Alexander Baker

Adenoviruses are widely used as vectors for subunit vaccines and oncolytic therapies. Efficient vectors must infect target cells and deliver therapeutic transgenes at high levels. Species D adenoviruses, such as human adenovirus type 10 (HAdV-D10), are promising candidates due to low seroprevalence in humans. Here, we present the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the HAdV-D10 capsid alongside transcriptomic profiling of infected cells to inform vector development. The fiber shaft, essential for cell entry, was resolved at 4.6 Å, revealing a previously uncharacterized ‘umbrella’ motif. Viral transcript analysis using an ORF-centric pipeline uncovered key differences from HAdV-C5, including abundant expression of a transcript encoding a protein equivalent to mature protein VII. These findings highlight the importance of detailed vector characterization prior to clinical translation and support the advancement of HAdV-D10 as a next-generation platform for gene delivery and vaccine development.

Understanding eviction as a positioning of bodies and loss in a property relation, I argue a critical logistical reading may offer a means of describing the capacity to evict within the economic, racial, reproductive, and political configurations that drive the decisions and motives for eviction. With a focus on the Cape Town metropolitan area, I trace one route through the flows conceptualised in eviction practices in urban informal settlements in the Western Cape and their material organisation. I follow preparations from flow charts to demolition, through in‐depth interviews with individuals responsible for the planning and physical conduct of forced evictions, security facility visits, and analysis of documents and news reports. Adding to existing dialogues on the failure of housing delivery in South Africa, I describe “eviction‐logistics” as a mechanism for organising loss and an additional point of intervention for housing and land justice.

What Counterpoints describes is overwhelming: There is no one person who has the capacity to capture the ways that displacement and racialized dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area have grown...

We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore avenues to build solidarity across institutions and geographies, to ensure that the conduct of urban research, and support offered to ECAs, allows for more inclusivity, diversity, security and equitability.

An unnamed shift has occurred in geographies of eviction. While past research focused on the causes and effects of eviction in political economy, state power, and cultural difference, emerging work emphasises the subjective experience and sustaining practices of eviction as it happens. This paper makes the case for this turn away from causes and outcomes of ‘eviction’, and towards ‘evicting’ as a set of material technologies and practices that sustain displacement, and explores the implications of such a shift. Research into lived durations of eviction, evicting technologies, and eviction enforcement agencies opens up new conceptual and political fields of intervention.

Eviction might be considered a form of infrastructure: as a process of binding and unbinding people to a world in movement, producing the grounds on which action can take place. Going beyond a causal relationship between infrastructure and displacement, we may posit that eviction can be seen as a distributed, ongoing, system which binds people and creates the grounds for action. So, what might infrastructural theory reveal about evictions? How might we begin to study eviction as infrastructure?