Search results for "languages"
showing 10 items of 2101 documents
“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)
2017
The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscap…
Multimodal accomplishment of alignment and affiliation in the local space of distant meetings
2017
Technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings are complex settings that involve distributed participation frameworks and the coordination of actions in multiple interactional spaces. This paper examines how problems with hearing, speaking, or understanding in the overall meeting space enable the negotiation of alignment and affiliation by co-present participants in the same local meeting space. Conversation analysis is used to investigate the local accomplishment of alignment and affiliation achieved through the sequential and temporal organization of verbal, embodied, and material resources of interaction in three types of situations: during technological trouble, silences, and disagreements…
Visualising political thinking on the screen : a dialogue between von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt and its protagonist
2016
This article analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt: The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil through its protagonist’s own writings on visual culture, visibility and invisibility in the context of political thinking. We start by clarifying Arendt’s understanding of political theory as an activity aiming to provoke thinking. We then discuss systematically the visual language of the film and offer a typology of its representations of political thinking, subdivided into a part on internalisation and one on externalisation (dialogue). We emphasise von Trotta’s reliance on a negative approach, i.e. the representation of thinking through the absence of any other activity while thinking, c…
Mediation effect of self-efficacy in the relationship between neuroticism and L2 attainment
2019
This article investigates the role self-efficacy plays in the relationship between Neuroticism and foreign language attainment (operationalised as final grades and self-perceived foreign language skills). To date, the role of personality in foreign language learning has not been clearly specified; moreover, self-efficacy related to this domain has not received sufficient attention. For the purpose of the paper it was proposed that the negative relationship between Neuroticism and attainment can be explained by self-efficacy. The study’s informants consisted of 495 secondary grammar school students at the intermediate to upperintermediate levels of English proficiency. The results revealed t…
The foreign language teaching profession in Finnish and Japanese society: a sociocultural comparison
2016
The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in a cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language (FL) teacher in Finland and Japan. Both countries have high educational equality but with contrasting patterns of management policies that are manifested in their teacher education curricula. Educational policy documents as well as teacher interviews and classroom observations were conducted in both countries and the findings compared by one Japanese and …
Shaping public Opinion for confrontation : catalan independence claims as represented in spanish, catalan, valencian, and basque editorials
2017
Editorials represent a newspaper’s principal means of ideological positioning and serve to identify the attitude of each newspaper and its readership to some of the main actors in any given conflict, especially those that are political in nature. Catalonia’s independence movement has experienced a surge in recent years. The turning point came in July 2010, after Spain’s constitutional court ruled against some aspects of Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy (the legislation regulating the relationship between the Catalan autonomous community and the Spanish state). The ruling annulled some of the articles of the statute. The demonstration in support of Catalan independence that took place on Sep…
Spaces of Identity: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Quicksand (1928)
2018
Abstract The 1920s marked a fervent time for artistic and literary expression in the United States. Besides the famous authors of the decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen, among other female writers, also managed to carve “a literary space” for their stories. Yezierska and Larsen depicted the struggles and tribulations of minority women during the fermenting 1920s, with a view to illustrating the impact of ethnicity and race on the individual female identity. Yezierska, a Jewish-American immigrant, and Larsen, a biracial American woman, share an interest in capturing the nuances of belonging to a particular community…
The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality
2016
This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, …
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Bewilderment Trilogy” as Bildungsromane
2018
Abstract In this essay, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Bewilderment Trilogy” is read as a series of Bildungsromane that test the limits of that genre. In these thematically unrelated novels, characters reach critical points in their lives when they are confronted with the ways in which their respective childhoods have shaped their grownup expectations and professional careers. In each, the protagonist has a successful career, whether as a musician (The Unconsoled), a detective (When We Were Orphans), or a carer (Never Let Me Go), but finds it difficult to overcome childhood trauma. Ishiguro’s treatment of childhood in these novels foregrounds the tension between individual subjectivity and the formal st…
Popularity-driven science journalism and climate change: A critical discourse analysis of the unsaid
2018
Abstract This study traces popularity-driven coverage of climate change in New Scientist with the special aim of identifying which aspects of the issue have been backgrounded. Unlike institutional communication or quality press coverage of climate change, commercial science journalism has received less attention with respect to how it frames the crisis. Assuming that the construction of newsworthiness in popular science journalism requires eliminating, or at least obscuring, some alienating information, the study identifies prevalent frames, news values and discursive strategies in the outlet’s most-read online articles on climate change (2013–2015). With the official statement of the World…