Gendered Understanding of Disability and Aging

In its early conventional sense, disability was largely understood in bio-medical model which subsequently was supplemented with the psycho-social underpinnings of disability. In recent times, the social identities in terms of race, religion, class, caste, and gender add other dimensions to the social science discourse on disability studies. The chapter attempts to inform through the dimensions of age and aging in relation to the disability discourse, drawing from ethnographic cases over a period of research in North India. In the process, this chapter offers an analysis of disability and aging with focusing on the lack of access to social and familial resources for people with disability who are old and people who acquire any kind of disability in their old age. This chapter examines uncertainties experienced by the older disabled and the disabled older persons in relation to the extent of family ties and other social resources in both the rural and urban context.

THE DELETION OF THE HUMAN AGENT IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE DISCOURSE: AN ECOLINGUISTIC STUDY

This study explores the use of the strategy of erasure in environmental science discourses to explore the deletion of the agent. Three environmental science textbooks have been chosen for analysis. Stibbe’s (2015) framework of erasure has been used as a model for analyzing the data. He asserts that the natural world is marginalized in texts through the use of certain linguistic strategies; these strategies run throughout the whole discourse to construct the erasure of the ecosystem. The researchers aim to identify erasure at the level of void, which is the complete erasure or deletion of the agent from these discourses. Stibbe mentions nine linguistic strategies for the construction of erasure in environmental discourses. These strategies are passive voice, nominalization, co-hyponymy, hyponymy, metaphor, metonymy, construction of noun phrases, transitivity patterns and massification. For the construction of void, the researchers have analyzed the strategies of passivization and nominalization. It has been found that these strategies are pervasive in the discourses, thereby deleting the agent and constructing void. The study suggests a new way to look at the language of ecological discourses and proposes further studies on how euphemistic language in these discourses can negatively influence readers. Keywords: erasure, mask, void, environmental discourse

Baseball, Modernity, and Science Discourse in British Popular Culture, 1871–1883

Baseball in the United Kingdom has long been considered a contradiction in terms, especially during the nineteenth century, with both the 1874 National Association Tour and the 1888 Spalding Tour viewed as financial and cultural failures in a sophisticated consumer society already dominated by cricket. This article takes a fresh look at evidence from the 1870s and 1880s in order to challenge this perspective. It presents the 1874 Tour as a transnational success, articulating shared Anglo-American assumptions about modernity, science, and social progress. This discourse informed a broad process of technology transfer involving new sources of industrial power as well as the corporal techniques of modern sport. The article also places the tour in the context of a unique historical phenomenon: the transatlantic diffusion of an early modern English game to the United Kingdom as the New York Game, a modern American sport. Previous accounts of the tour focused on a few selected reports, confirming American views of its financial failings and British disinterest in its exhibitions. When considered in light of hundreds of British accounts from the 1870s, including unexamined evidence of the first British baseball clubs less than two years after the tour, this perspective becomes unsustainable.

Infografías científicas en secundaria: complejos de significados multimodales en ensambles compuestos verbales-visuales

The complexity of science discourse has long been recognized as challenging for many students. Systemic functional linguistic accounts of technicality and meaning aggregation, differentiating scientific and everyday discourse, have explicated the linguistic complexity confronting students. The complexity of images and image-language ensembles in science discourse has not been similarly delineated. Two aspects of multimodal meaning-making have not been sufficiently theorized to support pedagogies of visualization interpretation and creation in science: (1) the role of the verbiage within scientific visualizations has been largely ignored; (2) image analysis has emphasized single-structure images, e.g. narrative or classificational or analytical, whereas multiple structures in a single image is a frequent and significant resource in science. This paper outlines a framework describing the co-deployment of image and verbiage to construct multi-structure image-language ensembles in high school science textbooks. Using this framework two investigations are described: (1) variation among textbook infographics in image-language co-articulation representing meaning complexes of phenomena such as mitosis; (2) the relationship between co-articulation of image-language resources and achievement level in infographics constructed by senior high school students. Implications are drawn for extending transdisciplinary research in educational semiotics and science education and for pedagogies of multimodal disciplinary literacy development in high school science.

A Systematic Review of Science Discourse in K–12 Urban Classrooms in the United States: Accounting for Individual, Collective, and Contextual Factors

The literature on science discourse in K–12 classrooms in the United States has proliferated over the past couple of decades, crossing geographical, disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological boundaries. There is general consensus that science talk is at the core of students’ learning; however, a synthesis of key findings from the expansive literature base is needed. This systematic literature review is guided by a complex systems framework to organize and synthesize empirical studies of science talk in urban classrooms across individual (student or teacher), collective (interpersonal), and contextual (sociocultural, historical) planes. Findings are discussed in relation to contemporary approaches that integrate theories and methodologies to account for the complex phenomena of science discourse, including interacting elements across levels as well as stable and changing patterns that influence students’ access to, and nature of, science talk in urban classrooms. Unresolved questions related to high-leverage, equitable, and sustainable discourse practices; future lines of inquiry that can benefit by drawing from diverse theoretical traditions and mixed methodological approaches; and practical implications for classroom-based strategies to support science discourse are also discussed.

The “thinking meme” meme

After a brief flurry of attention following its introduction by Dawkins (1976), the concept of memes has largely disappeared from mainstream social and cognitive science discourse. A significant exception is Dennett’s (1995; 2017) writings on the philosophy of mind. In his most recent book, Dennett (2017) develops what he presents as a comprehensive account of cultural evolution, based on the claims that memes, defined as a “way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught…,” develop through evolutionary processes more or less identical to the processes through which biological organisms and their genes evolve, and that both memes and genes are active agents in their own evolution. Although Dennett presents some very interesting ideas about the co-evolution of culture and human brains, he couches his argument in a system of personification, organism, war, and object metaphors that implicitly assign mental activities including intending, competing, and planning to memes. In this paper I analyze Dennett’s metaphors and argue that they effectively distract attention from the psychological and cultural processes that actually determine whether a behavior pattern (i.e. a meme) is learned, remembered, and reproduced (none of which Dennett acknowledges). I then show how the substance of Dennett’s argument can be rephrased in language that avoids the obfuscating effect of his metaphors. In addition to countering a common metaphor-based misconception in evolution theory, this analysis illustrates the importance of close attention to the entailments of conceptual metaphors used as theoretical arguments.

Knowing Groundlessness: An Enactive Approach to a Shift From Cognition to Non-Dual Awareness

The enactive approach has become an influential paradigm in cognitive science. One of its most important claims is that cognition is sense-making: to cognize is to enact a world of meaning. Thus, a world is not pregiven but enacted through sense-making. Most importantly, sense-making is not a fixed process or thing. It does not have substantial existence. Instead, it is groundless: it springs from a dynamic of relations, without substantial ground. Thereby, as all cognition is groundless, this groundlessness is considered the central underlying principle of cognition. This article takes that key concept of the enactive approach and argues that it is not only a theoretical statement. Rather, groundlessness is directly accessible in lived experience. The two guiding questions of this article concern that lived experience of groundlessness: (1) What is it to know groundlessness? (2) How can one know groundlessness? Accordingly, it elaborates (1) how this knowing of groundlessness fits into the theoretical framework of the enactive approach. Also, it describes (2) how it can be directly experienced when certain requirements are met. In an additional reflexive analysis, the context-dependency and observer-relativity of those statements themselves is highlighted. Through those steps, this article exhibits the importance of knowing groundlessness for a cognitive science discourse: this underlying groundlessness is not only the “ground” of cognition, but it also can be investigated empirically through lived experience. However, it requires a methodology that is radically different from classical cognitive science. This article ends with envisioning a future praxis of cognitive science which enables researchers to investigate not only theoretically but empirically the “foundationless foundation” of cognition: groundlessness.

„Handeln statt Hoffen“. Zur Gemeinschaftsanrufung durch Attribution von Verantwortungsgefühlen im medialen Diskurs zur Seenotrettung von Carola Rackete im Sommer 2019

<p>The article addresses a narrative of communanlity stemming primarily from feelings of responsibility. Referencing selected media reports on Carola Rackete’s sea rescue operation in 2019, the article discusses the circumstances under which a society calls on its individual members to act in a spirit of responsibility for their community - and at which point this common hope actually results in common action. The paper focuses on what constitutes responsible communities real and imagined, i.e. the discursive processes by which a community is invoked through the attribution of feelings of responsibility. The article employs methodological elements from linguistic and social science discourse research.</p>

Bridging Feminist Psychology and Open Science: Feminist Tools and Shared Values Inform Best Practices for Science Reform

Feminist researchers have long embraced the challenging, dismantling, and reimagining of psychology, though their contributions to transforming psychological science remain largely overlooked in the mainstream open science movement. In this article, we reconcile feminist psychology and open science. We propose that feminist theory can be leveraged to address central questions of the open science movement, and the potential for methodological synergy is promising. We signal the availability of feminist scholarship that can augment aspects of open science discourse. We also review the most compelling strategies for open science that can be harnessed by academic feminist psychologists. Drawing upon best practices in feminist psychology and open science, we address the following: generalizability (what are the contextual boundaries of results?), representation (who is included in research?), reflexivity (how can researchers reflect on who they are?), collaboration (are collaborative goals met within feminist psychology?), and dissemination (how should we give science away?). Throughout each section, we recommend using feminist tools when engaging with open science, and we recommend some open science practices for conducting research with feminist goals.