Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe
The resilience of nationalism in contemporary Europe may seem paradoxical at a time when the nation state is widely seen as being 'in decline'. The contributors of this book see the resurgence of nationalism as symptomatic of the quest for identity and meaning in the complex modern world. Challenged from above by the supranational imperatives of globalism and from below by the complex pluralism of modern societies, the nation state, in the absence of alternatives to market consumerism, remains a focus for social identity. Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe takes a fully interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the 'national question'. Individual chapters consider the specifics of national identity in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Iberia, Russia, the former Yugoslavla and Poland, while looking also at external forces such as economic globalisation, European supranationalism, and the end of the Cold War. Setting current issues and conflicts in their broad historical context, the book reaffirms that 'nations' are not 'natural' phenomena but 'constructed' forms of social identity whose future will be determined in the social arena. (Less)
The Genetic Makeup of Azoreans Versus Mainland Portugal Population
Since the first draft of the human genome we observed a boost in biomedical research. As consequence, nowadays, it is possible to know a person’s predisposition to a genetic disease or even how its organism will metabolize a given drug. Although, there is some delay in translating this knowledge to the development and implementation of personalized medicine, there are currently available some successful pharmacogenetic based treatment decisions. One of such example is abacavir, a nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor used in treatment of HIV-1 infection. Abacavir hypersensitivity is strongly associated with HLA-B*57:01 allele. Genetic testing before abacavir’s prescription is now recommended in clinical guidelines and is practiced in most western countries (Chaponda & Pirmohamed 2011). In a near future, personalized medicine will, most certainly, bring considerable health gains to society. The new approaches to analyze the human genome, – genome-wide association studies (GWAS; Orange et al., 2011), deep resequencing (1000 Genomes Project Consortium, 2010) and gene expression variability (Li et al., 2010) –, are producing massive data, which are already historic marks in the understanding of the genetic makeup of traits. A good example is the 9p21 genomic region association with coronary artery disease (McPherson et al., 2007; Helgadottir et al., 2007). However, only a small fraction of the heritable variation of complex diseases has been identified. One possible explanation may be that many rare variants, which are not included in the common genotyping platforms, may contribute substantially to the genetic variation of complex diseases. Therefore, researchers are becoming aware that common disease – common variant and common disease – rare variant models (Gorlov et al., 2011; Carvajal-Carmona, 2010; Zhu et al., 2011) will largely contribute to understand the genetic architecture of the populations with a diverse ancestry, such as the Azoreans. Hence, regional and local studies are good approaches to comprehend the genetic specificities of each population.
Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies
The question of reception is closely linked to the history and the roots of audience studies. But what is ‘reception’ and what exactly does it mean? As audience studies have developed from a contested novelty to a now established academic field, what do we do with a concept that defined our interests in the past and may now be too wide or even obsolete? This article deals with this issue by mapping how the concept of reception was conceptualized and researched in audience studies of the past ten years, with a focus on studies of music and studies of television. We find that in music, strong focus remains on music reception in the context of performances and events, and this lies in contrast to a small number of studies which instead focus on a framework of music in ordinary life and the audiences’ contextual localities. Concerning reception of television, much of the scholarship starts from the cultural studies tradition and looks at television viewing as a means to construct identities. Discussing these findings, we inquire whether the hybridization of media also implies a hybridization of research traditions and methodologies, and what consequences it has for the balance between textual, production and audience approaches.