Globalism for Undergraduates: Pedagogies and Technologies of Global Education in the US and Canada

Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the reproductive condition for these postsecondary education systems and their infrastructures that has emerged within regional conditions of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials. Across its chapters, university globalism is defined and cataloged via institutional practices that shape learning and labouring conditions for students, their surrounding environments, and the pedagogies administered to market and credential student experience. Chapters examine the global university, the global learning interface, the global curricular programme, the global student and the global classroom as multi-scalar sites for observing university globalism’s forms and their effects, especially on the situation of undergraduates. This formation is studied via infrastructuralism as an analytic shortcut to questions of social reproduction, political economy and their geohistories in these Global North contexts as globally dominant, mass cultural sites for global education. I posit the framework of connectivity, defined as the social and infrastructural good through which globalism is variously represented and embedded into undergraduate study, to periodize this shared regional institutional culture from the 1990s to the present. Connectivity links higher ed’s digitalization with its cosmopolitan modes of networking, identity formation, and human capital development that emerge across the institutional spectrum in public pedagogies and curriculum studied herein. This infrastructure is managerial, extractive, and socially reproduced, conditioning ambivalence and pessimism into the institutionalist modes of learning, networking and credentialing promoted by university globalism. Connectivity’s pro-social ideologies of global citizenship, inclusive excellence and social innovation are analyzed against higher ed’s proletarianizing material conditions and its anti-social foundations in racial capitalism and settler nationalism within US and Canada. This study aims to illuminate global study’s contradictory terms for undergraduates alongside their organic intellectualism within university conditions, and their affordances for critical global pedagogical practice to meet the crises of the present.ThesisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)This dissertation examines globalism’s pedagogical and technological expressions in undergraduate student experience in the US and Canada. This study reads the global projects of these higher education systems as an infrastructure that conditions learning and credentialing as forms of anti-social, settler national and managerial self-development. By taking up the global connectivity era of the past three decades, this work brings digital infrastructures into dialogue with globalist education policies and administrative and disciplinary curricular projects in the context of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials for undergraduates in these dominant inter/national sites for global education. It ultimately argues that the double binds produced by university globalism in these settings present a pedagogical occasion for abolitionist study in our time of planetary crises, unmasking the university as a knowable cultural object in a global cultural field and its infrastructure as a glitch-filled archive of relations of power, empire, and social reproduction

Introduction : contemporary orientations in African cultural studies

Abstract: This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorized beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalization studies frequently offer. Under the shifting paradigms of cultural studies, the work of this conference, as well as the current project, moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroffs’ Theory From the South, this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which cultural studies emanates and positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects

Light regime and growth phase affect the microalgal production of protein quantity and quality with Dunaliella salina

The microalga Dunaliella salina has been widely studied for carotenogenesis, yet its protein production for human nutrition has rarely been reported. This study unveils the effects of growth phase and light regime on protein and essential amino acid (EAA) levels in D. salina. Cultivation under 24-h continuous light was compared to 12-h/12-h light/dark cycle. The essential amino acid index (EAAI) of D. salina showed accumulating trends up to 1.53 in the stationary phase, surpassing FAO/WHO standard for human nutrition. Light/dark conditions inferred a higher light-usage efficiency, yielding 5–97% higher protein and 18–28% higher EAA mass on light energy throughout the growth, accompanied by 138% faster growth during the light phase of the light/dark cycle, compared to continuous light. The findings revealed D. salina to be especially suitable for high-quality protein production, particularly grown under light/dark conditions, with nitrogen limitation as possible trigger, and harvested in the stationary phase

Prospects for viruses infecting eukaryotic microalgae in biotechnology

publishedVersio

Heterologous production of β-pinene in the chloroplast of the marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum

Microalgae are considered promising hosts for the sustainable production of plant-derived secondary metabolites, such as terpenoids. In particular, the model marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum is a promising candidate for the heterologous production of such chemicals due to its robustness, relatively fast growth, and high natural accumulation of terpenoids. In addition, P. tricornutum possesses two separate pathways for the synthesis of terpenoid precursors, the MEP pathway in the chloroplast and the MVA pathway in the cytosol. In this study, we explored the two pathways for the heterologous β-pinene production in P. tricornutum by episomally expressing pinene synthase in either the chloroplast or cytosol for the first time. Our results show that the chloroplast expression from episomes led to β-pinene titers of up to 10.27 ± 1.45 µg·L -1. No β-pinene synthesized from the cytosolic MVA pathway precursors was detected, however the expression and functionality of the pinene synthase was confirmed both in the cytosol and in the chloroplast. Furthermore, to enhance production in the chloroplast, we developed more stable transgenic lines with random chromosomal integration of two different pinene synthase genes. We observed higher titers compared to the episomal mutants, up to 19.35 ± 1.42 µg·L -1 with the pinene synthase from Abies grandis and 20.07 ± 0.51 µg·L -1 with the pinene synthase from Citrus limon. All the β-pinene producing strains used in this study also produced α-pinene as a side product, which accounted for 20-25 % of total monoterpenoid production. Overall, this study represents a fundamental step in microalgal engineering towards the synthesis of monoterpenoids. </p

Genetic engineering of Nannochloropsis oceanica to produce canthaxanthin and ketocarotenoids

Background Canthaxanthin is a ketocarotenoid with high antioxidant activity, and it is primarily produced by microalgae, among which Nannochloropsis oceanica, a marine alga widely used for aquaculture. In the last decade, N. oceanica has become a model organism for oleaginous microalgae to develop sustainable processes to produce biomolecules of interest by exploiting its photosynthetic activity and carbon assimilation properties. N. oceanica can accumulate lipids up to 70% of total dry weight and contains the omega-3 fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) required for both food and feed applications. The genome sequence, other omics data, and synthetic biology tools are available for this species, including an engineered strain called LP-tdTomato, which allows homologous recombination to insert the heterologous genes in a highly transcribed locus in the nucleolus region. Here, N. oceanica was engineered to induce high ketocarotenoid and canthaxanthin production. Results We used N. oceanica LP-tdTomato strain as a background to express the key enzyme for ketocarotenoid production, a β-carotene ketolase (CrBKT) from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Through the LP-tdTomato strain, the transgene insertion by homologous recombination in a highly transcribed genomic locus can be screened by negative fluorescence. The overexpression of CrBKT in bkt transformants increased the content of carotenoids and ketocarotenoids per cell, respectively, 1.5 and 10-fold, inducing an orange/red color in the bkt cell cultures. Background (LP) and bkt lines productivity were compared at different light intensities from 150 to 1200 μmol m-2 s-1: at lower irradiances, the growth kinetics of bkt lines were slower compared to LP, while higher productivity was measured for bkt lines at 1200 μmol m-2 s-1. Despite these results, the highest canthaxanthin and ketocarotenoids productivity were obtained upon cultivation at 150 μmol m-2 s-1. Conclusions Through targeted gene redesign and heterologous transformation, ketocarotenoids and canthaxanthin content were significantly increased, achieving 0.3% and 0.2% dry weight. Canthaxanthin could be produced using CO2 as the only carbon source at 1.5 mg/L titer. These bkt-engineered lines hold potential for industrial applications in fish or poultry feed sectors, where canthaxanthin and ketocarotenoids are required as pigmentation agents

De novo point mutations in patients diagnosed with ataxic cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy is commonly attributed to perinatal asphyxia. However, Schnekenberg et al. describe here four individuals with ataxic cerebral palsy likely due to de novo dominant mutations associated with increased paternal age. Therefore, patients with cerebral palsy should be investigated for genetic causes before the disorder is ascribed to asphyxi

The nucleolus as a genomic safe harbor for strong gene expression in Nannochloropsis oceanica

publishedVersio

Effect of phosphorus limitation on Se uptake efficiency in the microalga Nannochloropsis oceanica

publishedVersio

Enhancement of co-production of nutritional protein and carotenoids in Dunaliella salina using a two-phase cultivation assisted by nitrogen level and light intensity

Microalga Dunaliella salina is known for its carotenogenesis. At the same time, it can also produce high-quality protein. The optimal conditions for D. salina to co-produce intracellular pools of both compounds, however, are yet unknown. This study investigated a two-phase cultivation strategy to optimize combined high-quality protein and carotenoid production of D. salina. In phase-one, a gradient of nitrogen concentrations was tested. In phase-two, effects of nitrogen pulse and high illumination were tested. Results reveal optimized protein quantity, quality (expressed as essential amino acid index EAAI) and carotenoids content in a two-phase cultivation, where short nitrogen starvation in phase-one was followed by high illumination during phase-two. Adopting this strategy, productivities of protein, EAA and carotenoids reached 22, 7 and 3 mg/L/d, respectively, with an EAAI of 1.1. The quality of this biomass surpasses FAO/WHO standard for human nutrition, and the observed level of β-carotene presents high antioxidant pro-vitamin A activity