Early anteroposterior regionalisation of human neural crest is shaped by a pro-mesodermal factor

The neural crest (NC) is an important multipotent embryonic cell population and its impaired specification leads to various developmental defects, often in an anteroposterior (A-P) axial level-specific manner. The mechanisms underlying the correct A-P regionalisation of human NC cells remain elusive. Recent studies have indicated that trunk NC cells, the presumed precursors of the childhood tumour neuroblastoma, are derived from neuromesodermal-potent progenitors of the postcranial body (NMPs). Here we employ human embryonic stem cell differentiation to define how NMP-derived NC cells acquire a posterior axial identity. We show that TBXT, a pro-mesodermal transcription factor, mediates early posterior NC regionalisation together with WNT signalling effectors. This occurs by TBXT-driven chromatin remodelling via its binding in key enhancers within HOX gene clusters and other posterior regulator-associated loci. In contrast, posteriorisation of NMP-derived spinal cord cells is TBXT/WNT-independent and takes place under the influence of FGF signalling. Our work reveals a previously unknown role of TBXT in influencing posterior NC fate and points to the existence of temporally discrete, cell type-dependent modes of posterior axial identity control.

The Multiple Facets of Iron Recycling

The production of around 2.5 million red blood cells (RBCs) per second in erythropoiesis is one of the most intense activities in the body. It continuously consumes large amounts of iron, approximately 80% of which is recycled from aged erythrocytes. Therefore, similar to the “making”, the “breaking” of red blood cells is also very rapid and represents one of the key processes in mammalian physiology. Under steady-state conditions, this important task is accomplished by specialized macrophages, mostly liver Kupffer cells (KCs) and splenic red pulp macrophages (RPMs). It relies to a large extent on the engulfment of red blood cells via so-called erythrophagocytosis. Surprisingly, we still understand little about the mechanistic details of the removal and processing of red blood cells by these specialized macrophages. We have only started to uncover the signaling pathways that imprint their identity, control their functions and enable their plasticity. Recent findings also identify other myeloid cell types capable of red blood cell removal and establish reciprocal cross-talk between the intensity of erythrophagocytosis and other cellular activities. Here, we aimed to review the multiple and emerging facets of iron recycling to illustrate how this exciting field of study is currently expanding.

Claude McKay’s Bad Nationalists

This article examines Claude McKay’s 1928 journey to Africa under colonial occupation and uncovers how these true events partly inspired his late work of expatriate fiction, Romance in Marseille. By bringing together migration studies with literary history, the article challenges and expands existing research that suggests that McKay’s writings register the impulse for a nomadic wandering away from oppressive forms of identity control set up in the wake of World War I. The article contends that Claude McKay’s renegade cast of “bad nationalist” characters registers a generative tension between the imperial national forms the author encountered in North Africa and the Black nationalist vision of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa campaign. Reading the dialectics of bad nationalisms and Black internationalisms, the article explores how the utopian promise for Black liberation by returning back to Africa, central to the New Negro project of Black advancement, frequently becomes entangled in McKay’s transnational stowaway fiction with conflicting calls for reparations, liabilities, and shipping damages.

Constructions of Undeservingness around the Figure of the Undocumented Pregnant Woman in the French Department of Mayotte

This article examines how Comorian pregnant women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, came to embody an unwanted presence as irregular migrants due to their children’s and their own potential claims to belonging, while they are entitled by law to access perinatal and maternal care. This article argues that framing undocumented pregnant women as a threat led to significant shortcomings in perinatal care delivery and that those shortages in turn worsened access to healthcare services for the Mahoran-French population as well, exacerbating feelings of resentment towards Comorians. Drawing on this case-study, the article foregrounds the malleability of the CARIN criteria (Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need), a theoretical tool to analyse ideas related to deservingness, by demonstrating how actors re-think the meanings of ‘identity’, ‘control’, ‘attitude’ and ‘need’ and assign different weights to them in the context of a dominant frame of undeservingness.

Caring for the divided self: A psychoanalytic exploration of care and identity in organizations

The study introduces a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the investigation of care in organizations. It examines 52 stories describing how employees care for one another in material and emotional ways and explores how the narration of care becomes mapped on to struggles with unconscious aspects of the self, variously subjugating the self to, and empowering the self from, existing power structures. The study finds that current conceptions of care facilitate an imaginary project to fix identity and therefore privilege a more disempowering practice of care. It also reveals that, if investigated from a Lacanian perspective, care can serve more empowering constructions of identity. Specifically, care can create a space in which divided subjectivity can surface and action can be freed from identity projects and the vulnerabilities to identity control this introduces. Implications for theorizing the function of care in relation to identity are discussed.

BLOCKCHAIN AS A SOCIAL REVOLUTION: FOCUSING ON THE THREATS

The paper discusses the benefits and threats provided by the blockchain technology and focuses on those which are the flipside of its advantages. Potential threats related to creating and using digital identity, control over personal information and erosion of responsibility justify the claim that we are dealing not just with a technological but a social revolution impacting key social relationships.

Border hacking: una conversione artistica dei confini nazionali nella società delle reti

Through the category of ‘border hack’ (proposed by Rita Raley) and the analysis of three meaningful artworks (Transborder Immigrant Tool by Electronic Disturbance Theatre 2.0 and b.a.n.g. lab, BorderXing Guide by Heath Bunting and Shadows from Another Place by Paula Levine), the aim of this article is to investigate the aesthetic-political practices around the notion of transnational border. These are works of a performative nature and are linked to the networked environment of the Internet. They exemplify a brand-new season of New Media Art, in which the electromagnetic armamentarium of satellite positioning systems and mobile devices takes on a tactical dimension of confrontation with the equally technological governmental-military strategies of border surveillance and identity control.

Fostering a concept: Why cell identity matters

The aim of this editorial is to examine if and why a new journal focusing on issues concerning identity in general, cell identity, or cell-group identity could offer a new perspective or better vision in cell science. Recent advancements in technology (single-cell -omics) and the high amount of data and perspectives provided by the former experience in other domains of science (mainly social sciences) could offer at least some answers and, more importantly, allow new questions in biology and life sciences. Issues such as diversity, identity management in cells, and conservation versus change of identity, reprogramming, identity control, or identity recognition, may be interpreted or analyzed in a more complex manner if regarded form the perspective of the concept of identity. Deciphering what mechanisms stabilize or regulate cell identity could be crucial in understanding cell behavior. Learning how different pathogens or transformed cells hijack mechanisms involved in maintaining cell identity may offer, from a practical point of view, models or instruments to imagine means of control and maintain or manipulate cell identity during development, physiology, or disease. This opening article in the Journal of Cell Identity briefly mentions some of the emerging ideas concerning cell identity and is intended as a starting point for debate and analysis of more aspects concerning cell identity in health and disease.

Dance and Socio-Cybernetics: The Dance event of “K’na” As A Shaping Component of The Cultural Identity Amongst the Arvanites of Neo Cheimonio Evros, Greece

The research field of this paper is the wedding dance event of “K’na”, as this takes place by the Arvanites of Greek Thrace, an ethnic group moved to the area from Turkish Thrace in 1923. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the three components of dance, music and song of Greek traditional dance, as these reflected in the “K’na” dance event amongst the Arvanites ethnic group of Neo Cheimonio (Evros), are related to issues of ethno-cultural identity under the lens of socio-cybernetics. Data was gathered through ethnographic method as this is applied to the study of dance, while its interpretation was based on socio-cybernetics according to Burke’s identity control theory. From the data analysis, it is showed that through the “K’na” dance event the Thracian Arvanites of Neo Cheimonio shape and reshape their ethno-cultural identity as a reaction to the input they receive from their environment. Therefore, the “construction” of their identity, as a constant process of self-regulation and internal control, is subjected to the conditions of a cybernetic process.