Identity of a Tilapia Pheromone Released by Dominant Males that Primes Females for Reproduction

Knowledge of the chemical identity and role of urinary pheromones in fish is scarce, yet it is necessary in order to understand the integration of multiple senses in adaptive responses and the evolution of chemical communication [1]. In nature, Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) males form hierarchies, and females mate preferentially with dominant territorial males, which they visit in aggregations or leks [2]. Dominant males have thicker urinary bladder muscular walls than subordinates or females and store large volumes of urine, which they release at increased frequency in the presence of subordinate males or preovulatory, but not postspawned, females [3–5]. Females exposed to dominant-male urine augment their release of the oocyte maturation-inducing steroid 17α,20β-dihydroxypregn-4-en-3-one (17,20β-P) [6]. Here we isolate and identify a male Mozambique tilapia urinary sex pheromone as two epimeric (20α- and 20β-) pregnanetriol 3-glucuronates. We show that both males and females have high olfactory sensitivity to the two steroids, which cross-adapt upon stimulation. Females exposed to both steroids show a rapid, 10-fold increase in production of 17,20β-P. Thus, the identified urinary steroids prime the female endocrine system to accelerate oocyte maturation and possibly promote spawning synchrony. Tilapia are globally important as a food source but are also invasive species, with devastating impact on local freshwater ecosystems [7, 8]. Identifying the chemical cues that mediate reproduction may lead to the development of tools for population control [9–11].

A educação intercultural na formação contínua de professores de línguas

Situado entre o discurso investigativo e o profissional da Didática de Línguas, o presente estudo assenta: num entendimento da educação em línguas como um processo valorizador da diversidade linguística e cultural, tendo como fim último a promoção da intercompreensão e do diálogo intercultural, dentro dos pressupostos de uma didática das línguas e do plurilinguismo; na conceção do professor de línguas como um dos principais atores na educação de cidadãos / comunicadores interculturais, vendo-se, portanto, a braços com novas exigências, para as quais, muitas vezes, não se sente preparado; e nos pressupostos de que a identidade profissional condiciona fortemente a forma como o professor desempenha a sua ação didática, sendo este processo de se tornar professor contínuo e dependente, quer do sujeito-professor e dos seus percursos profissionais e formativos, quer do contexto (profissional, local, nacional, global) em que este se insere. Pretende-se, com este estudo, contribuir para que a educação intercultural seja uma realidade nas nossas escolas, potenciando a sua migração contextualizada dos documentos orientadores das políticas linguísticas e educativas nacionais e transnacionais e dos discursos da investigação em Didática de Línguas. Para o efeito, desenvolvemos um programa de investigação/formação denominado O Professor Intercultural, durante o ano letivo 2006/2007, com professores de línguas (materna e estrangeiras) de três escolas básicas e secundárias do distrito de Aveiro. Este programa integrava um curso (25 horas) e uma oficina (50 horas), ambas as ações de formação acreditadas pelo Conselho Científico-Pedagógico da Formação Contínua. Do ponto de vista formativo, com este programa pretendíamos levar as professoras em formação a desenvolver competências pessoais e profissionais que lhes permitissem gerir a diversidade nos seus contextos profissionais, tendo em vista o desenvolvimento nos seus alunos de uma competência de comunicação intercultural (CCI). Do ponto de vista investigativo, não só pretendíamos compreender as representações dos sujeitos relativamente à educação intercultural em geral e à CCI em particular; como também identificar princípios e estratégias de formação potenciadores do desenvolvimento de competências profissionais docentes para trabalhar a CCI, a partir das perspetivas dos próprios sujeitos. Trata-se, portanto, de um estudo de caso de cariz qualitativo e interpretativo / fenomenológico, com potencialidades heurísticas, que pretende evidenciar os sujeitos, as suas representações, as interações consigo e com os outros e a forma como conceptualizam a identidade profissional docente e as suas dinâmicas de desenvolvimento. Como instrumentos de recolha de dados, privilegiámos os Portefólios Profissionais que foram sendo construídos ao longo do percurso de formação; a sessão “Entre Línguas e Culturas” da plataforma Galanet (www.galanet.eu), recurso de formação no âmbito da oficina (entre fevereiro e maio de 2007); o “Diário do Investigador”; e as “entrevistas narrativas e de confrontação” efetuadas sensivelmente um ano após o final do programa de investigação/formação. Os resultados da análise de conteúdo revelam que os sujeitos consideram a CCI uma competência multidimensional e complexa, reconhecendo três componentes: afetiva (domínio do saber ser e saber viver com o outro), cognitiva (domínio do saber) e praxeológica (domínio do saber-fazer). A componente afetiva constitui, de acordo com os resultados, o motor de arranque do desenvolvimento desta competência, que, posteriormente, é alargada em dinâmicas de informação-(inter)ação-reflexão. Por outro lado, dada a grande pertinência que atribuem à abordagem intercultural e à urgência com que veem a sua integração escolar, os sujeitos consideram a CCI uma das competências inerentes à competência profissional docente, elemento integrador da identidade profissional, numa forte ligação com a missão ética e política que cada vez mais é associada ao docente (de línguas). Para além disso, percecionam o seu desenvolvimento profissional docente como um processo que os acompanha ao longo da vida, fruto das idiossincrasias e predisposições do próprio indivíduo, mas também das dinâmicas da sua formação, das caraterísticas dos contextos em que se movimenta e da colaboração com o Outro, no seu espaço profissional ou fora dele. Importa salientar que este desenvolvimento profissional é potenciado, segundo os nossos resultados, por propostas de formação assentes numa abordagem acional e reflexiva, articulando dinâmicas investigação-ação-reflexão como as propostas no nosso programa de formação, nomeadamente no âmbito da oficina. Neste quadro, concluímos o presente estudo, indicando alguns caminhos possíveis para a formação de professores de línguas para a educação intercultural.

Various Joyful Encounters with the Dystopias of Affective Capitalism

This article contends that what appear to be the dystopic conditions of affective capitalism are just as likely to be felt in various joyful encounters as they are in atmospheres of fear associated with post 9/11 securitization. Moreover, rather than grasping these joyful encounters with capitalism as an ideological trick working directly on cognitive systems of belief, they are approached here by way of a repressive affective relation a population establishes between politicized sensory environments and what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a brain-becoming-subject. This is a radical relationality (Protevi, 2010) understood in this context as a mostly nonconscious brain-somatic process of subjectification occurring in contagious sensory environments populations become politically situated in. The joyful encounter is not therefore merely an ideological manipulation of belief, but following Gabriel Tarde (as developed in Sampson, 2012), belief is always the object of desire. The discussion starts by comparing recent efforts by Facebook to manipulate mass emotional contagion to a Huxleyesque control through appeals to joy. Attention is then turned toward further manifestations of affective capitalism; beginning with the so-called emotional turn in the neurosciences, which has greatly influenced marketing strategies intended to unconsciously influence consumer mood (and choice), and ending with a further comparison between encounters with Nazi joy in the 1930s (Protevi, 2010) and the recent spreading of right wing populism similarly loaded with political affect. Indeed, the dystopian presence of a repressive political affect in all of these examples prompts an initial question concerning what can be done to a brain so that it involuntarily conforms to the joyful encounter. That is to say, what can affect theory say about an apparent brain-somatic vulnerability to affective suggestibility and a tendency toward mass repression? However, the paper goes on to frame a second (and perhaps more significant) question concerning what can a brain do. Through the work of John Protevi (in Hauptmann and Neidich (eds.), 2010: 168-183), Catherine Malabou (2009) and Christian Borch (2005), the article discusses how affect theory can conceive of a brain-somatic relation to sensory environments that might be freed from its coincidence with capitalism. This second question not only leads to a different kind of illusion to that understood as a product of an ideological trick, but also abnegates a model of the brain which limits subjectivity in the making to a phenomenological inner self or Being in the world.

Bush and Lula's political identity constructions: are they so different? A critical discourse analysis of presidential speeches of North and South America

Dissertação de mest., Linguística, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, Universidade do Algarve, 2007

The discursive construction of place-identity: british lifestyle migrants in the Algarve

Tese dout., Philosophy, Lancaster University, 2011

The discursive construction of Portuguese national identity in the media thirty years after the 1974 revolution

Tese dout., Philosophy, Lancaster University, 2010

Digital unterwegs ohne das virtuelle soziale Netzwerk – qualitative Studie über Facebook-Verweigerung und Virtual Identity Suicide

Das virtuelle soziale Netzwerk Facebook feiert seinen zehnten Geburtstag. Mit über einer Milliarde aktiver Nutzer ist es seit seiner Entstehung zur weltweit größten Internetplattform zur Kommunikation avanciert. Dennoch gibt es in Deutschland eine große Anzahl an Menschen, die sich zwar täglich im Internet bewegt, aber auf eine Mitgliedschaft bei Facebook verzichtet. In dieser Arbeit werden die Gründe untersucht, warum manche Personen Facebook nicht nutzen. Die Leitfrage der Arbeit lautet: „Warum nutzen ausgewählte deutsche Internetnutzer Facebook nicht?“. Es wird zwischen zwei unterschiedlichen Personenkreisen, den Nicht- und den Ex-Nutzern, unterschieden. Basierend auf Leitfadeninterviews mit 25 Befragten, die mittels einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet werden, werden elf verschiedene Gründe für eine Verweigerung von Facebook identifiziert. Für die Nicht-Nutzer stellt die Art der Kommunikation den zentralen Grund dar, Facebook nicht zu verwenden. Die Ex-Nutzer wiederum sehen den fehlenden Nutzen der Anwendung als wichtigstes Argument gegen Facebook.

Identity, Well-being and Effectiveness: the Emotional Contexts of Teaching

This paper draws on findings from a four‐year longitudinal research project, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which investigated Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness (VITAE). Drawing on data gathered from 300 teachers working in 100 primary and secondary schools in England, the research identified associations between commitment and effectiveness (perceived and in terms of pupil attainment) and found that there were more, and less, effective teachers in each of six professional life phases. It found that teachers in each of these phases experienced a number of different scenarios that challenged their abilities to sustain their commitment (i.e. remain resilient). This paper discusses how these impact, positively and negatively, on teachers’ capacities for sustaining their initial commitment and associations between identity, well‐being and effectiveness. It finds that teacher identities are neither intrinsically stable nor intrinsically fragmented, but that they can be more, or less, stable and more or less fragmented at different times and in different ways according to the influence of the interaction of a number of personal, professional and situated factors. The extent to which teachers are able to and are supported in managing the scenarios they experience will determine their sense of effectiveness.

Reform, Standards and Teacher Identity: Challenges of Sustaining Commitment

Teacher commitment has been found to be a critical predictor of teachers’ work performance, absenteeism, retention, burnout and turnover, as well as having an important influence on students’ motivation, achievement, attitudes towards learning and being at school (Firestone (1996). Educational Administration Quarterly, 32(2), 209–235; Graham (1996). Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 67(1), 45–47; Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27; Tsui & Cheng (1999). Educational Research and Evaluation, 5(3), 249–268). It is also a necessary ingredient to the successful implementation, adaptation or resistance reform agendas. Surprisingly, however, the relationship between teachers’ motivation, efficacy, job satisfaction and commitment, and between commitment and the quality of their work has not been the subject of extensive research. Some literature presents commitment as a feature of being and behaving as a professional (Helsby, Knight, McCulloch, Saunders, & Warburton (1997). A report to participants on the professional cultures of Teachers Research Project, Lancaster University, January). Others suggest that it fluctuates according to personal, institutional and policy contexts (Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27) and identify different dimensions of commitment which interact and fluctuate (Tyree (1996). Journal of Educational Research, 89(5), 295–304). Others claim that teachers’ commitment tends to decrease progressively over the course of the teaching career (Fraser, Draper, & Taylor (1998). Evaluation and Research in Education, 12 (2), 61–71; Huberman (1993). The lives of teachers. London: Cassell). In this research, experienced teachers in England and Australia were interviewed about their understandings of commitment. The data suggest that commitment may be better understood as a nested phenomena at the centre of which is a set of core, relatively permanent values based upon personal beliefs, images of self, role and identity which are subject to challenge by change which is socio-politically constructed.

(Dis)located Olympic Patriots: Sporting Connections, Administrative Communications and Imperial Ether in Interwar New Zealand

During the interwar period (1919–1939), protagonists of the early New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) worked to renegotiate and improve the country's international sporting participation and involvement in the International Olympic Committee. To this end, NZOC effectively used its locally based administrators and well-placed expatriates in Britain to variously assert the organization's nascent autonomy, independence and political power, progress Antipodean athlete's causes and counter any potential doubt about the nation's peripheral position in imperial sporting dialogues. Adding to the corpus of scholarship on New Zealand's ties and tribulations with imperial Britain, both in and beyond sport (e.g. Beilharz and Cox, 2007, “Settler Capitalism Revisited,” Thesis Eleven 88: 112–124; Belich, 2001, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Auckland: Allen Lane; Belich, 2007, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Auckland: The Penguin Group; Coombes, 2006, Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, Manchester: Manchester University Press; MacLean, 2010, “New Zealand (Aotearoa),” In Routledge Companion to Sports History, edited by Steve W. Pope and John Nauright, 510–525, London: Routledge; Phillips, 1984, “Rugby, War and the Mythology of the New Zealand Male,” The New Zealand Journal of History 18 (1): 83–103; Phillips, 1987, A Man's Country: The Image of the Pakeha Male, Auckland: Penguin Books; Ryan, 2004, The Making of New Zealand Cricket, 1832–1914, London: Frank Cass; Ryan, 2005, Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society 1854–2004, Dunedin: University of Otago Press; Ryan, 2007, “Sport in 19th-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand: Opportunities and Constraints,” In Sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand Society, edited by Chris Collins and Steve Jackson, 96–111, Auckland: Thomson), I will examine how the political actions and strategic location of three key NZOC agents (specifically, administrator Harry Amos and expatriates Arthur Porritt and Jack Lovelock) worked in their own particular ways to assert the position of the organization within the global Olympic fraternity. I argue that the efforts of Amos, Porritt and Lovelock also concomitantly served to remind Commonwealth sporting colleagues (namely Britain and Australia) that New Zealand could not be characterized as, or relegated to being, a distal, subdued or subservient colonial sporting partner. Subsequently, I contend that NZOC's development during the interwar period, and particularly the utility of expatriate agents, can be contextualized against historiographical shifts that encourage us to rethink, reimagine and rework narratives of empire, colonization, national identity, commonwealth and belonging.

Changing Professional Identity in the Transition from Practitioner to Lecturer in Higher Education: an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

This research explores the experiences of five professional practitioners from disciplines including teaching, youth work, sport and health who had become lecturers in Higher Education. Their experiences are considered using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and tentative conclusions are reached on the meaning of such experiences for the individuals. The work extends previous studies (Shreeve 2010, 2011; Gourlay 2011a, 2011b; Boyd & Harris 2010) to consider the relationship between knowledge and influence and how institutional preference for knowledge gained from research impacts on the validity of knowledge derived from professional experience. The research finds shared feelings associated with inauthenticity and loss arising from concerns that the contribution of the professional in Higher Education is undervalued. The research challenges the assumption that professional practitioners adopt the professional identity of a lecturer in Higher Education instead finding that they create their own professional identities in the liminal space between the professional and academic domains, but points to difficulties associated with constructed nature of such professional identities within the institutional structure of a Higher Education institution.

Before identity, gender and human rights

This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis ‘before’ (temporally) and ‘be-fore’ (spatially) difference. Before denotes the origin and the desired destination. Before (in the double sense of ‘before’ and ‚be-in-the-fore’) opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objective, illusion of teleology, unity, completion. Applied to the two domains of Human Rights and Sex/Gender, the space of ‘before’ yields two slightly different vistas: in human rights, a premodern, functionally undifferentiated society which had to invent human rights as its safeguards of functional differentiation. In Sex/Gender, 'before' brings a self-referential construction: that of ipseity, as the form of identity beyond comparison that does not play with id but with ipsum. Ipseity is inoperable but not useless. It is inoperable because it cannot be observed from anywhere without suffering rupture. It is not useless because it offers a ground for the reconceptualisation of difference, both through awe and desire.