Developing crosslinguistic awareness through plurilingual consciousness-raising tasks

If maximal exposure were the key to success in language learning, then adult learners at the university level would be doomed to fail. Not only are they presumably too old to learn additional languages effectively, but target language (TL) input appears to be insufficient, especially when other languages are allowed in class. Nevertheless, learners were shown to build on knowledge of previously acquired languages, to rely on language learning experience and to develop metalinguistic awareness. This study explores the perceived usefulness of a plurilingual consciousness-raising task that aims at helping learners make and strengthen connections between the TL and other previously acquired languages. Two university-level language courses were targeted: Spanish in Quebec and French in Mexico. Two customized tasks were implemented and recorded in each course throughout the semester. Each task included an input-based (discovery) phase, a reflective (metalinguistic) phase during which participants were asked to make assumptions on underlying patterns and correspondences across languages, and a validation phase where they presented their assumptions until reaching a consensus as a group. While tasks were generally perceived as useful, analyses of post-task questionnaires also revealed mixed feelings regarding its inductive stance. However, the verbal data collected demonstrated that the collaborative and metalinguistic reflective nature of the task permitted learners to find correspondences between languages and to engage in knowledge construction. Moreover, the various reflections collected indicate that learners benefitted from the task as groups engaged in metalinguistic reflections, activated their plurilingual repertoire and were able to create accurate assumptions regarding the targeted structure.

(Post)Dramatic Strategies: Performing Difference in Pat Kinevane’s Solo Theatre

Pat Kinevane's solo performances focus on identities constituted on the margins of contemporary Irish society. Fusing the comic with the tragic, improvisation with carefully planned execution, and entertainment with serious cultural critique, these performative works range freely through diverse theatrical styles to represent Irish characters marginalized by their communities. Utilizing Hans-Thies Lehmann's ideas in Postdramatic Theatre (2006), this essay demonstrates how Kinevane's theatre inscribes but also contests some of the modalities of postdramatic discourse, creating a platform through which hegemonic political frameworks are challenged and identities are presented outside the established social norm. Through a performative analysis of the constructional, formal, and stylistic techniques, I argue that Kinevane's combined use of dramatic and postdramatic strategies can be seen as an essential part of his attempts to create consciousness raising and promote critical thinking among audiences.

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

The Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinances, 1983–1991

The chapter analyzes attempted civil rights legislation against pornography (the “MacKinnon-Dworkin” ordinance). It delineates its underlying hierarchy theory: consciousness-raising, group representation, and intersectional legal analysis—a commanding approach to end oppression through civil lawsuits against producers and disseminators, avoiding criminal law. The contemporaneous critics’ charges of “rigidity” and “one-sidedness” are found wanting, inadequately apprehending hierarchy and subordination. The ordinances’ definitions are shown to target provably harmful material only, preventing overbreadth and vagueness. A legal argument is advanced that the ordinances are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest, the incidental restrictions on alleged First Amendment freedoms are no greater than is essential to further their interest, and the definitions are sufficiently analogous to other unprotected expressions (e.g., obscenity and group libel). The Seventh Circuit’s judicial invalidation in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut (1985) is found based on ideology rather than law, political ideas rather than legislated rules.

Democracy and Hierarchy

The chapter sets forth a political theory of what would make legal challenges to pornography successful. Obstacles are identified in early liberal concepts of “negative rights,” which prevent interventions against non-state abuses of power. A nuanced view of power recognizes “positive rights” to intervention. The feminist theory of consciousness-raising is explored, shedding light on the necessity of subordinated groups’ representation. Intersectionality theory illustrates how multiple disadvantages prevent redress for people harmed by pornography under existing laws. Hence, legal challenges are hypothesized to be more efficient when the perspectives and interests of survivor groups of pornography-related harms are represented. The postmodern position submitting that subordinated groups’ rights should not be recognized, claiming they will be misappropriated and “renaturalize” oppression, is criticized for being a reductionist anti-state position conflating social categorization with its material consequences, thus denying (like negative rights do) a politics that could challenge that same oppressive material reality.

THE PROS AND PERILS OF INTERDEPENDENCE: FEMINIST ORGANIZING IN ONLINE GAME FORUMS

Within video game culture, where the medium's association with masculinity remains strong, it can be difficult for female players to connect with one another or to find safe spaces for play. Without support systems, many drop out of gaming over time. This indicates a need to build greater interdependencies between affected players, to provide interpersonal support and develop collective responses to gaming’s inequalities. Research in other areas suggests that targeted internet communities, such as Facebook groups, could provide space for feminist networking, consciousness-raising, and action, but it also reveals that such spaces have limits. Like games, the internet is often seen as masculinized, meaning explicitly feminist conversations and communities can draw disruptive trolls. Groups that police their boundaries to avoid these problems may implicitly prioritize some participants—i.e. straight, white, cisgender women—over others. This exploratory study analyzes top posts in two gaming forums—one general and one female-specific—to begin assessing if/how online communities for female gamers build interdependencies and raise feminist consciousness. More specifically, it assesses posts about harassment—which is often directed at female players as perceived “outsiders”—to determine if, when, and how toxicity is discussed as a general vs. a gendered problem, as well as if resulting discourses offer opportunities for consciousness-raising and collective action. This paper seeks to help marginalized players build stronger, more inclusive gaming and internet cultures.

Between Two Minds: The Work of Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant

This inquiry illustrates how Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant facilitates consciousness-raising between sign users. Because it forces attention and progression of action, the Energetic Interpretant highlights perfective aspectual characteristics, namely atomistic/punctual cause-effect sign relations by featuring junctures between events: beginning, middle, end. For example, the stops and starts of events are influenced by the nature of the action, in addition to the agent’s idiosyncratic preferences and predilections. The Thirdness underlying it further perpetuates the punctual component (Vendler 1967) present in action relations, operational when effort produces resistance against an opposing force. Because effort can materialize physically, or internally, it demonstrates the continued primacy of Peirce’s categories in fostering certain consequences. Energetic Interpretants can inhibit (Secondness), i.e., attention to one stimulus, while ignoring another. Nonetheless, consciously inhibiting/resisting a force (via Energetic Interpretants) introduces control beyond the self—another’s reflections upon the conscious acts of an agent (ms 318). This influence between interlocutors satisfies Peirce’s maxim of a “common place to stand” (ms 614), demonstrating mutual comprehension of the sign’s proper effect (5.475). In fact, Energetic Interpretants may result in an effect of such proportion upon either or both interlocutors that a habit-change materializes. As such, Energetic Interpretants epitomize the perfectivity exercised by particular efforts, intimating the likelihood of their discursive success. Inherent in punctual events (versus dynamic ones) is the element of surprise, which ultimately hastens the kind of habit-change especially exhibited in Peirce’s double consciousness (5.53)—self talking to self or other.

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Bhutan: Understanding Women’s Responses to IPV Using the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change

Intimate partner violence is highly prevalent in Asian region. It is largely committed by male against their female intimate partner. This is often associated with the region’s unique social and cultural norms which subordinate women throughout their lives. IPV is an ongoing concern in Bhutan. The country’s age-old traditions and customs are closely related to culture of silence among women experiencing IPV. This study examined women’s responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) in Bhutan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore sensitising concepts such as how and when women recognised IPV and how they responded to it. Fifteen women who had sought supportive services at the institution `RENEW’ (Respect, Educate, Nurture, Empower Women) as a result of IPV participated in the interview. The Trans-theoretical model of behaviour change (TTM) was used as a theoretical framework to understand women’s cognitive, affective and behavioural change processes. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis was used to identify the patterns of women’s responses. From the analysis, women’s experiences of IPV and their responses were located within the four stages of change, including contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. Women used nine traditional processes of change among which consciousness raising and helping relationships were critical and appeared across all four stages of change. This study provides important insights of Bhutanese women’s cognitive and behavioural responses to IPV. The appearance of consciousness raising and helping relationships across all the stages of change represents a potential opportunity for intervention to initiate and promote changes in women’s response to IPV in the early stages.