Leave or Stay: Simulating Motility and Fitness of Microorganisms in Dynamic Aquatic Ecosystems

Motility is a key adaptation factor in scarce marine environments inhabited by bacteria. The question of how a capacity for adaptive migrations influences the success of a microbial population in various conditions is a challenge addressed in this study. We employed the agent-based model of competition of motile and sedentary microbial populations in a confined aquatic environment supplied with a periodic batch nutrient source to assess the fitness of both. Such factors as nutrient concentration in a batch, batch period, mortality type and energetic costs of migration were considered to determine the conditions favouring different strategies: Nomad of a motile population and Settler of a sedentary one. The modelling results demonstrate that dynamic and nutrient-scarce environments favour motile populations, whereas nutrient-rich and stagnant environments promote sedentary microorganisms. Energetic costs of migration determine whether or not the Nomad strategy of the motile population is successful, though it also depends on such conditions as nutrient availability. Even without penalties for migration, under certain conditions, the sedentary Settler population dominates in the ecosystem. It is achieved by decreasing the local nutrient availability near the nutrient source, as motile populations relying on a local optimizing strategy tend to follow benign conditions and fail, enduring stress associated with crossing the valleys of suboptimal nutrient availability.

Mobilizing Networks and Relationships Through Indigenous Food Sovereignty: The Indigenous Food Circle’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Northwestern Ontario

This paper explores the Indigenous Food Circle’s (IFC) response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. Established in 2016, the IFC is an informal collaborative network of Indigenous-led and Indigenous-serving organizations that aims to support and develop the capacity of Indigenous Peoples to collaboratively address challenges and opportunities facing food systems and to ensure that food-related programming and policy meets the needs of the all communities. Its primary goals are to reduce Indigenous food insecurity, increase food self-determination, and establish meaningful relationships with the settler population through food. This community case study introduces the IFC and shares the strategies and initiatives that were used during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to address immediate needs and maintain a broader focus on Indigenous food sovereignty. The food related impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indigenous People and determining solutions cannot be understood in isolation from settler colonialism and the capitalist food system. Reflecting on the scholarly literature and the experiential learnings that emerged from these efforts, we argue that meaningful and impacting initiatives that aim to address Indigenous food insecurity during an emergency situation must be rooted in a decolonizing framework that centers meaningful relationships and Indigenous leadership.

Conflict among Indigenous Communities and Settler Bengali Community of Chittagong Hill Tracts: Is There a Way to Peace?

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of southeastern Bangladesh is the most isolated and geographically unique region of the country, with its hilly composition, vast valleys, cascading streams, and rivers. It is also home to at least 11 indigenous communities, each with its distinct language, culture, and traditions, and a large quantity of Bengali settler population. Since the beginning, there has been tension between the indigenous communities and the Bengali settler community residing in CHT. Now, this tense situation is becoming more and more intense with each passing year, where you almost can’t have a conversation about CHT without discussing ethnic conflict. Therefore, we need to look for ways out of the current juncture. During my visit to CHT, I found that a lack of understanding between the two entities and unsatisfactory implementation of the 1997 peace accord is causing distrust and frustrations among the ethnic groups, leading them toward increased ethnic violence and eradicating the likelihood of peace further from this hilly region. Therefore, we have to look for ways to foster understanding between the indigenous communities and settler community, in order to create a sense of interconnectedness among them which, in turn, will persuade them to overcome their differences and sympathize with one another. In addition, the unimplemented clauses of the Peace Accord should be implemented as soon as possible to regain indigenous populations' trust and to give them a sense of security on their own ancestral land.

Postcolonial Legal Pluralism

This chapter examines European colonization, which created transplanted state legal systems alongside bodies of customary and religious law, and brought workers from outside in large numbers for plantations and mining, creating a wave of legal pluralism across the Global South. Colonization conventionally refers to European political, economic, and legal domination of large parts of the world from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. European political domination involved various degrees of control over a peripheral territory as a colony, protectorate, or some other relationship; economic domination involved utilizing the land, labor, natural resources, and trade of a peripheral territory for the economic benefit of the metropole and its settler population; and legal domination involved instrumental use of law by the colonial state to enforce its political rule and achieve its exploitative economic objectives. The chapter then elaborates on postcolonial legal pluralism: how it came about, its consequences, and the situation of legal pluralism today. The topics covered include the recognition and transformation of customary law, informal village tribunals, the power of traditional leaders, conflicts over law, women’s right and human rights, and rule of law development efforts.

Exploring a Tiriti-based superdiversity paradigm within early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article reports findings from a study that used a process of document analysis to examine early childhood care and education responses to increasing superdiversity in the ‘bicultural’ legislative context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The New Zealand Education Review Office has described both Indigenous Māori children and ‘children of migrants and refugees’ as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘priority learners’. This article uses the lenses of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Indigenous rights) and Steven Vertovec’s superdiversity approach to examine the implications of representations of the Indigenous Māori and the settler population in early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It further applies Sara Ahmed’s diversity work on a phenomenology of whiteness to scrutinise the New Zealand government’s commitments to supporting its nation’s ‘priority learners’.

Exploring a Tiriti-based superdiversity paradigm within early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article reports findings from a study that used a process of document analysis to examine early childhood care and education responses to increasing superdiversity in the ‘bicultural’ legislative context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The New Zealand Education Review Office has described both Indigenous Māori children and ‘children of migrants and refugees’ as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘priority learners’. This article uses the lenses of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Indigenous rights) and Steven Vertovec’s superdiversity approach to examine the implications of representations of the Indigenous Māori and the settler population in early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It further applies Sara Ahmed’s diversity work on a phenomenology of whiteness to scrutinise the New Zealand government’s commitments to supporting its nation’s ‘priority learners’.

Exploring a Tiriti-based superdiversity paradigm within early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article reports findings from a study that used a process of document analysis to examine early childhood care and education responses to increasing superdiversity in the ‘bicultural’ legislative context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The New Zealand Education Review Office has described both Indigenous Māori children and ‘children of migrants and refugees’ as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘priority learners’. This article uses the lenses of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Indigenous rights) and Steven Vertovec’s superdiversity approach to examine the implications of representations of the Indigenous Māori and the settler population in early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It further applies Sara Ahmed’s diversity work on a phenomenology of whiteness to scrutinise the New Zealand government’s commitments to supporting its nation’s ‘priority learners’.

Making the Desert Bloom?

World War one witnessed the first dense flow of Indian labor into the Persian Gulf. To reconstruct the campaign in Mesopotamia/Iraq after the reverses of 1915-16, the Indian Army demanded non-combatants for dock-work, construction labor and medical and transport services. This chapter explores the Government of India’s anxious deliberations about the choice of legal form in which to meet this demand. The sending of labor for military work overseas had to be distanced conceptually from the stigmatized system of indentured labor migration. There was a danger of disrupting those labor networks across India and around the Bay of Bengal which maintained the supply of material goods for the war. Non-combatant recruitment took the war into new sites and spaces. Regimes of labor servitude were tapped but some form of emancipation had to be promised. The chapter focusses on seven jail- recruited Indian Labor and Porter Corps to explore the work regime in Mesopotamia. Labor units often insisted on fixed engagements rather than ‘duration of war’ agreements, but had to struggle for exit at the conclusion of their contract. After the Armistice, Britain still needed Indian labor and troops in Mesopotamia but sought to prevent the emergence of a settler population.

Creative Research as Story-Telling: An Indigenous visual culture course from the perspectives of a librarian, a professor and students

Located on Treaty #13 (Toronto Purchase) territory, OCAD University offers an Indigenous Visual Culture (INVC) program that leads to a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or an interdisciplinary minor. The curriculum combines courses in the cultural, social and political history of Indigenous peoples, preparing students to engage in global discourses in contemporary art practice through a profound understanding of story-telling as the foundation of visual culture.A narrative framework is used to present an information literacy interaction with an INVC course from the perspectives of a librarian from the Canadian settler population and an assistant professor, who is a member of the Métis Indigenous nation. Research and evaluation models are presented; ones that emerged from traditional information literacy concepts informed and transformed by Indigenous knowledge systems. Finally, student learning outcomes from the course are presented through an exhibition of artworks and artist statements that display their visual story-telling skills.

«They drank tea, they struck spoons...»: ethnocultural identity in the tea drinking practices of Russian Siberians in the 19th — early 20th century

On the basis of original field materials, the author set a goal to reveal the identifying functions of the food cul-ture, particularly, of such a characteristic component of the Northern Eurasian population as hot drinks (teas), in different ethnocultural groups of Siberia: descendants of the old settlers and later Russian migrants, old-believers and followers of the official church. The practices of Siberian tea-drinking have been studied from the perspective of ethnocultural identity within the framework of the mundanity theory. It is the folk customs and beliefs related to the consumption of decoctions of local herbs and later of Chinese leaves (tea) that provide opportunity to infer the place of hot drinks in people’s culture. The author reports interesting facts about the traditions of Siberian tea-drinking and table etiquette in the countryside. Chinese tea-drinking from samovars (table boiling tanks) was not embraced by the old-believers and by some Russian migrants in the late 19th — early 20th c. (South-Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), where the former refrain due to “suspicious glare” of the surface resembling snake-skin, while the latter by the slimy samovars. In Siberia, the spread of the tea-drinking with Chinese leaf coincided with formation of local old-settler population in the 17th—18th centuries and therefore it can be regarded as an old custom for the service-class people and Cossacks. The fact that the Chinese tea was relatively a novation in the culture of the Siberian population is evidence by that it was not part of the ceremonial practices (e.g., family), in contrast to various herbal brews and kisels (jellies). Siberian tea-drinking traditions of the old-settlers (apart from the old-believers) had strong influence on formation of the regional and ethnocultural identity of the Siberians, in the wide sense of the term as Siberia locals. The established traditions can be considered as a consequence of integration processes amongst the Slavic people in Siberia. The tea-drinking traditions support the conjecture that the differentiation process (comparative evaluation) was accompanied by another process — cultural interference and is inextricably linked to the cognitive process — collective identification, which inhibits non-critical adoption of ‘extraneous’ traditions.