Enhanced Zika virus susceptibility of globally invasive Aedes aegypti populations

The drivers and patterns of zoonotic virus emergence in the human population are poorly understood. The mosquito Aedes aegypti is a major arbovirus vector native to Africa that invaded most of the world’s tropical belt over the past four centuries, after the evolution of a “domestic” form that specialized in biting humans and breeding in water storage containers. Here, we show that human specialization and subsequent spread of A. aegypti out of Africa were accompanied by an increase in its intrinsic ability to acquire and transmit the emerging human pathogen Zika virus. Thus, the recent evolution and global expansion of A. aegypti promoted arbovirus emergence not solely through increased vector–host contact but also as a result of enhanced vector susceptibility.

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.

Suspect Device: British Subsidised Theatre’s Response to the Iraq War, 2003-2011.

This thesis explores the most significant British subsidised theatre that was created in response to the Iraq War. Suspect Device: British Subsidised Theatre’s Response to the Iraq War, 2003-2011 looks to examine how British theatre’s contemporary forms became increasingly politicised and adapted to critique the material circumstances of a contentious Middle Eastern war. This work analyses the theatre of the Iraq war using Cultural Materialism and a range of postructuralist and postmarxist methodologies. Suspect Device investigates the key plays of the period in terms of their presentation of the politics of the initial invasion, as well as the ensuing issues of war trauma and the British soldier’s experience as a part of the coalition. The British domestic response to the publicised issues of new forms of prison, war crimes and the presentation of the victim is extrapolated in terms of contemporary plays. This thesis also explores selected plays for domestic youth created in response to the PREVENT strategy and how theatre became a contentious politicised instrument. The work examines how an apparent shortfall in cultural empathy for the victims of the war was understood and explained in terms of a theatre working within a climate of wide-scale commodification. Suspect Device investigates pivotal plays across a number of British locations and genres with the aim of establishing common trends and styles of form and content. It attempts to determine if the postmodern forms of contemporary theatre responded with a re-emergent sense of the material. There has been much work on theatre around the ‘War on Terror’ but, as yet, little that considers the Iraq War specifically and in terms of its response, commercialisation and domestic form.

Kontanthjælpsmodtagerens kritiske register

This article investigates different acts of political protests currently floating from unemployed citizens who are being affected by recent retrenchment policy reforms. Whereas most of the existing literature tends to portray political protest as either collective and public or individual and private, this article attempts instead to shed light on the plurality of normative resources activated by the unemployed in a highly critical situation. Thereby the analysis moves between the collective and the individual as well as between the public and the private. Using the theoretical framework developed by Laurent Thévenot and Luc Boltanski in their joint work on justification, the article analyses a specific case, namely unemployed Danish recipients of social assistance who are affected by a new policy initiative meaning that their income has been lowered. Drawing on newspaper articles and qualitative in-depth interviews with affected citizens, the analysis unfolds and theorizes upon three very different forms of protesting: a civic, an industrial and a domestic form of resistance.

Genetics of house-entering behaviour in East African populations of Aedes aegypti (L.) (Diptera: Culicidae) and its relevance to speciation

Samples of larvae of Aedes aegypti (L.) were collected in three principal habitats, domestic, peridomestic and feral, in the Rabai area in eastern Kenya. The samples from the domestic habitat represent the population of the domestic form, A. a. aegypti, and the feral samples from tree holes from Bejumwa Forest represent the feral subspecies, A. a. formosus (Wlk.). The peridomestic samples from steps cut into trunks of coconut palms most probably represent hybrids between the domestic and the feral forms. These samples were brought to the laboratory where they reproduced in high numbers, and crosses were made between the three populations. Adults of the parental populations and those resulting from the crosses were marked with different colours of fluorescent pigments, released in the peridomestic habitat in the Rabai area and subsequently recaptured in biting catches on man in the domestic and peridomestic habitats. The results indicate that domesticity, particularly house-entering behaviour, in A. aegypti is genetically controlled and is a product of the action of several genes. The gene action in terms of house-entering behaviour is additive as can be clearly seen from the recapture data for the various crosses. The percentage entering houses was highest among mosquitoes of the form from inside houses (the domestic A. a. aegypti population (D)) and the percentages decreased progressively through the peridomestic (P) and hybrid forms to the feral population of A. a. formosus (F) in the following manner: D (45·)DP (15 ·5), PD (13·9), P (9·8), DF (5·7), FD (73·), PF (1·5), FP. (0·6) and F (0·6).The recaptures outdoors were in the reverse order, the highest percentage being for F (187·) and the lowest for D (8·5), DP (8·0) and PD (7·7). The data suggest that the larvae from the peridomestic habitat may represent hybrids between the domestic and feral formsA model for the inheritance of behavioural characters in mosquitoes is presented. On the basis of isolating mechanisms and partial hybridisation, it is concluded that A. a. aegypti and A. a. formosus have developed as geographically isolated allopatric populations. This supports the existing polytypic concept of speciation in A. aegypti. Spatial distribution, non-random mating and the existing series of isolating mechanisms indicate that the domestic type form has been introduced into East Africa, most probably on ships.