Explore the vast range of titles available.

New models of collective farming have been suggested as potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transform peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we ask: to what extent can collective farming open up possibilities of empowerment for margilized groups in smallholder agriculture? We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by a research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small landholdings and a high rate of margilised and landless farmers. We alyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across scales, (2) intersectiolity and (3) emotiol attachment. Our results in Saptari/ Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotiol attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land and capital. We find that gendered relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action and access to land and water, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relatiol understanding of collective farming processes. Our alysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can compliment commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming.

Water security has become the new buzzword for water and development programmes in the rural South. The concept has potential to focus policymakers and practitioners on the inequalities and injustices that lie behind lack of access to affordable, safe, and clean water. The concept of women's empowerment also provides an opportunity to do this. However, the vast majority of water security interventions using the term are apolitically and technically framed and fail to understand complex intersectional inequalities. We suspect that many of these interventions have been implemented following a business-as-usual approach with the risk of reproducing and even exacerbating existing gendered inequalities in access to and control over water. This article explores these concerns in the context of four villages in Western Nepal, where two internationally funded programmes aimed to empower women by improving access to water for both domestic and productive uses. They hoped to transform women into rural entrepreneurs and grassroots leaders. However, differences between women - such as age, marital status, caste, remittance flow, and land ownership - led to some women benefiting more than others. Water programmes must recognise and address difference between women if the poorest and most disadvantaged women are to benefit. Gender mainstreaming in the water sector needs to update its understanding of women's empowerment in line with current feminist understandings of it as a processual, relational, and multi-dimensional concept. This means focusing on inter-household relations within communities, as well as intra-household relations. In addition, we recommend that water security programmes rely on more nuanced and context-specific understandings of women's empowerment that go beyond enhanced access to resources and opportunities to develop agency to include social networks, critical consciousness, and values.

Collective farming has been suggested as a potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transforming peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we reflect on the extent to which collective farming enables marginalized groups to engage in smallholder agriculture. We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by an action research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small landholdings and a high rate of marginalised and landless farmers. We analyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across scales, (2) intersectionality and (3) emotional attachment. Our results in Saptari/Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotional attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land, produce and capital. We find that unequal gender relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action, land tenure and water management, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relational understanding of collective farming processes. Our analysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can complement commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming.

According to Floysand (4), social practices can be defined as interactions between two or more agents that are characterized by overlapping processes of transaction and signification or as the interchange of goods and signs (s. figure 1). [...]the well being of women gets sacrificed and compromised for the overall family honor and status in society. 46 The discussed data show how dowry as a social practice creates and sustains a highly gendered discriminatory space amongst members of the Kushwaha caste in urban Patna, Bihar.

In this chapter, we review literature on gender-mainstreaming in agricultural and forestry institutions in the global North and South through the lens of two cases - the CGIAR and one of its organizations in Nepal, IWMI, and the Lantbrukarnas Riksförbund (LRF)'s Gender-Equality Academy in Sweden. Both these institutions took up gender-mainstreaming as a strategy and we follow their work in relation to dominant themes from the literature on gender-mainstreaming. A striking parallel across the global South and North is the lack of discussion on land ownership and systemic inequalities in mainstreaming attempts. Another parallel is the penchant for silver bullets in relation to gender-mainstreaming, for example in the partiality towards economic empowerment/women's entrepreneurship and assumption of neutral markets. One major difference between the North and South is the support to collectives/networks in the South in mainstreaming attempts that has enabled action and claims by women as may be seen in the literature and in the CGIAR gender network. The focus in the North has remained on the individual woman. Here, women got together in the #metoo movement to challenge the system. We also highlight the issue of men as figureheads for mainstreaming and the cleavages between the natural and social sciences that become apparent in mainstreaming attempts. This chapter examines the issue of gender mainstreaming in agriculture and forestry in the North and South. It analyzes some of the main themes that emerged from a review of literature on gender mainstreaming and relate them to our case studies. Writing on the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, Shortall wonders how gender mainstreaming can apply to an industry that is intrinsically premised on the exploitation of family labor and particularly women's labor. Gender mainstreaming, as a necessity, comes up frequently in the realm of development and environmental governance and often in different places at different times. The push came first when feminists at the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 made it an essential part of all national strategies. The builds on a review of the literature on gender mainstreaming, primarily from English language journals and books and mainly from the late 1990s onwards when critiques of gender mainstreaming picked up in the literature.

COVID-19 and response measures have major economic implications, including for global value chains, and these implications are gendered. Consequently, unlike other chapters that are highly researched, this epilogue is a collective thought piece with our initial thoughts that might form the basis of future research. Large inequalities between women, men persist in terms of salaries, job security, social protection, unemployment benefits, and health insurance. With their insecure contracts, women are vulnerable to losing their jobs, incomes, economic ­independence. Women are responsible for a disproportionate share of the additional unpaid care work within households, communities. As COVID-19 spreads, the knock-on effects on global food systems unfold, lessons learned from past pandemics on gender impacts reinforce the centrality of sound gender analysis for both preparedness and response efforts to the crisis. The impact on the production, processing of food for consumption, sale will also be greatly impacted by closing borders, lockdowns, and social distancing, which may threaten consumers' food supply.

RAS proteins control cell proliferation and activating mutations are collectively the most frequent oncogenic event observed in cancer patients, justifying investments into multiple drug discovery efforts. While RAS-directed therapeutic agents targeting either the inactive GDP-bound or the active GTP-bound state have entered the clinic, invariably resistance is observed. Mutations at drug binding sites represent a common resistance mechanism indicating the need to discover new targetable pockets in RAS. Such efforts are hindered by the small globular size of the protein, for long considered undruggable. Here we perform macrocyclic peptides mRNA and nanobody yeast display screens and discover a targetable ligand-induced pocket in RAS. In vitro and cellular experiments with the KM12 and KM12-AM nanobodies show RAS inhibition via displacement of cRAF, by affecting their protein-protein interaction via the less studied cRAF CRD domain. Further, we provide orthogonal functional validation for the discovered binding pocket via mutagenesis experiments. Notably, the discovered RAS-targeting approach enables simultaneous targeting of both GTP-bound active and GDP-bound inactive states and leaves the SwII pocket unaltered, opening possibilities of combinatorial approaches with clinically approved SwII pocket inhibitors. In this work, Beyer and colleagues have utilized display screening technologies to comprehensively chart RAS proteins “druggability” and in doing so unravel a targetable ligand-induced pocket in RAS opening unprecedented anti-RAS targeted opportunities.

Stéphanie Debette and colleagues report the results of a genome-wide association study of cervical artery dissection, a major cause of ischemic stroke in young adults. They show that common variation in PHACTR1 , previously associated with lower risk of migraine and increased risk of myocardial infarction, is associated with reduced risk of cervical artery dissection. Cervical artery dissection (CeAD), a mural hematoma in a carotid or vertebral artery, is a major cause of ischemic stroke in young adults although relatively uncommon in the general population (incidence of 2.6/100,000 per year) 1 . Minor cervical traumas, infection, migraine and hypertension are putative risk factors 1 , 2 , 3 , and inverse associations with obesity and hypercholesterolemia are described 3 , 4 . No confirmed genetic susceptibility factors have been identified using candidate gene approaches 5 . We performed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in 1,393 CeAD cases and 14,416 controls. The rs9349379[G] allele ( PHACTR1 ) was associated with lower CeAD risk (odds ratio (OR) = 0.75, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.69–0.82; P = 4.46 × 10 −10 ), with confirmation in independent follow-up samples (659 CeAD cases and 2,648 controls; P = 3.91 × 10 −3 ; combined P = 1.00 × 10 −11 ). The rs9349379[G] allele was previously shown to be associated with lower risk of migraine and increased risk of myocardial infarction 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . Deciphering the mechanisms underlying this pleiotropy might provide important information on the biological underpinnings of these disabling conditions.