Historicising global nutrition: critical reflections on contested pasts and reimagined futures

The COVID-19 pandemic has provoked a range of economic shocks, food systems shocks, public health crises and political upheavals across the globe, prompting a rethink of associated global systems. Prepandemic anticolonial movements that challenged hierarchies of race, space, gender and expert knowledge in global health took on new meaning in the context of the unequal impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it moved through different kinds of spaces and distinct political contexts. In light of these dynamics, and the desire of many current practitioners in global health to reimagine the future, the need for critical analyses of the recent past have become more urgent. Here we challenge linear understandings of progress in global health—with a focus on the field of nutrition—by returning to consider a previous cycle of dramatic social, political and economic change that prompted serious challenges to the dominance of Western powers and US-based philanthro-capitalists. With a ‘global’ health and nutrition audience in mind, we put forward considerations on why a better understanding of the continuities and divergences between this past and the present moment are necessary to challenge a status quo that was, and is, highly flawed.

Climate change and human health

Climate change belongs in a new category of global environmental health problems. It is not just that the impacts are widely distributed: climate change is a result of unbalanced global systems. It is one of the modern threats to a ‘safe operating space’ for the planet. The effects on health occur directly, such as increased heat waves; through pressures on natural systems (reduced crop yields and undernutrition, for instance); and, as a consequence of social disruption. Also there may be impacts due to policy responses to climate change: these are so-called ‘transition risks’. Improving baseline health status is fundamental to coping with climate change, because the populations that are most seriously affected are those that already bear a heavy burden of disease. But an undifferentiated public health response is not sufficient. There are distinctive features of climate change that have to be taken into account. Mitigation, or primary prevention, will require rapid, deep cuts in greenhouse emissions if global heating is to be limited. The goal is to identify common solutions, responses to climate change that are health-enhancing rather than health damaging. There are many candidates, but by and large they are not on the path of ‘business as usual’ development.

Intersectionality at the Macro Level: Social Theory as Practice (Chapter prepared for Routledge Handbook of Intersectionality, Kathy Davis and Helma Lutz, editors).

The macro-level of society consists of the relationships among its institutional structures and how such patterned relations change in systematic ways over time. Considering intersectionality at this level implies asking how global systems that produce inequality operate together. The challenge for macro-level thinking about intersectionality is to resist the long history of treating capitalism, class relations and the global economy as the most fundamental set of global relations. Intersectional theorizing at this level combines analysis of the emergent and relational properties of inequality-producing systems with an equally critical attitude to all of these structural inequalities. However, in contrast to top-down theorizing about abstract systems, intersectional macro-theorizing incorporates a focus on experience that enlarges the meaning of developing critique. This chapter situates the development of intersectional theory at the macro-level and highlights its contributions.

A clinically validated human saliva metatranscriptomic test for global systems biology studies

We report here the development of a high throughput, automated, inexpensive, and clinically validated saliva metatranscriptome test that requires less than 100 microliters of saliva. The RNA in the samples is preserved at the time of collection. Samples can then be stored and transported at ambient temperatures for up to 28 days without significantly affecting the test results. Another important feature of the sample preservative is that it inactivates all classes of pathogens, enabling safe transportation globally. Given the unique set of convenience, low cost, safety, and technical performance, this saliva metatranscriptomic test can be integrated into longitudinal, global scale, systems biology studies that will lead to an accelerated development of precision medicine diagnostic and therapeutic tools. This report describes an important improvement to saliva transcriptome analysis. While current methods are complicated and expensive, the method reported here includes at-home sample collection, global shipping at ambient temperatures and pathogen inactivation at the point of collection; it uses fully automated, clinically validated and licensed laboratory and bioinformatic analyses.

Partial C*-dynamics and Rokhlin dimension

We develop the notion of the Rokhlin dimension for partial actions of finite groups, extending the well-established theory for global systems. The partial setting exhibits phenomena that cannot be expected for global actions, usually stemming from the fact that virtually all averaging arguments for finite group actions completely break down for partial systems. For example, fixed point algebras and crossed products are not in general Morita equivalent, and there is in general no local approximation of the crossed product $A\rtimes G$ by matrices over A. Using decomposition arguments for partial actions of finite groups, we show that a number of structural properties are preserved by formation of crossed products, including finite stable rank, finite nuclear dimension, and absorption of a strongly self-absorbing $C^*$ -algebra. Some of our results are new even in the global case. We also study the Rokhlin dimension of globalizable actions: while in general it differs from the Rokhlin dimension of its globalization, we show that they agree if the coefficient algebra is unital. For topological partial actions on spaces of finite covering dimension, we show that finiteness of the Rokhlin dimension is equivalent to freeness, thus providing a large class of examples to which our theory applies.

‘Surviving to thriving’: Leading health professions’ education through change, crisis & uncertainty

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge change and uncertainty for universities, faculty, and students around the world. For many health professions’ education (HPE) leaders, the pandemic has caused unforeseen crises, such as closure of campuses, uncertainty over student numbers and finances and an almost overnight shift to online learning and assessment. Methods: In this article, we explore a range of leadership approaches, some of which are more applicable to times of crisis, and others which will be required to take forward a vision for an uncertain future. We focus on leadership and change, crisis and uncertainty, conceptualising ‘leadership’ as comprising the three interrelated elements of leadership, management and followership. These elements operate at various levels – intrapersonal, interpersonal, organisational and global systems levels. Results: Effective leaders are often seen as being able to thrive in times of crisis – the traditional ‘hero leader’ – however, leadership in rapidly changing, complex and uncertain situations needs to be much more nuanced, adaptive and flexible. Conclusion: From the many leadership theories and approaches available, we suggest some specific approaches that leaders might choose in order to work with their teams and organisations through these rapidly changing and challenging times.

Global Systems Performance Analysis for Mobile Communications (GSM) using Cellular Network CODECS

Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a cellular network that is popular and has been growing in recent years. It was developed to solve fragmentation issues of the first cellular system, and it addresses digital modulation methods, level of the network structure, and services. It is fundamental for organizations to become learning organizations to keep up with the technology changes for network services to be at a competitive level. A simulation analysisusing the NetSim tool in this paper is presented for comparing different cellular network codecsfor GSM network performance. Theseparameters such as throughput, delay, and jitter are analyzed for the quality of service provided by each network codec. Unicast application for the cellular network is modeled for different network scenarios. Depending on the evaluation and simulation, it was discovered that G.711, GSM_FR, and GSM-EFR performed better than the other codecs, and they are considered to be the best codecs for cellular networks.These codecs will be of best use to better the performance of the network in the near future.

Food, diet and the pandemic

This article is concerned with the ways that diet-related health outcomes (including increased incidence and severity of Covid-19) are linked to the system of provision for food. Worldwide obesity has tripled in the past three decades, creating an immense strain on health services, with poor diet associated with 22 per cent of global deaths in 2017. We show that neoliberal and financialised global systems of food production have intensified dysfunctional practices such as land grabs and price speculation. Moreover, capitalist expansion of production inevitably creates pressures to increase consumption such that malnutrition from overeating runs neck and neck with undernutrition on a global scale. It is shown how food corporates (producers, retailers, and so on) are instrumental in creating avenues to affect our diets in ways that are far more effective than government campaigns to promote healthy eating. It is these powerful systemic corporate interests that need to be addressed in order to improve diets and consequent health outcomes.

Digital Technology at the Edge of Capitalism

It is sometimes argued that there is hardly a place in the world in the 21st century left untouched by global capitalism [111, 112]. Even so, some places remain at the periphery, participating in this system without being fully absorbed by it. In this article, we take a detailed look at the economic life of such a “pericapitalist” [161] community in the Brazilian Amazon region. We detail how the community increasingly participates in global systems and supply chains, yet also organizes economic life around local and traditional values. We pay special attention to the role of digital technologies in the community, including mobile phones and internet. The contribution of the article is as follows: firstly, it provides a detailed analysis of the material practices of a community at the edge . Secondly, it draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of responses to global capitalism, formed from the relationship between specific material practices, new technology, and elements of cultural identity. Thirdly, it argues for an increased sensibility towards these different relations to capitalism when considering design implications. We argue that close attention to material practice goes some way towards resolving those tensions and, further, provides for an appeal to a more pluralistic views of culture and development [61].