Social Movements in Cities

How social movements are rooted in specific places has been of interest to scholars of collective action, as well as geography and sociology generally. Social movements, in general, are characterized by the sustained mobilization of people sharing social or political aims. The characteristics of cities, as distinct from rural geographies, play a role in the development of urban social movements, offering concentrations and a diversity of people, resources, and power. Academic literature on the topic examines how cities are conducive to, or constrain, the development of social movements. Although the term urban social movement first appears in scholarly literature in 1972, cities have been key sites of contention at least since industrialization in the 1800s. Cities remained prominent throughout the rise of new social movements and transnational summit protests. In more recent decades, networked movements such as Occupy have renewed questions about inequalities and the right to the city. In short, cities are both a prominent focus and locus of contention. This bibliography focuses on academic literature on the city as the locus and focus of social movements, aiming to provide a selection rather than a comprehensive list. Other, not specifically urban aspects of transnational and domestic social movements are covered in other Oxford Bibliographies articles. This bibliography pays particular attention to works which impacted debates in the field, including contrasting perspectives, as well as diverse methodological approaches.

Crowds, Police and Provocations: Temporal Patterns of Rioting in Britain, 1800–1939

This essay develops an original, temporal approach to the study of rioting. It uses a catalogue of 414 riots from 19th- and early 20th-century Britain to identify several common developmental patterns: (1) riots often begin with provocation, intervention by the police or routines that license violence; (2) while often short-lived, riots can also be linked by cycles of revenge and the feedback loop between action and identity; (3) the state’s monopoly of organised violence was often decisive in bringing riots to an end. These findings reveal significant limits to the explanatory power of two widely used concepts in this area: triggers and identity. More interestingly, they show that this power varies meaningfully over time. I therefore argue for a properly historicised theory of rioting, drawing attention to two key sites of historical change: the norms and traditions which govern public violence, and the state’s monopoly of force.

The burial ground on Tankovoye Lake (Iturup Island): brief history and results of researches

The burial ground located on a bank of Tankovoye Lake (Kuibyshevskoye) is one of the key sites in the archaeology of the Kuril Islands. This is due not only to the fact that huge archaeological collections reflecting all stages of peopling of the region have been collected here over many years of excavations but also to the fact that this burial ground still remains the only object of this kind throughout the entire islands chain. Moreover, apart of the burials themselves, the stone burial structures, which have not yet been recorded on other sites of the Kuril Islands, but have analogies in the Jōmon culture, were also revealed at the site. Interest in this site is also enhanced by recent genetic studies, which unexpectedly demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity of a person buried here with modern Koryaks and Itelmens. At the same time, despite the site’s uniqueness, it is heavily underrepresented in available scientific publications. Information about it can be found only in the field reports and in few the hard-to-reach regional publications. Therefore, this article provides a brief overview of all data gathered at this site. It is based on the field reports, data from the private archive of Y. Knorozov, museum collections of the Sakhalin Regional Museum, and on the results of the author’s own research as well. Summing up the outcomes of long-term researches, we have to state that the site’s unique objects remain almost unexplored. For many years, studies here were limited to visual examination, cleaning up of the dune opening, and surface artifact gathering. Therefore, the nature of the burial objects found at the site might be recognized only in the most general terms. Their cultural affiliation also remains questionable. Radiocarbon dates suggest that the early Epi-Jōmon epoch is most powerfully represented near the lake, while the bulk of the ceramics collected here belongs to the later stage of this epoch (in accordance with archaeological data from Hokkaido). In addition, artifacts of Middle and Final Jōmon, Okhotsk culture, Satsumon-Tobinitai culture, and Ainu are presented here as well. Presumably, people could bury their dead here during the epochs of Final Jōmon, Epi-Jōmon and, possibly, the Okhotsk culture.

The Cross Talk Between ROS And NO In The Viability Decline of Cryopreserved Pollen From Paeonia Lactiflora

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitric oxide (NO), two common active molecules, are both involved in changes in viability after liquid nitrogen (LN) storage, but the relationship between these two molecules has not been examined in plant cryopreservation until now. In this study, the pollen of Paeonia lactiflora 'Fen Yu Nu' with significantly decreased viability after cryopreservation was used as the material. We studied the effects of the two regulators on each other and their biosynthesis and scavenging indices to explore the interaction between ROS and NO in pollen cryopreservation and its mechanism. The results showed that the contents of ROS and NO increased significantly with the decrease of pollen viability after cryopreservation, and changes in the ROS and NO content had a significant effect on post-LN pollen viability. The ROS content positively regulated the endogenous NO content and had significant effects on the expression level of NOS-like enzyme regulation gene CSU2 and its activity. Down-regulated NO had a positive effect on the ROS content, and it significantly affected the expression of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase and its regulatory gene RBOHJ. It also significantly affected catalase (CAT) and substrates related to the ascorbic acid (AsA)-glutathione (GSH) antioxidant cycle system. These results indicate that there was a positive interaction between ROS and NO in pollen cryopreservation. The NOS biosynthesis pathway is one of the ROS-regulated NO pathways, and the NADPH oxidase, CAT and AsA-GSH antioxidant cycle systems are the key sites of regulation of the ROS content by NO.

Water Ownership and Governance

Water governance refers to the material and regulatory control of water and waters. It involves questions such as who makes decisions about water and how; at what scale such decisions are made in relation to different waters; and who and which water or ecosystem benefits. Classical work in anthropology considered how irrigation practices may have given rise to the development of state forms, and in response to early-21st-century privatization regimes, anthropologists have considered how different groups have challenged the apparent global dominance of commodity values and water as property. Infrastructures for water distribution in urban areas (such as systems of canals, pipes, and faucets), and considerations of the sociocultural effects of hydrological unit delineation and definition (e.g., groundwater or river “basins”) have become key sites for the ethnographic investigation of water governance, emerging forms of personhood, and societal inequalities. The diversity in anthropologies of water unsettles generalized models in global regimes of water governance. The anthropology of water governance and ownership considers the context and contingencies of water and power. It reveals the global dominance of markets, rights, and technical approaches to water management, such as the case of “private water” in Chile, in which water markets have failed to provide equity and environmental health, but also how certain groups avoided complete privatization of water under this extreme example. Ethnographic studies of the cultural organization of resource scarcity over topographically complex and remote terrain, such as that of irrigators in the Andean cordillera, express the diversity of human innovation at the intersection of politics and ecology. In arid South Eastern Australia, basin plans that treat water as a unit of calculation and economic trade place social and ecological relations in peril. Infrastructures of development provide a narrative of unsettled state and development ideologies, and the problem of groundwater management reveals governance challenges in the face of unstable, unknown, and invisible material. Anthropological studies of water contribute to knowledge of earth’s diverse humanity, knowledge practices, and ecologies. Researchers propose that water governance might engage with human differences articulated at multiple scales, as well as in understanding water’s material agency and waters as dynamic, especially in an ever-changing climate.

Epistasis is not a strong constraint on the recurrent evolution of toxin-resistant Na+,K+-ATPases among tetrapods

Comparative genomic studies reveal a global decline in rates of convergent amino acid substitution as a function of evolutionary distance. This pattern has been attributed to epistatic constraints on protein evolution, the idea being that mutations tend to confer the same fitness effects on more similar genetic backgrounds, so convergent substitutions are more likely to occur in closely related species. However, this hypothesis lacks experimental validation. We tested this model in the context of the recurrent evolution of resistance to cardiotonic steroids (CTS) across diverse groups of tetrapods, which occurs via specific amino acid substitutions to the α-subunit family of Na+,K+-ATPases (ATP1A). After identifying a series of recurrent substitutions at two key sites of ATP1A1 predicted to confer CTS resistance, we performed protein engineering experiments to test the functional consequences of introducing these substitutions onto divergent species backgrounds. While we find that substitutions at these sites can have substantial background-dependent effects on CTS resistance, we also find no evidence for background-dependent effects on protein activity. We further show that the magnitude of a substitution's effect on activity does not depend on the overall extent of ATP1A1 sequence divergence between species. More generally, a global analysis of substitution patterns across ATP1A orthologs and paralogs reveals that the probability of convergent substitution protein-wide is not predicted by sequence divergence. Together, these findings suggest that intramolecular epistasis is not an important constraint on the evolution of ATP1A CTS resistance in tetrapods.

The Exercise-induced Improvement in Insulin-stimulated Glucose Uptake by Rat Skeletal Muscle Is Absent in Male AS160-Knockout Rats, Partially Restored by Muscle Expression of Phosphomutated AS160, and Fully Restored by Muscle Expression of Wildtype AS160

One exercise session can elevate insulin-stimulated glucose uptake (ISGU) in skeletal muscle, but the mechanisms remain elusive. Circumstantial evidence suggests a role for Akt substrate of 160 kDa (AS160 or TBC1D4). We used genetic approaches to rigorously test this idea. The initial experiment evaluated AS160’s role for the postexercise increase in ISGU using muscles from male wildtype (WT) and AS160-knockout (AS160-KO) rats. The next experiment used AS160-KO rats with an adeno-associated virus (AAV) approach to determine if rescuing muscle AS160 deficiency could restore exercise’s ability to improve ISGU. The third experiment tested if eliminating the muscle GLUT4 deficit in AS160-KO rats via AAV-delivered GLUT4 would enable postexercise enhancement of ISGU. The final experiment employed AS160-KO rats and AAV-delivery of AS160 mutated to prevent phosphorylation of Ser588, Thr642, and Ser704 to evaluate their role in postexercise ISGU. We discovered: 1) AS160 expression was essential for postexercise increase in ISGU; 2) rescuing muscle AS160 expression of AS160-KO rats restored postexercise enhancement of ISGU; 3) restoring GLUT4 expression in AS160-KO muscle did not rescue the postexercise increase in ISGU; and 4) although AS160 phosphorylation on 3 key sites was not required for postexercise elevation in ISGU, it was essential for the full-exercise effect.

The Exercise-induced Improvement in Insulin-stimulated Glucose Uptake by Rat Skeletal Muscle Is Absent in Male AS160-Knockout Rats, Partially Restored by Muscle Expression of Phosphomutated AS160, and Fully Restored by Muscle Expression of Wildtype AS160

One exercise session can elevate insulin-stimulated glucose uptake (ISGU) in skeletal muscle, but the mechanisms remain elusive. Circumstantial evidence suggests a role for Akt substrate of 160 kDa (AS160 or TBC1D4). We used genetic approaches to rigorously test this idea. The initial experiment evaluated AS160’s role for the postexercise increase in ISGU using muscles from male wildtype (WT) and AS160-knockout (AS160-KO) rats. The next experiment used AS160-KO rats with an adeno-associated virus (AAV) approach to determine if rescuing muscle AS160 deficiency could restore exercise’s ability to improve ISGU. The third experiment tested if eliminating the muscle GLUT4 deficit in AS160-KO rats via AAV-delivered GLUT4 would enable postexercise enhancement of ISGU. The final experiment employed AS160-KO rats and AAV-delivery of AS160 mutated to prevent phosphorylation of Ser588, Thr642, and Ser704 to evaluate their role in postexercise ISGU. We discovered: 1) AS160 expression was essential for postexercise increase in ISGU; 2) rescuing muscle AS160 expression of AS160-KO rats restored postexercise enhancement of ISGU; 3) restoring GLUT4 expression in AS160-KO muscle did not rescue the postexercise increase in ISGU; and 4) although AS160 phosphorylation on 3 key sites was not required for postexercise elevation in ISGU, it was essential for the full-exercise effect.