This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the inhabitants of Whiddy Island, and focuses on the change from one form of societal organisation to another on this island. The thesis is not an ethnography proper, but an attempt to link the local perceptions of change and the changes in the islanders' daily lives, to the wider political economy. Throughout the course of the study my original intention of exploring the tension between technology and community was replaced with the wider hypothesis that there is tension between modernity and community. Technology was revealed as both a product and producer of modernity, and modern state capitalist societies as the antonym not the synonym of community. The 40 remaining islanders represent the last of the transient phase in which community disappears and is replaced by society. The changes in the daily lives of the islanders were not total nor revolutionary. Rather the products of modernity - both policies and artefacts, were absorbed into the islanders' daily lives, and once absorbed the products of modernity promoted modernity in the daily lives of those using them. Modernity is thus a circular process, yet it settled on the island in layers. Each layer produced a new set of paradoxes and reformed the old practices and the old ideology to fit the new setting. The settlement of modernity culminated in the replacement of community members with state citizens. By focusing on the interrelationship and dialogue between modernity, the state and the citizen the processes by which modernity settled on this small island are revealed. It settled both as a result of the direct intervention of state policies on education, emigration and employment, and as a result of local decisions to embrace mechanised transport, domestic technologies and the mass media. By accepting the policies and the artefacts of modernity, the islanders were prohibited from resisting their transformation from community members to state citizens. The island citizen, like all citizens to-day, has a direct dialogue with, and relationship to modernity, and an indirect one mediated by the state.

<p>Multifunctional calcium/calmodulin dependent protein kinases (CaMKs) are key regulators of spine structural plasticity and long-term potentiation (LTP) in neurons. CaMKs have promiscuous and overlapping substrate recognition motifs, and are distinguished in their regulatory role based on differences in the spatiotemporal dynamics of activity. While the function and activity of CaMKII in synaptic plasticity has been extensively studied, that of CaMKI, another major class of CaMK required for LTP, still remain elusive. </p><p>Here, we develop a Förster’s Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) based sensor to measure the spatiotemporal activity dynamics of CaMK1. We monitored CaMKI activity using 2-photon fluorescence lifetime imaging, while inducing LTP in single dendritic spines of rat (Rattus Norvegicus, strain Sprague Dawley) hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons using 2-photon glutamate uncaging. Using RNA-interference and pharmacological means, we also characterize the role of CaMKI during spine structural plasticity. </p><p>We found that CaMKI was rapidly and transiently activated with a rise time of ~0.3 s and decay time of ~1 s in response to each uncaging pulse. Activity of CaMKI spread out of the spine. Phosphorylation of CaMKI by CaMKK was required for this spreading and for the initial phase of structural LTP. Combined with previous data showing that CaMKII is restricted to the stimulated spine and required for long-term maintenance of structural LTP, these results suggest that CaMK diversity allows the same incoming signal – calcium – to independently regulate distinct phases of LTP by activating different CaMKs with distinct spatiotemporal dynamics.</p> / Dissertation

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