Older Indigenous Australians: their integral role in culture and community

This review explores the social and cultural roles played by older Indigenous Australians within their communities. In the absence of a body of conventional academic literature on this topic, we used a broad range of sources including stories, articles, videos, and other narratives to present the lived experiences of older Indigenous Australians illustrated in their own words. The intention is to move beyond the usual negative focus of reporting the significant health and social problems experienced by older Indigenous Australians, whilst still recognising that their present‐day roles within the society have to be understood against a backdrop of such lifetime disadvantage. The major underlying theme of this review is the crucial roles played by older Indigenous people and how these roles have adapted over time to contemporary circumstances. Roles include kinship relationships, support for the young, transmission of cultural knowledge, as well as the key concept of respect for older people as ‘survivors’.     

Hierarchical topological network analysis of anatomical human brain connectivity and differences related to sex and kinship

Modern non-invasive brain imaging technologies, such as diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI), enable the mapping of neural fiber tracts in the white matter, providing a basis to reconstruct a detailed map of brain structural connectivity networks. Brain connectivity networks differ from random networks in their topology, which can be measured using small worldness, modularity, and high-degree nodes (hubs). Still, little is known about how individual differences in structural brain network properties relate to age, sex, or genetic differences. Recently, some groups have reported brain network biomarkers that enable differentiation among individuals, pairs of individuals, and groups of individuals. In addition to studying new topological features, here we provide a unifying general method to investigate topological brain networks and connectivity differences between individuals, pairs of individuals, and groups of individuals at several levels of the data hierarchy, while appropriately controlling false discovery rate (FDR) errors. We apply our new method to a large dataset of high quality brain connectivity networks obtained from High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) tractography in 303 young adult twins, siblings, and unrelated people. Our proposed approach can accurately classify brain connectivity networks based on sex (93% accuracy) and kinship (88.5% accuracy). We find statistically significant differences associated with sex and kinship both in the brain connectivity networks and in derived topological metrics, such as the clustering coefficient and the communicability matrix.     

Engaging therapeutic citizenship and clientship: Untangling the reasons for therapeutic pacifism among people living with HIV in urban Zambia

This article explores the reasons for therapeutic pacifism among people living with HIV (PLHIVs) in urban Zambia. It contributes to a growing ethnography on global health, biosociality, and patient-provider dynamics. Therapeutic citizenship is a biopolitical citizenship that includes claims and ethical projects that emerge from techniques to control and manage bodies. In some contexts, therapeutic citizenship has included activism and claims-making against local, national, and international power brokers. This article investigates therapeutic citizenship in the specific context of impoverished urban Zambian compounds, sites of food insecurity, unemployment, and political exclusion, as well as targets for donor, NGO, and faith-based organisation projects and PLHIV support group proliferation. The article utilises data from participant observations at two Lusaka AIDS clinics, interviews, and focused discussions with support groups of PLHIVs. It argues that PLHIVs continuously negotiate subjectivities related to kinship, clientship, religious belief, and political citizenship in processes that complicate therapeutic citizenship. Rather than fostering participation in PLHIV support groups or challenging ‘politics as usual’ through activist claims-making to institutions of biopower, these processes lead to therapeutic pacifism.     

‘Love builds brains’: representations of attachment and children's brain development in parenting education material

A focus on early brain development has come to dominate expert child rearing advice over the past two decades. Recent scholars have noted a reinvigoration of the concept of attachment in this advice and changes in the ways that attachment is framed and understood. The extent to which the concept of attachment is drawn on, the way it is framed, and the consequences for mothers, families and parent‐child relationships is examined through a discursive analysis of a current Canadian parental education campaign. Findings support the argument that attachment is receiving a great deal of attention in brain‐based parenting education programmes as children's emotional development becomes increasingly prioritized. Attachment is presented as needing to be actively and continually built through expert‐guided empathetic and responsive parental behaviour, and is framed as crucial for the development of brain pathways that promote emotional strength and self‐regulation in children. Attachment‐building is also presented as requiring highly intensive parenting that falls overwhelmingly to mothers. The parent‐child relationship that is envisioned is one that is instrumental, lacking in affect and conducive to the creation of ideal self‐regulating neo‐liberal citizens.     

Controlling food,controlling relationships: exploring the meanings and dynamics of family food practices through the diary‐interview approach

Potential merits of a social practice perspective for examining the meanings and dynamics of family food include moving beyond individual behaviour, and exploring how practices emerge, develop and change. However, researchers have struggled to encourage reflection on mundane practices, and how to understand associated meanings. Drawing on a study of families in South Wales, this article reflects on the value of the diary‐interview approach in addressing these methodological challenges, and aims to explore and understand the dynamics of control across family contexts. Contemporary practice theories distinguish between practices as ‘performances’ and practices as ‘entities’ and the diary‐interview method facilitated an examination of these dimensions. Detailed accounts of daily ‘performances’ (through diaries), alongside reflection on underlying contexts and ‘entities’ (through interviews), illustrated the entanglement of control, practices and context. The article adds further complexity to the concept of practice ‘bundles’ which facilitated an understanding of how food was interrelated with other practices – across family contexts and across generations. Sociological approaches with a practices perspective at the core, offer potential for developing public health interventions by acknowledging: the relational meaning of food; the embeddedness of food within everyday practices; and the need to consider interventions across a range of policy areas.     

Negotiating identity at the intersection of paediatric and genetic medicine: the parent as facilitator,narrator and patient

This article identifies a significant transformation in the role and identity of parents accompanying their child to clinic. This shift is a product of the intersection between paediatric and genetic medicine, where parents play a critical role in providing information about their child, family and ultimately, about themselves. To provide a context for this matrix, two broad areas of sociological inquiry are highlighted. The first is explanations of the role a parent plays in paediatric medicine and the second is the diagnostic process in paediatric genetics and the implications for parent and child identities. Drawing from an ethnographic study of clinical consultations, attention is paid to the changing role of parenthood and the extended role of patienthood in paediatric genetic medicine.     

Navigating Interdependence: How Adolescents Raised Solely by Grandparents Experience Their Family Relationships

This study examined how adolescents raised solely by grandparents navigated their relationships with their parents and grandparents and how these relationships were influenced by the caregiving context. Forty‐one adolescents participated in qualitative, semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that relationships with parents were primarily companionate or marked by distance and distrust. Grandchildren had strong emotional bonds to their grandparents, although they also negotiated several sources of stress. Participants also reported feelings of gratitude because of the positive influence their grandparents had on their lives. Caregiving context shaped grandchildren’s interdependence with their parents and grandparents in numerous ways. Findings highlight the complexity of grandchildren’s family relationships and underscore the value of a systemic approach to understanding youth who are being raised by grandparents.     

Case‐control association testing in the presence of unknown relationships

Genome‐wide association studies result in inflated false‐positive results when unrecognized cryptic relatedness exists. A number of methods have been proposed for testing association between markers and disease with a correction for known pedigree‐based relationships. However, in most case‐control studies, relationships are generally unknown, yet the design is predicated on the assumption of at least ancestral relatedness among cases. Here, we focus on adjusting cryptic relatedness when the genealogy of the sample is unknown, particularly in the context of samples from isolated populations where cryptic relatedness may be problematic. We estimate cryptic relatedness using maximum‐likelihood methods and use a corrected χ² test with estimated kinship coefficients for testing in the context of unknown cryptic relatedness. Estimated kinship coefficients characterize precisely the relatedness between truly related people, but are biased for unrelated pairs. The proposed test substantially reduces spurious positive results, producing a uniform null distribution of P‐values. Especially with missing pedigree information, estimated kinship coefficients can still be used to correct non‐independence among individuals. The corrected test was applied to real data sets from genetic isolates and created a distribution of P‐value that was close to uniform. Thus, the proposed test corrects the non‐uniform distribution of P‐values obtained with the uncorrected test and illustrates the advantage of the approach on real data. Genet. Epidemiol. 33:668–678, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.