Young people’s caring relations and transitions within families affected by HIV

This chapter provides insight into young people’s caring relations and transitions within what is often considered a particularly ‘troubling’ familial context in both the global North and South: living with HIV. I analyse the findings from two qualitative studies of young people’s caring roles in families affected by HIV in the UK, Tanzania and Uganda from the perspective of a feminist ethics of care, emotion work and life course transitions.

Interpersonal interaction and economic theory: the case of public goods

Interpersonal interaction in public goods contexts is very different in character to its depiction in economic theory, despite the fact that the standard model is based on a small number of apparently plausible assumptions. Approaches to the problem are reviewed both from within and outside economics. It is argued that quick fixes such as a taste for giving do not provide a way forward. An improved understanding of why people contribute to such goods seems to require a different picture of the relationships between individuals than obtains in standard microeconomic theory, where they are usually depicted as asocial. No single economic model at present is consistent with all the relevant field and laboratory data. It is argued that there are defensible ideas from outside the discipline which ought to be explored, relying on different conceptions of rationality and/or more radically social agents. Three such suggestions are considered, one concerning the expressive/communicative aspect of behaviour, a second the possibility of a part-whole relationship between interacting agents and the third a version of conformism.

Ancillary narratives: maids, sleepwalking, and agency in nineteenth-century literature and culture

The limited coverage of servants in nineteenth-century literature may plausibly be ascribed to the tenuous nature of the roles they play in primary texts, and especially to the problematic nature of their agency. This idea is implicit in the arguments of Bruce Robbins, whose The Servant’s Hand remains the most cogent approach to giving servants a palpable role in critical narrative: for Robbins, the agency that acts through the servant ‘prosthesis’ rebounds on the master, granting the servant figure a sometimes exorbitant textual agency. The figure of the sleepwalking maid, and the analogies between sleepwalking and domestic service implicit in it, will help to complicate this picture. In anecdotes of spontaneous sleepwalking, and their subsequent appropriation by mesmerists, maids are cast as non-agents in terms of ownership of narrative: their subjectivity is immaterial to the public fate of the story which their acts generate. But this apparent non-agency is itself derived from their spontaneity; from an autonomous, albeit unconscious, self-will. As such, sleepwalking subjectivity is a gift to paternalism; a mastery it does not have to produce. In conclusion, it is this undetermined quality, rather than a simple lack of agency, that characterizes the maid in the novel, and which continues to exclude domestic servants from critical narrative.

Alanine-rich amphiphilic peptide containing the RGD cell adhesion motif: a coating material for human fibroblast attachment and culture

We studied the self-assembly of peptide A6RGD (A: alanine, R: arginine, G: glycine, D: aspartic acid) in water, and the use of A6RGD substrates as coatings to promote the attachment of human cornea stromal fibroblasts (hCSFs). The self-assembled motif of A6RGD was shown to depend on the peptide concentration in water, where both vesicle and fibril formation were observed. Oligomers were detected for 0.7 wt% A6RGD, which evolved into short peptide fibres at 1.0 wt% A6RGD, while a co-existence of vesicles and long peptide fibres was revealed for 2–15 wt% A6RGD. A6RGD vesicle walls were shown to have a multilayer structure built out of highly interdigitated A6 units, while A6RGD fibres were based on β-sheet assemblies. Changes in the self-assembly motif with concentration were reflected in the cell culture assay results. Films dried from 0.1–1.0 wt% A6RGD solutions allowed hCSFs to attach and significantly enhanced cell proliferation relative to the control. In contrast, films dried from 2.5 wt% A6RGD solutions were toxic to hCSFs.

Strong armies, slow adaptation: civil-military relations and diffusion of military power

Why are some states more willing to adopt military innovations than others? Why, for example, were the great powers of Europe able to successfully reform their military practices to better adapt to and participate in the so-called military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while their most important extra-European competitor, the Ottoman Empire, failed to do so? This puzzle is best explained by two factors: civil-military relations and historical timing. In the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of an institutionally strong and internally cohesive army during the early stages of state formation—in the late fourteenth century—equipped the military with substantial bargaining powers. In contrast, the great powers of Europe drew heavily on private providers of military power during the military revolution and developed similar armies only by the second half of the seventeenth century, limiting the bargaining leverage of European militaries over their rulers. In essence, the Ottoman standing army was able to block reform efforts that it believed challenged its parochial interests. Absent a similar institutional challenge, European rulers initiated military reforms and motivated officers and military entrepreneurs to participate in the ongoing military revolution.