Search

Pharmaceutical excipients are no longer considered inert and have been shown to influence the activity of metabolic enzymes and transporters, resulting in altered pharmacokinetics of substrate drugs. In this study, the effect of 25 excipients commonly used in drug formulations were investigated for their effect on P-glycoprotein (P-gp) activity. The effect of excipients on P-gp were assessed by measuring the change in the cellular accumulation of a P-gp substrate, digoxin, in MDCK-MDR1 (Madin Darby canine kidney transfected with multidrug resistance 1 gene) cells. The cells were exposed to low (10 μM) and high (200 μM) concentrations of excipient along with 10 μM digoxin. Excipient concentrations were chosen to span the range of concentrations previously used for investigating activities in vitro. At 10 μM of excipient, an increase in the intracellular digoxin concentration was seen with d-α-tocopherol poly-(ethylene glycol) succinate (Vit-E-PEG; p = 0.002), poly(ethylene oxide)

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department for International Development, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, under the UK Zoonoses and Emerging Livestock Systems Initiative (BB/L017679/1 and BB/L018926/1). BACKGROUND: With increasing demand for red meat in Tanzania comes heightened potential for zoonotic infections in animals and humans that disproportionately affect poor communities. A range of frontline government employees work to protect public health, providing services for people engaged in animal-based livelihoods (livestock owners and butchers), and enforcing meat safety and food premises standards. In contrast to literature which emphasises the inadequacy of extension support and food safety policy implementation in low- and middle-income countries, this paper foregrounds the 'street-level diplomacy' deployed by frontline actors operating in challenging contexts. METHODS: This research is based on semi-structured interviews with 61 government employees, including livestock extension officers/meat inspectors and health officers, across 10 randomly-selected rural and urban wards. RESULTS: Frontline actors combined formal and informal strategies including the leveraging of formal policy texts and relationships with other state employees, remaining flexible and recognising that poverty constrained people's ability to comply with health regulations. They emphasised the need to work with livestock keepers and butchers to build their knowledge to self-regulate and to work collaboratively to ensure meat safety. Remaining adaptive and being hesitant to act punitively unless absolutely necessary cultivated trust and positive relations, making those engaged in animal-based livelihoods more open to learning from and cooperating with extension officers and inspectors. This may result in higher levels of meat safety than might be the case if frontline actors stringently enforced regulations. CONCLUSION: The current tendency to view frontline actors' partial enforcement of meat safety regulations as a failure obscures the creative and proactive ways in which they seek to ensure meat safety in a context of limited resources. Their application of 'street-level diplomacy' enables them to be sensitive to local socio-economic realities, to respect local social norms and expectations and to build support for health safety interventions when necessary. More explicitly acknowledging the role of trust and positive state-society relations and the diplomatic skills deployed by frontline actors as a formal part of their inspection duties offers new perspectives and enhanced understandings on the complicated nature of their work and what might be done to support them. Publisher PDF

The image of Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond unfurling the Scottish Saltire behind the bemused UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, moments after Andy Murray won the Wimbledon tennis tournament in July 2013, has come to epitomize the nature of debate around the implications of the Independence Referendum outside of Scotland. Mainstream coverage has rendered “IndyRef” as something of a pantomime politics performed by Salmond and Cameron. The debate has been reduced to a competition between Salmond's idealistic political nationalism and the economic “realities” presented by Cameron, rendered as a chant: “We can afford independence, we will be one of the world's wealthiest countries” versus the response, “Oh no you can't”! In Scotland, on the other hand, debates around the implications of the referendum have gone beyond romanticized notions of tartan, Braveheart and freedom (although these do still exist, of course). Although the political parties themselves have perhaps been rather conservative, debates beyond their official efforts have been much more imaginative, with discussion around the nature of the state, citizenship, and Scotland's role on the international stage, among other issues.

There has recently been much said about the end of public space. In contemporary cities, the public sphere is increasingly been seen as comprised of dead public spaces, privatised shopping malls and gated communities, eroding the essence of city life. However, in this paper it is argued that this particular vision of contemporary public space is skewed by the concentration of research in city centres, and in particular in the recapitalised, flagship spaces associated with urban restructuring. The paper questions the extent that the inclusivity and accessibility of local public spaces is under threat and whether democratic practices unfold to threaten such local public spaces, drawing on the recent experience of two inner-city neighbourhoods in Glasgow.

El final de la guerra fría parecía prometer el final de una praxis geopolítica basada sobre la exclusión de la diferencia. Los teóricos hablaron de fluidez, hibridación y de un mundo en el que progresivamente disminuían las fronteras. Sin embargo, las consecuencias del 11 de septiembre mostraron claramente la persistencia de imágenes de un mundo peligroso donde el mantenimiento de las fronteras es vital para la seguridad. Mientras que este artículo se centrará inicialmente en la crítica de textos y de escritos de la geopolítica de la «guerra contra el terror» en el espíritu de una «geopolítica crítica», proseguirá hacia el planteamiento de una geopolítica feminista que ponga cuerpos y prácticas cotidianas en el centro de la geopolítica.

As a result of the failure of formal top-down development, there has recently been increased interest in the possibilities of drawing upon the indigenous knowledges of those in the communities involved, in an attempt to produce more effective development strategies. The concept of indigenous knowledge calls for the inclusion of local voices and priorities, and promises empowerment through ownership of the process. However, there has been little critical examination of the ways in which indigenous knowledges have been included in the development process. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, this article suggests that indigenous knowledges are often drawn into development by both theorists and development institutions in a very limited way, failing to engage with other ways of perceiving development, and thus missing the possibility of devising more challenging alternatives.

This paper offers a contribution to the recent emergence in geography of studies of travel writers and the production of other representations of the non-Western world. I consider a rather different text to those normally studied in that the book, Empire of Signs by Barthes, purports not to represent any real place. A number of writers, influenced by Said's pathbreaking work Orientalism, have considered whether Barthes perpetuates Orientalist images. Rather than structure my argument around the binary of Orientalist/not-Orientalist I will consider the ways that Barthes subverts the structure of Orientalism from within. Barthes counterfeits travel: playing with the concept of ‘wonder’ which halted the representational language of more conventional travellers. Through the construction of his own ‘hyper-Orientalist’ account, Barthes produces a poststructural ethics which I argue offers some important reflections on the politics of representation both of travel writing and of academic critiques of it.

I would like to thank Merje Kuus and Garth Myers for suchthoughtful and generous responses to my paper. Their comments,inverydifferentways,bothdrawouttheimplicitchallengerunningthrough my paper, which is the attempt to overcome the domi-nance of western ways of thinking in political geography withoutsliding towards a kind of relativism where everything is of equalimportance (see also Agnew, 2007).Kuus suggests that I see marginality and subalterity as equiva-lent, leading to her argument that marginalityis not a trait but a relationship to power. Our efforts to grasp itsoperation, whether in Denmark, Tanzania or the US, cannot be astraightforwardmatteroflabellingsomeplacesassubalternandothers as hegemonic.Kuus argues that potentially all countries are subaltern in thecurrent system; they just don’t know it yet. Recent debates aroundthe difficulties of states ensuring that multinational corporationspay tax is illustrative of this point: it has recently been discoveredthat tax avoidance by one UK-based companycost Zambia fourteentimes the amount it received in aid from Britain (Boffey, 2013). Butit has also been argued that the tax owed by companies like Star-bucks, Google and Vodaphone to the UK government would elim-inate the need for austerity cuts (Milne, 2012). Argued like thisthen, each state is in a subaltern position relative to systemic po-wer; each matters equally.However, I do not want to entirely equate marginality andsubalterity e they are broadly comparable, as Kuus notes, but notquite the same. While I do want to see both primarily as being in arelationship to power, there is no doubt that, at times, certainplaces are labelled as subaltern, that this representation has con-sequences, but also that it is a location with a certain strategicpolitical agency. Nyerere played up the subalterity of Tanzania,insisting on the importance of unity with other people placedoutside of hegemonic power. And, this is where Tanzania is notjustanother example of a marginal state. Nyerere had a vision thatmade it more significant than the country’s position in otherranked measures might suggest. Post-colonial Tanzania was tryingto do something different, setting a new path not just forTanzanians but to challenge a system where certain states wouldcome todominance. Nyerere’s vision of going beyond societies thatwere defined by religion, colour and ethnicity led to the countrybecoming a beacon of hope for many. But this was a leadership ofmoral authority, not one based around conventional geopolitical oreconomic power.Thus, as I noted in my paper, post-colonial Tanzania sought topush a different world order. Nyerere did not seek to compete withhegemonic powerof any kind, as he explained in an interviewwiththe Kenyan paper, the Daily Nation, in 1968:The big Communist states are as likely to indulge in attempts toinfiltrate societies as the big capitalist states. The major differ-ence which I see at the moment is that the eastern powers arenot yet used to controlling Africans . They don’t assume theyhave the right to ‘give us advice’ in the same wayas some of thelargewesternpowers do.The real truthis thatcapitalismis bynature expansionist. Communism is on the other hand evan-gelical . and Africa has some experience of the things that canfollow evangelism. (quoted in Pratt, 1976: 250).Nyerere sought to create linkages with a variety of lower-orderpowers; politically through pan-Africanism and non-alignment butalso in terms of economic assistance, by going to those Europeanpowers (Norway, Sweden, Denmark.), which, he believed, werenot used to assuming dominance (from this Tanzanianperspective,Denmark did matter). Thus, I do think the Tanzanian case is of in-terest in and of itself. It is not just one marginal state amongstmany, because of what it stood for, and what it attempted to dowithin and beyond its own boundaries.Nyerere’ssubalterngeopoliticswasprojectedthroughanumberof scales. Myers has suggested (in his response to my paper and,more forcefully, in Myers and Muhajir 2013) that the true subalterngeopolitics in Tanzania are expressed in Swahili. Indeed, Nyerereused Swahili to narrate the Tanganyikan, then Tanzanian, nation,and perhaps one day hoped for this to be a language that wouldunite East Africa and beyond. The concepts that Myers explains,alongside the more familiar ujamaa, umoja and uhuru (family-ness,unity and freedom), capture Nyerere’s conceptualisation of adistinctively African form of self-reliant socialism in a way thatthese English translations do not. However, while it is clear that, asMyers explained so convincingly, Nyerere was an exceptionalSwahili orator, this was a performance made in particular spaces,when he was promoting a vision of a country united beyond the

It has now become something of a cliche that with the decline of a communist threat at the end of the Cold War, conservative American culture has entered a period of crisis that has raised profound questions about both national identity and purpose (Engelhardt 1995). America’s Cold War goal of containing the USSR might be understood in terms of a moving frontier between the US and this ‘foreign’ threat, not unlike the frontier narratives that characterized the nation’s initial western colonial expansion. This narrative of frontier containing difference and protecting the American nation from foreign incursion, is key to American national identity. Its absence at the close of the Cold War has made the operation of traditional identity politics problematic. With the demise of the ‘Evil Empire’ lurking beyond the frontier, arguments for consensus and discipline in the face of this accepted enemy have become less urgent. This has led to an almost tangible fear in conservative political culture that once the recognized enemy has gone, the American populace will not be able to tell right from wrong, nor good from evil.

Using Žižek's theorisation of power, we analyse the UK Conservative Party's Green Paper on international development, ‘One World Conservatism’ (OWC). We argue that by placing the West's giving of development aid as something beyond politics, on the moral high-ground of self-evident certainty, it acts to deflect attention from critical engagement with the nature of globalisation, power and aid itself, hiding both economic and epistemological violences behind the apparently benevolent act of giving. An analysis of the nature of the green paper demonstrates the ways in which it draws in UK citizens as active subjects complicit with this vision of the world.

A major dilemma in Gender and Development (GAD) work is why it is that sometimes women may feel better off colluding with gendered structures that ensure their continued subordination rather than seeking approaches that will allow them to break free of this. Kandiyoti (1988 Gender and Society 2 274-90) has identified this apparent collusion as 'patriarchal bargains', which offer women greater advantages than they perceive can be achieved by challenging the prevailing order. Such women are therefore reluctant to engage in empowering activities that may challenge their gendered bargain. This paper explains this dilemma in the context of GAD work undertaken with Bedouin women in Southern Egypt.

The language of participation and empowerment has become a convention in urban redevelopment practice. While on first glance there is little to disagree with, a critical literature has emerged around the notion that participation has become a new ‘tyranny’ that, despite its claims, is little more than tokenism. However, it is the contention of this paper that the impacts of participation in community-based urban regeneration projects are complex, usually contested and often contradictory. While an uncritical vocabulary of ‘participation’ has proliferated in both cultural and regeneration policy, the actual practice on the ground reveals significant difficulties which have implications for policy goals of community participation and empowerment, and for the community itself. Rather than seeing it as a problem, or something to be removed as soon as possible from the process, contestation and conflict should be recognised as appropriate reflections of community.

International audience; The Francophone "territoire" is often translated by the English "place" and not by "territory", as the common sense would suggest. This detail underscores a deeper, and epistemological, difference existing between the Anglophone "territory" and the Francophone "territoire". The Francophone territoire never so strictly coincided with a bounded state territory, as in the Anglophone tradition. In the Francophone territoire the logics of agents and not necessarily state-agents, are included, and historically the concept of territoire allowed Francophone geography to become a social science in its own right. As such, territoire conceived in the Francophone way, is nowadays a powerful scholars tool to explore the contemporary world, made of a combination of borders, networks and overlapping territories. Despite the evident interest of conceiving territories beyond a state-centric view, Anglophone geographers, as opposed to their Francophone colleagues, never dare to do so. This chapter aims to present to an Anglophone audience how the Francophone tradition conceives territory and how it links it with issues of identities, projects and agents.