Reading “Women Don’t Riot” After the Riot: Creating a University-Prison Collaboration

We examine a case study of a collaboration between a University and a Women’s Correctional Institution: an Inside Out college course that brings together incarcerated and traditional students. We analyze the creation of a class in the aftermath of a riot in the region and in the ongoing context of internal and external reforms. We provide specific examples of mistakes, lessons learned, and the impact of our pedagogical values and techniques, and provide links to our class materials. We emphasize communication between the institutions, from the students to instructors, among the instructors, and from instructors to students. In the classroom, we exploit our expertise and our non-expertise as learners together to break down perceived barriers. We also emphasize the value of self-care and recognition of all students as agentic. We conclude with a call for future research that attends to student agency and that examines who benefits from prison-university partnerships

‘I’m Scared to Death to Try It on My Own’: I-Poems and the complexities of religious housing support for people on the US sex offender registry

In the US, street-based sex workers and people convicted of sex offences are both ‘special populations’, often with additional conditions of community supervision. People convicted of sex offences experience a complicated mix of assistance and surveillance as they re-enter society post-conviction, including numerous restrictions on housing and employment. As a result, they are especially likely to experience homelessness upon release. This article uses I-Poems drawn from interviews with volunteers and professionals who navigate the obstacles to re-entry that govern people on the sex offender registry. We focus on people with religious affiliations (n=38) who provide urgent support during the re-entry process. I-poems are a feminist technique for analysing qualitative data that forefronts the voices of people not often heard and distils complex experiences into accessible narratives. While few in our study overtly exploited re-entering persons on the registry, most support was problematic in subtler ways: we found that re-entering registrants are asked to accept constrained choices involving labour, religious participation, and romantic and other personal relationships in order to receive assistance. Given the secondary stigma attached to work with people convicted of sex offences, and the obscurity within in which many of these religiously-affiliated programmes operate, I-Poems both humanise and reveal the complexities of coercion, religious calling, and supportive housing

Expanding the role of tachykinins in the neuroendocrine control of reproduction

Reproductive function is driven by the hormonal interplay between the gonads and brain–pituitary axis. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is released in a pulsatile manner, which is critical for the attainment and maintenance of fertility; however, GnRH neurons lack the ability to directly respond to most regulatory factors, and a hierarchical upstream neuronal network governs its secretion. We and others proposed a model in which Kiss1 neurons in the arcuate nucleus (ARC), called as KNDy neurons, release kisspeptin (a potent GnRH secretagogue) in a pulsatile manner to drive GnRH pulses under the coordinated autosynaptic action of its cotransmitters, the tachykinin neurokinin B (NKB, stimulatory) and dynorphin (inhibitory). Numerous genetic and pharmacological studies support this model; however, additional regulatory mechanisms (upstream of KNDy neurons) and alternative pathways of GnRH secretion (kisspeptin independent) exist, but remain ill defined. In this aspect, attention to other members of the tachykinin family, namely substance P (SP) and neurokinin A (NKA), has recently been rekindled. Even though there are still major gaps in our knowledge about the functional significance of these systems, substantial evidence, as discussed below, is placing tachykinin signaling as an important pathway for the awakening of the reproductive axis and the onset of puberty to physiological GnRH secretion and maintenance of fertility in adulthood

Of House and Home: The meanings of housing for women engaged in criminalised street-based sex work

Despite emerging as a core concern for street-based sex workers participating in prostitution diversion programmes (PDPs), housing has received limited empirical attention. In this article, we explore the meanings of housing in the context of court-affiliated PDPs in the US cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia based on interviews and focus groups with 31 PDP participants and 32 criminal legal system professionals. Three themes emerged: (a) housing precarity and crisis mode, (b) housing as a foundation, and (c) housing as an idea(l). PDPs prioritise therapeutic interventions targeting individual behaviours and attitudes over meeting basic needs, often placing programme participants in substandard housing and removing them from existing networks of support. Such prioritisation, which often conflicts with participants’ expressed preferences, does not always leave them better off in the short or long term. PDPs’ neglect of the quality, type, and meaning of housing reveals and reinforces a fundamental disregard for people in street-based sex trade as multifaceted, agentic human beings. We conclude that programmes must prioritise home as a ‘comfort zone’ that must be afforded to all people

Clinical evaluation of WEB 17 device in intracranial aneurysms (CLEVER): 1-year effectiveness results for ruptured and unruptured aneurysms

Peer reviewe