Common Ragweed: A Threat to Environmental Health in Europe

Common or short ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.) is an annual herb belonging to the Asteraceae family that was described by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century. It is a noxious invasive species that is an important weed in agriculture and a source of highly allergenic pollen. The importance placed on A. artemisiifolia is reflected by the number of international projects that have now been launched by the European Commission and the increasing number of publications being produced on this topic. This review paper examines existing knowledge about ragweed ecology, distribution and flowering phenology and the environmental health risk that this noxious plant poses in Europe. The paper also examines control measures used in the fight against it and state of the art methods for modelling atmospheric concentrations of this important aeroallergen. Common ragweed is an environmental health threat, not only in its native North America but also in many parts of the world where it has been introduced. In Europe, where the plant has now become naturalised and frequently forms part of the flora, the threat posed by ragweed has been identified and steps are being taken to reduce further geographical expansion and limit increases in population densities of the plant in order to protect the allergic population. This is particularly important when one considers possible range shifts, changes in flowering phenology and increases in the amount of pollen and allergenic potency that could be brought about by changes in climate.

The Impact of Thought Speed and Variability on Psychological State and Threat Perception: Further Exploration of the Theory of Mental Motion

Thought speed and variability are purportedly common features of specific psychological states, such as mania and anxiety. The present study explored the independent and combinational influence of these variables upon condition-specific symptoms and affective state, as proposed by Pronin and Jacobs’ (Perspect Psychol Sci, 3:461–485, 2008) theory of mental motion. A general population sample was recruited online (N = 263). Participants completed a thought speed and variability manipulation task, inducing a combination of fast/slow and varied/repetitive thought. Change in mania and anxiety symptoms was assessed through direct self-reported symptom levels and indirect, processing bias assessment (threat interpretation). Results indicated that fast and varied thought independently increased self-reported mania symptoms. Affect was significantly less positive and more negative during slow thought. No change in anxiety symptoms or threat interpretation was found between manipulation conditions. No evidence for the proposed combinational influence of speed and variability was found. Implications and avenues for therapeutic intervention are discussed.

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.

Purity of Blood and Caste. Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites

This essay analyses the roles played by purity of blood and caste in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century identity narratives of Goan clites. Goa and its population are usually excluded from the mainstream literature of Indian social history, and seldom related to the early-modern Atlantic world, making this case study all the more valuable as a place to think the topic of blood and caste. The early establishment and the longevity of the Portuguese imperial presence (1510-1961) in Goa, its location at the crossroads of multiple cultural geographies (Iberian and Indian, and later, also Dutch, British and French), as well as the systematic process of religious conversion of its inhabitants and the questions of legal equality that conversion entailed, all intensified the types, textures, layers and meanings of experiences of social differentiation in this colonial context. This mapping of the experiences of purity of blood and caste in early-modem Goa therefore illuminates from a new angle the role of European imperial powers in the mUltiple expressions of racial classification.

Book review: Jiří Přibáň, legal symbolism: on law, time and European identity

This is a book review of Jiří Přibáň, Legal Symbolism: On Law, Time and European Identity, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007, 226 pp, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7073-5

(Un)settling the Irish emigrant identity: representation and construction of an Irish emigrant/exile identity in the travel narratives of Kathleen Nevin and William Bulfin

Through an examination of the travel works of William Bulfin, Tales of the Pampas (1900) and Kathleen Nevin's You'll Never Go Back this paper considers the representation of the Irish in Argentina and the contribution of these narratives in the construction of identity and the reconstruction of the emigrant identity into an exilic one. Escaping one colonial framework (Britain/Ireland), travelling to and writing from within another postcolonial construct (Argentina and the Spanish Empire), this paper analyses how Bulfin and Nevin use language as a tool to construct, and even invent, an Irish identity. This identity is inextricably linked to home and the desire to return there. Despite this desire, Argentina becomes internalised to some extent, which in Bulfin can be seen in the mix of the Spanish, English and Irish languages in his stories, highlighting that the Irish were doing with language what they had already done with their lives; trying to adapt it to their new situation. In Nevin, the contrast between us and them (Irish and 'Native') demonstrates her attempts to shape an exilic rather than emigrant mentality. Through these texts I analyse how Argentina never quite becomes a new home, but a place where Irish identity is played out and acquires form.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 3

Jewish identity and its development through the Enlightenment, Antisemitism and Zionism.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 2

Discussion of Jewish Identity and its development through the Enlightenment, Antisemitism and Zionism.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 1

Discussion of the development of Jewish identity, considering the Enlightenment, Antisemitism, and Zionism.

Britain and the threat to stability in Europe 1918-45

After the horrors of the First World War a dialogue began between European statesmen seeking some form of European integration as a way of achieving lasting peace. During the inter-war period this idea started to attract support in Britain even though Britain's strategic and economic interests remained focused outside Europe. This book explores Britain's relations with the continent between 1918 and 1945, focussing on diplomatic and military responses to the major crises and examining attitudes to the idea of Europe in the broader context of relations with the Empire, Commonwealth and the USA.