Somatic gene therapy remains a promising therapeutic approach for both inherited and acquired disorders. Among the tissues amenable to gene therapy, the skin, and particularly the epidermal cells, present several features advantageous for genetic manipulation and monitoring of therapeutic effects. Candidate diseases for cutaneous gene therapy not only involve skin defects but also systemic abnormalities. The robust basic and pre-clinical data gathered during the last few years have allowed the imminent launching of keratinocyte-based gene therapy with applications to patients.

Accounts of the evolution of human language must, by their very nature, express claims of a historical sort: claims about why, when, where or how human language emerged and/or developed in some distant past. What is more, it is of the essence of those claims that they are put forward in the absence of direct evidence about the events and factors that may or may not have been involved in the evolution of language. In modern work on language evolution, however, scholars have come up with various strategies aimed at lessening or even solving this problem of evidential paucity. One of these approaches starts from the assumption that language evolution can be studied by examining other phenomena about which there is direct evidence. This article sets out, in informal terms, what it is to use such phenomena as windows on language evolution.

International criminal justice really began at Nuremberg in 1945, after an inauspicious start at Versailles in 1919. But little happened during the Cold War, and only in the 1990s, driven by a human rights movement that had refocused its energy on the rights of victims and concerns about impunity and accountability, did the efforts revive. The United Nations pioneered the activity, with three ad hoc tribunals. In 2002, a permanent institution, the International Criminal Court, began its operations. Concerns about the fairness of such proceedings have featured since the earliest days. In balance, both Nuremberg and its modern-day successors deliver acceptable judgments from a due process standpoint, although problems remain. Also troubling is an emphasis on convictions based upon paradigms that approach vicarious liability. This enhances the probability of conviction, but weakens the stigma of guilt and ultimately compromises the historical legacy. There is also a recent tendency to focus upon non-state actors, prosecuting rebels and terrorists rather than crimes of state.

The policy frame and resource base within which universities work in the UK have undergone drastic changes. Whilst the nature of changes at the governmental level has often been remarked upon, there is little empirical work on the impact of these changes on academic values and working. This paper reports findings from the English component of an Anglo–Norwegian-Swedish project nearing completion which gives an account of the policy changes and their impact on values, research agendas and criteria, and modes of creating and ‘delivering’ the curriculum. Whilst the research invites caution about overstating the discontinuities of policy over the last 20 years, it displays the considerable effects of policy changes which emerge, however, differently in different subject areas and types of institution.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal, supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe.

If we look at the Mediterranean only as a space, a dissonant geography is obvious. Its diversity is mistakenly reduced in a process of ‘diorthosis’, a cognitive and operational approach that starts from assuming the nature of things and functionality modes rather than arriving at a proper image via actual analysis.1 The study of flows, of networks – i.e. the circulation of ideas, people, finances, and so on – challenges the continuous representation of the Mediterranean between homogeneity and otherness, and re-posits it as both a post-colonial imbricate site of encounters and currents and as a site of new hegemonic and counter-power discourse(s) and alliances. This paper explores the ‘mobility’ paradigm as an initial approach to contemporary geographies of the Mediterranean. The latter are being created not only by the media, powers and ideologies, but also by everyday people’s inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and emotional interactions in places and digital communication channels. Such interactions are often characterized by blockages of inter-ethnic or inter-cultural exchanges, as well as by inequalities. They present and discuss initial paths of new encounters structuring North–South relationships, and vice versa, but also circular and East–West ones since they are typified by a variety of personal and virtual mobilities in terms of gender, motivations, emotional geographies, impacts, and circulation rather than origin/destination, and so on. It seems to me that the internet and people’s spatial mobility underline a deep process of change for the Mediterranean. A dialectic of diaspora politics, circuits of funds, weapons, empowerments, and emotions, challenge the boundaries of political communities in transformation. The Mediterranean thus appears as a global space of confrontation, emulation, opposition, dialectics, and change. Places, flows, wires and digital TV are the loci for all this. There is no assumption of ‘Mediterranean as a bridge of cultures’; instead, we all are actors in networking communities

Progress is hardly a given in the humanities or the suspect sciences. In many ways we are not quite as astute as our grandparents, and they not as much as theirs, and so forth in an infinite entropic regress. Would I trade Montaigne or Stendhal's psychological acumen for even the best work that comes from social psychology departments? In this short essay I want to show just how good some medieval people, medieval Icelanders to be exact, were at understanding the mental and emotional states of others, and if of others then presumably, though not necessarily, also of themselves. And I hope to show in some ways they were rather more sophisticated than we are.

This article examines differences of non-standard employment among parenting couples on the basis of qualitative research carried out in Rome and Naples. Although there is a growing interest in Europe in issues of flexibility and job security, there has been little focus upon the social differences among non-standard workers. Social class differences are assumed to be represented by the polarization between protected and secure employees on the one hand and casual and unprotected ones on the other, as if the latter represented a homogeneous group of marginalized workers. The research presented here offers evidence about three types of social differences among Italian couples of non-standard workers: job insecurity, the impact of various types of work-flexibility, and the organization of home–work boundaries. These vary widely depending upon the content, technological organization and prestige of professional positions that non-standard workers hold. This paper shows how social and economic differences within the group of non-standard workers affect family life.

This article considers the modern-day relevance of C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ while the author, Walter Massey, reflects upon his own personal journey through these two worlds, from his early life as a student of physics, to his current role as Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The divisions between the sciences and the arts have been improved over time, thanks to the evolution of both disciplines, the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a more collaborative mindset among scholars of both worlds. Certain shared challenges remain, such as the decline in the perceived value of intellectualism and scholarship among certain segments of society. The keys to overcoming these new two cultures are open communication and transparency.

In this paper, the author critically analyses Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (Flammarion, 2017). The analysis uses post-structural theories of discourse, gender, and post-colonialism. The author argues that the novel employs neo-orientalist modes of identification where abjection is a fundamental theme. A neo-orientalist mode of identification refers to how knowledge about Muslims as an abject other is produced through various discursive techniques of differentiation, and how this performative practice is articulated through contingent conceptions of race, religion, and gender. Abjection refers to a symbolic castration, namely the central theme of how Western masculinity and European civilization has been de-masculinized by social democracy, liberalism, globalization, and feminism. Finally, the analysis of the novel is contrasted and compared with Houellebecq’s earlier writings.

The term globalization has been accepted very quickly. Until the 1990’s virtually unknown, the word is now on everybody’s lips. The phenomenon of globalization however is much older than the concept. It started at the end of the 15th century with the beginnings of European expansion and was dramatically increased by the industrialization of the world since the late 18th century. Over the last 30 years or so it has accelerated so much that one can speak of a new stage of globalization.

Today Western European welfare states find themselves in a paradoxical situation: parts of working life are in need of labour that is difficult to find nationally – and internationally. While this is partly due to inflexible policies, it is also due to competition for labour among Western countries. At the same time, asylum seekers are constantly arriving, often to be joined by family members. The authorities are confronted with a mismatch between the supply of, and demand for, immigrants. The receiving countries do not get the labour they want, while many of those who actually come cannot be incorporated productively for various reasons. This situation illustrates the squeeze facing today’s welfare states – in this article exemplified with the Norwegian case – between the logic of humanitarian responsibilities and the concerns of the national economy.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by multifarious crises that have given way to individual and collective wounds resulting from environmental disasters, exile and migratory movements, war, terrorism, radicalism and other disturbing historical episodes. Our main contention is that trauma and/or excessive exposure to vulnerable situations can be relieved thanks to diverse narrative practices. Accordingly, we explore the field of Trauma Studies since its emergence to its current evolution towards the vulnerability paradigm, examining the different meanings of vulnerability not only from the perspective of the life sciences but also from the social sciences and its application to the humanities. Then, we move on to the notion of resilience and how it can help us articulate and/or move beyond trauma and vulnerability. In keeping with this, considering the ethical and political relationality between the self and other, we highlight one’s tendency to be affected by the other’s wounds and vulnerability as well as the inevitability of interdependency and interconnectedness between people and non-human entities. Thus, we explore the role of literature in giving voice to the voiceless and to unheard experiences of suffering as well as in representing the demise of the sovereign self and the rise of human and non-human interconnectedness after being exposed to traumatic or disastrous events, as represented in contemporary literatures in English.

Data aggregations are an under-acknowledged site of social relations. The social and technical specifics of how data aggregate are arenas for rich debates about how knowledge ought to be produced, and who should produce it. Consumer goods such as fitness trackers create conditions where data scientists or professional researchers are no longer the only ones making decisions about how to aggregate data. Users of these products also rework their data to discover something medically significant to them. These practices call attention to a modality of ‘scaling up’ datasets about a single person that is different from, and until recently largely invisible to, clinical approaches to big data, which privilege the creation of a ‘bird’s eye’ view across as many people. Both technical questions how to build these aggregations, and social questions of who should be involved, betray broader epistemological issues about how new knowledge is created from electronic devices.

Universities in the UK have been offering ‘bachelor of science’ degrees in preposterous made-up pseudoscience. The Freedom of Information Act made it possible to winkle out some of the nonsense taught on these courses. When this was exposed on blogs and in the mainstream media, vice-chancellors were embarrassed into closing many of the courses. The fact that it had to be done this way reflects badly on the integrity of the vice-chancellors involved. And the total failure of every regulatory agency to achieve this reveals the bad value that they give.

There is very much more to Daniel Defoe's inspired piece of ‘faction’ about Robinson Crusoe than seeing it just as a boy's adventure story. Its influence was widespread, judging by the great scale of new editions and reprintings, both internationally and through many translations. It can be read as a sophisticated myth of the ascent of man, of economic growth by dint of the work ethic, of the imperative of ‘improvement’ and the determination to master nature. It has implications for natural rights theory, the Lockeian justification of private property and the role of the ‘civilised’ European facing a hostile, alien habitat.

Roman Jakobson famously defined poetry as pivoting on the metaphorical axis with parallelism as a major feature, and James Kugel argues that parallelism is the defining feature of biblical poetry. The parallel structure – including its variations of symmetry and antithesis – is crucial for classical Chinese poetry. In drawing on both Chinese and Western critical views on the symmetrical structure of parallelism and antithesis, this paper will explore the relationship between the cognitive and linguistic correlation in the formation of parallel structure in literary language, particularly poetry, and argue for the basis of parallelism as deeply embedded in the mind and manifested in literary expressions.

In the Lisbon Agenda, the European Union’s member States have committed themselves to invest in becoming the most competitive economy in the world. In this paper we review the evidence on whether investment in health should be part of this process. Concentrating on microeconomic studies, we show how better health can increase productivity and labour supply. In addition, there is an indirect positive effect through the investment that healthy people make their own education. Governments pursuing sustainable economic growth – broadly defined – should include the health of their population along with education and physical infrastructure in a balanced investment strategy.

As the discipline of Comparative Literature expands beyond its traditional concentration on the literatures of a few European great powers, our expanded range of vision involves rethinking Europe itself as well as the larger global production of literature. Already in the 19th century, comparatists were deeply engaged in sorting out relations between major powers and minor literatures, as can be seen in the ambitious early journal Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, edited in the 1870s by the Transylvanian comparatist Hugo Meltzl. This article discusses Meltzl's journal and its struggles against the great-power cosmopolitanism represented by Meltzl's rival, the German comparatist Max Koch. As an illustration of the importance of trans-national perspectives in understanding European identity, the article concludes with a discussion of the recording of pagan myth in medieval Iceland.