Gendered bodies in academia — an analytic approach to social meaning‐making among students

1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-50
Author(s):  
Dorte Marie Søndergaard
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Gendered Bodies

Do Violations of Global Beliefs and Goals Drive Distress and Meaning Making Following Life Stressors?

2020 ◽  
pp. 105413732095834
Author(s):  
Login S. George ◽  
Crystal L. Park
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Additional Research ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Life Stressors ◽  
Treatment Approaches ◽  
Stressful Experiences ◽  
Unique Association

Theoretical and treatment approaches posit that violations of beliefs and goals by stressful experiences drive distress and meaning making. However, empirical work examining this notion is limited. Accordingly, we tested violations’ role in driving distress and meaning-making using repeated assessments among 180 undergraduates coping with a recent significant stressor. On four occasions over two months, we collected data on belief and goal violations, distress, and meaning making. A within-person analytic approach showed that when participants' violations changed, their distress and meaning making also changed in the same direction. Additionally, violations had a unique association with meaning making, independent of distress. Results suggest that experiencing discrepancy between a stressor and one's beliefs and goals may be distressing and lead to efforts to reduce that discrepancy. Additional research on how individuals successfully resolve violations could improve understanding and treatment of individuals dealing with significant stressors.

scholarly journals Generalizing Meaning-Making from One to Many: A Meso-Analytic Approach for Conceptualizing Group Constructive Development

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
John E. Barbuto, Jr. ◽  
Megan Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Team Development ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Development Model ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Constructive Development ◽  
Constructivist Perspective ◽  
Personal Understanding

This essay presents the foundation for a group and team development model from a constructivist perspective. This model elevates Kegan’s (1994) meaning-making theory to the meso level. Meaning-making involves not only the cognitive structure necessary to interpret the environment, but also encompasses inter- and intra-personal understanding, which, at the team level, is a social process that changes based on the members of the team. Several propositions are stated for further study.

scholarly journals Untroubling abortion: A discourse analysis of women’s accounts

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siân M Beynon-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Discursive Psychology ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Growing Body

In this paper, I highlight key differences between a discourse analytic approach to women’s accounts of abortion and that taken by the growing body of research that seeks to explore and measure women’s experiences of abortion stigma. Drawing on critical analyses of the conceptualisation of stigma in other fields of healthcare, I suggest that research on abortion stigma often risks reifying it by failing to consider how identities are continually re-negotiated through language-use. In contrast, by attending to language as a form of social action, discursive psychology makes it possible to emphasise speakers’ capacity to construct “untroubled” (i.e. non-stigmatised) identities, while acknowledging that this process is constrained by the contexts in which talk takes place. My analysis applies these insights to interviews with women concerning their experiences of having an abortion in England. I highlight three forms of discursive work through which women navigate “trouble” in their accounts of abortion, and critically consider the resources available for meaning-making within this particular context of talk. In doing so, I aim to provoke reflection about the discursive frameworks through which women’s accounts of abortion are solicited and explored.

scholarly journals Ethnographic accounts of linguistic issues in the Yugoslav successor states: An introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Linguistic Ethnography ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Linguistic Means

Doing ethnographic linguistics (or linguistic ethnography) in the area of what used to be Yugoslavia is both a challenging and a promising undertaking. Challenging, in that there are so many ideological traps to take into consideration. Promising, in that there are so many complex matters to take a closer look at. These matters, even when exclusively realized in linguistic means, may have great influence on people’s everyday political, cultural, and social meaning-making. Especially so, as indexical relations and the ideological premises and effects of choosing to use one linguistic realization over the other, has played an important role for all speech communities in the region.

scholarly journals “Smiles and Laughs—All Teeth Intact”: A Cultural Perspective on Mediated Women’s Handball in Norway

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trygve B. Broch
Keyword(s):  
Female Athletes ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Sport Communication ◽  
The Media ◽  
Female Bodies

This article explores gendered sport communication in Norway. The data highlight Norwegian TV2’s live game commentaries of the 2009 women’s handball world championships, as well as live and studio commentary and journalistic reports concerning the Norwegian national women’s handball team from 2009 to 2013. The narrative-analytic approach is structural-hermeneutic and concerned with processes of meaning making. Instead of reading off gender/macrostructure in data, this project maps the semiotic culture structure of mediated women’s handball and shows how gendered meaning is creatively used to inform understandings of female handballers’ situated practices. The analysis first outlines the cultural binaries that constrain the media presentations of Norwegian women’s handball, then scrutinizes how gendered conceptions of sport and female athletes are used to understand this binary culture structure. Analytically revealed is a staging of Norwegian women’s handball that portrays successful and powerful female bodies’ contextual conduct. Norwegian women handballers are playing the aggressive and physically violent game in what is analyzed as a gender-appropriate manner.

scholarly journals “It’s more fashionable to speak it badly”: indexicality and metasemiotic awareness among users of English from the Spanish-speaking world

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Morán Panero
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Expanding Circle ◽  
English Language Teachers ◽  
Contextual Variability

Abstract As ELF scholars warn us against treating linguistic productions of “non-native” English speakers as “errors” when they are sociolinguistically driven variation, it is necessary to investigate how speakers in Expanding Circle settings conceptualise, label and experience such uses themselves. This paper reports a qualitative study of the metalinguistic and evaluative practices of university students in Chile, Mexico and Spain. It explores how they ascribe (un)desirable meanings to different ways of speaking English as an additional language (i. e. indexical relations), whether these symbolic associations are seen to influence students’ own linguistic use, and the extent to which such indexical relations are theorised as inherent in language form or as symbolic and negotiable (i. e. metasemiotic awareness). The analysis of more than 53 hours of elicited interview talk reveals a complex web of available social meaning relations and multidirectional accounts of the effects that such meanings have on students’ linguistic and semiotic practices. Although many students display awareness of the contextual variability of social meaning-making processes (Coupland. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), only a minority were able to directly challenge dominant indexical associations and stereotypical trait attributions. The findings underscore the need for English language teachers to understand their students’ semiotic goals and interpretative repertoires, firstly to avoid discriminating against sociolinguistically motivated variation in students’ English use and secondly, to provide them with additional tools to negotiate their position as speakers of English as an additional language. The paper also reflects on the implications that these findings have for how we explain variation and attitudinal ambivalence in ELF research.

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