A Plural and Uneven World: Queer Migrations and the Politics of Race and Sexuality in Sydney, Australia

This dissertation examines how the geographies of sexuality and race shape queer migrants’ experiences of settlement and citizenship in Sydney, Australia. Against a backdrop of economic shifts in the Asia Pacific and Australia\u27s long history of racialized exclusion, I conducted 43 in-depth interviews with queer migrants and \u272nd generation\u27 adult children of migrants who reflect the diversity of Australia\u27s migration streams, including historically important migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and increasingly significant movements from South, Southeast, and East Asia. Through those interviews, I examined participants\u27 migration histories, everyday spatial trajectories in the city, and involvement with queer and ethnic communities in and beyond the city. This was supplemented by an additional 23 interviews with policy-makers and advocates whose work intersected with these issues, as well as the analysis of archival materials related to the politics of race and sexuality in Sydney. In contrast with a depoliticizing \u27torn between two worlds\u27 frame that imagines queer migrants as being torn between ethnic or religious communities on the one hand, and LGBTQ communities on the other, I showed—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt\u27s writing on plurality in a single, unevenly shared world—how participants cultivated opportunities to appear and to act politically as they worked to make a place for themselves in Sydney. This dissertation collects three articles, which speak to both the quotidian politics of everyday life and participants’ organized political projects in Sydney. The first article examines the politics of race and multiculturalism in the context of a city council-sponsored project working to raise awareness about ‘sex, sexuality, and gender diversity’ within Sydney’s migrant and ethnic communities. The second contributes to literatures on encounters across difference by showing how experiences of sexual racism worked as an obstacle to participants’ sense of belonging and citizenship, even as these ‘bad encounters’ also provided an impetus to political organizing. The third article examines the publically intimate nature of debates around migrant integration and explores the intimate geopolitics through which participants made a place for themselves in Sydney, which entailed assertions of \u27privacy\u27 as much as more immediately recognizable forms of \u27public\u27 politics

Effects of climate change on mammalian fauna composition and structure during the advent of North American continental glaciation in the Pliocene

textThe cooling preceding the beginning of North American continental glaciation is beautifully represented by the thick fluvial and lacustrine sequences of the Pliocene Glenns Ferry Formation at the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument (HAFO), Idaho. This time interval is commonly studied because it contains the elevated global temperatures predicted to result from continued anthropogenic warming. The fossil mammals at HAFO were examined to see the effects of climate change on past mammalian assemblages. The nature of the fossiliferous localities at HAFO was documented to establish which localities could be considered in situ. Additionally, the structural architecture of the beds was mapped to establish an idealized stratigraphic datum to which localities were tied. This facilitated temporal comparison of the widespread localities at HAFO. Second, a high-resolution record of climate change was created using global climate models to predict which oceanic areas varied in temperature in concert with HAFO during the middle Pliocene. Data from deep-sea cores from those oceanic areas were combined to create a proxy temperature pattern; such a detailed record from terrestrial data in the Glenns Ferry Formation is not currently possible. Selected mammalian groups, carnivorans, insectivorans, and leporids, were examined in light of the established climatic patterns. The cooling through the lower portion of the Glenns Ferry Formation corresponds to variation in the morphology of individual species, the relative abundance of species, and the species-level diversity of mammalian groups. There is a return to warm temperatures near the top of the section at HAFO, and the mammals returned to the conditions exhibited before the cool-temperature extreme. This faunal resilience, however, occurred over hundreds of thousands of years. The final paleoecologic approach established correlations between the species diversity of groups of modern mammals and modern climatic values. Many modern groups were found to be highly-significantly correlated to climate, but when the established predictive equations were applied to HAFO, the results were variable. Estimates of annual precipitation varied widely, depending on the taxonomic group, and also deviated from precipitation estimates from sedimentology. Temperature patterns were more consistent with each other and with the pattern of the deep-sea core proxy.Earth and Planetary Science

Les enquêtes du TPIY. Entretien avec Jean-René Ruez

Cet article présente les résultats principaux, le déroulement, les méthodes de travail et les limites des enquêtes menées par le Tribunal pénal international pour l’ex-Yougoslavie (TPIY) sur le massacre de Srebrenica de juillet 1995. L’enquête a mis au jour une vaste opération de transfert forcé des femmes et des enfants et d’exécutions des hommes. Ces exécutions organisées ont été menées en trois phases, d’abord sporadiques puis systématiques, puis de déplacement et dissimulation des corps. L’enquête a révélé l’architecture militaire de cette opération d’extermination des prisonniers. Devant l’énormité de la scène de crime, le commissaire de police utilise des méthodes d’investigation classiques (croisement de témoignages, perquisitions, etc.) et joue le rôle d’un coordinateur d’une équipe d’enquêteurs et d’experts (en archéologie, en médecine légale, en balistique, etc.) pour rassembler les pièces d’un immense puzzle.This article presents the principal results, the process, the working methods and the limits of the investigation carried out by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concerning the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995. This investigation brought to light a vast operation to forcibly displace the women and children and to execute the men. The executions were organised and took place in three phases: (1) a sporadic phase, (2) a systematic phase, and (3) a phase of moving and hiding the bodies. The investigation revealed the military architecture underlying this operation of prisoner extermination. Despite the immensity of the crime scene, the police commissioner uses classic investigative methods (crossing of testimony, search and seizure, etc.) and plays the role of coordinator for a team of investigators and experts (in archaeology, forensic medicine, ballistics, etc.), working to put together the pieces of a huge puzzle

Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’

Taking the scene of ‘The Great Resignation’ in the USA and UK (2021‐2023) as its starting point, this paper explores how love ‐ with its promises and disappointments, its nurture and its destruction ‐ is activated in relation to the ideologies of work that prop up capitalism’s world. Through critical engagement with the popular maxims of ‘do what you love’ and ‘work won’t love you back’, we trace the weave of love and work in the context of predominantly (but not only) high-status, employment-based work within the unevenly gendered, racialised and sexualised labour markets in the USA and the UK. We show how the call to love work or to recognise work’s lack, while ostensibly antithetical, both offer a key to understanding the promise and problem of work’s love. We argue that work’s love is productive of the capitalist world and the violences that accompany it and foreclose alternative possibilities. Through a critique of Arendt’s theorisation of the world, we conclude by showing how love and work are central to geographical imaginaries of worldliness, and to both the rejection and possibility of other worlds after (or within) colonial-capitalism’s abolition. Our analysis thus demonstrates how affect and ideology ‐ that is, modes of feeling and forms of consciousness that (re)produce the material relations of capitalism’s world ‐ at once reverse into and continue one another in work’s love

High BMI is a specific risk factor for drug-related mortality in patients receiving methadone:A case control study

Background and Aims: Long-term treatment of opioid dependence with the opioid agonist therapy (OAT) methadone can lead to significant weight gain. This study investigated whether OAT patients with a body mass index (BMI) deemed overweight (≥25) are at increased risk of mortality. Methods: A retrospective case–control study was performed with anonymised data collected from living and deceased persons registered as receiving OAT from Derbyshire or Teesside drug and alcohol services in the United Kingdom. Height, weight, age, gender, OAT type and dose, smoking status and postcode of usual address were collected. Cause of death was collected from deceased individuals. Adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were calculated using regression models. Results: Data were collected for 1574 living and 233 deceased individuals. Mean BMI of all individuals (25.75 ± 6.56) was above the threshold considered a healthy weight, and was higher in deceased (26.63 ± 7.87) than living individuals (25.61 ± 6.34; P &lt; 0.05). A BMI of 30 corresponded to an average 7.7% increased risk of mortality, increasing to 37.2% for those with a BMI of 35 and 107.3% for those with a BMI of 40. Risk of death also increased by an average of 43.6% for those deemed underweight (BMI 15). People who were older (mean aOR = 1.019; 95% CI = 1.002–1.036), smoked (mean aOR = 2.917; 95% CI = 1.726–4.934) and lived in more deprived areas (mean aOR = 0.891; 95% CI = 0.831–0.956) were more likely to have died, as were those prescribed methadone (vs buprenorphine) (mean aOR = 1.916; 95% CI = 1.138–3.227). There was no significant effect of gender (mean aOR = 0.844; 95% CI = 0.612–1.162) or methadone dose (aOR = 0.995; 95% CI = 0.988–1.001) on incidence of death. Acute drug toxicity was the predominant underlying cause of death for healthy and overweight people (46% of cases in both groups), with cancer (21% of cases) and infection (18% of cases) greater contributors to cause of death in underweight people. Conclusions: Opioid agonist therapy (OAT) patients with a body mass index outside of the ‘healthy’ range appear to have an increased risk of death compared with OAT patients within the 'healthy' range.</p

First Pleistocene jumping mouse (\u3ci\u3eZapus\u3c/i\u3e, Zapodinae, Rodentia) from Utah

Two of the Little Dell Dam fossil localities produced the 1st Pleistocene records of the jumping mouse Zapus from Utah. We describe these teeth in detail and compare their morphology with both extinct and extant jumping mouse taxa. Although it is not possible to confidently assign these specimens to a particular species, the Little Dell Dam fossils are clearly distinct from the only living jumping mouse (Zapus princeps) currently known from Utah. The paracone is attached to the rest of the occlusal surface of the upper 1st and 2nd molars in modern Z. princeps from Utah; the paracone is isolated in the molars from Little Dell Dam. The fossils from Little Dell Dam are the 1st reported records of Pleistocene Zapus west of the Rocky Mountains