We All Know”: Queer Objects and Orientations in Edith Wharton's (Haunted) Houses

"The Queer Feeling We All Know":Queer Objects and Orientations in Edith Wharton's (Haunted) Houses Shannon Brennan In the night that follows his impetuous stab at heteronormativity, Edith Wharton's queerest character is startled to consciousness by his sense of an intruding, untoward object. "I was waked by the queer feeling we all know," Andrew Culwin reflects, "—the feeling that there was something in the room that hadn't been there when I fell asleep" (43). Culwin, the interpellated narrator of "The Eyes," has just surprised himself by proposing marriage to a young cousin—a proposal that he sees as his "suddenly undertak[ing] to promote the moral order of the world" (42). That night, he experiences his "queer feeling," waking to the sense—and then the sight—of a pair of ghostly eyes. Culwin flees their presence, and flees his fiancée, too, embarking on a trajectory that will lead him to Europe, to Hong Kong, and, eventually, to the intimate library where he narrates his story to a few male friends whom he is lustily said to "lik[e] … juicy" (38). We might thus say that his "queer feeling" leads to Culwin's queer orientation. Then again, since this feeling was aroused by the suspicion that the room Culwin occupies has been mysteriously reconfigured, it might be more accurate to recognize that his "queer feeling" was always a matter of his position in space—that is, it has always been a matter of orientation. I am interested in the emphatically spatial, haptic, and object-oriented quality of this scene of queer reorientation. Equally intriguing is its asserted universality: the proposal that "queer feeling" is a thing that "we all know."1 Taking my cue from Culwin's suggestive phrase, I would like to make a few proposals regarding the construction of queer space in what Annette Benert has referred to as Wharton's "architectural imagination." Wharton, I suggest, renders queerness an always-available mode of experience during a period that was increasingly invested in understanding sexual orientation to be a matter of identity. [End Page 82] While Maria Farland and Richard Kaye have shown how Wharton's theories of sexuality were tied to the medical and juridical discourses of her time, I argue that Wharton's writing stages the queering potential of the nonhuman environment.2 Hers is a theory of the queer feelings and alignments produced by the spaces we inhabit. Beyond positing a "theor[y] of space," Wharton offers a preliminary account of queer subjectivity as the uncanny experience of one's position within a choreography of people, furniture, and objects (Somers 41).3 It is just this spatial aspect of sexual orientation that renders queerness a consistent potential available to the characters and interpellated readers of Wharton's oeuvre. What might be queer about our relation to the environment? The New Materialist theories of Sara Ahmed and Mel Chen offer two potential strategies for addressing this question. "Bodies are gendered, sexualized, and raced," Ahmed notes, "by how they extend into space" (5). The structure of a room and the objects in it can naturalize particular lifelines and exclude others; they can make certain subjects feel at home while putting others in their place. In this account, queerness is a phenomenological experience, the sense of disorientation that comes of recognizing oneself and one's desires to be out of place—a precarity that also generates possibilities. Like Ahmed, Chen frames queerness in terms of an affective relation to the environment; however, her work is less focused on the experience of alignment than on humans' reciprocal interaction with the material world. Chen locates queerness in the moments when we violate the "proper intimacies" dictated by our ontological scale (11). Language and custom distinguish subjects and objects, animals and matter, and racialized, sexualized, and gendered persons according to hierarchies of "animacy." To cross these boundaries, recognizing our affective and biological relationship with the presumably inanimate environment—to love the couch that enfolds me in its cushions, for instance—is to queer a commonsense ideological scheme. The discussions of "queer orientation" and "queer feeling" that follow are based in these two concepts. Queer orientation involves the social/sexual...

Historical Books: Joshua–2 Kings

Historical BooksJoshua–2 Kings Thomas Hieke, Fred W. Guyette, Christopher T. Begg, Jaime A. Banister, William J. Urbrock, Francis M. Macatangay, Richard A. Taylor, and Paul R. Redditt 1683. [Dtr] Jean-Pierre Sonnet, "The Siege of Jerusalem between Rhetorical Maximalism (Deuteronomy 28) and Narrative Minimalism (2 Kings 25)," Fall of Jerusalem, 73-86 [see #2004]. S. treats the literary relationship between the description of Jerusalem's siege and fall in 2 Kings 25 and Deuteronomy 28. According to S., already the narrative in 2 Kings 22 directs the reader to the Book of Deuteronomy, especially chap. 28. As Josiah deciphered the fate of Jerusalem by relating this to the curses of the Torah book, the reader is called to make sense of the ending of 2 Kings in terms of Deuteronomy—in particular the curses in Deuteronomy 28 and the prospect of return in Deuteronomy 29–30. Josiah's reading of the mysterious book is a mise en abyme of these interpretative operations in the coordination of 2 Kings and Deuteronomy. An analogy to this process occurs with the figure of Joshua (see Josh 1:8). At key junctures, the Deuteronomy–Kings sequence evokes elements of cross-reference and parallel reading. Finally, S. comments on the ending of the references to the [End Page 553] Annals of the Kings of Judah: "At the demise of royal historiography, the Deuteronomic Torah book is what provides the fall of Jerusalem with its authorized written legend. In that sense, the fall of Jerusalem indeed means the rise of the Torah" (p. 85).—T.H. 1684. [Joshua] L. Daniel Hawk, "The Myth of the Emptied Land: Biblical Conquest and American Nationalism," W&W 37 (2017) 252-62. Many people see similarities between the story of the Conquest in the Book of Joshua and America's expansion across North America. To be sure, however, neither land was empty when the occupiers "found" it. What drove Americans to erase the indigenous presence from conquered lands and from the nation's vision? The erasure of the indigenous presence was a means to transform a conquered land into a national homeland, in a way that camouflaged un-biblical practices. Part of that camouflage involved erecting monuments, shrines, and memorials, and reverencing them as sites where national identity was "won" for future generations of white people. Some politicians want to "Make America Great Again," but how far back would they need to go to find truly moral policies toward the human beings who were here before us? New policies of erasure try to persuade us that we have every right to build walls, deport the undocumented, block immigrants, and dismiss the concerns of minority groups. However, if we fail to examine and critique nationalist myths and symbols, the United States will likely try to "solve" new domestic and global challenges by rehearsing the same old destructive scripts. Against this background, H. seeks to show how the Book of Joshua can be problematized and read against the grain, so that the above challenges come into sharper focus, and he contends for a reading of the canonical Book of Joshua in which wrestling over the identity of the people of God is finally separated from the idols of land, race, and civil religion.—F.W.G. 1685. [Joshua] Paul Hinlicky, "The Theology of the Divine Warrior in the Book of Joshua," W&W 37 (2017) 271-80. Genocide in the name of the Lord? Obsession with matters of identity and boundaries at the expense of the Other? Conflicts over proper worship and religious pluralism? We could add to that list of questions raised by the Book of Joshua the bizarre exchange at the conclusion of the book. After recounting how the people obeyed Joshua in their sweeping victory over the Canaanites, the book culminates with a reproach. Joshua asserts that the people, who have just sworn their everlasting fidelity to God, cannot and will not keep the covenant (Josh 24:19-20). The Book of Joshua it seems, cannot make up its mind about what story it is trying to tell! In NT terms, we could say that Joshua, the book's protagonist...

Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lauren S. Cardon

Reviewed by: Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lauren S. Cardon Allan G. Borst Lauren S. Cardon. Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 232 pp. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon asks readers to check their assumptions about the shallow consumerism and superficiality of fashion and instead consider how fashion choices—as they proliferate in the pages of the early-twentieth-century US literary canon, at least—tie directly to issues of socioeconomic mobility and identity. Toward this end, Fashion and Fiction traces the increased accessibility of fashionable clothing made possible through mass production and the corresponding growth of what Cardon calls "American democratic fashion" (10). No longer restricted by the rules or prices of the Parisian haute couture donned by upper-class elites, American fashion's increasing availability and affordability during the early twentieth century enabled, if not implored, Americans to freely augment their identities through clothing and fashion accessories. Cardon's close readings emphasize how characters do not wear clothes in simple obedience to fashion trends but strategically develop and deploy their "fashion knowledge" (6) in attempts to facilitate social mobility and craft personal styles. Fashion and Fiction calls attention to the frequency and nuance with which characters actively observe, contemplate, and discuss fashion choices of their own and of those around them in order to suggest that fashion plays an integral part in the ways literature—and by extension, US society—engages with matters of upward mobility, Americanization, and racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity. Few readers will be surprised to discover that Fashion and Fiction begins with an opening chapter dedicated to Edith Wharton's Gilded Age classics, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Wharton's novels offer Cardon prime opportunities to illustrate how New York's upper crust, through its commitment to the exclusivity and expense of Parisian haute couture, used fashion to demarcate social barriers and dictate permissible behaviors and expressions of personal desire. In Cardon's reading, the socioeconomic and romantic difficulties of Wharton's heroines, which often play out in relation to their ability to correctly or happily dress themselves, signal the desire for greater freedom and self-determination that the rise of American democratic fashion would later oblige. Fashion and Fiction proceeds more or less chronologically in a manner that underscores Cardon's thesis that US canonical literature illustrates how "over the years, fashion extends to a larger demographic, transcends lines of class and race, and affords increasing opportunities to express one's personality and lifestyle through a [End Page 760] range of stylish garments and accessories" (181). Like chapter 1, subsequent chapters adopt something of a simplified cultural-materialist approach. Précis of pivotal fashion trends—the pages of Vogue and the designs of Coco Chanel supply most of the book's cultural-historical points of reference—serve subsections devoted to close readings of individual primary texts. This schema makes for tidy analysis, but it also reveals how Fashion and Fiction privileges literary close readings at the expense of more deeply researched, analyzed, and integrated cultural history and cultural theory. In chapter 4, for example, an Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement for women's sportswear in a 1922 issue of Vogue—discussed alongside depictions of the modern woman by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—does well to add to the reader's visual and rhetorical understanding of the "slim silhouette" (108) and the associated gender play at work in women's fashion at the time. Yet however much Fashion and Fiction works to explicate the various fashions appearing in its primary texts, the close readings funneled through fashion consistently lead to conventional conclusions. In chapter 2, the titular protagonists of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie still successfully pursue the American Dream and achieve success only to discover "loneliness and alienation, a modern malaise that seems a side effect of embracing the consumer capitalist mentality" (82). In chapter 5, which focuses primarily on Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, the Negro Welfare League dance remains a pivotal scene for the way...

Ownership structure and dividend policy: application of Lintner's dividend model in Sri Lanka

This paper investigates the effect of ownership structure on the dividend policy of 77 Sri Lankan firms listed in the Colombo Stock Exchange over the period 2006-2014. The Lintner's full adjustment model and the partial adjustment model are used to examine the potential relationship between ownership structure and the dividend policy. We find that the ownership identity matters in determining the dividends according to Lintner's dividend model in Sri Lanka. Compared to the full adjustment model, the partial adjustment model is superior in explaining the variation in dividends with variables associated in different ownership structures. There is a negative association between institutional, managerial ownership structures and the dividend policy and a significant positive association between concentrated ownership structure and the dividend policy. In addition, the dividend in the preceding year is highly significant in explaining the succeeding year's dividend, thus confirming the stability of the dividend policy.

Amanda Cross and Androgyny

Abstract Amanda Cross is the pen name Carolyn Heilbrun used for her mystery fiction. In two of her novels she employed the theme of androgyny. She also wrote the non-fiction, 1973 Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in which she promoted androgyny as aspect of her approach to feminism, an intellectual denial of any significant differences between the sexes. While that thread of American feminism has lost favor in current feminist ideologies, matters of gender identity are rising in prominence in American social and political thought, reviving the debate on male and female roles and identities in the United States.

Cosmopolitan Methods and Recruiting the Urban Stranger in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article emerges from the fieldwork experiences and methodological issues that arose while conducting fieldwork with older New Zealanders in two urban settings of diversity and multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Some of the encountered methodological complexities are discussed, including the inherent complications around categorization and ethnicity when approaching the urban setting as the ethnographic field, particularly in a New Zealand context. I argue that serendipitous, fleeting interactions between ethnographer and those encountered in urban fields do not afford individuals the respectful time and space necessary to discuss matters of identity, such as ethnicity. I suggest, then, that the urban anthropologist is a peripheral stranger among other urban strangers and must employ an ethical, cosmopolitan detachment by refraining from ready categorizations in the urban field. With this discussion of cosmopolitanism-as-method, I thus present Aotearoa New Zealand as sitting at the periphery of an “anthropological gaze” that still prioritizes ethnic groupings.

Voices of Deficit

People who endure mental and emotional distress experience a plethora of negative experiences beyond the effects of the symptoms themselves. For centuries, the designation of labels of difference; that is, those which transgress approved social norms have affected the lived experiences of those individuals, and more widely in structuring responses, engagements with, and attitudes between society and the individual. Understanding the creation of tainted identities, particularly of those with experience of mental and emotional distress, has been well rehearsed in the sociological literature of the second half of the 20th century. Central to much of this analysis has been to understand the nature of the manufacture of deviant identities, how they are sustained, and the impact of these identities on those who experience them. This article explores the experience of those with mental and emotional distress as a victim of crime. The interconnectedness of matters of identity created though the application of a diagnosis of illness or disorder is addressed as is the crisis of criminal victimization. This is achieved via an exploration of contemporary concerns surrounding victims of crime with experience of mental and emotional distress, including the (further) loss of voice and agency when interfacing with agencies of the state.

Border Anxiety: Culture, Identity and Belonging

AbstractThis paper considers the ethical choices confronting European countries in relation to what has been described as border anxiety. Last year over a million migrants and asylum-seekers crossed European Union borders and the flow has shown no sign of diminishing. This unprecedented movement of people has attracted two main responses. A core issue for both is the Schengen principle of open borders and opinion is split between those who believe that the sheer weight of numbers of would-be migrants requires the reintroduction of strictly controlled frontiers, and those who demand a prompt and sympathetic response to the plight of refugees from war-torn countries. These two positions, however, do not constitute the sum of the moral debate. A broader appraisal of the issues must take account of matters of culture and identity, partiality and preference, and also of some rather more arcane questions about the ethics of ownership, the notion of belonging, and the legitimacy of preferring your ‘own’, whether at a global, national, or personal level. The complexity of this debate and its internal paradoxes throw light on some contemporary concerns about the threat the current situation may pose to Europe's own historic culture and identity.

TheQiaopiTrade and Its Role in Modern China and the Chinese Diaspora: Toward an Alternative Explanation of “Transnational Capitalism”

This essay takes issue with the idea that the trade in remittance letters (qiaopi侨批) was a modern form of “transnational capitalism” that relied on trust in a system of impersonal rules rather than “a distinctive form of ‘Chinese capitalism’” dependent on cultural or familial affinities, and thatqiaopitraders used instrumental economic practices to transnationalize their businesses. The essay aims to identify alternatives to modern capitalism that are, at the same time, robustly cosmopolitan, and for which modernity is multiple rather than modular. Ethnicity and identity matter greatly in diasporic Chinese business culture, as sources of entrepreneurial resilience and creativity, especially in the early stages of diaspora formation. Far from forming an obstacle to economic growth and technological innovation, business familism, social networks, and their associated cultural values can be shown, at least in some periods and contexts, to have assisted economic development in Chinese societies at home and abroad, by enabling social mobility, furthering family interests, building partnerships, facilitating contracts, and promoting other practices proper to a modern market economy.

Habitat use by armadillos in agroecosystems of central Argentina: does plot identity matter?

Fil: Abba, Agustin Manuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Estudios Parasitologicos y de Vectores. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Centro de Estudios Parasitologicos y de Vectores; Argentina

Phosphate and ATP uptake by lake bacteria: does taxonomical identity matter?

SummaryPhosphorus often limits bacterial production in freshwater ecosystems. However, little is known on whether different bacteria contribute to inorganic and organic phosphorus uptake proportionally to their relative abundance and production. Here, we followed the temporal dynamics of the main heterotrophic bacterial taxa taking up inorganic phosphate (33P‐Pi) and organic phosphorus (33P‐ATP) in two mountain lakes and compared them to their contribution to bacterial production (3H‐leucine uptake). The short turnover times for Pi and ATP suggested that in both lakes, phosphorus was limiting most of the year. The bulk uptake rates and the fractions of cells labelled positive for Pi and ATP uptake followed a seasonal trend with minima in winter and maxima in summer. Generally, the bacterial taxa examined contributed to Pi and ATP uptake proportionally to their relative abundance, but not always to their contribution to bacterial production. For instance, AcI Actinobacteria were often underrepresented in phosphorus uptake compared with leucine incorporation suggesting they might have high intracellular C:P ratios. Our results emphasize that ATP utilization is widespread among freshwater bacteria and indicate that members within the dominant bacterial taxa (Actinobacteria and Betaproteobacteria) have variable phosphorus requirements, probably due to their different growth potential and variable degrees of homeostasis.

The Ontological (In)security of Similarity Wahhabism Versus Islamism in Saudi Foreign Policy

It has long been argued that identity matters in international relations. Yet how identity impacts enmity and conflict among states remains the subject of debate. The existing literature asserts that differences in identity can be a source of conflict, whereas convergence and similarity lead to cooperation. Nevertheless, empirical evidence from the Middle East has long defied this hypothesis. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which prides itself on being an Islamic model and claims Islamic leadership, has opposed the rise to power of Islamist movements in the Middle East. To address this paradox, this article builds on the growing literature on ontological security to propose a theoretical framework explaining how similarity can generate anxiety and identity risks. This framework, I argue, moves beyond traditional regime security approaches to reveal that security is not only physical but also ontological. I then illustrate the argument through a comparison of Saudi identity risks in the wake of the Iranian revolution (1979) and the ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt (2012). Ultimately, these cases provide intriguing insights into foreign policy behavior during critical situations.