Books on the topic 'MAPS pathway'

Early nineteenth-century studies demonstrated, on the basis of clinical, experimental, and anatomical evidence, that a motor pathway, the corticospinal or pyramidal tract, passes from a specific area of the cortex, the precentral motor cortex, to the brainstem and spinal cord. The motor cortex can be seen as a topographic map of the movable body parts, and damage to the cortex or pathways produces correspondingly localized paralysis. However, there are a great many other pathways that link other areas of the cortex to parts of the brain active in the control of movements. These still play a puzzling role in the standard model where the control of movements focuses on cortical contributions to voluntary movements by the corticospinal pathways.

A brief introduction to cancer biology, aimed at psychiatrists, is offered. Selective DNA transcription, the cell cycle, receptor tyrosine kinases, and cell signalling pathways are introduced, using the EGFR/RAS/MAPK pathway as an exemplar. The molecular pathology of oncogenesis is summarized, including discussion of oncogenes, tumour suppressor genes, and examples of driver mutations. The exploitation of such mutations in stratified medicine, using molecularly targeted agents, is mentioned. Finally, Hanahan and Weinberg’s six hallmarks of cancer are listed, adding angiogenesis and metastasis to the picture of oncogenesis.

This chapter gives a short overview of the Pathways Project, its aims and objectives, and its media of choice. The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. This chapter argues that both technologies are alike, and furthermore that they have an advantage over the traditional media of books in that they “mine the way we think” by processing along pathways within a network. Finally, the chapter maps out the structure of the Pathways Project, both in the form of its website, and in this book.

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

Chapter 3 depicts Birmingham’s booming print culture and maps its members, activities, and locations. Bookshops, printers, libraries, lecturers, and debating societies offered self-education to non-elites who enjoyed cultural activities. Hutton sold second-hand books and ran a circulating library. He disseminated useful knowledge for ‘the meaner sort’ and sold cheap paper to workshops. His neglected cashbook (1751–3) lists 1,038 books, stationery, and services. Charts and tables analyse the items he sold by type, subject, price, and sales. The cashbook’s references to ‘reading’ present new evidence of the role of the bookshop as an early community reading centre. Hutton’s very low prices also challenge the orthodoxy that non-elites could not afford to read. The books he sold were practical products, not the pathway to politeness that dominates eighteenth-century studies. Book bills, catalogues, and inventories of the contents of Hutton’s shop reveal the mechanics of selling and consuming books in rare detail.

Social mobilization has been the catalyst, guarantor, and pathway for fulfillment of human rights worldwide. Social movements represent marginalized populations, raise consciousness of new issues, establish or bridge compelling frames for social problems, foster transnational networks, translate international norms into locally appropriate vocabularies, advocate, occupy public and forbidden space, mobilize culture change, and persuade decision makers, elites, and mass publics. This chapter treats the complementary pathways of mobilization to contest violence against women: voice, advocacy, transnationalism, vernacularization, and information politics. We will see voice against femicide in Pakistan and Brazil, alongside public protest and lobbying for reform over all types of gender violence in the Philippines, Algeria, and Argentina. Transnational mobilization strategies in Mexico and Nigeria contrast with vernacular translation of international norms by grassroots movements in India. Meanwhile, online campaigns create new repertoires and vocabularies to protest harassment, rape, and honor cultures in Pakistan, Egypt, India, and Brazil.

This chapter shows, using atomic xenon as a prototype, how coincidence maps and double photionisation spectra are created from the raw electron timing data, and how direct and indirect photoionisation pathways can be distinguished in the maps. A minor feature in the maps is recognised as coming from electron-impact single ionisation, which can be studied by the same technique. The chapter also explains how a simple formula can be used, with constants calibrated by measuring electrons of known energy, to convert the times of flight into kinetic energies. This introductory chapter concludes with a summary of some basic features of double photoionisation and of the spectra presented in this book, exemplified by Xe, including times of flight, energy resolution, ionisation, and Auger decay.

The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has been an exciting breakthrough in our understanding of the genetic aetiology of autoimmune diseases. Substantial overlap has been found in susceptibility genes across multiple diseases, from connective tissue diseases and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, and psoriasis. Major technological advances now permit genotyping of millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Group analysis of SNPs by haplotypes, aided by completion of the Hapmap project, has improved our ability to pinpoint causal genetic variants. International collaboration to pool large-scale cohorts of patients has enabled GWAS in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), systemic sclerosis and Behçet's disease, with studies in progress for ANCA-associated vasculitis. These 'hypothesis-free' studies have revealed many novel disease-associated genes. In both SLE and systemic sclerosis, identified genes map to known pathways including antigen presentation (MHC, TNFSF4), autoreactivity of B and T lymphocytes (BLK, BANK1), type I interferon production (STAT4, IRF5) and the NFκ‎B pathway (TNIP1). In SLE alone, additional genes appear to be involved in dysregulated apoptotic cell clearance (ITGAM, TREX1, C1q, C4) and recognition of immune complexes (FCGR2A, FCGR3B). Future developments include whole-genome sequencing to identify rare variants, and efforts to understand functional consequences of susceptibility genes. Putative environmental triggers for connective tissue diseases include infectious agents, especially Epstein-Barr virus; cigarette smoking; occupational exposure to toxins including silica; and low vitamin D, due to its immunomodulatory effects. Despite numerous studies looking at toxin exposure and connective tissue diseases, conclusive evidence is lacking, due to either rarity of exposure or rarity of disease.

Macrophage activation syndrome (MAS) is a life-threatening condition caused by excessive activation and proliferation of T lymphocytes and haemophagocytic macrophages. Although MAS has been reported in association with almost any rheumatic disease, it is by far most common in systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Flares of the underlying disease or infection are most common triggers of MAS. The pathognomonic feature of MAS is typically found in bone marrow: numerous, well-differentiated macrophagic histiocytes phagocytosing normal haematopoietic elements. The expansion of these histiocytes leads to a massive systemic inflammatory reaction associated with three cardinal clinical features: severe cytopenias, liver dysfunction, and coagulopathy consistent with disseminated intravascular coagulation. Clinically, MAS is strikingly similar to the autosomal recessive disorders collectively known as familial haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (FHLH). FHLH has been associated with various genetic defects affecting the cytolytic pathway. Cytolytic function is profoundly depressed in MAS patients as well, and this abnormality is caused by both genetic and acquired factors. Studies in animals suggest that uncontrolled expansion of activated CD8+ T lymphocytes secreting cytokines that activate macrophages is central to the pathophysiology of haemophagocytic syndromes. Consistent with this view, the combination of steroids and ciclosporin, an immunosuppressant that preferentially inhibits T lymphocytes, is an effective treatment for the majority of MAS patients. Patients in whom MAS remains active despite this treatment present a serious challenge and require more aggressive immunosuppression. However, in MAS triggered by infection, the optimal level of immunosuppression is difficult to determine. As a result, reported mortality rates reach 20%.

Pontine gliomas-also known as diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG)-primarily occur in children and typically present subacutely with a combination of cranial nerve palsies associated with long track signs including hyper-reflexia in the legs, positive Babinski responses, and cerebellar signs. On imaging they typically appear as intrinsic mass lesions within the pons. Treatment with radiation can prolong the course of from months to years but the tumors are rarely curable. Chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy targeted at specific signaling pathways has shown only modest impact on survival.

This chapter addresses the neurological architecture of both pain and addiction. The components of the relationship between the two are manifold, and include substances ingested; neurotransmitters and their receptor sites; cells, tissues, and organs and their integrated function. The author focuses on the basic neuroscience. The opening discussion (“Progress in Understanding Pain and Addiction”) maps our present understanding of both the plasticity of brain circuits and the fixity of drug effects. There follows a review of the anatomical structure of the brain, integrated with the known addiction and pain sensation processing pathways; an anatomical figure of the brain is provided. These descriptions lead to a scenario-based discussion of the implications for treatment of both pain and addiction: a patient with high pain tolerance experiencing pain, a patient with low pain tolerance experiencing pain, and the consequences of administering opioids. It concludes with therapeutic recommendations for management.

We argue that dominant research approaches concerning mental illness, which are centered on traditional categories of psychiatric classification as codified in the DSM-IV, have serious empirical, conceptual, and foundational problems. These problems have led to a classification scheme and body of research findings that provide a very poor map of the domain of mental illness, a map that, in turn, undermines clinical and research pursuits. We discuss some current efforts to respond to these problems and argue that the DSM-5 revision process is not very promising, whereas the NIMH Research Domain Criteria initiative and some recent research in cognitive neuroscience fares better, although the latter remains potentially compromised by residual influences of the DSM-based approach. We conclude with some lessons and suggestions for the pursuit of alternative research pathways.

After control of the primary process causing acute neurological injury, further control of secondary injury pathways can be achieved by manipulating brain temperature, and achieving biochemical and metabolic homeostasis. Surgical techniques are routinely used to remove blood or trapped cerebrospinal fluid, control mass effect, or repair unstable vascular abnormalities. Therapeutic temperature management to a defined target can be achieved and maintained using cold fluids, ice packs, body surface cooling pads, and surface and intravascular devices with servo (feedback) mechanisms. Successful temperature management requires attentive surveillance and control of shivering and other potential complications, such as bleeding, infection, cardiac arrhythmias, and electrolyte and metabolic disturbances. Extremes of oxygenation and ventilation are associated with worse long-term functional outcomes, and should be avoided.

A vital task for organizations is to communicate their organizational identity in ways that generate organizational images that are attractive to external stakeholders. Such favorable evaluations may generate stakeholder identification—a perception of belonging such that an organization becomes important to stakeholders’ sense of self. This chapter reviews and integrates prior research to elaborate how organizational communications via mass communication channels (e.g., company websites) can generate stakeholder identification. Several motivational pathways are outlined involving stakeholders’ needs for uncertainty reduction, self-continuity, and self enhancement. Association and dissociation communication strategies offer organizations means of conveying organizational images that directly address these stakeholder needs. How organizational communications aimed at stakeholder identification connects to other management practices such as corporate branding and corporate identity communication are discussed.

The origins of On Becoming a Scholarlie in the realisation that there is a need for a vademecum, a handy compendium of ideas, plans and strategies for building a productive and fulfilling academic career to guide the host of prospective academics. On Becoming a Scholaris geared to help relatively new scholars to construct personal futures and to find their way through the 21st century university. It is intended to be a map, and like any map it does not contain all the contours and details of the landscape, but rather seeks to reveal the important pathways and milestones in the journey to becoming an established academic. Drawing on highly experienced academics and accomplished professors in their different fields, as well as promising younger academics already on their way, this book cover a concentratedresource of practical wisdom. The topics are broad and, cumulatively, they seek to answer the many questions that experiencedmentors encounter every day in their work with new academics.

American officials attempted to construct the plausible legality of torture, indefinite detention, targeted killing, and mass surveillance in the global war on terror. These efforts were largely successful, foreclosing prosecution and ensuring impunity for human rights violations. Moreover, with the exception of torture, many of these counterterrorism practices persist and enjoy widespread acceptance. Around the world, international human rights and humanitarian law have been weakened by American efforts to erode and reinterpret constraints on state violence. This has created space for more overt attacks on legal norms by the Trump administration, which has signaled its intent to shift American national security legal culture toward the politics of exception. At the same time, international law advocates are pushing back. The chapter concludes by reflecting on possible pathways for promoting a culture of human rights in the United States.

Tracts descending from motor control centers in the brainstem and cortex target motor interneurons and in select cases motoneurons. The mechanisms and constraints of postural control are elaborated and the effect of body mass on posture discussed. Feed-forward reflexes that maintain posture during standing and other conditions of self-motion are described. The role of descending tracts in postural control and the pathological posturing is described. Pyramidal (corticospinal and corticobulbar) and extrapyramidal control of body and face movements is contrasted. Special emphasis is placed on cortical regions and tracts involved in deliberate control of facial expression; these pathways are contrasted with mechanisms for generating emotional facial expressions. The signs associated with lesions of either motoneurons or motor control centers are clearly detailed. The mechanisms and presentation of cerebral palsy are described. Finally, understanding how pre-motor cortical regions generate actions is used to introduce apraxia, a disorder of action.

The potential of documentary moving images to foster democratic exchange has been percolating within media production culture for the last century, and now, with mobile cameras at our fingertips and broadcasts circulating through unpredictable social networks, the documentary impulse is coming into its own as a political force of social change. The exploding reach and power of audio and video are multiplying documentary modes of communication. Once considered an outsider media practice, documentary is finding mass appeal in the allure of moving images, collecting participatory audiences that create meaningful challenges to the social order. Documentary is adept at collecting frames of human experience, challenging those insights, and turning these stories into public knowledge that is palpable for audiences. Generating pathways of exchange between unlikely interlocutors, collective identification forged with documentary discourse constitutes a mode of political agency that is directing energy toward acting in the world. Reflecting experiences of life unfolding before the camera, documentary representations help order social relationships that deepen our public connections and generate collective roots. As digital culture creates new pathways through which information can flow, the connections generated from social change documentary constitute an emerging public commons. Considering the deep ideological divisions that are fracturing U.S. democracy, it is of critical significance to understand how communities negotiate power and difference by way of an expanding documentary commons. Investment in the force of documentary resistance helps cultivate an understanding of political life from the margins, where documentary production practices are a form of survival.

Abstract The number of severe, sometimes catastrophic disruptive events has been rapidly increasing. Extreme weather events including floods, wildfires and hurricanes, and other natural disasters have become both more frequent and more severe. At the same time the COVID-19 pandemic has created a global threat to public health with huge economic effects that recovery packages tried to address. These disruptive events, alone and in combination, have dramatic consequences on nature, human life, and the economy, calling for urgent action to mitigate their causes and adapt to their impacts. In response to discourses of collapsology and end-of-growth theories, this book offers an analytical approach to developing legal responses that can help assure that needs of present and future generations can be met through energy systems, infrastructure development, and natural resources management in times of more frequent and intense disruption. ‘Resilience’ is therefore seen as a common framework for the interpretation and development of energy, infrastructure, and natural resources law. With a mix of thematic chapters and case studies from multiple jurisdictions, the book maps and assesses legal responses to disruptive nature-based events, and examines possible legal pathways for more sustainable outcomes, based on its engagement with the concept of ‘resilience’ and a social-ecological thinking.

In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People, David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB's urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger. Beginning in urban dumpsters, Giles traces the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless thrown out—an act that manufactures food scarcity—to the social order of “world-class” cities, the pathways of discarded food as it circulates through the FNB kitchen, and the anticapitalist political movements the kitchen represents. Describing the mutual entanglement of global capitalism and anticapitalist transgression, Giles captures those emergent forms of generosity, solidarity, and resistance that spring from the global city's marginalized residents.

The anatomy and function of forebrain circuits is described. The role of the hypothalamus as the executive center for regulating and protecting the body’s physiology is detailed. The thalamus is a necessary interpreter for subcortical inputs to cerebral cortex, which uses thalamic input to map the sensory world. The amygdala, critical to expressing and interpreting fear, has been implicated in post-traumatic stress disorder. During resting conditions, the basal ganglia suppress movement. Damage to the basal ganglia produces a hypo- or hyperkinetic disorder. The representation of visual fields in pathways from retina to striate cortex is described in detail. The student is then introduced to the invaluable use of visual field deficits for localizing forebrain lesions. Extrastriate, somatomotor, and prefrontal contributions to abstract functions are outlined in a clinically relevant way. Finally, the importance of the hippocampus to declarative memory is discussed, and common memory symptoms are described.

This two-volume set provides a one-stop resource on invasive plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that are threatening native ecosystems, agriculture, economies, and human health in the United States. Kudzu vine and field bindweed. Eurasian collared-doves, Burmese pythons, and black rats. The northern snakehead and the gypsy moth. All of these are examples of invasive species that have taken over or are threatening certain ecosystems—places where these organisms never naturally occurred. This two-volume work contains 168 entries on plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that are invasive in the United States, providing a complete examination of the variety of organisms, pathways, distribution patterns, and impacts of non-native species introduced to this country. Encyclopedia of Invasive Species: From Africanized Honey Bees to Zebra Musselsbegins with a background essay that illuminates the complexities of dealing with invasive animals and plants. Each entry provides information on the origins and invasion history of the species in question as well as a general description of the biology and ecology of each organism. Impacts—actual and potential, as well as management strategies—are addressed. Every species is depicted via photographs as well as maps that show its place of origin and invaded regions in the United States. This unique work presents fascinating scientific information as well as valuable insights about how seemingly minor events can drastically alter our environment.

This two-volume set provides a one-stop resource on invasive plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that are threatening native ecosystems, agriculture, economies, and human health in the United States. Kudzu vine and field bindweed. Eurasian collared-doves, Burmese pythons, and black rats. The northern snakehead and the gypsy moth. All of these are examples of invasive species that have taken over or are threatening certain ecosystems—places where these organisms never naturally occurred. This two-volume work contains 168 entries on plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms that are invasive in the United States, providing a complete examination of the variety of organisms, pathways, distribution patterns, and impacts of non-native species introduced to this country. Encyclopedia of Invasive Species: From Africanized Honey Bees to Zebra Musselsbegins with a background essay that illuminates the complexities of dealing with invasive animals and plants. Each entry provides information on the origins and invasion history of the species in question as well as a general description of the biology and ecology of each organism. Impacts—actual and potential, as well as management strategies—are addressed. Every species is depicted via photographs as well as maps that show its place of origin and invaded regions in the United States. This unique work presents fascinating scientific information as well as valuable insights about how seemingly minor events can drastically alter our environment.

The authors review how attention helps track and process dynamic events, selecting and integrating information across time and space to produce a continuing identity for a moving, changing target. Rather than a fixed ‘spotlight’ that helps identify a static target, attention needs a mobile window or ‘pointer’ to track a moving target, picking up pieces of evidence along the way to determine not just what the target is, but what it is doing. Behavioural studies show that this dynamic version of attention is model-based, using familiar trajectories to help identify a target and to guide encoding of continuing input from its path. Attention has very coarse temporal resolution for both static and moving targets. However, when the focus of selection is on the move, a given location on a moving target’s path can be selected for extremely brief instants, as little as 50 ms, compared to the typical ‘dwell time’ or minimum duration of attention selection at a fixed location, of 200 ms or more. To determine the path of a moving object, attention must accurately process and sort the onsets and offsets in order to match an offset to the subsequent onset. This aspect of dynamic attention has been called the ‘when’ pathway and patient studies show that it is a qualitatively different system from spatial attention, being completely based in the right parietal lobe for events in both hemifields. Finally, like the salience map of spatial attention, temporal attention may have its own map that guides allocation to upcoming, current, and recent moments to select information at the appropriate time, changing the experience of time as it does so.

Contributing to the rapidly emerging field of Ecolinguistics, this book explores the role of language in mediating and determining our relationship with nature and in shaping attitudes and social practices in environmental areas. In doing so, it maps out research pathways for informed ecological debate that concerns both the planet and the discipline. The book centres on two case studies. The first is a nature reserve near Siracusa in Sicily run by Fabio Cilea, where flamingos have begun to breed despite the devastation of the nearby coastline by one of the largest petro-chemical plants in Europe. The second is High Ash farm, a small farm near Norwich. Farmer, Chris Skinner, is a passionate naturalist who for thirty years has presented a programme on BBC Radio Norfolk. Through analysing the discourse of both Skinner and Cilea, the book explores what it can reveal about the underlying environmental visions that sustain them. Together with the discourse of other engaged ecological figures, a picture emerges of the connections that exist between our beliefs/attitudes, language and the natural world. Presenting a framework for analysing environmental discourse from a primarily positivist standpoint, the book draws attention to the discourses that underline social practices felt to be useful, necessary and beneficial in these moments of environmental crisis. Although these contexts are European, the methodologies applied, as well as the ecological and linguistic issues dealt with, are universal, clarifying the relationship between social practices and language itself, viewed in the book as an ecosystem that is also in need of loving attention.

In 1980, young, healthy women in the United States suddenly began to get sick and even die. The unexpected link to these deaths was superabsorbent tampons. Thousands of women used them during their menstrual periods, signaling the potential for a large-scale outbreak. Toxic Shock: A Social History traces the emergence of this new illness of toxic shock syndrome (TSS) and its relationship to tampon technology. This multifaceted history engages microbiology, design and innovation, journalism and mass communication, product liability, and federal policy and regulation. The broad scope captures the various approaches that contributed to defining meaning about the emergent illness. Vostral argues that tampon-related TSS was a paradigm shift in the way that illness manifests. No longer was an infection necessarily the origin of disease, or a faulty product the direct cause of injury. Together, a new pathway to an illness formed, in which a supposedly inert tampon became interactive, and a bacterium once in equilibrium grew dominant and produced toxins. Toxic Shock: A Social History makes a case for understanding tampon-related TSS as the result of biocatalytic activity between technology and bacterium. Moreover, though women were the primary consumers of tampons, the bacterium became the unintended users. This unusual disease process challenged standard approaches to public health, required women to evaluate technological risk, and currently serves as a harbinger about other internal medical devices used and worn within the human body.

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for the river basin beyond the destructive practices of resource extraction. It problematizes well-intentioned literary projects to map the region otherwise by charting their impact in framing contemporary struggles against the division and commodification of Amazonia. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza deliberately described the Amazonian regions of their respective countries in contrast to state and corporate projections, and the acceptance of their Amazonian novels in the Latin American literary canon has given power to their geographic representations. Smith reveals how authors sometimes mapped imperfectly, misrepresenting cultural geographies, erasing lived realities, and speaking for unacknowledged sources. Navigating Amazonia across its real and fictional landscapes, this book seeks to identify where literary configurations of the region have shaped geopolitics. This spatial reexamination of influential twentieth-century novels suggests that even literary works implicated in the ongoing repurposing of the rubber fields of the past can also plot pathways out of the cycles of extractivism.

Dignity is having a moment. It pervades our cultural, political, and legal imagination and has become a basis for LGBTQ+ rights and visibility. How has the word been invoked? Who has done so and why? Should the recognition of LGBTQ+ people as dignified be a cause for celebration or, ironically, a cause for concern? Put differently, does this recognition foster equality, equity, and inclusion, or does it expand boundaries? Beginning with an episode in HIV/AIDS history—the shuttering of bathhouses in the mid-1980s—we trace dignity’s generative work as a rhetorical and neoliberal tool to police queer bodies and practices. We map the consequences of this practice for queer logics and worldmaking in contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We explore how the term is brandished by state and cultural authorities in public health policy, cultural representations, and law. While some understand dignity as an unalloyed good, we are skeptical of what dignity requires. Because it often demands sameness as the foundation for valuing LGBTQ+ life, some political and cultural authorities, as well as some LGBTQ+ people, denigrate the value of queer life and its position of difference. Despite this pressure, the queer penchant for difference has never fully dissipated. Instead of an adoption of sameness, contemporary LGBTQ+ practices and representations often reveal a dynamic tension between dignity’s seductive rhetoric of homogenization and efforts to reclaim a historical potential for transgression and a celebration of difference. This tension creates one possible pathway to understand who we have been and who we might become.

Este 7º (sétimo) volume da New Trends in Qualitative Research (NTQR) apresenta um conjunto de trinta e quatro artigos que foram selecionados para o 10º Congresso Ibero-Americano em Investigação Qualitativa (CIAIQ), que ocorreu on-line entre os dias 13 e 16 de julho de 2021. Os artigos selecionados e apresentados neste 7º volume da NTQR estão alinhados com a proposta do CIAIQ, que recebe de braços abertos e dá voz a pesquisadores e cientistas da comunidade multidisciplinar, cujo congresso possui como foco a pesquisa qualitativa.Os trabalhos deste volume representam um desafio e uma conquista. Tal afirmação justifica-se pelo facto de a Metodologia Qualitativa não ser (ao menos até à presente data de publicação deste Prefácio) uma área ou tema de consensual (Alarcão, 2014; Minayo, 1992). De facto, se considerarmos que a ciência se caracteriza como forma de conhecimento objetivo, geral, racional, sistemático, verificável e reprodutível, seria compreensível que, durante muito tempo, a pesquisa qualitativa fosse considerada como sendo uma preferência pouco recomendada. Pesquisadores de diversas áreas que se atreviam (e se atrevem) a envolver-se neste tipo de estudos, não raro tinham os trabalhos rejeitados, e os seus resultados eram, eventualmente, considerados não-científicos.É importante registar que muitos trabalhos/artigos julga-se que possuem falta de expressividade pelos dados numéricos que utilizam, quando apresentados sem um contexto e uma análise mais ampla/profunda, e, por isso, têm-se mostrado insuficientes para a compreensão da sociedade contemporânea, ao mesmo tempo complexa e multifacetada. Assim, poderemos afirmar que, em certos ambientes académico-científicos, o final do século XX foi marcado por debates/discussões acerca dos limites e possibilidades oferecidas por pesquisas que considerassem, não apenas os aspetos mais evidentes ou coletáveis de forma organizada e matematicamente categorizada, mas também os dados qualitativos categorizados fiavelmente. A emergência de questões ligadas às novas formas de organização social, a emergência de novos problemas, como, por exemplo, os ligados às questões ecológicas ou ao uso desorganizado de produtos — inclusive de medicamentos — antes da compreensão dos seus resultados a longo prazo, resultam de uma ostensiva perda da influência do paradigma positivista e levam a uma reflexão muito mais ampla sobre o processo de construção do saber científico. Como consequência há uma crescente opção por metodologias que buscam a descoberta/produção/desenvolvimento de conhecimento e inteligibilidade de uma sociedade em constante mutação. Corroborado por Minayo (1992), verifica-se, com o passar do tempo, torna-se cada vez mais claro o uso — combinado/misto ou não — da pesquisa qualitativa como metodologia essencial quando o objetivo do estudo é buscar o entendimento do como e o porquê de certas coisas, para assim entender as subjetividades e o que está além da superfície fria dos dados puramente descritivos ou numéricos. Características básicas, quanto à epistemologia, identificam as pesquisas baseadas em abordagens qualitativas. Estas abordagens pressupõem que tais fenómenos e/ou objetos de estudo podem ser melhor compreendidos dentro do contexto em que acontecem e do qual fazem parte e, portanto, podem ser compreendidos e analisados de forma adequada a partir da compreensão da sua natureza dual ou mista. Em decorrência dessa afirmação, os pesquisadores, sempre que possível, deveriam optar por essa abordagem do locus que contextualiza o seu estudo, para com isso captar o fenómeno em estudo a partir da perspetiva do contexto no qual ele ocorre. Diante de tudo isto, é certo afirmar que as pesquisas qualitativas são encaradas (ou deveriam ser) naturalmente multifacetadas, uma vez que necessitam que os vários tipos de dados sejam coletados e analisados, de forma a contribuir para a compreensão da dinâmica do processo no qual o material pesquisado se desenvolve. Em geral, a pesquisa qualitativa tem como ponto de partida questões amplas ou mais complexas que se desconstroem durante o próprio desenvolvimento da investigação. Estudos qualitativos (em associação ou não a estudos/abordagens quantitativos/as) podem ser realizados seguindo diferentes caminhos. Segundo Pathak, Jena e Kalra (2013), em termos práticos, abordagens qualitativas oferecem inicialmente três possibilidades diferentes: pesquisas documentais, o estudo de caso e a observação em diferentes níveis, incluído a etnografia. Vale registar que, uma pesquisa com abordagem qualitativa possibilita ir além de propostas rigidamente estruturadas, e esses pontos iniciais desdobram-se em novos modelos e em novas aplicabilidades, advindas da experiência dos investigadores, que adaptam e recriam/modificam/melhoram propostas, nunca enviesando os dados, explorando novos enfoques e/ou trazendo novos usos, ou adentrando em novos ambientes e, portanto, em novas possibilidades. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa qualitativa tem-se mostrado sempre como possuindo um carácter inovador, de articulação nas, e das, inter e intra relações humanas nas suas diferentes possibilidades. Em função de tudo o que foi apontado, o número de trabalhos/artigos que recorrem a pesquisas qualitativas vem aumentando nas últimas décadas, tornaram-se bem aceites inclusive nas ciências biológicas e médicas. De tal forma que, felizmente, atualmente muitas revistas científicas ligadas às áreas distantes das ciências sociais publicam pesquisas qualitativas com bastante frequência. Ainda assim, no entanto, o valor da abordagem qualitativa para compreender os respetivos fenómenos está num bom caminho para se tornar independente da pesquisa quantitativa. Diferentemente de trabalhos puramente quantitativos, trabalhos que abordam métodos qualitativos apontam que não existem percursos metodológicos únicos e cada escolha supõe riscos e limites, mas também a abertura de novas possibilidades de compreensão (Minayo, 2017). É necessário acrescentar, no entanto, que o sucesso da pesquisa qualitativa está, principalmente, no embate bem orientado sobre autores diversos e na certeza de que assumir cegamente uma corrente é abrir mão de uma proposta dialógica. É necessário registar, também (ou ainda), a necessidade de ficar atento às armadilhas dos modismos e o fascínio por abordagens que, sendo sedutoras, podem também revelar-se superficiais e insuficientes. Assim como qualquer outra metodologia, ou abordagem, a pesquisa qualitativa exige um diálogo constante entre diferentes áreas do saber, a busca de possibilidades que vão além da especificidade das diferentes áreas profissionais, para avançar na interpretação dos resultados. Sabemos que é público que existe um certo consenso, na comunidade investigativa, de que a pesquisa qualitativa é um método de investigação científica que se foca no carácter subjetivo do objeto analisado, estudando as suas particularidades e experiências individuais. Ao manter um espaço para esse debate, o CIAIQ oferece oportunidade para que sejam consideradas as subjetividades e perspetivas culturais apresentadas nas (e por) diferentes pesquisas em diferentes áreas, de modo a ampliar a compreensão dos dados e dar profundidade à análise do quanto robusto e útil pode ser a pesquisa qualitativa. Para finalizar, queremos convidar todas.os leitoras.es a conhecer os trabalhos apresentados neste 7º volume da NTQR e a aprofundar estudos baseados com recurso à metodologia qualitativa. Em tempo, e de forma mais que merecida, queremos agradecer a todas.os as.os autoras.es pela importante e inestimável contribuição ao submeteram os seus artigos e às.aos revisoras.es pela incansável análise e avaliação dos trabalhos submetidos. A relevância científica da publicação destes trabalhos no 7º volume da NTQR é um motivo forte para a sua consolidação, e um incentivo para que futuramente mais e mais participantes/autoras.es submetam trabalhos nos próximos CIAIQs.

In an era of mass migration and restrictive responses, this book seeks to understand how migrants negotiate their place in the receiving society and adapt innovative strategies to integrate, participate, and access protection. Their acceptance is often contingent on the expectation that they contribute economically to the host country while remaining politically and socially invisible. These unwritten expectations, which this book calls the “invisibility bargain,” produce a precarious status in which migrants’ visible differences or overt political demands on the state may be met with a hostile backlash from the host society. In this context, governance networks of state and nonstate actors form an institutional web that can provide access to rights, resources, and protection for migrants through informal channels that avoid a negative backlash against visible political activism. This book examines Ecuador, the largest recipient of refugees in Latin America, asking how it has achieved migrant human security gains despite weak state presence in peripheral areas. The key finding is that localities with more dense networks composed of more diverse actors tend to produce greater human security for migrants and their neighbors. The argument has implications beyond Ecuador for migrant-receiving countries around the world. The book challenges the conventional understanding of migration and security, providing a fresh approach to the negotiation of authority between state and society. Its nuanced account of informal pathways to human security dismantles the false dichotomy between international and national politics, and it exposes the micropolitics of institutional innovation.