Racial entanglements and sociological confusions : repudiating the rehabilitation of integration

In line with the broader nationalist advances currently remaking the Western political landscape, the concept of integration has witnessed a marked rehabilitation. Whilst many influential critiques of the sociology of integration are already available, this article contests the concept's renewed purchase through addressing its own internal incoherence. Based on research in Stockholm, this critique concerns the relationship between ethnic identity and cultural integration. It will be argued that integration and the production of difference are intertwined, entangled dualities, and far from being a benign entanglement, this duality is premised on the force and reach of everyday civic racisms. Of pivotal and unique analytical significance here is the observation that racism should not only be considered an exogenous process that impedes integration, but as a multifaceted phenomenon folded into integration

Notes on theorizing racism and other things

In the spirit of ‘furthering debate and reflection’ in this response to Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we consider here the pertinence of the theme of resistance that occupies particular chapters within the collection and that has been central to key works within the wider race critical scholarship. Yet, when the larger field of contemporary race study is considered, we also note that other contiguous concerns – including capitalism, religion, nation, and war – are key factors in thinking through racism. Here, we further elaborate on how future theorizations of race and ethnicity must engage with these domains

The uses and abuses of class : left nationalism and the denial of working-class multiculture

This article establishes the importance of recognizing what Satnam Virdee describes as the wider racial history of ‘socialist nationalism’. Attentiveness to this formation attests to a broader attempt to resist the tendency of much contemporary analysis to attribute to today’s reconsolidated nationalism an elite, unitary and generically rightist character. It remains important to observe how racial nationalisms’ heightened contemporary appeal hinges crucially on the convergence of multiple and often contradictory ‘political rationalities’ – only some of which speak to elite machinations and/or attempts to manage the capitalist crisis. Particularly telling here is how nationalist politics ably call upon certain leftist registers: as premised on an iconography of working class plight alongside an institutional programme of welfare state entitlement as tied to exclusive visions of working class community. The second half of the article issues, in turn, an antidote to this class-coded nationalist consolidation. A renewed case for the importance of everyday multiculture, as a decidedly working class formation, is advanced. Whilst rebuking the forms of exotic romanticism and excessively upbeat vigour that characterises some multiculture research – alongside the tendency to only locate such multiculture in more fabled ‘global cities’ – the article argues here that such multiculture is a political repertoire that ably subverts the nationalist attempt to monopolize class for its own political ends

Defining and challenging the new nationalism

Sivamohan Valluvan argues that to understand how the idea of nation has recovered its lustre, we need to re-examine the core historical principles of European nationalism, and the place of race and racism within them; stop assuming the primacy of economic developments; and address the multiple ideological forms within the new nationalism

Diesel price hikes and farmer distress: the myth and the reality

FuelsDiesel oilPricesFarmers attitudesPumpingCostsGroundwater irrigationWellsOwnershipEconomic impactWater productivityFarm incomeMilk production

Pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia: poverty in irrigated agriculture: issues and options: India

Irrigated farming / Poverty / Institutions / Irrigation programs / Performance evaluation / Irrigation management / Water distribution / Water rates / Cost recovery / India

A pub for England: Race and class in the time of the nation

The pub is often romanticised as a site of idyllic English ‘working-class’ sociability that is now under threat. Such melancholic invocations of the pub’s plight are invoked amid the wider resurgence of a racialised English nationalism that makes particularly effective claims to a ‘white working-class’ and their putatively ‘left-behind’ anguish. This article challenges such dominant accounts, juxtaposing such racially defensive readings of the working-class pub against the otherwise overlooked phenomenon of England’s ‘desi pubs’ (Indian-run pubs) through recourse to David Jesudason’s Desi Pubs as well as drawing upon the accounts of the founder of Glassy Junction, a historic desi pub in Southall. Importantly, this overdue engagement of ‘desi pubs’ is considered not through frameworks of race and nation alone but also within conjunctural webs of capitalist stratification and subjectivity. Ultimately, we argue that attentiveness to desi pubs helps draw out convivial modalities of working-class sociability that exist outside of both otherwise ascendant racial and nationalist grievance frames and the sanitised but also prohibitive consumerist webs of aspirational distinction and individualism

Investigating the Role of Sterol Regulatory-Element Binding Proteins (SREBPs) in Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Background/Objective: SREBPs are transcription factors involved in lipid biogenesis and are known to play a role in angiogenesis. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) also promotes angiogenesis, with VEGF inhibitors as the predominant treatment for Age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is the leading cause of permanent vision loss in the elderly population and is characterized by choroidal neovascularization (CNV). We hypothesize that VEGF can activate SREBPs in a SCAP-dependent manner. Methods: Human retinal microvascular endothelial cells (HRECs) were grown in 5% media and treated at passage 7. Prior to treatment, cells were all starved for 1h in 0.5% media. To estimate the changes in SREBP activation - HRECs were treated with 50ng/ml VEGF for 1, 4, and 12h or with 20 μM fatostatin, an inhibitor of SREBP activation, translocation into the nucleus, and SREBP transcription for 6h and 12h. Post treatment cells were lysed and protein was collected in RIPA buffer and semi-quantitative changes in target proteins were analyzed using immunoblotting. Statistical analysis was done by t-test, with significance if p<0.05, and sample size of n=2-3. Results: HRECs treated with VEGF exhibited an increasing trend for SREBP-1 and SREBP-2 in the cytoplasmic and nuclear forms at all time points. SCAP did not show a clear trend. HRECs treated with fatostatin exhibited a decreasing trend for SREBP-1 and SREBP-2 in the cytoplasmic form and nuclear SREBP-1 form at both time points. The nuclear form of SREBP-2 increased at both time points. Conclusion and Potential Impact: VEGF has demonstrated a role in SREBP activation, with both playing a role in angiogenesis. Fatostatin inhibition of SREBP indicated a potential antiangiogenic property. The downregulation of SREBP could provide a novel target in controlling and preventing angiogenesis in AMD. Further studies using animal models should elucidate the role of SCAP in VEGF activation of SREBPs