Transregional Research Research Articles

The lifeways of small-scale gold miners: Addressing sustainability transformations

Small-scale gold mining sustains millions of people’s lives and yet it stimulates environmental harms and social conflicts. Global environmental crises drive calls for fundamental change to how people live on the planet. For small-scale gold mining, this raises questions about whether current dynamics can provide a basis for sustainability transformations. Proposing the notion of gold lifeways to focus on the lived experience of mining and gold resources as relational phenomena, we ask what sustainability looks like from different miners’ perspectives and probe the practice dynamics of current transformation. Our methodology is social science-led and transdisciplinary. From multi-sited and trans-regional research between South America and Africa, we draw cases from Suriname, Guinea Conakry, and Uganda. Our study finds that gold lifeways give expression to different strands of sustainability: sustaining everyday life in mining; discourses framing mining practices; and government repression of mining. Hence, as our empirical data demonstrates, miner perspectives on sustainability gain content not in isolation, but as part of gold lifeways embedded within different contexts and shaped by societal dynamics. Ultimately, the transformative potency of small-scale gold mining is located in personal lives and precarious dynamics rather than glittering promises of a sustainable future.

Rethinking Authoritarian Power: The Logistics Space and Authoritarian Practices in and between Secondary Port Cities of the Global South

AbstractHow to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia. We demonstrate that processes of privatization and a continuum of pre-emptive, technocratizing, and repressive authoritarian practices with the overall purpose of enabling capital accumulation occur in a remarkably entangled manner in both locales, even if located at seemingly unconnected geographical sites. By thinking of Aqaba and Buenaventura as occupying the same “transregional authoritarian logistics space” (TALS), we understand Buenaventura through Aqaba, and vice versa. This crisscrossing of established notions of context has important implications for our understanding of authoritarianism and future transregional research designs. As a unit of analysis, the TALS allows us to highlight the role of global logistics players and “developmental aid” agencies—actors rarely discussed in literature on authoritarianism—in rearticulating boundaries within and beyond the nation-state based on class and race. Our contribution calls for an understanding of authoritarian power as transregionally entangled, rather than separate and limited to the nation-state and builds on literatures on authoritarian practices, authoritarian neoliberalism, critical logistics, and transregional connections.

The Sahara as a\xa0Bridge, Not a\xa0Barrier: An Essay and Book Review on Recent Transregional Perspectives

In the course of the spatial turn, long-established regional subdivisions of the world have been deconstructed, and area studies are increasingly opening up for transregional research. One (re)emerging research field is Trans-Saharan Studies, which considers historical and contemporary entanglements between the Maghreb, the Sahara and the Sahel (with further connections far beyond). Against this background, Steffen Wippel’s essay reviews six recently published works that can be assigned to trans-Saharan research: two comprehensive textbooks and a catalogue written in French, two edited volumes that tackle entangled trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean migration flows and a study of an enclosed, yet widely interconnected inner-Saharan place and population group.

Mechanisms of cardiovascular complications in chronic kidney disease: research focus of the Transregional Research Consortium SFB TRR219 of the University Hospital Aachen (RWTH) and the Saarland University.

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) exhibit a massively increased risk for cardiovascular (CV) events, and traditional strategies to improve CV outcome have largely failed in the context of CKD. This review article summarizes the current understanding of the pathophysiology of CVD in patients with CKD, defines the gaps in knowledge and describes the structure of the German Transregional Research Consortium SFB TRR219 which addresses "Mechanisms of Cardiovascular Complications in Chronic Kidney Disease".

Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities, Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise

AbstractThis symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.

Three Points about Current German Anthropology

Comment on World Anthropology with an Accent: the Discipline in Germany since the 1970s, by Bierschenk, Thomas, Krings, Matthias, and Carola Lenz

Religiöser metropolitaner Mainstream.

Contrary to assumptions in traditional urban theory that understand religion as external or peripheral to urban modernity, cities have by no means been secularized over the course of the rapid global urbanization processes of recent decades. Instead, the much discussed return of religion in the public sphere is primarily an urban phenomenon. At a global level, metropolises have become laboratories and arenas for new religious phenomena exercising a huge influence on urban spaces, cultures and societies. Current research in various world regions shows that religion does not represent some exotic reminiscence. Rather, its agency unfolds at the heart of contemporary metropolitan modernization. Based on the results of case studies that the transregional research project “Global Prayers – Redemption and Liberation in the City” has conducted in cities like Berlin, Istanbul, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro, the paper argues that the religious appears to be expanding in all other areas of the production of the urban in such a manner that it is increasingly difficult to say where religion stops, and where it begins. It shows how urban religions, generally interpreted as reactions to social relocations caused by global neoliberalism, can as well be understood as driving forces of contemporary urban capitalism itself.

Polarization‐field control in nitride light emitters

Polarization‐field control in nitride light emitters

Web-based database for the management of tissue specimens in a transregional histological research facility

BackgroundIn the setting of a histological research core facility sample tracking and project specific archiving of tissue specimens and communication of related data is of central importance.DescriptionOver a 24-month period 10 laboratories from two transregional research centers submitted in excess of 3000 tissue samples for histological processing and evaluation to our core facility. A web based database was set up to overcome the logistical problem of managing samples with inconsistent, duplicate and missing labels and to allow for efficient sample tracking, archiving and communication with the collaborating research laboratories. The database allows the users to remotely generate unique sample identifiers and enter sample annotation prior to sample processing. Furthermore the database facilitates communication about experimental set-up results and media files such as histological images.ConclusionOur newly constructed web based portal is an important tool for the management of research samples of our histological core facility and facilitates significantly interdisciplinary and transregional research. It is freely available for scientific use.

Abdürrezzak Bedirhan: Ottoman Kurd and Russophile in the Twilight of Empire

In a January 1914 article in London journal The National Review, Walter Guinness described situation in Ottoman eastern Anatolia. (1) Events in that distant region were topical, even for a British audience. The Ottoman Empire had long served as a barrier to Russia's southern expansion, but now it was reeling from catastrophic defeats of Balkan wars and its breakdown and final partition appeared imminent. Ottoman eastern Anatolia, just across Russia's Caucasian border, was heating up as a site of great-power competition. Russia had been locking horns with Germany for more than a year over a scheme for future reform of region's administration, ostensibly for providing greater security to region's Armenians against more numerous Kurds. In Impressions of Armenia and Kurdistan Guinness called attention to incapacity of Ottoman administration to maintain order, precarious position of region's Armenians, and shadow of Russian military power ... thrown across Caucasian frontier. The region's Armenian minority, Guinness noted, traditionally had regarded prospect of Russian rule with ambivalence. But because of region's chronic and sometimes violent disorder, Russia's recent tack away from repression of its own Armenians in domestic policy, and skillful Russian propaganda, it now seemed that eastern Anatolia's Armenians looked with favor at prospect of Russian rule. What Guinness could not fathom, however, was the liking which Kurds show for Unlike beleaguered Armenians, Kurds dominated local politics, were very free of any form of Turkish interference, and had no obvious reason to wish to break from Istanbul. Yet, Guinness discovered, many Kurds indeed not only welcomed prospect of Russian rule but were even carrying rifles supplied by Russia. (2) For a European correspondent in 1914 notion that imperial Russia could hold appeal for Muslim tribesmen was difficult to comprehend. After all, as Guinness laid out, even Ottoman Armenians' affinity for Russia was conditional, more product of alienation from Ottoman administration than attraction toward Russia. That Russia could command fear and demand respect was understandable, but what of positive value could Russia offer? Historians of Near East have by and large missed this question for three sets of reasons: their starting assumptions about imperial Russian policy in region, limited access to sources, and a polarization of historiography. Typically, historians of Near East have reduced Russia's impact on region to projection of unidimensional military and diplomatic power, overlooking such things as impact of Baku's oil industry on migration patterns in Iran and wider influence of socialist movements in Caucasus? Moreover, when they do discuss Russia's influence in region at beginning of 20th century, they operate within a narrative framework constrained by nationalist teleology and restrict their focus to Russian sponsorship of Christians in general and Armenians in particular, all but ignoring Russia's relationship with Kurds. In addition to these conceptual assumptions about nature of Russia's interaction with Middle East, linguistic barriers endemic to transregional research spanning Russia and its non-European borderlands, coupled with earlier obstacles to obtaining access to Russian and Ottoman archives alike, also help explain why scholars have left Russia's relationship with Kurds in obscurity. Nonetheless, formerly restricted access to sources can provide only part of explanation. Contemporary observers from Europe and America, including diplomats, missionaries, and journalists such as Guinness, were aware of Russia's dealings with Kurds and informed both their governments and their publics about them. Perhaps largest part of explanation stems from polarization of what might be termed Anatolian historiography but, in reflection of underlying problem, is instead known as separate Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish historiographies. …

Differential effects of temporal pole resection with amygdalohippocampectomy versus selective amygdalohippocampectomy on material‐specific memory in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy

In the surgical treatment of mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, there is converging evidence that individually tailored or selective approaches have a favorable cognitive outcome compared to standard resections. There is, however, also evidence that due to collateral damage, selective surgery can be less selective than suggested. As part of a prospective transregional research project the present study evaluated the outcome in memory and nonmemory functions, following two selective approaches: a combined temporal pole resection with amygdalohippocampectomy (TPR+) and transsylvian selective amygdalohippocampectomy (SAH). One year after surgery, cognitive outcomes of postoperatively seizure-free patients with mesial TLE and hippocampal sclerosis, who underwent either TPR+ (N = 35) or SAH (N = 62) in two German epilepsy centers (Bonn/Berlin), were compared. Repeated measurement MANOVA and separate post hoc testing indicated a double dissociation of verbal/figural memory outcome as dependent on side and type of surgery. Verbal memory outcome was worse after left-sided operation, but especially for SAH, whereas figural memory outcome was worse after right-sided operation, preferentially for TPR+. Attention improved independent of side or type of surgery, and language functions showed some improvement after right-sided surgeries. The results indicate a differential effect of left/right SAH versus TPR+ on material-specific memory insofar as transsylvian SAH appears to be favorable in right and TPR+ in left MTLE. The different outcomes are discussed in terms of a different surgical affection of the temporal pole and stem, and different roles of these structures for verbal and figural memory.